1.1 Climate Risks Facing the Asian Fisheries

The climate risk index measures the degree to which countries have experienced extreme weather events between 1999 and 2018.¹ As Table 14 shows, nine of the Asian fisheries ranked among the world’s 25 highest risk countries over this period (Eckstein et al. 2019). Worldwide in 2017, nearly 19 million people were displaced by climate-related disasters, and 52 per cent of them were located in the Asian fisheries. Nearly three-quarters of these ecological displacements occurred in the Philippines and China while Bangladesh, Vietnam and Indonesia accounted for another 20 percent. One of the most climate vulnerable countries in the world, Bangladesh averaged 700,000 people displaced annually by rapid-onset natural disasters over the last decade (Smith and Henly-Shepard 2021). Since 2010, several of Pakistan’s coastal communities have been forced to move further inland due to seawater intrusion and salinization of farm lands and inland fishing areas (IDMC 2021). In Vietnam, ten disasters caused 633,000 displacements. Climate change experts predict that “sudden-onset disasters are likely to displace an average of more than a million people in any given year in the future, giving Viet Nam the 4th highest disaster displacement risk ranking behind India, China and Bangladesh” (IDMC 2018: 43). That prediction was validated in 2020.

Between 2010 and 2019, an average of 23.1 million people were displaced by ecological disasters (IDMC 2021), but 2020 proved to be the most extreme in history, most specifically in the Asian fisheries. More than 30.7 million people were displaced by ecological disasters in 2020, and 70 percent of them were situated in the Asian fisheries (see Table 14). In South Asia, there were 7.9 times more people displaced by climate-related events than in 2017, 1.8 times more displacees from Southeast Asia and 1.8 times more displacees from East Asia. Climate change led to massive wildfires across Australia while parts of the Asian fisheries were underwater for extended periods.

The low-pressure systems of the summer monsoon were particularly strong and slow-moving, allowing them to pick up more moisture than usual from the Indian and Pacific oceans before delivering it to land. … [In addition to climate change], unsustainable land use, construction on floodplains and the destruction of ecosystems play a critical role. Large-scale infrastructure projects such as dams also alter entire river basins and increase flood risk upstream and drought downstream. Dam failures and releases also increase downstream displacement risk, as has been the case in the Mekong river, that is undergoing rapid change across six countries, from China to Viet Nam. Many rivers in China rose above warning levels in 2020 and 77 reached record highs. (IDMC 2021: 27–28)

Throughout South and Southeast Asia in 2020, monsoon rainfalls averaged 9 percent above historical averages. More than 16.2 million were forced from their homes and livelihoods in South and Southeast Asia, with another 5.3 million from East Asia. Nearly 90 percent of the displacements were from Bangladesh, India, the Philippines, China and Vietnam. By mid-2020, one-quarter of Bangladesh was underwater, disrupting the communities and livelihoods of 4.4 million peasant farmers and fishers. For the Philippines, 2020 brought two typhoons close together, the eruption of Mount Taal, and several flooding and landslide events. Storms triggered more than 1.2 million displacements from Indonesia and Myanmar. In Indonesia, 397,000 were displaced by flooding in Jakarta which sits on a swamp and is sinking due to sea level rise (IDMC 2021).

Loss of livelihoods is the greatest economic cost to countries impacted by these ecological disasters (IPCC 2012). Over the last two decades, agriculture and fishing in South and Southeast Asia have been repeatedly disrupted by sea level rises or heavy storms. Peasant farmers and fishers of the Indo-Gangetic Plain, the Mekong Delta and along the Yangtze River will continue to be especially vulnerable. There are also likely to be more unusual weather events that threaten crops and fish reproduction. In Pakistan, for instance, extreme 2020 weather caused a double whammy of livelihood losses. After heavy monsoons and floods destroyed crops and livestock, unusual breeding of the desert locust was stimulated, destroying another third of the crop area (IDMC 2001).

1.2 Climate Migration in the Asian Fisheries

The Groundswell Report (World Bank 2018) predicts that, by 2050, there will be 216 million climate migrants displaced within countries or forced across national borders. About 41 percent of those relocations will occur in South and Southeast Asia which is predicted to lose 1.8 percent annually due to climate change. Seven major climate-related changes are likely to threaten the livelihoods of Asian peasant farmers and fishers: a 10 percent increase in rainfall, a 10 to 15 percent rise in sea level, increased speed and frequency of cyclones, a 30 percent increase in land made nonproductive by saltwater intrusion, greater salinization of major river deltas (impacting inland fishing and rice production), greater destruction and degradation of coral reefs, and widespread contamination of fresh drinking water. The Report estimates that 28 million South and Southeast Asians will be impacted by heat extremes and coastal flooding. A 12 per cent crop loss for Asian grain production may occur while fisheries may be directly threatened by warmer oceans, sea level rises, ocean acidification, and rising CO₂ concentrations.

Asian aquaculture will face worsening threats from cyclones and salinization from flooding. Asian fishers can expect a 25 percent drop in coral reef catches, and the Mekong Delta will probably lose as much as 2.6 million tons annually, mostly from inland river fishing. “The projected degradation and loss of coral reefs, decreased fish availability, and pressures on other near-coastal rural populations due to sea-level rise within the next few decades is likely to lead to diminishing livelihoods in coastal and deltaic areas” (World Bank 2018: 69). According to the World Meteorological Organization (2021: 37), Asian farmers and fishers are likely to “be subject to repeated and frequent displacement, leaving little time for recovery between one shock and the next.” Asian communities constructed in peri-urban areas are likely to be most hard-hit by extreme weather events because they are located in floodplains or on coasts or rivers where they are vulnerable to rises in sea level (World Bank 2018).

1.3 CO₂ Emissions of the Asian Fisheries

Recent rhetoric focuses on Asia as the pivotal region to “stabilize” climate change, to use the words of The Economist (30 Oct. 2021). This is a political, not a realistic, assessment of world climate change because it is intended to shift global attention away from the fossil fuel track record of the rich western countries. At the 2021 Glasgow Climate Pact Conference, western representatives singled out coal dependence of the public electrical systems of China, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan and Vietnam. Backed by China and other coal-dependent developing countries, India led a last-minute effort to reject a clause calling for phasing out coal-fired electrical systems. The pact was saved by a last ditch wording change to “phasing down coal.”² Reducing fossil fuel consumption in Asia threatens a much larger labor force than would be impacted in the western countries. Those directly impacted will encompass the 1.3 billion peasant farmers and fishers and informal sector, ranging from coal mine laborers to gas-powered agricultural equipment and fishing boats, to street cooking equipment, to the operators of jeepneys and motorcycle taxis.³ Table 15 clarifies the global climate record. In reality, the coal-dependent Asian countries, with the exception of China, do not account for a majority of greenhouse and CO₂ emissions. Indeed, eleven of the Asian fisheries rank well below world emissions per capita of consumption-based CO₂ emissions, with only China, Japan, Malaysia, and South Korea above the world average. Worldwide, the average person produces 2.9 times more CO₂ emissions than the typical resident of one of the eleven fisheries at highest risk (see Table 15). More starkly, an American citizen is responsible for 8.4 times the CO₂ emissions of a resident of those eleven fisheries (see Table 15). It is a bitter ecological irony that little more than 11 percent of the world’s greenhouse emissions are produced by the nine Asian fisheries that rank among the top 25 countries that are most likely to experience more frequent natural disasters caused by climate change. Contrast that with the four Asian fisheries that generate nearly a third of the world’s greenhouse gases but face much less risk of natural disasters.

Despite the high CO₂ emissions by the richest countries, there are two Asian fossil fuel trends that have serious implications for regional food security. On the one hand, we pointed out in Chapter 1 that the hungriest Asian fisheries are growing increasingly dependent on petroleum. Indeed, they expend nearly eight times more on petroleum than they do on food imports. For instance, India’s food imports cost only 13 percent of what the country pays for petroleum (see Table 9). On the other hand, all the Asian fisheries publicly subsidize coal and petroleum to a degree they do not provide in per capita food subsidies. These per capita annual fossil fuel subsidies range from less than $1 in the Philippines (the only country in which food subsidies exceed petroleum) to more than $63 in Indonesia (a per capita subsidy that is 2.3 times greater than that of the United States and 1.7 times greater than China’s subsidy).⁴ To put things in perspective, twelve of the Asian fisheries fall below the American subsidy, with Indonesia and China exceeding and India, Japan and South Korea falling very close (see Table 15). Those eleven Asian countries that fall below world per capita CO₂ emissions expend less than 12 percent as much on fossil fuel subsidy as the European Union and only about 10 percent of the Australian subsidy. Still the Asian role in fossil fuel consumption is clear. Combined, China, the United States, the European Union, Russia and Japan account for two-thirds of world fossil fuel consumption and two-thirds of the world’s CO₂ emissions. While CO₂ emissions have declined between 1990 and 2020 for the United States, the European Union, Russia and Japan, emissions were 4 and 4.8 times greater in 2020 for India and China (Crippa et al. 2021).

1.4 Climate Emission Reduction and REDD Projects

In addition to negative impacts on agriculture, food security and human safety, there is another way in which climate change will impact Asian peasant communities in the 21st century. Since 2005, international climate change programs have reached into rural areas of the Asian fisheries. Notwithstanding low emissions, all the Asian fisheries signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate between 1992 and 1995, as well as the 2021 Glasgow Global Climate Pact. Starting before 2005, two types of mitigation program were initiated in Asian rural areas, displacing and disrupting farming and fishing communities and threatening livelihoods. The first climate mitigation projects to impact Asian communities were associated with the global marketing of carbon offsets. The Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol allows emission reduction projects in developing countries to earn certified emission reduction (CER) credits, each equivalent to one ton of CO₂. These CER s can be marketed by the producing country to industrialized countries to meet part of their emission reduction targets. For example, Switzerland uses CER s to offset 10 percent of emissions from domestic aviation while Germany offsets 40 percent of emissions from buildings and transport. Between 1997 and 2005, there were 3,000 projects in developing countries, two-thirds of them concentrated in the Asian fisheries (Michaelowa 2012). Between 2005 and 2011, offsets sold in private markets were valued at $2.854 billion and $2.01 billion between 2014 and 2020.⁵ To get a sense of the kinds of carbon offset projects that are being implemented in the Asian fisheries, we examined the four months of carbon emission certifications leading up to the signing of the Glasgow Climate Pact in November 2021. Over this period, the database lists 101 projects in fourteen countries, three-quarters of them concentrated in nine of the Asian fisheries. As Table 16 shows, Certified Emissions Reductions are valuable export commodities for Asian countries, selling at $3 to $6 per ton in 2021 (International Carbon Action Partnership 2021). Over this four-month period Asian CERS were marketed to Australia, Japan, and nine European countries, and 69 percent of them originated in countries with low emissions (see Table 15).

Nearly 28 percent of the CERS were earned by the largest and most ecologically significant project. By modernizing its natural gas distribution system, Bangladesh will eliminate dangerous gas flaming and explosions and will accumulate more than 4 million emissions annually over the next ten years to the benefit of Denmark.⁶ There are 47 wind farms in China, India, South Korea and Vietnam among the carbon offset projects. China and India are world leaders in wind power, including the development of offshore wind farms.⁷ The projects include fifteen hydroelectric dams, three solar projects, ten waste to electricity projects, and one natural gas to electricity project. There are also cutting edge approaches, including a geothermal project, a landfill gas recovery project and a tidal power project. While Australia, Japan and the European countries continue to subsidize fossil fuels to support their inequitable creation of emissions (see Table 15), these Asian countries with low emissions operate like carbon sinks for them. Through the carbon offset approach, both distant beneficiaries and Asian states externalize to rural communities the threats to livelihoods, village displacements, destruction of fishing habitats, and any dangers associated with managing a natural geothermal site or recovery of biogases or methane. Both the wind farms and the dams have required the displacement of large numbers of farmers and fishers, resulting in threats to livelihoods and a great deal of ongoing resistance activity from indigenous peasants. Wind farms are placed in agricultural areas which includes putting them in the middle of rice paddies in China and India. Coastal wind farms cause below-water noise pollution that has altered fish migration and reproductive patterns, leading to depopulation of some species. Moreover, the wind towers are closed to human traffic (even though they attract colonies of mollusks and crustaceans), causing loss of fishing grounds, declining catches and the need to go deeper into the ocean to fish (van Hoey et al. 2021).

The second climate mitigation projects to impact Asian communities have been the global efforts to end the 1.5 billion tons of annual CO₂ emissions caused by deforestation. Since 2000, the REDD and REDD+ programs have been treating Asian forests as massive carbon sinks for fossil-fuel burning countries.⁸ In 2015, forests contracted to the REDD program were credited with absorbing the equivalent of 14 percent of global fossil CO₂ emissions and 10.5 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. The European Union relies on REDD projects to offset as much as a third its CO₂ emissions (Crippa et al. 2021). Because Southeast Asia had the highest rate of forest loss in the tropics between 2000 and 2010, the UN-REDD program heavily targeted that region (Graham et al. 2016: 1). Exceeding any other Asian country, Indonesia displaced 44.1 million hectares of forest, half for logging, timbering and oil palm and half for a telecommunications network (Lang 2016). By 2019, twelve of the Asian fisheries were participating in the REDD program, and the largest tracts of forest were under contract for REDD funding in India, Indonesia, China, the Philippines and Vietnam. By 2019, seven countries had received nearly $2.1 billion, but 89 percent had gone to India, Indonesia and China (see Table 17).

There is an inherent economic contradiction between simultaneous use of Asian forests for the production of market exports and as spaces protected from deforestation. Consequently, three faulty assumptions underlie the REDD program. According to Carbon Trade Watch (2017), REDD+ makes it possible for polluting states and industries in the Global North to take control of carbon stocks stored in forests in the Global South, as a cheap strategy to protect continued Northern fossil-fuel pollution. Second, factual errors underlie the justifications and goals for the REDD program, for there is a sharp disconnect between the levels of emissions from deforestation and fossil fuel consumption.

Emissions from global forest destruction and degradation were estimated in 2017 at 10–20% of all human-induced GHG output. … Fossil-fuel combustion and industrial processes accounted for 78% of the total increases in GHG emissions between 1970 and 2011. … Recent research shows that tropical forests are increasingly victims of climate change, becoming carbon contributors instead of carbon sinks. … For these reasons, it may be unwise to put too much emphasis on forests as a cure for humanity’s emission problems.

Third, when evaluated “as a disincentive to clearing forest,” the REDD project “has failed miserably” (Lang 2016: 5–8). The geographical spaces encompassed by Asian REDD projects are very small when compared to the areas that are deforested for logging, timbering, mining, infrastructure construction, and monocultural plantations. Less than one percent of total tropical forest area in Asia is under certified forest management (Graham et al. 2016: 8) because the climate change mitigation efforts cannot compete financially with lucrative export commodities. Studies of the value of carbon stocks in Indonesian forests indicate that payments from the REDD program will be well below the $22 per ton needed to be competitive with profit from oil palm (Deininger et al. 2011: 21).

Buying oil palm and timber permits, where operations cause severe degradation or deforestation and conserving these forests, are expensive options for REDD+. … Limiting the expansion of new oil palm and timber plantations in forests is vitally important for biodiversity conservation, however. it is an expensive practice to pursue for the purpose of mitigating emissions. … The relatively low uptake of oil palm and timber projects indicates a reluctance from REDD+ proponents to engage in these activities, for financial and/or political reasons, and a challenge in convincing concession holders to cooperate. (Graham et al. 2016: 8)

There are two other longstanding problems. First, countries generate inconsistent emission and carbon offset statistics because the REDD programs have no established definition of what constitutes a forest and no guidelines for measuring the degree of deforestation. Indonesia defines a forest to be 30 percent tree cover, with no clarification about whether a monocultural plantation species can be forest cover. In contrast, Vietnam defines a forest as having 10 percent tree cover, specifying that converting natural forest to a monocultural industrial tree plantation is considered an enhancement of carbon stock.⁹ Second, “one of the main issues of REDD is leakage, as destruction of forests simply moves to unprotected areas.”

We lack space to go into detail, but we would like to provide readers a sense of how a few of the largest Asian REDD projects have operated. In early November 2021, the Washington Post published an extensive investigation of the strategies that countries employ to under-report emissions by over-reporting forest cover by as much as 60 percent. Pointing to the country’s REDD carbon offset claims, the Post found that Malaysia’s so-called protected forests have been extensively deforested for the development of monocultural oil palm plantations.¹⁰ There have been many attempts to stop deforestation in Indonesia, but all have failed. “The destruction, by fire and by chainsaw, of Indonesia’s old-growth tropical forests, has continued and, particularly since 2000, been increasing. … Since the year 2000, the rate of deforestation has more than doubled… [accompanied by] a 48% increase in the country’s total GHG emissions” (Maxton-Lee 2020: 1–2). In conflict with existing REDD agreements, Indonesia passed a 2020 Omnibus Law that strikes down numerous environmental regulations, including a requirement that provinces maintain 30 percent forest cover. The Law also simplifies the process for corporations to operate in protected forest areas. Within months, six new paper pulp mills had either been built or were under construction, getting prepared for Indonesia to export one million tons of pulp annually. A few weeks before the 2021 Glasgow Climate Pact conference, Indonesia terminated its $1 billion REDD agreement with Norway.¹¹ India’s Kaziranga National Park has a ugly history of human rights violations reaching back to the initiation of the REDD agreement. Repeated violent evictions of forest communities resulted in deaths and many injuries. The Indian government put in place a shoot-on-sight policy, resulting in ranger killings of fifty indigenous forest dwellers and few poachers.¹²

In the Mekong Delta, the REDD project forests of three countries have been targeted for illegal logging of rare species. In southeastern Thailand, the project forest has been systematically stripped of endangered Siamese rosewood trees. “A web of traders, middlemen and corrupt officials making their fortunes by channeling rosewood from remote forests to the glitzy furniture showrooms of China. On the surface, the ban on trading Siamese rosewood in Thailand has been tightly enforced. But… bribery and connections with government officials enable some traders to circumvent the law” (Environmental Investigation Agency 2014: 15). Despite an expensive electronic forest monitoring system and dozens of armed rangers, violent Chinese and Vietnamese gangs have pushed the endangered species nearly to extinction to meet the Chinese demand for carved wooden furniture and artwork. Many rangers have been injured and killed, and resident forest communities live under a state of siege. Record levels of deforestation triggered crippling drought in Cambodia after illegal logging continued despite a government ban on timber exports.¹³ Subsequently, the Myanmar military announced its seizure of 510 tons of illegal timbers, 221 tons of endangered species and 289 tons of teak and hardwoods.¹⁴ In August 2021, Cambodia sold 645,410 carbon credits grounded in offsets calculated for its Prey Land Rainforest. Between 2015 and 2021, 37 percent of the forest coverage was devastated by illegal logging for black market trading in expensive woods for furniture. To exacerbate the situation, the national government constructed a power line across the forest, destroying more trees (Friends of the Earth 2021). As illegal logging escalated, there was conflict between indigenous villagers hired to patrol the forest and government elites who banned the village patrols.¹⁵

1.5 Climate Adaptation Projects

In addition to the two carbon offset programs, the third climate change agenda to impact Asian communities has been, and will continue to be, the funding and financing of adaptation projects. Since 2005, climate change adaptation has been the conceptual lynchpin of institutional responses by the United Nations Framework on Climate Change (UNFCC). Grounded in the naive notion that climate change is “governable” through “scientific management” of natural resources and threats, the UNFCC adaptation strategy repackages existing international development planning. “A world of adaptation can be mapped out in terms of a social cartography of vulnerabilities to be ameliorated by building adaptive capacity and forging resilience. …The idea of adaptation intrinsically lends itself to a technocratic politics that seeks to contain the perceived threats posed by climate change within existing institutional parameters” (Taylor 2014: XI–XII). Adaptation strategies are embedded in the impossible notion that climate change can be slowed without changes in global economic growth that is based on fossil fuels. Ideologically, the UNFCC promises that societies can “adapt to the effects of climate change” without threatening livelihoods, lowering agricultural outputs, or disrupting economic growth.¹⁶ In short, the naive operational philosophy is to make no changes to the activities that are causing climate change and pretend that small scattered projects will mitigate the effects of global warming.

Supposedly, countries can reduce climate vulnerability through tactics like the following interventions that either avoid the underlying global causes or are likely to generate new problems about which the UNFCC adaptation program remains silent.¹⁷

1. Relocation of communities: Even if necessary in the face of rising sea levels, this drastic approach destroys local economies, livelihoods and agricultural outputs (which UNFCC claims to want to prevent) and may possibly trigger ethnic conflicts or maltreatment of indigenous peoples.

2. Early disaster warning systems: This is the historical strategy of “running away” that leads to thousands of people internally displaced in problem-ridden camps, as well as the ecological destruction of businesses, agriculture and infrastructure.

3. Building roads, bridges, railroad lines and underground transport to withstand storms and flooding: These infrastructural changes will require more funding than is currently available. Do the needed technologies for diverse ecological contexts actually exist?

4. Replanting mangroves along coastlines: This action is needed to replace the mangroves that were deforested by Asian countries in past decades for the export-oriented aquaculture expansion recommended by the World Bank, FAO and United Nations. Most past mangrove reforestation projects have failed, and many years are required for mangrove growth.

5. Introduction of new genetically-modified (GM) crop varieties that are drought and flood resistant to allow the world food system to avoid a sharp decline in global agricultural yields: First, this strategy assumes that sufficient agricultural lands will survive the salinization that accompanies rising sea levels and natural disasters. Second, it assumes that sufficient farmers, laborers and irrigation systems will survive climate risks. This thinking is far too optimistic in the face of the Asian agricultural and aquaculture labor shortages and food crop losses that occurred during the COVID-9 pandemic (see Chapter 8). Third, such GM varieties will have to be engineered to fit specific climate conditions in specific locations, so not enough of them yet exist. Like previous GM varieties, these new crops will probably require fertilizers and pesticides that contribute CO₂ and GHG emissions, thereby exacerbating the climate risk.

By 2021, nine of the Asian fisheries had received $96.6 million in United Nations Climate Adaptation grants, plus nearly $2 billion in low-interest, long-term loans from the Green Climate Fund and multilateral development banks (see Table 17). It is striking that the Asian fisheries with greenhouse gas emissions below the world average (see Table 15) are taking on significant debt to undertake climate adaptation projects. Moreover, the country debt far exceeds the level of United Nations grants. To every adaptation grant dollar, Cambodia has taken on nearly $47 debt, India more than $23 debt, Bangladesh more than $21, and Pakistan more than $13 (Eckstein et al. 2020). All these adaptation projects are subnational, usually aimed at specific communities or economic activities. Thus, they are not systematically designed as part of a national agenda, and they do not necessarily cooperate with or avoid contradictions with one another, either nationally or internationally. Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia and Thailand are expending funds for infrastructure changes to prevent or redirect sea level flooding. Projects to develop alternative livelihood strategies for forest-based indigenous groups have been undertaken by Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka. Pakistan has allocated much of its adaptation funding to make agriculture and livestock raising more resilient against repeated cycles of floods and drought, accompanied by water scarcity. Myanmar is experimenting with new genetically-modified agricultural species that are tolerant of drought and drier agricultural zones.¹⁸ Some of these countries are experimenting with expensive new technologies, usually imported from western countries. For example, Cambodia has installed eleven biodigesters that are placed in areas with significant waste associated with livestock production for agribusiness commodity chains. At about $1,200 for every five head of cattle, a biodigester relies on anaerobic digestion to convert manure to ecologically-friendly fertilizer and methane that fuels cooking stoves in households.¹⁹

In its 2020 and 2021 Adaptation Gap Reports, the United Nations Environment Program points to five major shortcomings of the “world adaptation science” that has been applied for nearly two decades.²⁰ Most significantly, there is very limited evidence (none supplied by these reports) that adaptation strategies lower the climate risks they are funded to diminish. Moreover, implementation of adaptation projects is not likely to keep pace with increasing levels of risk caused by continued high global levels of fossil-fuel and greenhouse gas emissions, The funding is insufficient to meet the project demand from countries (also noted by European Bank for Reconstruction and Development 2021). Levels of engagement and the quality of adaptation approaches and technologies differ vastly from country to country. The total number of funded projects is too small and too narrow in geographical scope to make any serious impact on lowering climate risk. By 2021, there were 2,600 adaptation projects, most of them subnational in scope. Very few projects are cross–national to tackle broader regional problems. Finally, there is increasing recognition, both nationally and internationally, that “green” nature-based solutions can make important contributions to climate change adaptation, but there are few tangible plans or approved projects. To date, funding spent on organic solutions has been a tiny fraction of total adaptation and conservation finance.

Will UNFCC-funded adaptation strategies shield Asian peasant fishers and farmers from climate risks? The most extreme degree of climate adaptation and resiliency will be required of those nine Asian fisheries that already rank among the world’s top 25 in incidence of devastating natural disasters (see Table 14). It is not likely that the kinds of climate grants documented by Tables 16 and 17 will ameliorate Asian climate risks. Paralleling the failures of past development projects, climate adaptation efforts are under-funded, too small in number, too narrow in geographical scope, and too often driven by the economic interests of national and international elites. These realities will leave Asian peasant fishers and farmers and indigenous peoples in the eye of the climate storm, doubly threatened by the natural forces and by the pressures that result when UNFCC adaptation projects are implemented without sufficient funding, advance planning, or public transparency. These projects are likely to be plagued by the same kinds of domestic conflict, human rights violations and governmental corruption that have handicapped REDD agreements. Furthermore, Asian national governments have set contradictory development and climate goals for the 21st century, reflecting the opposing crosscurrents that characterize international development organizations and banks. Indonesia is typical of the region. At the same time that the Indonesian government targets its forests to be a “carbon sink” for the world by 2030, it intends to double palm oil production by 2025 through deforestation to create 4 million additional hectares of oil palm. In addition, the country will make 5 million additional hectares of mining and timbering concessions in those forests, alongside deforestation to establish 9 million hectares of paper pulp species and to build seven new pulp mills (Angelsen et al. 2012: 58).

According to Antonio Quizon (2013: 56), climate change already alters the known parameters of land tenure for peasant farmers on a regular basis.

The current effects of the annual monsoon season in Bangladesh provide an illustration of the potential impact and complexity of land tenure issues that come with climate change. … During the monsoon months, an enormous amount of water flows over relatively flat lands, creating new channels, eroding riverbanks, and shifting silt deposits. In a country with high rural population densities, the social impact is immense. Over one million people a year shift their place of residence as their houses are washed away, or to take advantage of newly created lands. As rivers expand and shrink, new land bars or riverine islands are created. These emerging riverine lands are known as char lands, where an estimated 5% of the population lives – literally, on shifting sands. Settlement and ownership rights of char lands have always been complicated, in terms of ascertaining who owns the land. … There is a state ordinance that provides that “all newly emergent lands previously lost by dilution should be restored not to the original owner but only to the government”. In reality, however, it is often the locally powerful farmers (jotedars) who wrest control over accreted lands.

As we move deeper into the 21st century, worsening climate change will bring three significant impacts on Asian land tenure. The rise in sea levels will impact two-thirds of the world’s urban population that resides in South and Southeast Asia. Glacial melt in Asia’s mountainous interiors will impact half a billion people in the Himalaya/Hindu Kush region and a quarter of a billion people in China. The collective impacts of extreme weather, rising temperatures, water availability, and soil salinity will impact agriculture throughout East, South and Southeast Asia (Quizon 2013: 56).

2.1 National Land Displacements for Nonagricultural Development

The fourth stage in Asian land policy changes has been the encouragement of national regulations and/or programs that target the lands on which indigenous Asians live and secure their livelihoods. It is quite striking that the latest World Bank (2017: 108–114) report to recommend policies for the management of state lands strongly endorses “gender equity” while ignoring the political and economic biases against ethnic and indigenous minorities. This is a crucial oversight with respect to the Asian fisheries in which so much of public land is occupied by indigenous groups and ethnic minorities. Available land is steadily shrinking, and national governments seek to develop untapped natural resources, making those forest areas that are inhabited by indigenous communities particularly vulnerable to land concessions and development/infrastructure projects. Indigenous groups are situated on some of the most valuable Asian lands. In ten of the Asian fisheries, 16 to 60 percent of the land area is currently occupied by indigenous groups, and 50 to 93 percent of the deforestation between 2000 and 2020 occurred in indigenous areas (see Table 18). With the exception of China and Japan, much of the valuable forest area of the Asian fisheries is stewarded by communities under customary systems, either on legally recognized public land or on communally managed natural resources (Oakland Institute 2020). In India alone, 104 million Advisaris (tribal peoples) are at risk of state eviction for development and infrastructure projects (International Land Coalition 2020). In 2019, the Indian Supreme Court decreed the eviction of more than one million people from forests.²²

Despite United Nations efforts to secure international agreements to protect indigenous peoples, Asian national governments do not legally protect the traditional land, farming and fishing practices of indigenous peoples (Rights and Resources Initiative 2021; International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs 2021; United Nations 2020; Tamayo 2019; Tauli-Corpuz and Tamang 2007).²³ “Traditional lands under swidden cultivation are often treated as ‘barren’ or ‘marginal’ lands and are leased to corporations, including lands that indigenous communities cultivate and leave during the fallow period. Indigenous farming practices are considered to be low-technology and unproductive, with too much ‘idle time’ among rural labourers” (Quizon 2013: 45). In one study of expropriation of state land in developing countries, the World Bank (2017: 109) found that those groups and households that “are not central to the networks of social and political power… are much more likely to have their land expropriated when it is fallow.”²⁴ In order to appropriate their lands for commercial land concessions, development projects and infrastructure construction, Asian states have evicted indigenous communities since the mid-1990s, either moving them into new settlements or forcing them to become migratory laborers (Quizon 2013).

In order to make large land concessions that speed investor development of large-scale agribusiness, extractive industries, tourism projects or infrastructure, national and subnational government units construct two political myths to justify their aggressive displacements. Rural or forest areas are depicted as “empty wastelands,” and indigenous settlements are portrayed as “isolated backward communities” cut off from the flow of national development and in need of external financial assistance (Bakker and Moniaga 2010).²⁷ Through such political rhetoric, nearly 15 percent of India’s total area is classified as wastelands (Baka 2013: 413). Since land is legally claimed, owned or controlled by the state, government agencies play key roles in securing domestic and international investments.

A range of different agencies are involved, such as investment promotion agencies, ministries for agriculture, planning, and land, the president’s office, and regional government. … Governments extinguish local land rights through their power of eminent domain. Several governments (e.g., Cambodia) have made proactive efforts to identify available land that can be allocated to investors. Most governments have set up investment promotion agencies to provide the doorway for those seeking to acquire land, acting as a ‘one stop shop’ for foreign capital. (HLPE 2011: 17)

Indeed, most of the countries engage in “state-mediated dispossession to produce space for capital” by acting as coercive brokers that transfer occupied lands from peasants and indigenous communities to capitalist enterprises (Levien 2013: 381–382). In order to promote the domestic and foreign investment needed to achieve economic growth, Asian political elites adhered to post-1980s World Bank policy (Deininger and Binswanger 1999; World Bank 2017: 108–114) and institutionalized state expropriation of land from their weakest citizens (Ong 2018: 364). To lure large investors, Asian states removed people and communities from lands falsely categorized as “empty” in order to offer long term leases with tax and tariff breaks (Robertson and Andersen 2010: 273). “Rural land is commodified while peasant labor power is marginalized” (Levien 2012: 963), generating hundreds of community contexts in which poverty, housing conditions and food insecurity are worsened (International Land Coalition 2020; Mahmud et al. 2020; Lucas and Warren 2013: Quizon 2013; Cruz 2011).

India, China, Indonesia, Myanmar, South Korea and Thailand are utilizing new global finance capital to replicate the historical errors of the Philippine boom-to-bust shrimp farming that we documented earlier.²⁸ By fall 2021, nearly 60 percent of Thai coastal fishing areas had been lost to large-scale aquaculture, and the intense fish farming is destroying underwater currents.²⁹ Throughout the Asian fisheries, large, export-oriented aquaculture pushes out small farmers and fishers, intensifying land-related conflicts. Moreover, rice and food croplands have been swallowed up for massive fishponds (Mahmud et al. 2020).

Stimulated by international financial institutions, the low and middle income Asian fisheries have undertaken frenetic agendas to integrate their rural areas, forests and natural resources into national goals for the 21st century. On the one hand, these Asian states have actively solicited investments in rural areas in order to nationalize ethnic and indigenous minorities that have resisted state control (Neef 2016; Ho and Spoor 2006; Mgbako et al. 2010; Gillespie and Fu 2014; Henley 2014; Karen Human Rights Group 2012; Amnesty International 2018; Springer 2012; McCarthy et al. 2012). On the other hand, these countries (except Japan and China) have taken on massive indebtedness to move quickly to exploit natural resources in those areas and to open “rural frontiers” through new transportation, trading and tourism networks. For instance, Malaysia and Thailand have accumulated a combined debt of $140 billion. Table 19 provides an overview of the extent of these national efforts to modernize infrastructure and to integrate their rural economies more deeply into globalized trade circuits. Since 2000, more than 350 dams have displaced more agricultural and fishing households than any other type of infrastructure projects.³⁰ In addition to serious ecological impacts, dam construction threatens fishing and aquaculture production and floods large areas of croplands. Typically, corporate enclaves around dams are operated by foreign workers, generating little local employment. While local communities absorb negative impacts, the electricity is sent elsewhere not into impoverished surrounding peasant communities (Baird and Barney 2017; Kakonen and Thuon 2019; Rousseau 2020). Thousands of rural Asians have also been displaced for military bases, coal-fired power plants, railroads, bridges, highways, roads, airports, deep sea ports, harbors, coastal levees, and waste water treatment plants. Public land acquisitions and funding have also gone into heavy industry, including steel mills, aluminum smelters, natural gas refineries, and palm oil refineries (see Table 19).

Since 2000, 789 Asian Special Economic Zones have been developed as comprehensive export-oriented enclaves for manufacturing, mining, agribusinesses, and services, supported by tax, environmental and labor concessions (Sampat 2015). National and subnational government units act as the chief land brokers for the creation of these private enterprises.

As increased demand for land – driven both by higher growth rates in general and real estate markets in particular – has confronted an inelastic supply in rural land markets, capitalists increasingly turn to the state to use non-market means for making land available for capital accumulation. … Unlike the older developmental state that expropriated large amounts of rural land for public infrastructure and heavy industries, land brokering in the neoliberal era – culminating with SEZ s – proceeds under an expansive definition of ‘public purpose’ that is indistinguishable from private capital accumulation. Elite housing colonies, IT parks, malls and amusement parks have joined the hydroelectric dam and steel mill as causes for expropriating the peasantry. … The SEZ developer is a state-appointed capitalist landlord who receives windfall returns by commodifying artificially cheap land expropriated from farmers. … In return for turning farmland into ‘developed land parcels’, SEZ developer-landlords command a portion of the profits generated by the producing firms inside the SEZ. … Instead of capital seizing hold of agriculture – the traditional problematic of agrarian political economy – capital is seizing hold of the land, creating a new pattern of agrarian transformation driven by real estate speculation. (Levien 2012: 964)

Comprised of industries, transport linkages, commercial enterprises, tourism facilities and elite housing, SEZ s are often privileged enclaves in the midst of rural poverty and exclusion. In Indonesia, for example, the eight largest SEZ s each encompass a power plant, a tourism complex, a seaport, an airport, bridges, and roads, in addition to commercial and industrial enterprises. Effectively, the state creates capitalist rentiers “who profit from the transfer of under-valued assets” (Levien 2012: 964). State evictions make available agricultural or forest lands that cannot otherwise be obtained on the market, making those large concessions available at prices well below market value. International trading is made more lucrative in these SEZ s which are duty free and afford capitalists tax exemptions (Carter and Harding 2011; Levien 2012, 2013).

Land concessionaires for hundreds of tourism complexes (see Table 19) have received public subsidies for the creation of private enclaves that stand in stark contrast to the displaced farming, fishing and indigenous communities. Tourism facilities have drawn international attention for their high number of human rights complaints by indigenous communities.³¹ Construction of airports, seaports, railroads, and highways have also displaced communities to create transport linkages for tourists. In several countries, special laws have been passed to legalize activities like gambling that are illegal for citizens. National and provincial governments play central roles in recruiting foreign investments and manipulating domestic politics to secure land concessions and infrastructure funding (Neef 2021). Rainforests and indigenous areas have been targeted for tourism and for the establishment of national parks and ecological reserves that are designed as tourist attractions. The national military and tourism are tightly linked in Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka (see Table 19). The Bangladesh government has prioritized the opening of indigenous areas of the Chittaangong Hills where the military operates seven tourist complexes after the eviction of 28 villages. In Cambodia and Myanmar, the boom in casino tourism is controlled by the military. In Sri Lanka, the military operates two airlines, 21 resort hotels, three golf courses, four restaurants, two whale watching tours, a ferry service, a diving center and a nature reserve in northern provinces. Chinese corporations have sought land concessions from the Myanmar military for tourism complexes along the border (Woods 2011).

In a rare examination of the linkages between tourism and the forced evictions of large groups of people, Andreas Neef (2021: 190, 107) calls attention to the brutal displacement from land and livelihoods that lay the groundwork for national tourism projects. In Cambodia, “a large-scale tourism project by a Chinese corporation in Koh Kong Province forced hundreds of families from coastal land they had occupied for many decades; families were given no choice and only meagre compensation; resisting groups have faced violence by private security guards and the Cambodian military; families were resettled into the interior of the Botum Sakor National Park where illegal logging remains one of few options to sustain their livelihoods.” Following a 20-year civil conflict in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, the Bangladesh military “has maintained a strong presence to ‘securitise’ the region for tourism but also controlling a large part of the tourism sector itself. Several hundred indigenous families from the Jumma, Mro and Marma ethnic groups have been forcefully evicted from their land to make way for military-owned tourist resorts popular with domestic tourists.” Similarly, the Sri Lanka military “uses the booming tourism sector in the country to provide employment opportunities for its oversized forces and thereby controls a major share of the country’s economy, while dispossessing many Tamil citizens, cutting off their livelihood resources and systematically trying to erase their culture and collective memory, a process that is understood by many Tamils as a continuous structural genocide.”

2.2 Impacts of Transnational Land Grabbing

It is not likely that the post-2008 international land grabbing frenzy would have occurred in Asia if the national-states had not accumulated significant historical experience at employing coercive land displacements to facilitate large land concessions to investors. Globally, the highest incidence of external investments occurred in countries with weak protection of citizen landholding rights (Deininger et al. 2011: 55). Countries that failed to formally recognize land rights were more attractive for foreigners in search of land in the wake of the 2008 commodity price hike. Indeed, most international land investments occurred where there was either a lack of national legal recognition and protection of citizen land rights or a history of public willingness to regulate around such established rights (Deininger et al. 2011; OXFAM 2013: Melepia and Griffin 2019). Table 19 makes clear the causative role of Asian states in facilitating the post-2008 land grabbing frenzy. Asian countries that fail to grant formal land rights to peasants, ethnic minorities and indigenous peoples have been easy targets for large land seizures, both domestic and international (OXFAM 2013; Deininger et al. 2011; Human Rights Watch 2019; Land Matrix 2016). According to a World Bank study, “the quality of the destination country’s business climate is insignificant, and weak tenure security is associated with increased interest for investors to acquire land in the country” (Arezeki et al. 2011: 18). Less than one-third of the farm operators held clear title to the land from which they were displaced; the rest were smallholders on state-owned or ancestral indigenous or ethnic community lands (Land Matrix 2016).

Furthermore, only about 7 percent of the affected communities were provided any advance informed consent by investors (Anseeuw et al. 2012), and less than 13 percent ever received the promised compensation (Land Matrix 2016). According to accumulated United Nations evidence about oil palm plantations in Southeast Asia, the land and labor rights of indigenous peoples are “disregarded, their right to consent is not respected, some are displaced, and they are left with no alternative but to become de facto bonded labourers gathering oil palm fruit for the companies that manage the plantations” (Tauli-Corpuz and Tamang 2007: 9).³² “Forest, farming lands and rubber gardens have been cleared for oil palm plantation development, reducing livelihood options of the indigenous communities, while fertilizer leaks outside of the plantation grounds and waste water from the palm oil mills pollute the rivers.” As forest and farming lands disappear, “the availability of local food shrinks because there are fewer opportunities for fishing, hunting, gathering of forest resources, and growing subsistence crops” (Orth 2007: 12).

To complicate matters, international investments were more likely to occur where there was weak national and subnational political will to protect ecological reserves (Neef 2016; Friends of the Earth 2019; Greenpeace 2021), a tendency that is clear in our analysis of post-2000 infrastructure agendas of Asian states (see Table 19). A majority of the Asian land deals were located in “high biodiversity” areas, much of that land situated within nationally designated reserves. Throughout Southeast Asia, vast land tracts have been grabbed for “large-scale monocultural development… with its heavy reliance on chemical fertilisers and pesticides, massive deforestation and the destruction of valuable ecosystems” (Friends of the Earth 2019). Recent research indicates that oil palm is invading ecological havens throughout Southeast Asia, including 3.12 million hectares inside Indonesia’s protected forests (Greenpeace 2021). In late 2021, Sri Lanka shocked environmental NGO s by announcing that it is banning palm oil imports and is razing plantations due to environmental threats. National policy will be to replace oil palms with rubber which hosts greater biodiversity and provides more local employment (Rodrigo 2021).

From the accumulated scholarship, we can derive four other generalizations that provide a reliable analysis of post-2008 transnational land grabbing. First, the Asian states mythologized their land concessions to be idle, marginal, and/or uninhabited. “The tendency to neglect existing rights often derives from a legal framework inherited from colonial days – reinforced or more deeply entrenched post-independence – that presumes any unclaimed or unregistered land to be ‘empty’ and thus available for transfer with few safeguards” (Deininger et al. 2011: 6). In reality, the land deals have converted agricultural lands, destroyed fishing grounds, invaded protected ecological sanctuaries, and/or displaced indigenous communities. “The claim that lots of ‘available’ land is unused and waiting for development is simply a myth. Most agricultural land deals target quality farmland, particularly land that is irrigated and offers good access to markets… Much of this land was already being used for small-scale farming, pastoralism and other types of natural resource use” (OXFAM 2012: 4). Through analysis of 833 land deals involving 23.8 million Asian hectares, Land Matrix (2016) discovered that 81 percent of the acquired lands had been previously used actively for agriculture, with 58 percent planted in food crops or used to pasture food livestock– 37 per cent operated by smallholders and 44 percent by larger commercial farm owners. Rather than being isolated, a majority of the lands were situated with easy access to urban areas with markets. In short, the land grabbing resulted in massive losses of agricultural hectares and fisheries, resulting in net losses of food producing resources. For production of nonfood exports, investors focused on acquiring the best lands in terms of water availability, irrigation potential, soil fertility, and access to markets, with many acquisitions made in higher-value peri-urban areas (Cotula 2012).

Second, Asian land grabbing has been carried out by domestic, regional and transnational companies, often with the involvement of corrupt government and military officials (Deininger et al. 2011: 62). While there was some land grabbing by global agribusinesses, more than 70 percent of the deals and nearly 80 percent of the Asian land area involved in this historical land grabbing period were orchestrated by regional capitalists and state elites, primarily based in China, India, South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam (Cotula 2012).³³ Many of these land acquisitions were organized as joint ventures between foreign and domestic investors, often involving actors who had been actively recruited by the states where lands were grabbed (Borras and Franco 2011; Marks et al. 2015; Schoenberger et al. 2017). By 2015, nearly 60 percent of Asian land deals had targeted Southeast Asia, 28 percent had targeted East Asia, and 15 percent had targeted South Asia. More than 94 percent of the investors were private companies or individuals while the rest were Chinese and Vietnamese state-owned corporations. Strikingly, domestic investors were far less likely to utilize their acquired lands for food production (Land Matrix 2016).

Third, these land deals have not generated added resources for the world food system or for the Asians who live in the countries where the land concessions were made. Early in this global process, many international development organizations, NGO s and scholars erroneously linked these investments to specific national interests in capturing Global South land for future food production (e.g., GRAIN 2008; Robertson and Andersen 2010; Zoomers 2010; HLPE 2011; IFPRI 2009; Deininger et al. 2011).³⁴ Overwhelmingly, however, these land grabs were driven by high global demand for certain nonfood crops, especially palm oil, rubber, biofuels and animal feeds (Ariza-Montobbio et al. 2010; Borras and Franco 2011; Deininger et al. 2011; Pearce 2012; Marks et al. 2015; Gironde et al. 2016; Schoenberger et al. 2017). “Two-thirds of agricultural land deals by foreign investors are in countries with a serious hunger problem. Yet perversely, precious little of this land is being used to feed people” (OXFAM 2012: 3). China’s land acquisition pattern points to land grabbing in hungry countries for export commodities other than food. Fears that China was land grabbing for food production in other countries (GRAIN 2008) have proven to be unfounded (Hofman and Ho 2012; Brautigam and Zhang 2013; Brautigam 2015; Myers and Jie 2015). Like other foreign land grabbers, Chinese land acquisitions were concentrated in nonfood crops (Borras and Franco 2011; HLPE 2011; Land Matrix 2016; Schoenberger et al. 2017). Contrary to the popular perception that China dominated African land grabbing, the majority of Chinese land acquisitions between 2000 and 2011 were situated in Southeast Asia (Hofman and Ho 2012). China invested in nearly 2.9 million hectares in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Indonesia—countries with alarming or serious Hunger Indexes—primarily to export palm oil, rubber, and biofuel crops. Only 1.5 percent of the land area was targeted for food production, but the contracted outputs were luxury commodities (cashews, pistachios, fruits).³⁵ Even when foreign investments were made inside China, nonfoods were prioritized. In a large project not included in the land grabbing databases, two European corporations invested nearly 53 billion Yuan between 2000 and 2015 to lease nearly one million hectares for oil palm. Their construction of twenty palm oil mills positioned China to import and process raw oil palm from adjacent Asian and Pacific producers (Xu 2018).

By analyzing 833 land deals encompassing 23.8 million Asian hectares, Land Matrix (2016) reports that only 30 percent of the transferred lands were used to cultivate food crops or livestock. Nearly half were growing nonfood crops while 25 percent were allocated to tourism, mining and/or industrial uses. Land grabs since 2008 have not only converted land use to nonfood exports but have also shifted thousands of peasant producers from food crops into nonfood contract farming, particularly oil palm and rubber (Pearce 2012; Marks et al. 2015; Gironde et al. 2016). Philip McMichael (2012) labels this an historical reconfiguration of the global food-feed-fuel industry in which global alliances of feed-fuel, palm oil, ethanol, and sugar-soy agribusinesses orchestrate the production and marketing of flex crops that can be marketed as foods, biofuels, livestock feeds and industrial inputs (Borras et al. 2016).³⁶ The main drivers for investment in biofuel production in South and Southeast Asia are the European Union and American targets of sourcing transport fuels from renewable sources (McMichael 2010). “While policy-makers in the EU push for cleaner fuel and reduced greenhouse gas emissions, their palm oil imports (from Malaysia and Indonesia) actually destroy rainforests, threaten biodiversity, and cause the conversion of peatlands, which creates carbon emissions” (Quizon 2013: 54). In addition to those nonfood uses, nearly 5 million acres in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar and China’s Yunan Province were converted from rice paddies and rainforests to monocultural rubber plantations (Pearce 2012: 200).

By 2017, 43.4 million hectares had been grabbed by transnational investors in Cambodia, Indonesia, Myanmar and the Philippines (Marks et al. 2015), primarily for production of palm oil, rubber and biofuel crops for export (Borras and Franco 2011; Pearce 2012; Schoenberger et al. 2017). Indonesia became “one of the world’s largest, most systematic and ruthless land grabbing operations in the world,” rendering the land rights of rainforest dwellers defunct, displacing great numbers of peasant farmers and substituting a largely migrant labor force. More than 70 percent of the jungle was destroyed, initially for timbering for plywood and paper pulp. Between 2000 and 2009, the Asian lands used to cultivate palm oil nearly doubled (Pearce 2012: 167–171). By 2020, four countries had set goals to convert more large areas to this commodity by 2030 (Pearce 2012; Gironde et al. 2016).³⁷ For instance, the Philippine government intends to plant 8 million hectares of oil palm by the end of the decade. To accomplish that, the country will displace existing coconut trees which will put at risk 3.5 million coconut smallholders, only a small percentage of whom can expect to be integrated into the low-labor oil palm estates. There are already two palm oil mills and a few plantations in southern Mindanao (Coca 2020). Since 2000, there has been a significant increase in the number of Asian smallholders who have converted from diverse food crops to monocultural contract farming of palm oil and biofuel crops (OXFAM 2013; McCarthy 2010). In Indonesia, for example, 3.5 million peasant contract farmers cultivate oil palm on 40 percent of the area planted in this crop (McCarthy 2010: 833). By 2019, Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia and the Philippines accounted for more than 80 percent of the world palm oil production and more than 90 percent of exports, 42 percent imported by China, India and five other Asian countries.³⁸

Fourth, depeasantization is the real agenda of large land acquisitions. Philip McMichael (2012: 693) contends that “the land grab effectively authorizes removal of rural populations from ancestral lands to install ‘agriculture without farmers.’ Domestic and transnational capitalists and their domestic compradors (landed elites, agribusinesses, state officials) monopolized the created wealth, with limited positive livelihood outcomes for displaced farming and fishing communities.” Land Matrix (2016) reports a net employment loss in which there was “large-scale crowding out of smallholders and low prevalence of contract farming schemes” because investors prefer to recruit migratory laborers who are not likely to resist evictions. Per 100 hectares, Asian oil palm and sugarcane plantations generate ten jobs, eucalyptus two jobs, and soybeans only 0.5 job (Li 2011). After investor land conversion, smallholder livelihoods were threatened, as their previous croplands and diverse uses of forests and waterways were displaced by new investor land uses (Gironde et al. 2016: 172; Pye 2017). In Indonesia, only about 27 percent of investor lands were allocated to smallholder plots, and many of the parcels were too small to cultivate oil palm (OXFAM 2011a).

Throughout South Asia, investor agendas have displaced peasant and indigenous food producers. Inequality of land control has widened significantly, and new class and ethnic bifurcations have emerged among peasants. On the one hand, the percentage of marginal farmers with parcels too small for production beyond household requirements has more than doubled. On the other hand, a new small class of entrepreneurial smallholders “is emerging that, together with domestic investors, is deriving a lucrative livelihood from boom crops, such as oil palm and cocoa. As these emergent ‘progressive farmers’ buy up surrounding areas of land, their prosperity is linked with problems of agrarian differentiation and dispossession” (McCarthy et al. 2012: 526). Peasant fishers have been negatively impacted by land deals through displacement of their communities, elimination of fishing rights by investors, diversion of inland waterways into irrigation systems and large fishponds, and pollution of river and coastal waterways that kills fish (Bavinck et al. 2017; Bues and Theesfeld 2012).