POLELUC · A POLitical Ecology of Land-Use Change (POLELUC)

Periodic Report Summary 1 - POLELUC (A POLitical Ecology of Land-Use Change (POLELUC))

The POLELUC project (www.poleluc.com) started in October 2011 in order to pursue a multi-disciplinary, cross-scale analysis of the following objectives in three Latin American countries, i.e. Guatemala, Paraguay and Argentina: 1. To understand the governance processes that facilitate ‘land grabbing’ processes and the subsequent expansion of agrofuels in selected countries, including regulatory, economic and market-related issues; 2. To identify ‘who gets what’ and ‘why’ from the cultivation, processing and distribution of these crops along their commodity chains, from the local to the international scale, and from the producer to the consumer levels; 3. To analyse livelihood impacts at local level and the role of factors like tenure and socio-political capital in mediating access to economic (e.g. employment) and other benefits derived from ‘land grabs’ and agrofuels production, with a particular emphasis on processes of dispossession and conflict; 4. To qualitatively and quantitatively assess the local ecological impacts of rapid land-use change for agrofuels production, paying attention to ecosystem services and biodiversity trade-offs; 5. To examine local discourses on ‘land grabs’ and their articulation with broader national discourses and social movements in favour or against the expansion of ‘agrofuels’. The Principal Investigator (PI - Esteve Corbera) and the project team (PhD candidate Almudena García and PhD candidate Sara Mingorría, the last one funded mostly through other sources) are based at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. They have so far gained a detailed understanding of soy and oil palm expansion in the selected countries and have already produced a number of non-public and public documents analyzing the expansion of these crops, the evolution of related legal, technological and land tenure systems, and the actors involved in production, processing and distribution networks. Intensive data collection in Paraguay and Argentina is only about to begin and no significant findings can yet be reported. PhD appointed candidate Almudena Sastre has spent 9 months of training at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague to gain further understanding of agrarian political economy, hosted by her co-supervisor Prof. Jun Borras. She also conducted, jointly with the PI, a preliminary fieldwork in Argentina and Paraguay in February-March 2013, which helped refining the research questions and methodology proposed with our host country partners. In Guatemala, data collection has been completed and results will be included in Mingorría's PhD dissertation, to be submitted during the second half of 2014. As regards of impact, the project has so far accomplished the objectives planned. A website introducing the research being conducted by the PI, with emphasis on the POLELUC project (http://www.poleluc.com/introduction/land-grabs-2/), and including updated news, activities and publications has been put together. The project has already resulted in two conceptual and one empirical academic publications, i.e. one more than originally expected at this stage of the project, which have contributed to situate the project's team members and their ongoing research in international academic debates. The first article has been published in the journal Environmental Research Letters (Creutzig et al., 2013) and reviews the macro and micro-effects of biofuel deployment on income, food tenure, land tenure, and health conditions. It further argues that integrated assessment models for bioenergy deployment need to incorporate both livelihood and distributional dimensions in such models, and couple them with multi-criteria exercises at regional and local levels. The second article will be published in the journal Geoforum (Hunsberger et al., in press) analyses how a set of biofuels' governance instruments consider livelihood and distributional impacts and we show that, on the one hand, these aspects often appear as a second-thought in instruments' design and implementation and, on the other, that the stricter instruments in this regard are those that have been less taken up by markets to date. The third article focuses on the livelihood impacts of working in oil palm plantations in Guatemala, and it is currently in press in Environment, Development and Sustainability (Mingorría et al., in press). It shows that working in such plantations produces positive effects on gross income but affects negatively other dimensions of well-being, as for example reduces the available time for social activities and creates additional labor burdens on women. The article also demonstrates that formal and informal access to land within the commons results a key-mediating factor of livelihood outcomes. Mingorría will present this article at the 6th Latin-American Congress on Environment and Development, Quito 12-13th December. Forthcoming research findings and subsequent publications will be presented in other academic conferences in late 2014 and 2015. The PI has contributed to the Bioenergy Annex of the "Agriculture, Forestry and Land-Use" chapter in the forthcoming IPCC Working Group III Report, which will be published in April 2014 and that contains a thorough review of the literature on agrofuels environmental and socio-economic impacts. Related to this last effort, the PI is one of the leading authors of a systematic review about the sustainable development impacts of bioenergy production alongside other IPCC authors. Finally, it is worth noting that Mingorría and Corbera have secured additional funding for the dissemination of Guatemala's research findings at community and regional levels in May 2014 (UAB-FAS small grant) and that activities to design and prepare the project's final edited book will start in September 2014, which will involve the selection of the publisher and an open call for contributions. By the end of the project, it is expected that all resulting outcomes contribute to inform relevant actors and collaborators in our selected countries, and support their policy-making and activist-oriented activities in relation to the expansion of soy and oil palm cultivation.

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