Rights Action

February 26, 2013

"GRABBING POWER: THE NEW STRUGGLES FOR LAND, FOOD AND DEMOCRACY IN NORTHERN HONDURAS"

by Tanya M. Kerssen

The Aguán conflict is "the most acute agrarian crisis in Central America in the past fifteen years." (Anthropologist Marc Edelman)

Following the military coup that overthrew the Honduran government headed by president Manuel Zelaya in June 2009, a massive anti-coup resistance movement emerged, embodied by the National Front of Popular Resistance (FNRP). An important pillar of this broad-based movement for democratization is the peasant movement of the Aguán Valley, profiled in the new book Grabbing Power: The New Struggles for Land, Food and Democracy in Northern Honduras, published by Food First Books/Institute for Food and Development Policy (February 2013).

In the wake of the 2007-2008 global food, fuel and financial crises, an estimated 56.6 million to 227 million hectares of farmland have been grabbed by investors - especially in poor countries of the global south. These "land grabs" erode local control and re-orient agriculture away from community needs towards global market demands for food, feed and fuel.

In Honduras, a small handful of elite businessmen used the global crisis and militarized conditions created by the 2009 coup to wage a war on peasants in the Aguán Valley and expand their massive oil palm plantations. Between September 2009 and August 2012, 53 peasants were murdered in the context of the Aguán agrarian conflict-with many more injuries, kidnappings, illegal detentions, forced evictions and cases of torture and sexual assault. Many Aguán peasants and activists now place the death toll at over 60.

Anthropologist Marc Edelman calls the Aguán conflict "the most acute agrarian crisis in Central America in the past fifteen years."

Grabbing Power explores the history of this crisis-from the United Fruit Company's dominance in the 20th century to the rise of a powerful class of domestic elites in the 1980s and 90s including the brutal landowner Miguel Facussé, also known as the "oil palm grower of death." The book also shows how the power of these elites is bolstered by international aid, "green" capitalism, a corrupt media, and US-funded militarization in the name of a tragic War on Drugs.

Grabbing Power also tells the story of the fierce resistance of Aguán peasants and Afro-indigenous communities in northern Honduras, and their fight for the democratization of land, food and political power. United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Olivier De Schutter observes, "With this chilling description of the impacts in Honduras of the new scramble towards land and resources, Tanya Kerssen gives faces, and voices, to what is all too often described through statistics and trends-an anonymization that is also a silencing. This is required reading for those who wish to understand land grabbing from the point of view of the victims."

[Tanya Kerssen is a researcher at the Institute for Food and Development Policy/Food First, where she analyzes the root causes of hunger and works to amplify the voices of social movements fighting to transform the global food system. She writes and teaches on the political economy of food, agriculture and peasant resistance, with a focus on Latin America and Africa, and is engaged in solidarity work in support of Honduran land and democracy movements. Food First Books is the publishing arm of the Institute for Food and Development Policy, better known as Food First, founded in 1975 by Frances Moore Lappé and Joseph Collins as a people's "think-and-do tank" to promote informed activism and movement building. Its mission is to end the injustices that cause hunger through action-oriented research, education and advocacy.]

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