Efforts to increase responsibility in agricultural investments : policy frameworks and implementation challenges : evidence from civil society in Sierra Leone
Rahall, Joseph et al.
Sierra Leone belongs to the Group of LDCs with high rate of poverty and ongoing food insecurity for large parts of the population. Moreover, the country still has to recover from a decade lasting civil war. The control over natural resources was a trigger for conflict and land a major natural resource remains to be a contentious issue. Against the historic and conflictive background the acceleration of large scale land acquisitions bear the risk of increasing the divide within rural population, worsening local food insecurity and fuelling underlying conflict fault lines. While national policies aim to foster both, smallholder commercialization and large scale foreign direct investments in land, those two goals conflict with each other in practice. Given the prevailing agricultural practices there is no idle productive land available in Sierra Leone that can easily be made available for large scale investments. Government, investors and donors have to be aware of risks involved and need to be explicitly sensitive to the context, in particular with regard to unequal capacities and power imbalances between investors on the one and rural communities to the other hand. Responsible investments and governance will need to follow high standards and the implementation of any investment will need to be carefully monitored. As illustrated local civil society organizations can play an important role in that regard. The World Bank and also other international donors should attentively develop further their safeguards that build up on human rights requirements and the Do no Harmm principle.
Event: Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty 2013
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