We, the participants of the regional workshop on Promoting Peoples’ Rights to Land and Natural Resources, who gathered in Bali, Indonesia from July 23-25, 2012, have come from across Southeast Asia and the Pacific to share our experiences and understanding of the global land grabbing in our countries and explore possible ways to collaborate and coordinate plans of learning, advocacy and grassroots action.

We assert that the convergence of intermeshing crises of food, energy and climate and the rise of newer hubs of global capital have triggered a contemporary wave of land grabbing. Land and natural resources in Southeast Asia and the Pacific are being grabbed for industrial agriculture, monocrop plantations, land speculation, mining, infrastructure projects such as dams, tourism, conservation areas, climate change mitigation and urban expansion.

This process is being facilitated by states and international financial institutions through laws, policies and deals among and between state and private actors including domestic and foreign corporations, rural elites, landowners, and corrupted community leaders; by intra-regional investments such as free trade and investment deals; by international policies such as the European Union biofuels policy, which is a key driver in the massive expansion of oil palm and other crops; and by financial capital’s control of commodity markets and natural resources, which will likely reduce all nature’s values into an exchangeable financial instrument or a derivative.

We collectively share the understanding that land grabbing has differentiated impacts within and between countries across class, gender, and ethnicity. Women, children and indigenous peoples are particularly vulnerable to dispossessions, evictions, and displacement caused by land, water and forest grabs. Land grabbing not only exacerbates existing inequalities, it destroys local economies and the socio-cultural fabric and identities of those who rely on the land for their sustenance, livelihood and continued ways of life. Land grabbing also impedes goals of poverty alleviation, protection of human rights and peoples’ welfare, rural development and social justice enshrined in Southeast Asian and Pacific governments’ constitutions, laws and policies and regional and international human rights instruments  such as the rights to self-determination, adequate standard of living, housing, food, health, culture, property and participation.

We recognize the differentiated political responses by various actors including social movements and civil society to land grabbing within and between countries. But we are alarmed over the increasing criminalization of and grave threats to communities in struggles to claim/reclaim and protect their rights to land and natural resources. One after another, we learned about the harassments, violation of peoples’ human rights, imprisonment and killings of those who stand for their rights.post-colonial property regimes]

With the severity of the situation, we cannot take this issue sitting down. We collectively demand that:

• governments and states including bilateral, regional, and international institutions must ensure and respect the rights of peoples and communities to land and natural resources rather than corporate and economic interests to grab land and resources.
• investments, whether public or private, should not undermine the rights of various communities and social groups to land and natural resources tenure. Communities should be in control of decision making about investments. International laws and legally enforceable mechanisms and actions must be established to discipline and sanction companies whose investments and activities in other countries, especially with new investment mechanisms on climate change such as carbon trading/offsets, REDD, etc. violate human rights or cause damage to local communities.
• the free prior and informed consent  (FPIC) about investment projects, including the change of use of land and natural resources must be required, ensured, recognized and promoted at all times, at all levels.  Without such free, prior and informed consent on large projects, a community’s land, territory, and resource rights are compromised. Communities also have the right to say “no” to any development or investment project.
• accountability and recourse mechanisms on land grabbing must be created and established; this includes the ensuring the right of peoples and communities to adequate, timely, legitimate, accessible, and useful information, especially about development and investment projects in land and natural resources.

We are fully aware of the difficult challenges in confronting land grabbing in our countries and in the region as well as in protecting Southeast Asian and Pacific peoples’ individual and collective rights, access and tenure security to land and natural resources. However, these challenges embolden us to intensify our work and find ways of working together to stop land grabbing in the region. We further commit,

• to continue the documentation of and research on land grabbing, investments, loss of natural resources and impacts to local areas and differentiated constituencies, including disaggregate data and information on gender and ethnicity;
• to raise awareness, share information on land grabbing, and use new forms of social media to connect, join and strengthen each others’ campaigns;
• to build networks and new social alliances, broaden and deepen our connections with each other and with key social movements in the region;
• to explore possible arenas of coordinated engagements at the national, regional and international levels such as the adherence of governments to protecting people’s rights to land and natural resources and mechanisms and spaces in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN);
• to strengthen the capacities of the communities and movements we work with to reclaim and defend their rights to land and natural resources, especially of women, children and indigenous peoples; and
• to remain steadfast in resisting the global and concerted drive of, corporations, international financial institutions, governments and elites to grab, commodify, exploit and privatize land, water and forest resources.

Land and natural resources are the foundation of Southeast Asian and Pacific’s culture, identity, society, food sovereignty, self determination and well being.  These rights are being reclaimed to achieve social justice and well being of communities and entire society, including their ecosystems in the present and for the future. Given the collective experience and broad solidarity, overcoming the local, national, regional and international challenges of land, water and forest grabbing is urgent, necessary and possible.