 Good morning. This is a case study carried out in northern Zambia and it was a case study that we identified when we were doing research on the local social and environmental impacts of biofuels but the plantation had not yet been developed. There were only about 10 hectares or so cleared at the time that we first identified this case study but we started thinking among ourselves could we potentially look at the value of existing land uses, compare that with the value of employment given what the company was paying at that time and do a scenario analysis looking into the future. So this was a case study that was kind of put on hold for a year or two and then we went back and actually did it about a year ago. And so it's in a system where there's a shifting agricultural system called Chita Meni which helps us to explore this narrative about the marginality of lands being allocated for large-scale investments and with two co-authors who are or have been with C4 in the past. So Erin covered some of the global trends so I'm not going to go into much detail there. I just wanted to point out that in addition to the global market drivers host countries the significant host country agency in terms of trying to attract investment into particular country like Zambia which is land blocked and maybe potentially more having more difficulty than other countries in attracting investment. But across the board in southern Africa countries are offering a great deal to try to attract investors to their countries. From tax benefits five to ten year tax holidays for example and many other kinds of tax benefits as well as legislative reforms, land tenure reforms and business environment reforms etc to try to attract investors. And a number of narratives are of course leveraged in the context of these large-scale land acquisitions as a way to justify them. Some of them are focusing on the benefits and others are focusing on narratives that in effect try to minimize the cost. And this paper looks at these narratives that are essentially minimizing the cost by saying that the lands being targeted for investment are in fact marginal underutilized or degraded. And in this particular location degraded lands can mean a number of different things but it's often associated with landscapes where fire has been used relatively intensively for agriculture, for hunting, for charcoal burning etc. And they also may be considered under utilized in the context of itinerant land use as in this case this shifting agricultural system. So to what extent are these lands in fact marginal or underutilized? So just to contextualize this in the context of Zambia there's been a host of investment promotion initiatives as I talked about land policy reforms facilitating long-term leasehold by foreigners. In this case the leases are 99 years renewable. A host of fiscal incentives that I've talked about they also have established a land bank a number of countries are doing this where they've gone and negotiated with chiefs and basically have a database of land concessions that are made you know put on offer for investors who come and the establishment of the Zambia Development Agency as a one-stop shop for investors a number of countries are doing this as well basically trying to facilitate all of the permitting land acquisition etc within one government agency to facilitate investment. They've also participated in a relatively significant way in the biofuel boom particularly with Jatropha which is largely being seen now as a failed crop but the country established blending targets for ethanol as well as biodiesel. At the time of research when we were focusing on biofuels back in 2009 more than 500,000 hectares had been acquired by investors for biofuel production and more than 45,000 farmers had been engaged in outgrow schemes or contract farming schemes and there was a tendency to target quote marginal lands particularly in northern province where a government agent actually representatives of several government departments were going around talking to chiefdom by chiefdom negotiating land for investment is the way it was related to us and this area is where this shifting agricultural system is most prevalent. So just to give a little bit of an introduction to land use in the province Chintamani agriculture is a little bit different than many other shifting agricultural systems where an area seven times larger than the actual resulting plot is is lopped branches are lopped it's not so you can see here there's you know kind of large dumps left in this area and they're concentrated in a smaller area and burnt so it's essentially bringing concentrating nutrients from a larger area into smaller area for cropping and finger millet is the first crop that's cultivated it's a traditional crop with a number of cultural values and then followed by ground nuts cassava and then at the very end beans for as long as beans will produce one or two seasons and the benefits of the Chintamani system relative to permanent fields is yield farmers were saying that if mature for forest is cut it yields far far more per hectare than the permanent fields but also cost households are not of course don't have to buy expensive fertilizers to make the system viable finger millet was also stressed as a benefit that finger millet doesn't grow so well in the permanent cropland so that so there's some consequences there permanent fields have been promoted historically through subsidies for maize cultivation and so the benefits are access to that subsidy but also the declining desirability of Chintamani as mature for us are more and more distance from distant from households and also declining yields given the tendency to be opening up areas of younger vegetation over time so the case study was in Pika district and these are the five or six concession areas totaling around 300,000 hectares it's a mosaic landscape involving Chintamani permanent fields and natural vegetation in various stages of regeneration including permanent mature forest and we focused in on this concession here where operations had initiated on three villages which were on the boundaries of the concession there are also two villages that are fully contained within the concession boundaries but by doing it this way we're able to look at the actual resource distributions within and outside the plantation and also make some assumptions about what it would look like for villages that were fully encompassed within plantation boundaries so we looked at livelihood impacts under alternative plantation development scenarios the first being that only Chintamani farmland would be displaced and the permanent crops would remain this is the official company policy at the time but since even in the very early stages were 10 15 hectares were cleared some two farmers had indicated that their that their permanent croplands had been displaced and so we went ahead and looked at the other scenario where both both types of cropland are displaced so the scenario analysis looked at essentially eight scenarios which I'm going to present in very distilled format that defined by the company strategy so scenario one only Chintamani is displaced scenario two all vegetation or land uses are displaced and then we looked at all livelihood active the case where all livelihood activities are within concession boundaries representing those two communities that are fully encompassed by the concession area and then actual resource distributions for those boundary communities where which resources are found inside versus outside the concession area and then under scenarios of employment and no employment so that's to say you know looking at household averages what's the consequence if you know only my Chintamani fields are displaced and I do get employment versus I don't get employment and that was looked at for all the different scenarios so what's the baseline look at look like before concession comes in or a large-scale agricultural investment the current land holdings first of all we didn't find any households were who were solely focused on Chintamani agriculture we found people who are practicing permanent cropping exclusively and those who are practicing both Chintamani and permanent cropping but interestingly those who practice both had larger area of permanent cropland in addition to their Chintamani fields and we weren't able to figure it to distil why that was the case but in any case it's not that just the poor poor households are practicing Chintamani in the system the income derived from diverse livelihood activities permanent cropland as compared to Chintamani crops generates far more of the household's income on average however the Chintamani cropland is within a system involving natural vegetation in various stages of regeneration as I mentioned as well as our areas that are used for livestock grazing so the assumptions we made in terms of looking at the Chintamani system were to consider the non timber forest products as part of that system and only 50 percent of the livestock component as part of that system and so you see there's just just so so the implication of that is that this component these two components here are relevant for the households who also only practice permanent cropping because they're you they're also collecting non timber forest products so moving on to findings the first table looks at all where all livelihood activities are located within concession boundaries representing those two communities that are inside the concession area and where only Chintamani is displaced so this is kind of the the best case scenario for those communities and you see that Chintamani farmers are if you consider the consumptive value of all the resources in their system they're actually earning more than they would earn if all households were in fact employed which I've never witnessed in practice in this case there are 18 households employed at the time of research it's impossible to look to know what that would look like or look like over time as far as percentages but and then for non Chintamani farmers there would be a gain through employment if that employment could be guaranteed so it depends on their current livelihood strategies what the net effect would be looking at the case where if all land uses or vegetation were displaced by this company or in other by other companies in similar landscapes you see here that the annual income from employment is about this and this by the way this was a wage labor that people were very very happy with it and we were able to look at a number of different large-scale plantations and they were paying far more than others were paying at the time so it's a fairly generous estimate but if you look at all the consumptive value as well as the cash value which is here you see that you know if the basically employment cannot offset economic losses when you consider those consumptive values if you're only looking at cash value then you then the answer would be yes it would offset those losses and the final table is looking at existing resource distribution so each boundary community here in the left hand column and looking at the actual distributions of resources within an outside concession boundaries and I just want to point out here that there's a very different dependency on resources within versus outside concession boundaries based on local landforms the distribution of non-timber forest products there's a high highly heterogeneous distribution and also in this particular community where you see most of most of the much higher percentage of resources found within concession boundaries it was because there was a river that was basically blocking access to the other side of the community so they're very highly dependent on resources within the concession and so the net looking at the net household impact if you're they're not employed of course there's losses for everyone but anywhere between 5% and 86% of their livelihoods were displaced from inside the concession area and then the net household impact if considering employment was variable and it very much depended on which village you came from and how those resources were distributed so since this table is very dense I just thought I'd distill a few bullets from it so there's significant net losses in the absence of employment of course for land or resource losing households irrespective of the land occupation scenario it's obvious and we've yet to see any any situation we've been looking at the large-scale land acquisitions where communities have been able to negotiate employment for land losing households you know for all land losing households there's there's often a generic commitment that yes we will employ local people but never talks of you know in terms of numbers or percentages and one of this the concessions we looked at in Ghana only 4% of displaced households were employed so this is a really important thing to be looking at when looking at the impacts on local people there's significant inter-village differences based on variable land forms and heterogeneous forest product distribution which shape whether there are net economic gains or losses so these distribution this patterns of resource distribution are very much important and in shaping outcomes and with employment guarantees for displaced households net gains cannot be guaranteed when considering consumptive values and should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis and again I'm not seeing we're not seeing cases where local environmental impact assessments are actually quantifying the anticipated effects it's a a lot of you know you know kind of qualitative assessments of benefits that will come relative to cost but not a whole lot of quantification just to so I figured I do the disclaimers last a few shortcomings in the quantification of consumptive values for NTFPs NTFPs that have no market value such as thatch for roofing and and other and and I think we also left out firewood were not quantified in those estimates but the NTFPs that do have a market value all of the harvested volumes were considered to be sold and so that could have inflated or or reduce the estimates there and the state does not try to capture non-economic or indirect impacts and that's of course a huge issue when you know all these unanticipated effects on gender etc but there's one interesting finding is that in one of the focus group discussions where women said that they brewed beer from finger mill and then they use that especially single female-headed households use that to pay for male labor to establish their farming plots and so this loss of finger millet from the system is could potentially have some important consequences so going back to the questions the mark you know are these lands in fact marginal that are being targeted for investment in Zambia well first most house households continue to rely significantly on a Chita many system for cash income and subsistence even in the more degraded areas targeted for investment and also even for those households who do not practice Chita many agriculture there the their the first table I showed or the second table showed that they're actually also highly dependent on the system employment matters but is often insufficient to offset losses highly heterogeneous landscapes mean highly uncertain effects and so you know these narratives of certainty really we need to be very cautious about that and anticipated lively effect should be quantified even the most degraded environments to justify the development claim accompanying land acquisition narratives thanks