The world will reconvene a UN conference on an Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) from March 18 to 28, 2013. While nations, including US finalize the treaty language negotiated last summer, the National Rifle Association (NRA) and its allies have mounted a campaign of lies and deliberate distortions aimed at building opposition to the treaty.

As part of our efforts to highlight the truth, Oxfam has placed ads in Roll Call this week to encourage Members of Congress to acknowledge the fact that the ATT will not impact the Second Amendment rights of their constituents.

We know that our ads will not stop the NRA from repeating and further spreading their lies and distortions. Just last week, David Keene, the President of the NRA, said in an interview that the ATT was an attempt by the Obama administration to “end-run the Constitution.”

Mr. Keene is not ignorant. He does not lack a basic understanding of how treaties fit within the US Constitutional system. No treaty can override the Constitution. The Supreme Court in Geofroy v. Riggs (1890) held that the treaty power does not extend “so far as to authorize what the constitution forbids.” The Supreme Court rarely gets more clear than it did in Reid v. Covert (1957) when it reasoned that “it would be manifestly contrary to the objectives of those who created the Constitution, as well as those who were responsible for the Bill of Rights…[to permit] the United States to exercise power under an international agreement without observing constitutional prohibitions.”

If these two Supreme Court decisions aren’t clear enough to convince the NRA and its Congressional allies that the President cannot “end-run” the constitution through a treaty, the draft ATT text should be enough. The draft ATT states that it is the “sovereign right and responsibility of any State to regulate and control transfers of conventional arms that take place exclusively within its territory, pursuant to its own legal or constitutional systems.” In short, the Arms Trade Treaty excludes issues related to the second amendment from its scope. And even if it didn’t exclude these issues, the Constitution would not permit a treaty to override the bill of rights.

Mr. Keene’s recent statement is only one of the many lies and distortions being repeated by the NRA and Members of Congress. Oxfam has published a briefing paper on our website to help Members of Congress and the public separate the truth from the fiction.

The global arms trade is out of control and a treaty is desperately needed. An effective ATT would be based on a simple principle: no transfers of weapons when there is a substantial risk that the weapons will be used for serious violations of international human rights or humanitarian law or will impair poverty reduction. To achieve this end, the treaty will do two basic things: first, the treaty will provide clear standards by which all States judge the appropriateness of a particular arms transfer. Second, the treaty will require all States to adopt a comprehensive import and export control regime to ensure weapons entering and leaving their country are under the control of competent authorities.

No treaty will solve all the world’s problems, but the ATT will be a critical tool that for the first time will require all countries to take responsibility for their arms trade decisions. It is time for members of Congress to stop playing the NRA’s games and enter a real dialogue.

To read Oxfam America’s briefing paper, The Truth about the Arms Trade Treaty, see: http://www.oxfamamerica.org/publications/the-truth-about-the-arms-trade-treaty

I doubt members of the Agriculture Committee thought the eleventh-hour Farm Bill extension would be the conclusion of their year-plus efforts to negotiate a new and improved five-year Farm Bill.

The last-minute inclusion of a one-year extension of the commodity groups’ favorite farm subsidies and rural programs were tucked into the final fiscal cliff bill this week. This means that the debate about the future of US food and farm policy and efforts for real reform will have to continue in 2013.

The fiscal cliff bill does the bare minimum of providing continuing authority for life-saving food aid programs, avoiding most of what could be termed the “food aid cliff”.  The US provides roughly half of all food aid globally. If food aid programs had not been re-authorized, a true cliff would have emerged for tens of millions of people displaced by conflict or whose crops are decimated by floods or rain, and who depend on food aid from the US.

Although the extension of the food aid programs is obviously a relief, it’s a program in desperate need of improvement. Unfortunately the extension was not applied to reauthorization of one of the most promising and successful programs of the 2008 Farm Bill, the USDA Local and Regional Procurement Pilot Program (LRP). LRP ensures the most bang for the food aid buck, because it allows the US Government to purchase food aid from the most affordable and efficient sellers. The LRP pilot has proven to be a highly-effective and efficient way to spend scarce aid dollars to help save lives and build self-sufficiency for vulnerable communities.  As has been well documented, LPR can save time and money, allowing crucial aid to reach more people in need of food assistance. It also invests in communities so they can feed themselves, instead of becoming dependent on food aid in the future.

It is the epitome of irony that a deal designed to tackle some of the looming challenges of government spending allows LRP to lapse, thereby doubling down on the more expensive, inefficient, and outdated models of food aid.  It is a wasted opportunity for Congress, not to mention a waste of money for taxpayers. LPR is the kind of program you would prioritize if your aim was really to make federal spending more efficient and effective.

But that’s not what Congress chose to do, a depressing start to the new year. The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition issued a press release referring to the Farm Bill extension as “anti-reform” and “a disaster for farmers and the America people.”

Congress must extend authority for LRP, and adopt a host of other reforms to US food aid programs when it reauthorizes the Farm Bill in 2013. The Senate version of the Farm Bill, after much work and compromise, included good provisions on food aid reform that must be the starting point for continued discussions.

We may not have totally fallen off the food aid cliff, but we still have a mountain to climb.

“We do not see the people living in camps. We are blind to them, as their existence is now normal.” ~Suzie Castor, Executive Director of Cresfed Haiti

I have not been able to shake these words after something I saw last week. It was an exhibition of photos taken by displaced Haitian people. The photographers themselves live in camps under the constant threat of eviction. The images of three girls squatting around a fire, cooking pots stacked next to a tarpaulin wall, a girl looking almost resigned to the hardships she must face—all demonstrated to me people’s incredible ability to preserve their dignity under very harsh conditions and circumstances.

Titled “Déplacés” (The Displaced), the exhibition was commissioned by Oxfam and designed to spotlight what Haitians themselves observe in their day-to-day lives. The exhibition was launched in Port Au Prince on December 10^th to commemorate International Human Rights Day. The photos demonstrated to me the limits of the international community, the lack of capacity of the Government of Haiti, and the seeming irony of International Human Rights Day.

After the earthquake in 2010, there were approximately 1.5 million people living in camps. As we approach the three year anniversary this upcoming January, it is estimated that 357,000 people still live in camps, many under the threat of forced evictions. A recently released Oxfam briefing report, Salt in the Wound, suggests that the decrease was partly due to the implementation of several return and relocation programs, including the Haitian government’s 16/6 Project. This integrated project is aimed at rehabilitating 16 districts of Port-au-Prince with a view to offering the residents there, as well as the displaced people in six associated camps, sustainable housing solutions and improved living conditions. They do this by offering access to basic services and revenue generating activities.

While it is true that the 16/6 project has helped some of the displaced, Oxfam reports that the Government of Haiti’s plan is quite limited because it addresses relocation of IDPs on public land, but not those living on private land. Oxfam’s report highlights another reason for the declining camp populations—forced evictions by land owners.

Land owners’ rights are recognized in the Haitian constitution of 1987 and many landowners, acting as good citizens in the aftermath of the earthquake, allowed camp dwellings on their land. Now almost three years later and with no assurances from the government that they will be compensated, many landowners have begun to threaten, intimidate, and forcibly remove camp residents off their land.

So what happens to these people? Many internally displaced people now live in a constant state of fear of even leaving the camps for work or food, worried that their belongings will be destroyed in their absence. Once evicted from the camps, already vulnerable people face new and more complex problems, with no protection mechanisms from the state.

As we approach the third year commemoration of the Haiti earthquake, the need for a comprehensive durable housing policy designed to address the needs of camp residents and those already evicted remains. Piecemeal projects will not alleviate the long-standing problems of land ownership and housing in Haiti.

The government of Haiti must address the very real threats faced camp residents on private lands as they are completely unprotected. In addition, donors have to be willing to partner with the government and Haitian citizens who understand the complexity of the problems and can offer solutions.

We must all ensure that what the camp residents captured in their photographs does not become the new normal in Haiti.

David Waskow is Oxfam America’s climate change program director.

In a year of crippling droughts around the world—from West Africa to the US Midwest—the outcome at the major UN climate negotiation in Doha, Qatar, was itself an unfortunate drought of climate action.

This was a paradoxical COP—both a stepping stone and a cliff-hanger—with developing countries hanging from the finance cliff by their fingertips.  Even though several European countries pledged climate finance for the upcoming 2013-15 period, developed countries were unwilling to commit collectively to any funding level for the upcoming period or clarity about how they’ll ramp up toward the international goal of mobilizing $100 billion a year by 2020.

The United States, arguing that it was constrained by the fiscal cliff budget negotiations, refused even to commit to maintain the funding level of the past three years of ‘fast start’ climate finance agreed during the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009. All the final text says is that developed countries are “encouraged” to maintain fast start levels. Meanwhile, there was little done at Doha to further reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Qumrunnessa Nazly from Bangladesh held an empty basket amidst a field of dead corn set in front of the glittering Doha skyline to demonstrate the grave impact of a changing climate on food supply and food prices, and the crucial importance of the UN climate change negotiations in providing a solution. Richard Casson/Oxfam.

A few limited but hopeful elements in the Doha outcome: an agreement to convene a high-level dialogue on climate finance at the next COP in 2013; an agreement to work this coming year to develop an international mechanism to address “loss and damage,” the effects of climate change that cannot be adapted to; formal agreement on how some countries, particularly the European Union and Australia, will continue the Kyoto Protocol until 2020; and agreement on the process for negotiating the planned 2015 comprehensive climate agreement that will take effect in 2020.

The US made a verbal commitment to work for climate finance in Congress this coming year and try to continue the finance at current levels. (Todd Stern, the US special climate envoy said that “we have every intention to continue to press forward with funding of that same kind of level, to the greatest extent that we can.”)

But beyond the minimalist outcomes agreed in the texts, one of the most noteworthy outcomes at Doha was the growing strength, breadth, and depth of engagement and collaboration by civil society organizations. A press conference last week demonstrated this growing collaboration:  Oxfam, WWF, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Christian Aid, and ActionAid, with the chairs of the Least Developed Country and Africa negotiating groups, stood together to say that the climate talks were failing to produce meaningful change and that governments needed to shift gears dramatically.  Representing a range of perspectives, their joint statement was not just a marriage of tactical convenience—it demonstrates a real confluence around jointly shared objectives of equity and sustainability, with climate issues a central, though hardly the sole, issue.

Perhaps most important, advocates are shifting focus toward the national and local levels and bridging or even bypassing the old divides between development and environmental agendas. There’s a strong belief that this increased energy and action will eventually also flow upward back into the global level process. And home-grown advocacy on climate change is already blossoming in many developing countries. This came home for me while working with developing country partners from Nepal, Philippines, Uganda, and Zambia, partners in a new initiative to press for adaptation finance that’s accountable at the local level. They have been building strong civil society networks over the past several years and are pressing effectively for national level policy change, as well as engaging the international process.  For these groups and many others in developing countries, building advocacy from the ground up and seeing past environment-development divides are self-evident truths.

The pump is primed to water our advocacy from these sources. But there’s also an immediate question about the focus of our advocacy agenda in the US—especially on the climate finance front in coming months. We must work for robust levels of climate funding at least at the level of the past several years, joined to a public recommitment by the administration to the President’s Global Climate Change Initiative.  And we must seize opportunities to push forward on innovative sources of finance, such as a mechanism for international aviation that can limit emissions while producing financial resources.

Doha was parched—but there are oases on the horizon that we can and must move towards.

Although I don’t know quite what to say, I can’t not say something about this.

Erik Prince and his private security services company, Blackwater, gained notoriety in Iraq.  Prince had an inside track with the Bush administration, flew around with Dick Cheney on Air Force Two, secured billions in government contracts without open competition, and lunged into all sorts of difficult and sensitive places guns drawn. In Iraq, Blackwater was involved in 195 shooting incidents that involved civilians—many of which resulted in injuries or deaths of civilians. But that was just the tip of the iceberg of scandals and violations. In 2010, Prince sold Blackwater, which has been renamed several times, trying to escape the stench of scandal and atrocity.

Now, it seems, Prince has reinvented himself as an investment advisor. From a comfortable perch in Abu Dhabi (no extradition treaty with the US), Prince now raises funds and advises clients on the wonderful investment opportunities in Africa. He claims he’s raised $100 million and is shooting (err) for $400 million more. His new company, Frontier Resource Group (motto: fortuna audaces iuvat or fortune favors the bold) offers support for investors mixed with “security and logistical capacity”.

Ever the bottom dweller, Prince has focused his efforts on some of the more problematic investments (natural resources extraction), and problematic countries; DRC, Guinea, and South Sudan. Which should be appealing to problematic investors (based in Hong Kong).

So.  What can I say?

Sorry, Africa.

Every Sunday, my wife and I make a pot of coffee and settle in to watch our favorite political shows—“Sunday Morning” on CBS and “Meet the Press” on NBC. Every week, we cringe when it goes to commercial and we hear the Zydeco music kick in: here comes BP, trumpeting the message that the Gulf of Mexico is not only doing A-OK, but better than ever two and a half years after the largest offshore oil spill in our nation’s history. In one, Mike Ulster, a BP executive handling cleanup and damages, cites BP’s commitment of billions of dollars to ecological and economic restoration and says, “People in the Gulf measure commitment by what’s getting done.” In terms of paying those who lost income in the spill, BP, has paid billions to date in economic damages and is on the verge reaching a settlement with many parties, despite vocal concerns from many in the fishing industry about not accounting for unknowns of long-term impacts.

But in addressing ecological restoration, the reality is that BP just isn’t measuring up to its commitments.

It looked good at first. BP committed a down payment of $1 billion to start the work of repairing the ecological damage wrought by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. However, over a year and a half later, BP has approved only $66 million in ecological restoration projects—less than seven percent of the promised money. At this rate, it would take about 25 years to “measure up” and fulfill their commitment.

And make no mistake: timing is critical. We still don’t know the extent of the damage, but we do know that we need to act fast to mitigate the long-lasting effects and restore the vital resources of the Gulf Coast. For example, Prince William Sound’s herring fishery took a big hit after the Exxon Valdez disaster; but it didn’t totally collapse until four years later. Had action been taken to repair herring habitat, who knows what could have been prevented? While BP is dragging its heels and “slow walking” the process, key ecosystems are languishing.

Shrimp and oyster harvests have been down since the spill, crushing the spirits and livelihoods of thousands of working families. But the effects may extend further; oysters take two to three years to mature, and the bays and bayous are still suffering from the 4.9 million barrels of oil that hit the area in 2010. After Hurricane Isaac, Louisiana closed 12 miles of coastline because of thousands of pounds of oiled debris washing up—the same oil that leaked during the spill.

Under BP’s agreement on early restoration, BP must approve with relevant state and federal agency heads what projects are considered and has the final say on what moves forward.

Project ideas are out there. State and federal trustees have drafted plans that would repair damage, reduce storm surge, protect livelihoods, and more. Louisiana and Mississippi have both proposed significant sets of projects, costing hundreds of millions of dollars, which would restore barrier islands, wetlands, and fisheries. Other states have also engaged with coastal communities in finding solution. But despite having good projects ready to go, the approvals to move forward on vital projects are not materializing.

So, with less than seven percent of this initial commitment to the Gulf Coast  met, it’s fair to say BP must do a better job of working fairly with the state and federal trustee to move projects forward.

On another front, a BP-backed trade group, the American Petroleum Institute, has sued the Securities and Exchange Commission to try to overturn a landmark anti-corruption and transparency regulation that requires all oil, gas and mining companies to disclose their payments to governments both overseas and here at home. In the US, this Oxfam-supported regulation will give Gulf communities a picture of how much BP pays the Federal government in royalties and taxes for each offshore license in the Gulf. Yet another situation where BP talks a good game—in this case with public commitments to transparency—but has refused to follow through in doing the right thing: publicly backing away from this lawsuit which is trying to overturn a landmark disclosure law.

The question to Mr. Ulster: Is your company really willing to do what it takes to measure up?

Somalia

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Pastoralists and their camels on the road in southern Somalia. Photo by Njoroge/Oxfam

For the last few weeks, whenever I could get a quiet moment, I’ve been trying to read and think about resilience. It seems like the whole development and humanitarian sector is rapturous about resilience. And already, there’s a bit of backlash.

A lot of smart people are taking up the theme, and I think we should. As a frame for thinking about policy and programming, I think there’s a lot of utility in it.  One of the primary innovations of a focus on resilience is that it presumes an unstable and adverse external environment. This is a big advantage because, actually, reality presents a lot of unstable and adverse situations for poor people. My colleague Gina points out that presuming a stable environment is a big weakness of other frameworks, for example the sustainable livelihoods approach, which is one of the most important tools in development practice.

But if resilience has advantages, there must also be some disadvantages and cautions.

One of the most important is to define resilience in a way that’s useful—which is to say that excludes some things as NOT resilience. This is a big problem in the field right now, where it feels like some people are simply redrafting existing plans to include resilience as a goal or an outcome. In that case, maybe we were building resilience all along? If building resilience is something, then it can’t be everything. If it’s everything, then it’s actually not a thing.

So—a lot of my thinking lately has been to try to create a useful, exclusionary definition of resilience that has operational and policy value. To do this, I’ve been trying to disentangle some issues around resilience.  Here goes:

1.Resilience of what? What are we concerned with? The individual, the household, the village, the community, the region, the country, a financial system, a supply-chain, a farming system, an institution? It matters. If you prioritize one, you are probably undermining others. This isn’t absolutely true: building resilience of some component units can contribute to the resilience of larger units. But the opposite can be true also. So which one is important? How do we select? As a rights-based organization, I have to think that Oxfam would prioritize the resilience of individuals. Or maybe households. Possibly villages. But I’m not totally sure.

2. Resilience is an attribute not a form of support. I think resilience is a characteristic of the individual (or household or community, see item #1 above). Resilience might be improved through outside intervention; building assets, reducing risk exposure, preparing response. But outside intervention during or after a shock is not resilience—it’s assistance. Providing a robust safety net for people when they experience shocks is a good and important thing to do. But it is not building the resilience of beneficiaries and is a different species altogether than resilience-building. On the other hand, you might argue that a robust safety net program builds the resilience of a country to shocks. But not the beneficiaries, unless there’s a program of DRR or asset building that is part of the assistance.

3. Is resilience multi-dimensional or not? Can one build resilience against a variety of shocks at once? It seems to me that it’s best not to presume that resilience to one form of shock—let’s say a drought—implies resilience to another—say an earthquake or economic crisis. One might try to address them together, but the intervention probably needs to have distinctive strategies for each. Or no? Some forms of resilience assets—like having a significant cash reserve or a diversified household livelihood—seem to help build resilience across many potential hazards. When we think about resilience, should we organize around the individual’s (or other unit, see #1 above) resilience to various potential shocks? Or should we organize ourselves around each possible hazard and think about how to improve resilience each in turn; to drought, to earthquakes, to currency inflation, etc.?  Intuitively, we probably want to do the former, but it might not be an effective way to organize action and allocate resources.

4. Shocks v. stresses. Does resilience address both shocks and stress? A shock is an idiosyncratic event. A stress in a longer-term condition. Some materials can absorb stresses better than shocks; quantum of energy, applied in an instant, will break an iron rod. The same amount of energy applied over an hour has no effect. But maybe I’m making a distinction without a difference? Personally, I think resilience is about response to shocks. Using climate change as an example, long-term trends like rising sea levels and hotter temperatures would create a stress and require adaptation. But shorter-term events like hurricanes and droughts are shocks that test resilience.  They’re clearly related in their genesis, but different in their impacts and response strategy? Or am I wrong?

5. Resilience v. resourcefulness? In usage, these terms can seem interchangeable. “The Somali pastoralists are very resourceful; they find water even in the midst of a drought.” Ironically, we often use the word “resourceful” to describe people without resources. You wouldn’t call a rich family resourceful—because, indeed, they are full of resources. But you call a poor family resourceful when they send their kids to college by hook or by crook, i.e. DESPITE a lack of resources. Observers wonder at the “resourcefulness” of others largely because they don’t understand the real access and control over resources that they have. So seeing someone as “resourceful” probably reflect the ignorance of the observer more than the actual characteristics of the observed. Is there something similar in resilience? Do we understand an individual/household/community as resilient only because we are so ignorant of its assets and strategies that we don’t understand how shocks are accommodated?

6. Resilience is a floor. I think resilience is—and should be—a pretty sad goal. That is, if a definition of resilience is rigorous, it should set a baseline of survival; a floor, but not a ceiling. Resilience is the capacity to resist, withstand, and recover from shocks. That doesn’t mean becoming happy, healthy, or rich. Just getting through it and back to normal. Really, that’s aiming pretty low. And our hopes and aspirations for one another are a lot higher than that. But if we are honest, even resilience is often beyond our reach. Much of the energy behind the new fad of resilience is coming from the humanitarian response community. They are recognizing that the mismatch between the response capacity and the need for assistance is growing wider. Motivated as much by frustration as by a positive vision, they are saying we need a new paradigm. We can’t keep responding to droughts in the same way; we have to build up the resilience of communities to withstand them. My humanitarian colleague points out that part of the frustration is that the livelihoods and development programmers have ignored shocks and resilience, so the humanitarians end up having to pick up the pieces.

More thoughts soon.

Sarah Kalloch’s blog is cross-posted from Women Thrive Worldwide. Oxfam America is working with women’s groups that are actively working on ending violence against women and making links between violence against women and food security. 

World Food Day—October 16—falls right in the middle of Domestic Violence Awareness month. At first the connection between the two might seem tenuous. But as Oxfam’s GROW Campaign eloquently argues, “Hunger isn’t about too many people and too little food. Hunger is about inequality. And women and girls face the greatest inequalities of all”. When women are hungry, they are forced to make impossible choices and take untenable chances that make them vulnerable to violence.

Women grow the majority of the world’s food—and are also the majority of the world’s hungry because of vast inequalities in resources and power. Women farmers in the US still face a “grass ceiling”—denied access to billions in loans from the USDA.  And the situation is worse in developing countries, where women face discrimination in land ownership, lack of education, and little access to the capital, technology, and markets needed to make a living on the land. Women could feed up to 150 million more people if they had the same agricultural resources as men, according to a United Nations report.

But before women feed the world, they must feed themselves and their families—a simple act which exposes them up to violence, rape and abuse.

• In Bangladesh, women in households with lower food security are more at risk for physical and emotional abuse.
• Women in Bostwana who did not have enough to eat were twice as likely to have sold sex and were more likely to report a lack of control in sexual relationships.
• Women displaced by conflict in Darfur face further violence when they go to gather firewood and water.
• When food rations were cut at refugee camps in Tanzania in 2005, the World Food Program warned of an increased violence against women as women ventured further afield to feed their families and tensions rose in hungry households.
• Women from Canada to the Congo who have left abusive relationship or been victims of violence are often left economically vulnerable and food insecure.

This month, join Oxfam’s GROW Campaign and hold a WFD dinner with friends and family. Take time to talk about the amazing culture, community and power of food. Food security is human security. Women feed the world—they deserve the chance to feed their families free of violence.

Two campesinos (farmers) in northern Guatemala (2012). Pablo Tosco/Intermón Oxfam

Paul O’Brien is the vice president, policy and campaigns, for Oxfam America.

Washingtonians: I regret to inform you that we need your home. Please remove yourself and your belongings by the end of the month, or we will have our armed goons do it for you. Unfortunately, we are not going to talk about this, and there is no money for your troubles. We need your land. It is for the greater good. Thank you for understanding.

Sound crazy? Somewhere in the developing world, that speech, or something like it, will probably happen today. Over the last decade, in developing countries, a land area larger than Washington, D.C. has been sold from under the feet of poor communities every day. 500 million acres—enough to feed a billion people—have been traded, mostly to cash-rich countries, foreign agribusiness and equity investors over the past 10 years. Think about California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and Texas being sold off in a mad, unregulated, land rush without any real transparency on who is doing the buying, under what terms, or what they plan to do with the spoils. All those Southwesterners wondering what the hell happened to their land and their lives?

Why am I writing about this now? Honestly, because we are launching a report today laying out these facts, Our Land, Our Lives, and I want you to read it and join our new campaign. We may have an opportunity to meaningfully address this madness in the next few months.

The World Bank is about to gather the mighty in Tokyo for their Annual Meeting. It’s the coming out party for the new Bank president, Jim Kim—and we are going to hear what he cares about. If he makes stopping bad land grabs a priority, the Bank could play a massive role in fixing this Achilles heel in the global food system.

Early signs are discouraging. Today, the World Bank rejected our report recommendations, claiming “[the Bank] does not support speculative land investments or acquisitions which take advantage of weak institutions in developing countries or which disregard principles of responsible agricultural investment.”

Having watched the Presidential debates last night, I’m acutely sensitive to spin, and that feels like spin to me. Of course the Bank doesn’t actively “support” bad acquisitions or investments in land. But here is the thing—they don’t even know if their land investments are good or bad for affected communities. When we asked them to show us good large scale land investments where communities weren’t kicked off their land and were adequately compensated, they couldn’t find one.

That’s why we are asking the World Bank Group to take a breath! We want them to temporarily stop funding new large scale agricultural land acquisitions until they can be sure these deals aren’t going to violate human rights or harm communities. We want the Bank Group to put solid guidance in place, particularly because we want the 100+ major investing institutions that follow the IFC’s Performance Standards to take basic, reasonable precautions when doing a land deal.

Personally, I still have hope that Jim Kim will commit to doing this in Tokyo. My gut says he is “one of us”—a development activist who wants the poor to know what his institution is doing across the board. He can be proud in other areas: A new aid transparency index rated the Bank second of all major donors on aid transparency this week. Human Rights Watch (notoriously hard to please) recently applauded the Bank for using transparency to fight corruption.

The Bank knows that information is power. It is time to acknowledge that fact in the global land free-for-all. Our report suggests precisely how the Bank can lead an honest public effort to grapple with this issue.

And let’s not spin this proposal as an investment-killing idea. Oxfam has called for greater investment in poor countries for decades. We want communities to benefit from sound investments in agriculture. The Bank can leave its head in the sand and ask communities to trust the market’s invisible hand, or sort this mess out before we see even more community-used land disappear.

When Hurricane Isaac took another punch at the Gulf Coast in late August, it exposed yet again how imperative it is to invest in restoring the region’s battered environment and the economy. Oxfam America has been engaging leaders in the private sector in planning how to make best use of the billions of dollars coming to the region as a result of the RESTORE the Gulf States Act. The Act will send 80% of Clean Water Act fines back to the Gulf—from $5 to $21 billion.

This past Tuesday, Oxfam America and The Nature Conservancy were joined in Washington, DC by Atkins, a global engineering firm, and Calvert Investments for meetings with several federal agencies that will be implementing the Act.

Why would an engineering company like Atkins and an investment firm like Calvert be interested in how monies on the Gulf get spent?

As an investor in companies in the Gulf, Calvert wants to be sure that their holdings are not at risk as a result of climate hazards. As Rebecca Henson, Calvert’s Senior Sustainability Analyst told staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency, “Calvert Investments wants to support the companies in which it has holdings in their determination to be more resilient when faced with the next storm. These funds have the potential to decrease the region’s vulnerability and increase its resiliency by restoring the coastline and creating real economic development.”

Atkins Senior Vice President Doug Robison told staffers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that “coastal restoration projects have the opportunity to wrap together both ends of the socioeconomic spectrum as it relates to jobs. It will put to work scientists and engineers together with construction and monitoring crews. This is a growing industry sector and a once in a lifetime opportunity to invest in the Gulf economically and environmentally.”

This week President Obama signed an Executive Order creating the Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Council which is mandated by the RESTORE Act to create a comprehensive restoration plan. That plan has the potential to protect the precarious coastal communities that have been victim to one storm after another through ecosystem restoration. But it also has the potential to revitalize the Gulf’s economy by working with the Gulf States to ready a local workforce to take on the jobs created through projects the Council will administer. Let’s hope they don’t pass on this opportunity.