Tim Anderson, lecturer in Political Economy at Sydney University has researched land tenure and ownership in the South Pacific, Latin America, and more recently, Timor Leste. He published a report about the implications of an Indonesian Biofuel project the AMP government signed onto. He cites pressures on the government of Timor Leste to change the Constitution allowing foreigners to buy and sell land in Timor Leste. Some of Timor's political leaders appear to be wavering in their original intent to keep Timorese soil in Timorese hands. And is it just coincidence that USAID and AUSAID have recently launched a US$500,000 project to establish who owns what land in Timor Leste? Traditional communal ownership of land could suffer in the growing push for privatisation, as well as the population's drive for self sufficiency in the face of growing costs in basic foods world wide - largely as a result of multinational corporations turning land over to the production of food crops to biofuels.
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