Land grabbing in Africa

Robin Palmer

Robin Palmer gave the following presentation at the Africa-Europe Faith and Justice Day at Westminster Cathedral Hall on Saturday 13 April. He is a Land Rights Adviser with Mokoro, an Oxford-based consultancy that promotes sustainable development. Before that he worked for Oxfam.

I’d like to start with four quotations.

‘The decisions taken now will have repercussions for the shape of agriculture, food security and land access in Africa for generations to come. Today's choices must be based on strategic thinking and vigorous, transparent public debate, rather than piecemeal negotiations behind closed doors.’ Lorenzo Cotula, IIED, March 2010

‘Africa, squatting always at the bottom of the food chain, is rapidly being turned into a giant land mall. The irony of a famine-prone continent being used to bail out the world’s food crisis is lost on no one.’ Times of India, 26 September 2009

‘There's been a lot of secrecy around these contracts. We are giving our land away. We here in Africa were colonized once, we would be stupid to let it happen again.’ Faliry Boly, rice farmer from Mali, February 2011

‘Is your retirement fund a land-grabber?’, IATP, 17 May 2012

MY JOURNEY INTO LAND GRABBING

I studied for a History degree at the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland in Salisbury, now Harare, where I enjoyed a fabulous education, on and off campus, for which I have been eternally grateful. After I got my degree I did a PhD on the politics of land in Rhodesia. This became a book in 1977.

In 2010, I wrote a paper for a conference of the African Studies Association of the UK, Would Cecil Rhodes have signed a Code of Conduct? Reflections on Global Land Grabbing and Land Rights in Africa, Past and Present in which I noted:

Now, 120 years later, new concession hunters are on the march, seeking control over African land and water to augment food security back home, principally in the Persian Gulf and East Asia. They are finding willing local accomplices, only too eager to lease out vast tracts of land in return for derisory payments and illusory promises. As in colonial times, local people are almost never consulted.

RAISING AWARENESS

Six years ago, Oxfam GB finally retired me after I’d worked for them for 20 years. This might have been a fairly sensible thing to do. But simultaneously they abolished the post I held of Global Land Adviser, which certainly wasn’t a good idea. But if, in early 2007, I had been asked to explain why working on land was so important, I confess that I certainly wouldn’t have predicted that a new global land grab was just a few months around the corner.

A year after I left Oxfam, I went to a meeting of 50 or so land experts in Southern Africa and asked if anyone in the audience had heard of biofuels. Nobody had – so I offered them a brief introduction. This experience convinced me that I might usefully spend some of my time in retirement trying to read up on land grabbing and to raise awareness.

I’ve since done this in part by compiling select bibliographies on Biofuels, Global Land Grabbing and Land Rights in Africa and posting them on the Land Rights in Africa website, which I run. This was originally housed by Oxfam and is now housed by Mokoro. The latest are dated 20 October 2012. (See: 
www.mokoro.co.uk/other-resources/land-rights-in-africa )

BIOFUELS

‘Africa: Food to eat or to run your car?’ asked a report on Tanzania in IRIN News in October 2007. It’s a good question.

The recognition that the world’s oil reserves are finite, coupled with oil price rises, led to a frantic search for alternatives globally. Biofuels were initially seen as a strong option and were hugely hyped. Brazil, which has been using them for fuel for decades, was widely cited as a success story and a model for others to follow. Indeed, 15 African countries have now made agreements for the use of Brazilian technology. But the Brazilian story has been criticized for adopting a monoculture approach which has destroyed the livelihoods of many peasants.

In an attempt to reduce American dependence on oil from the Middle East and Venezuela, the George W. Bush administration offered huge financial incentives to Midwest farmers to turn their maize into biofuels (ethanol). This contributed significantly to the global food price crisis of 2007-8, which led to riots and deaths in many countries.

In addition, EU countries signed up to an undertaking to use a greater proportion of transport fuel from biofuels (10% by 2020), thereby contributing significantly to the global land grab by encouraging them to find land for biofuels production elsewhere, particularly in Africa, because they can’t be produced within the EU.

This provoked a withering attack from a brilliant ActionAid report, Meals per Gallon: The Impact of Industrial Biofuels on People and Global Hunger (February 2010).

This was followed by Friends of the Earth, Africa: Up for Grabs. The Scale and Impact of Land Grabbing for Agrofuels (August 2010).

There were earlier reports by Christian Aid, Growing Pains: The Possibilities and Problems of Biofuels (August 2009) and Oxfam, Another Inconvenient Truth: How Biofuel Policies are deepening Poverty and accelerating Climate Change (June 2008).

But in desperately poor countries, such as Ethiopia, Malawi and Mozambique, biofuels are seen by many as a magic route out of poverty by gaining carbon credits and by significantly reducing their high fuel import bills. A 2008 report spoke of Africa ‘becoming a biofuel battleground’ while in 2006 Southern Africa was said, somewhat alarmingly, to have the potential to be ‘the Middle East of biofuels.’

Much of the early optimism about the potential of biofuels is now dimming, as recognition grows that some of the claims made by its advocates about, e.g. Jatropha curcas being easy to grow on ‘marginal’ land, requiring little water, being resistant to pests and diseases and posing no risk to food security, were inaccurate. So what was once regularly described as a ‘miracle cure’ has increasingly become a ‘problem’.

An article in The Ecologist headed ‘Jatropha biofuels: the true cost to Tanzania’, concludes soberly: ‘Billed as wonder crop, the establishment of jatropha plantations on the ground in Tanzania has been far from successful, or, in some cases, ethical.’

WATER

‘African land deals lead to water giveaway’, The Guardian, 12 June 2012

There are increasing references to water in the land grabbing literature, for example from Lorenzo Cotula’s soon to be published, The Great African Land Grab?

No place in Africa can illustrate more powerfully the important implications of the global land rush for water resources. A land lease in a semi-arid country like Mali would be worthless if it did not ensure access to sufficient water for agricultural use. In fact, water is an important driver of the land rush in the first place. Countries that have much land but little water — such as the Gulf states — have been among those signing the deals. Financiers interested in capturing increases in the price of land are also mindful of the gains that can be made from the water rights embedded in the land deals. It is impossible to assess what the land deals mean for recipient countries without properly understanding their water dimension.

THE LAND GRABBING PHENOMENON – A SHORT ANALYSIS

I once read a paper submitted to the Journal of Peasant Studies which traced the origins of the current land grab in Africa back to 1607 in Ireland! Well, we don’t have time for all that, but the author made a strong case for the central role of received European law as an instrument of land grabbing in many continents down the centuries.

A key driver of the current land grab was clearly the 2007-8 global food crisis, characterised by rising fuel prices, by food exporters placing restrictions on exports (causing people to lose faith in the world food market), and by the dramatic switch in the American Midwest from farmers growing maize for food to growing maize for fuel. There is also some controversy over the role played by speculators.

I think it has taken quite a long time for many people, including academics, to get their heads around the land grabbing phenomenon because it involves so many different actors at many different levels, e.g.

• Middle East and Gulf states seeking food security for their rapidly growing populations by outsourcing agriculture by buying or leasing land in Africa and Asia, often via private companies.

• Chinese, Indian, South Korean and even Bangladeshi companies aggressively seeking agricultural outlets overseas for similar reasons, including a rapidly growing middle class demanding more meat and milk.

• Biofuel companies receiving subsidies and responding to EU targets.

• A wide range of speculators including agribusinesses, big corporations, and food traders investing in land as a long-term asset, including hedge fund and pension fund operators (including Harvard University!)

• Corrupt local politicians in Africa, from presidents downwards, anxious to make a quick buck from speculators.

There is also a recognition globally that population growth (expected to rise from 7 to 9bn by 2050) will outstrip the world’s ability to feed itself unless there are radical changes in agricultural production. See the January 2011 Foresight report, The Future of Food and Farming: Challenges and choices for global sustainability.

It is also frequently stated – and given as a justification for land grabbing – that agriculture in Africa has been chronically underfunded for decades. This is undeniably true. But the World Bank, the IMF and others conveniently forget that this is a consequence of decades of their own externally imposed structural adjustment programmes, which were driven by an almost religious belief in the magic of the free market.

In all of this the private sector is clearly in the lead, but there is also considerable government involvement, both foreign (including European) and domestic, at all levels.

There is also growing speculation in land. For example, Savills, the global real estate services provider, believes that:

farmland as an asset will increasingly become a sought after investment. Agricultural land can produce reasonable cash flows, is a tangible asset and a good inflation hedge. It also has low or negative correlation with other traditional asset classes such as stocks or bonds, giving an interesting portfolio diversification. In some markets within the EU, including the UK, there are also attractive tax breaks.

So we now typically find situations in which land deals are made in private behind closed doors and where local communities, often unaware of their legal rights, later find that their land has been sold or leased without their knowledge.

Which is why it is very hard for those – be they civil society activists, journalists or academics – who seek to expose some of the abuses of land grabbing.

Last year, World Bank researchers noted ‘an astonishing lack of awareness of what is happening on the ground even by the public sector institutions mandated to control this phenomenon’

And one of the most serious concerns is the lack of a level legal playing field - the power imbalances are extreme; small farmers generally have little practical legal recourse, even in countries with relatively progressive local laws, while investors have over 3,000 bilateral investment treaties to fall back on – which they frequently do.

WHY AFRICA?

Local complicity and the ‘race to the bottom’ to attract investors

Parts of Africa are being targeted because:

• ‘African farmland prices are the lowest in the world’
• ‘Labour is cheap’
• ‘it is really the last frontier’.

There is also:

• Corruption
• Insecure land rights
• Weak governance and capacity
• Lack of coordination.

In the course of an Oxfam eastern Africa workshop on land grabbing in June 2010

Governments were identified as the major land grabbers in the region. This is because land acquisition processes involve government officials who in most cases are corrupt and work in favour of the investor, using their influence to acquire land for investors. Also government institutions such as District Councils, investment centres and other private sector promotion institutions, supposedly working to alleviate poverty, have grabbed land from the people claiming it to be for ‘public interest’ and ‘development’ even though the terms are vaguely defined in the laws.

The Ghanaian anti-corruption campaigner, Lord Aikins Adusei offered this trenchant critique:

Many of the corruption-ridden governments in Africa are rushing to make land deals with multinationals without proper consultation with the people and without proper studies as to the economic, social and environmental cost of such deals.

Many African leaders, and foreign investors, peddle the myth that there is a vast amount of vacant, unused land, owned by no one – and hence available to outsiders. Mozambique’s Minister of Energy, Salvador Namburete, for example, stated that ‘36 million hectares of arable land could be used for biofuels without threatening food production, while another 41 million hectares of marginal land would be suitable for raising jatropha;’ Zambia’s Minister for Agriculture, Brian Chituwo, boasted ‘we have well over 30 million hectares of land that is begging to be utilised’; while his counterpart in Ethiopia, Abeda Deressa, suggested that pastoralists displaced by land grabbing ‘can just go somewhere else’.

This is aided by the new ‘discoveries’ (by satellite imagery) of vast areas of ‘reserve agricultural land’ which can be exploited without, apparently, affecting either food production or local land rights. But satellite imagery does not capture social relations on the ground or the livelihood practices of e.g. pastoralist communities.

Such quotes reflect a strong distrust of small-scale farmers, and even more so of pastoralists, which is all too typical of Africa’s rulers. And fear no political reaction from them. They despise backward, ignorant rural dwellers and they do not fear any political reaction from them. And so they are all too eager to buy into the notion that only outsiders working on a large scale can transform agriculture in Africa. This is critical.

So, with the willing consent of many such African leaders, and in ways that are for the most part perfectly legal, there has been extensive acquisition of land, usually in the form of long leases, across the continent, but especially in Sudan and South Sudan, Ethiopia, Mali, Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique.

BUT THE CAVALRY IS COMING!

THE IDS SUSSEX CONFERENCE

Until a couple of years ago, I had been very worried by what I felt amounted almost to a conspiracy of silence on the subject or, at best, a timidity on the part of many researchers who seemed desperately anxious to find painless, ‘win-win’ solutions. But a brilliant, hugely energising conference at IDS Sussex in May 2011 dispelled my pessimism. Amazingly, over 400 people wanted to write papers for the event, but there was space for only 120 at IDS. The organizers were clearly surprised by this reaction, but used it to create a really exciting programme – one of those where you would like to be in 3 different places at the same time. It also generated a good deal of serious media coverage. A follow up conference was held at Cornell, New York late last year. Apparently it was equally successful.

Since then the academic literature on land grabbing has grown apace, with the International Land Coalition and the Oakland Institute being particularly effective in publicizing their research and policy papers.

Here are SOME IMPORTANT PLAYERS

GRAIN, a small pressure group, produced the seminal and hugely influential briefing Seized! The 2008 land grab for food and financial security in October 2008, and has published widely on land grabbing across the world, and also on biofuels, which it prefers to call agrofuels. It is concerned about farmers’ control over biodiversity and local knowledge and sees the current land grab trend as a serious threat to local communities. Its daily updated site http://farmlandgrab.org/ is essential reading and quite incomparable. You can subscribe to its weekly update.

The International Land Coalition (ILC), a global civil society alliance, has produced a wide range of excellent country research reports (on Ethiopia, Zambia, Rwanda, Kenya and Madagascar) and policy briefs as part of its ‘commercial pressures on land’ programme. In January 2012 it launched its global synthesis report, Land Rights and the Rush for Land.

It has steadily expanded its membership and in May 2011 at its congress in Tirana for the first time it publicly denounced ‘all forms of land grabbing, whether international or national.’ It circulates regular updates. With others, it has been compiling a Land Matrix, ‘a systematic stocktaking of large-scale land-based investments.’ This has proved controversial.

The Oakland Institute is now emerging as a key player, undertaking serious research and finding imaginative ways of publicising a variety of issues, e.g. American universities investing their pension funds in ways that contribute to land grabbing. Its success in halting a land deal in South Sudan owed much to its use of good, old-fashioned radio! It has produced country reports on Ethiopia, Mali and Sierra Leone, Mozambique, Zambia, Sudan and Tanzania and two powerful critiques of the dominant consensus. Mis/Investment in Agriculture exposes the role of the World Bank’s private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation, in fuelling land grabs, especially in Africa. The Great Land Grab ‘dismantles the myth of the “win-win” argument’, questions the assumption that increased private sector investment in agriculture is beneficial to all, and argues that small farmers are being pushed aside.

(See: www.aefjn.org)

CONCLUSION

Global land grabbing is certainly difficult, complex terrain, involving a multiplicity of actors, great secrecy, huge power imbalances and extensive corruption at many levels. The long-term consequences of what we are now observing could well be catastrophic. Which is why we need allies; why it is good that academics and others are increasingly engaging; why it is good that the literature is growing, including 4 books which do much to destroy the absurd mystique and hype surrounding biofuels. But, as was noted at the conference in Brighton, we are currently losing the battle of ideas about scale and need to work much harder on this.

One who is constantly fighting this battle is Olivier De Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. When he opened the Brighton conference on land grabbing, De Schutter argued that:

What we need now is a vision that goes beyond disciplining land deals and providing policymakers with a checklist of how to destroy the global peasantry responsibly.

If it is to be truly responsible, agricultural investment must be investment that benefits the poor in the South, rather than leading to a transfer of resources to the rich in the North. It must be investment that truly reduces hunger and malnutrition, rather than aggravating them.

It is impossible to disagree with this.