Stop selling off African land - invest in farmers instead
Land deals between African governments and foreign investors threaten
farmers' way of life, while investing in farming would increase productivity
and wealth, says Ruth Hall
* Ruth Hall for content partner, the European Centre Development
Policy Management
* 28 January 2014 11.16 GMT
The <
http://www.familyfarmingcampaign.net/> international year of family
farming is now underway, and never before have family farmers in
<
http://www.theguardian.com/world/africa> Africa been more under threat.
Large land deals between African governments and usually foreign (and
sometimes domestic) investors have seen
<
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/sep/04/liberia-sold-quarter-land-logg
ing-companies> swathes of the countryside leased or concessioned, often for
as much as 50 to 99 years. From Senegal in West Africa to Ethiopia in the
Horn, and down to Mozambique in the South, land considered idle and
available has changed hands, with profound implications for local people and
the environment.
With estimates
<
http://oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/the-latest-big-numbers-on-land-grabs-and-some-po
werful-case-studies/> ranging from 56 to 227 million hectares globally (with
60-70% of this in Africa), what is clear is a rapid transformation of
landholding and agricultural systems has taken place in the past five to 10
years. Underpinning these deals is the longstanding failure of many African
states to recognise, in law and practice, the customary
<
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/land-rights> land rights of existing
<
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/farming> farming households and
communities, and the perpetuation of the colonial legal codes that
centralise control over such lands in the hands of the state as trustee of
all unregistered property.
And it's not just African land and water that are now so desirable for
international investors, but also the growing African consumer market. In
the face of growing urbanisation and consumer demand in Africa's cities, the
challenge is to scale up production and connect small farmers to markets,
lest the benefits of rising food demand in Africa's cities be netted by
importers and foreign supermarkets.
The land grab raises questions not only about land rights and transparency
in investment, but also what constitutes inclusive agricultural development
and how to bring it about.
Replace the farmers?
At a recent meeting of the
<
http://www.internationaldemocracywatch.org/index.php/central-african-econom
ic-and-monetary-community> Economic and Monetary Community of Central
Africa, parliamentarians and small-scale farmers from across this
resource-rich region butted heads over what kind of investment was needed.
The vice president of the Pan African parliament, honourable Roger Nkodo
Dang of Cameroon, argued in favour of the "industrialisation" and
commercialisation of <
http://www.theguardian.com/science/agriculture>
agriculture: "We really need to attract investments in the agricultural
sector. It is very important for us to work to find the solution for food
shortage that we have. Most African countries have an old-fashioned
agriculture. The industrialisation of agriculture is very important."
Discourses such as these ignore the inevitable tensions that arise:
clear-cutting tropical forests to make way for palm oil plantations destroys
carbon sinks; removing local farmers to make way for commercial plantations
might enable efficient food production for global markets, while undermining
the food security of local people. Often the presumed outcome is that
African farmers will become wage workers on their own land, yet most
assessments - including The
<
http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTARD/Resources/ESW_Sept7_final_final.p
df#sthash.OrCfjvnd.dpuf> World Bank's 2011 report on "rising investor
interest" in agriculture - have found that they are invariably worse off as
workers than as self-employed farmers. Yet there are emerging answers,
coming from Africa's farmers themselves.
Invest in Africa's farmers, don't take their land
Invest in African farmers rather than give away their land, argued Alangeh
Romanus Che, of the Regional <
http://infopropac.org/> Platform of Farmers'
Organisations of Central Africa, a network of farmers' associations in
Central Africa. "All farmers depend on land as their principal capital, any
denial of this access will impact negatively on farmers," said Che.
The international movement of peasants and family farmers,
<
http://viacampesina.org/en/> La Via Campesina (literally, "the peasant
path"), has rejected efforts to "clean up" land grabs by creating good
governance guidelines for the private sector to regulate itself. And African
farmers' organisations from across West, East and Southern Africa are now
mobilising around an alternative vision for the future, not of
corporate-dominated industrial agriculture, but family farming feeding
Africa and the world.
Central to their programme are two inter-related concepts. Land sovereignty
means that development should not be based on dispossession but on securing
the rights of communities to their land, water and forests, and to
supporting their types of farming methods. Food sovereignty means
privileging local and regional markets, and limiting the role of
corporations in the food system. In these ways, they argue, investment in
African farmers - rather than investment that dispossesses them - can
produce ample, healthy and safe food.
From land grabs to responsible agricultural investment
These arguments reflect the ongoing battle over how to define and ensure
responsible agricultural investment. The <
http://www.fao.org/cfs/en/>
Committee on World Food Security recently presented its "zero draft" for
consultation with African stakeholders in Johannesburg - and the response
was telling.
African farmer organisations insisted that transparency is just a starting
point. Following years of chronic neglect, African agriculture is in
desperate need of investment. What is needed for a turnaround in African
agriculture must start with reconsidering the slashing of subsidies,
agricultural deregulation and trade liberalisation that constituted the
policy formula foisted on many African states over the past three decades.
Responsible investment frameworks tend to wrongly assume that investments
are necessarily external, private and land-based. Other possibilities
include public as well as private investments in infrastructure, goods and
services to enable farmers to commercialise and scale up production, access
cheap and appropriate inputs, improve their productivity, add value to their
products, access better markets, and fetch better prices for improved
quality products.
The challenge remains to develop concrete alternative development programmes
that confirm land and other resource rights in the hands of local farming
families and invest in them.
Ruth Hall is an associate professor at the Institute for Poverty, Land and
Agrarian Studies, <
http://www.plaas.org.za/> University of the Western
Cape, South Africa. She tweets <
https://twitter.com/RuthHallPLAAS>
_at_RuthHallPLAAS. This article was
<
http://www.ecdpm.org/Web_ECDPM/Web/Content/Navigation.nsf/index2?readform&h
ttp://www.ecdpm.org/Web_ECDPM/Web/Content/Content.nsf/vwDocID/A05EE05FB5CD1D
6BC1257943003B7A16?OpenDocument> originally published in ECDPM's monthly
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Received on Tue Jan 28 2014 - 17:56:28 EST