Date: Tue, 13 May 2014 23:26:41 +0200
Africa Is Up For Sale By The Acre To The Highest Bidder
How land grabs in Africa could herald a new dystopian age of hunger
By <http://www.globalresearch.ca/author/mavengira> Atheling P Reginald
Mavengira
Global Research, May 13, 2014
africamap
Africa is up for sale by the acre to the highest bidder. But how can rice
exports from Ethiopia to Saudi Arabia be justified?
Land grabs have grabbed global attention. It's on the agenda at the World
Economic Forum this week, and as the trend for large land acquisitions
accelerates, it has moved from being primarily a story about Middle Eastern
petrodollars pouring into Africa, to a much more widely spread phenomenon
affecting many parts of south-east Asia, such as the Phillipines, as well as
Latin America.
In Cambodia, 15% of land has been signed over to private companies since
2005, a third of which are foreign. A new set of research studies from the
International Land Coalition find the competition for land increasingly
global and unequal.
Many of the deals are shrouded in secrecy, so the scale of what is happening
is not clear, nor is it clear who is benefiting from these deals; a number
of new reports try to tease these issues out, such as theInternational
Institute for Environment and Development's analysis of legal contract,
which is published on Monday.
It's not hard to see why the subject generates so much attention. It's
partly the secrecy element, partly the fear: who is buying up the future?
Large-scale land acquisition prompts all too vividly visions of a dystopian
future in which millions of the hungry are excluded from the land of their
forefathers by barbed wire fences and security guards as food is exported to
feed the rich world.
This is no longer just a fear for the future. The US environmentalist Lester
Brown points out in his new book, World on the Edge, that in 2009 Saudi
Arabia received its first shipment of rice produced on land it had acquired
in Ethiopia while at the same time the World Food Programme was feeding 5
million Ethiopians. Similarly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, China
has acquired 7 million hectares for palm oil production and yet millions of
people in the DRC are dependent on international aid for food.
Brown warns that "land grabbing is an integral part of the global power
struggle for food security". He argues that geopolitics for several
centuries have been dominated by the issue of access to markets, but
increasingly in the future this will be replaced by the overriding
importance of access to supplies. Food importing countries are anxiously
securing their food supplies, all too aware that exporting countries can
impose export bans to meet their needs. In 2007 both Russia and Argentina,
major grain exporters, put in place export bans and it sent waves of panic
around the world, which have probably played a big part in fuelling land
acquisition deals.
Much of the attention so far has focused on Africa. Most of the biggest
deals have been in countries such as Ethiopia, Mali and Sudan. The
imminently independent south Sudan has seen investors queuing up to exploit
one of the areas of greatest potential for as yet under developed
agricultural land. In comparison with many other areas of the world, land in
Africa is very cheap; in Ethiopia, land can be leased for as little as $1 an
acre.
China is acquiring land at the fastest rate, but South Korea is not far
behind. It has now set up an agency specifically dedicated to making direct
agreements with farmers and landowners to secure supplies.
Many African governments are defensive about the deals. Ethiopian President
Meles Zenawi is expected to talk on the subject in Davos this week; in the
past he has argued that investment in African agriculture is crucial to
improve the continent's low agricultural productivity. He has argued that
foreign investors bring in mechanisation and expertise which is vital for
development. Many campaigners would agree that investment is badly needed,
but insist that the future for African agriculture is not mechanised
monocultures for export but supporting sustainable smallholder agriculture.
They argue that the latter is far more likely to ensure food security for
the poorest Africans.
Some land deals claim to try to meet the needs of smallholders and bring
investment at the same time. When I visited Mali recently, a number of local
campaigners argued that the Millennium Challenge Account project had
invested in the irrigation needed and was training local farmers.
But this small example was outweighed by the enormous anxiety in Mali about
the foreign investors who were leasing hundreds of thousands of hectares in
a country where the population is rapidly expanding and the land suitable
for agriculture is shrinking as the desert expands. Lester Brown rightly
points out that the real issue here is not so much land deals as water
deals. What is driving the land grabs is the scarcity of water. Saudi Arabia
used to produce a lot of wheat, but it is the decline of its aquifers that
is forcing it to look abroad to secure its future food.
Leasing and buying land are always ultimately about access to water, and in
many parts of Africa this could be a major source of future conflict. Sudan
and Ethiopia both feed water into the Nile; intensifying production in these
areas could divert water. The Libyan lease of 100,000 hectares in Mali has
involved the construction of a massive dam, diverting water from the Niger,
a river on which several countries, including Niger and Nigeria, depend.
So what can be done? The World Bank has proposed guidelines for these kinds
of deals, but has no way of enforcing them. Many campaigners, such as the
international NGO GRAIN work with groups in affected countries who demand
accountability and transparency from their governments. In Mali I heard how
the CNOP, Coordination Nationale des Organisation Paysannes de Mali was
bravely challenging the government, but it was far from clear what success
it had had in checking the pace of land acquisitions.
This phenomenon reflects all too starkly the powerlessness of smallholder
farmers across the world. They lack the formal land rights or the access to
political power in their countries which would enable them to ensure these
deals worked in their interests. Instead, the future of their children is
being sold over their heads.
Atheling P Reginald Mavengira is founder and Chairman of APRM Capital
Holdings. He is incredibly effective at analyzing both unstructured and
structured data/information and thus have an unequaled capacity and
capability of converting/manipulating that into effective intelligence.
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