[dehai-news] Ethanol's African Land Grab


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From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Mon Oct 19 2009 - 23:48:11 EDT


Ethanol's African Land Grab
By Adam Welz | 2009 12:14 PM PST
massingir is an unremarkable town. The electricity supply here in rural
Mozambique is erratic, clean water is hard to come by, and the
hotels—well, calling them hotels is a little too polite. The town center
is two ragged blocks of colorful bars, stores, and market stalls arranged
along a reddish sandy furrow—the main street—with goods packaged in the
smallest possible quantities to match the pinched cash flow of local
buyers: individual quarts of fuel in old bottles, spoonfuls of soap powder
in bright little packets, single cigarettes, microcans of tomato paste and
sardines, all laid out in creative patterns to catch the eye. Babies doze
in the shade while their mothers gossip, pausing on the way back from the
unicef tent outside the shabby clinic; loose-limbed teenagers play rough
games of pool under a thatched roof by the side of the road.

Hardcore nature nuts sometimes pass through Massingir; tourism has been
picking up as word spreads of the giant Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, a
"peace park" that will merge the Mozambican wilderness of the nearby
Limpopo National Park with South Africa's world-famous Kruger National Park
(just across the border) and some adjacent Zimbabwean wildlands to make one
of Africa's largest protected areas.

But I'm here for something bigger than elephants. This backwater is also
the beachhead for an enormous project that promises to spend some $500
million, employ at least 2,000 people, and use nearly 75,000 acres of
native woodland and savanna—an area five times the size of Manhattan—to
grow sugarcane and produce ethanol for the growing global biofuel market.
Known as ProCana, it's an endeavor that could not just transform Massingir,
but also, via a mess of land claims and conflicting promises, put at risk
the transnational park and other significant conservation projects.

ProCana is just the first in a long line of massive biofuel projects backed
by investors ranging from local speculators to multinational corporations
like BP. Some have asked the government—which legally owns all land
here—for entire districts (the equivalent of US counties). Government
officials told me that as of 2007, biofuel investors had applied for rights
to use about 12 million acres, nearly one-seventh the country's 89 million
acres of arable land; unofficial tallies are double that. The message is
clear: This country, almost twice the size of California, is beckoning the
plow. ProCana and its ilk are the vanguard of an underreported land
revolution—a movement that could reshape vast terrains and the
livelihoods of millions as international agribusiness sets its sights on
the cheap soil of Africa.

 

i find the big man of ProCana, Izak Cornelis Holtzhausen—Corné to his
friends—in an unexceptional '60s modernist office block in Maputo. A
secretary shows me to a small boardroom with new furniture, extremely shiny
parquet floors, and a promotional banner for a new coal mining area along
the Zambezi River. Holtzhausen walks in, plants himself sideways at the
table, and introduces himself with a charming smile; as we talk, his chubby
fingers spin a tiny cell phone in unbalanced orbits on the table.

Holtzhausen is the Mozambique manager of the Central African Mining &
Exploration Company (camec), which does what its name suggests and owns
half of ProCana. He won't tell me who owns the other half ("Ask me next
month"), and he doesn't want to talk about camec at all. There's been too
much in the media about the company's allegedly corrupt mining deals in the
Democratic Republic of the Congo and its connections with two notorious
white Zimbabwean businessmen, Billy Rautenbach and John Bredenkamp, who
were blacklisted by the US Treasury Department in November for their
support of Zimbabwean despot Robert Mugabe. (Six months after our
interview, a British Virgin Islands-based company named BioEnergy Africa,
led by top camec officials, bought 94 percent of ProCana; Holtzhausen
remains its head.)

An Afrikaner born and raised in South Africa (he served in the
apartheid-era army and often uses Afrikaans in conversation), Holtzhausen
has taken Mozambican citizenship and married a Mozambican woman of color.
He believes in the place. Many Afrikaners, he says, ask him for business
connections in Mozambique. "Most of them are scum. Absolute scum. They go
on about the bad black government over there, and when they start using the
k-word"—kaffir, the racist slur—"I just put the phone down on them.
Afrikaners have caused a lot of trouble in Africa."

Mozambique is set to become a major biofuels producer, Holtzhausen assures
me, and other agribusiness ventures are booming, too. (Among other things,
he has a stake in the country's growing beef industry.) ProCana will
process its cane in a Brazilian-built sugar-ethanol factory. It will lay
miles of track to link the plant up with the national rail network.
Eventually, trains will take about 9.5 million gallons of ethanol a month
down to the Maputo harbor, where it will be pumped into tankers and shipped
to Europe. Once the operation is up and running, ProCana will be printing
money.

Yes, Holtzhausen acknowledges before I even ask, he's putting his
plantation in the driest part of Mozambique—but he's investing a fortune
in efficient drip irrigation. "You can't produce a green fuel and waste
water," he says. Still, ProCana will use 108 billion gallons of water per
year, supplied via canal from the nearby Massingir Dam. I've heard that
this has downstream farmers worried, but Holtzhausen says those stories are
pure fiction: "I'll give you a million bucks if you find me one of those
farmers!" he brags, grinning broadly.

I've also heard that much of the area ProCana aims to plant had previously
been slated to complete the development of the peace park, but that
Holtzhausen levered it away, leaving the project in chaos. He laughs this
off, too. I tell him of rumors that he got his land rights because powerful
people had equity in the venture. (The story around Maputo is that Graça
Machel, widow of Mozambique's first president and now wife of Nelson
Mandela, is involved in ProCana—though verifying this is near
impossible.) "No prominent people have invested in ProCana," he replies,
after some thought. "But it will only be good for me if she did." Machel is
a friend, he says. "I would be honored to have her as an investor." Another
triumphant smile.

Despite Holtzhausen's disavowals, out in Massingir I discover that many of
ProCana's 75,000 acres had indeed been slated rather precisely (and
publicly) as part of planning for the Transfrontier Park. Some 29,000
people still live within Limpopo National Park's borders, and as many as
9,000 in the heart of the park are supposed to be relocated. After years of
delicate negotiations, park authorities have arranged for the inner 9,000
to move to the valley of the Rio dos Elefantes, just downstream of
Massingir Dam. They have—as Mozambican law requires—obtained permission
from "receiving" communities to build houses for the newcomers and, very
important, identified a sufficiently large grazing area for the new
residents' livestock.

A ProCana map I've managed to obtain shows that the company's 75,000 acres
cover this intended grazing zone. The same chunk of land has been promised
to both the inner 9,000 and ProCana. How did this happen? I'll need a 4x4
and two interpreters (Shangaan to Portuguese, Portuguese to English) to
find the answer.

 

a trip into the Rio dos Elefantes valley is a journey into a cliché of
Africa: hardworking women in colorful cloth, relentlessly pecking chickens,
and thin, lazy yellow-brown dogs scattered around circular grass-roofed
huts. In most village centers a hand-carved flagpole carries a Mozambican
flag (crossed hoe and Kalashnikov, nice bright colors). Take away the
occasional T-shirt, radio, and cell phone, and the ever-present cheap
plastic buckets and chairs, and you have something like the Mozambique of
500 years ago. Polygamy is common, many children and cattle are a sign of
wealth, and the village leader and his elders are not to be crossed.
Villagers build their homes near a river, plant crops in the fertile
floodplain, and graze cattle in the nearby savanna; like about 70 percent
of their compatriots, they rely on the land for their livelihood.

Mozambique was colonized by the Portuguese starting in the early 1500s;
they set up vast plantations whose laborers were kept in line with brutal
corporal punishment. In 1975, after Portugal's Carnation Revolution,
Mozambique was chaotically catapulted into independence. The civil war that
followed, one of the Cold War's many proxy conflicts, shattered the
country's infrastructure and killed about a million people before petering
out in 1992. To this day, bullet holes pockmark buildings, amputees beg
along the roads, and crushing poverty saturates the country. During one of
my trips to Mozambique early last year, riots broke out a day after a
high-profile visit by the president of the World Bank, who had
congratulated the country on its success in becoming "a major destination
for foreign invest­ment." Thousands took to the streets to protest
skyrocketing prices; Mozambique's staple food, corn, had become vastly more
expensive as the United States turned an increasing percentage of its crop
into ethanol.

"It's important to remember that Mozambican independence was about
liberating people and land," Diamantino Nhampossa, a land-rights activist,
told me. Mozambique's constitution decrees that all land is owned by the
state. Individuals and private companies can acquire rights to use parcels
for 50-year periods, but the country's sweeping Land Law requires them to
find out if any local people are already using the land and, if so, obtain
their permission for any project. In theory, the law gives Mozambican
peasants more power to determine their fate than their counterparts around
the world. In practice, as I was to discover, the arm of the law has
limited reach.

driving down to the Rio dos Elefantes from Massingir along a rough track, I
pass a rust-flecked sign announcing a relocation area for a community from
the Limpopo park. I stop in some villages along the land ProCana has
claimed and, following protocol, ask to speak to the headman in each.
Everywhere, I hear versions of the same story. Yes, people from the park
are coming to live with us here, but we don't know when. Yes, ProCana is
taking a lot of land, but we think there will be enough for the project,
the people, and their cattle. In every village, I'm told that ProCana has
promised a house for the headman and jobs for others, but written evidence
of those promises is nowhere to be seen.

Villagers have conflicting stories about how much land ProCana is taking;
some direct me to Ernesto Bandi Ngovene, traditionally the leading headman
for the whole area. I find him reclining in the shade outside his home,
barely able to move after a stroke. He has not been to the disputed land
for a while, does not know how to read a map, and cannot say exactly how
much land has been promised to the people from the park, or to ProCana.

One afternoon I run into a couple of village elders when their headman
isn't around. They say that in the middle of their negotiations with the
park, ProCana came along and took all the valley's headmen away for
meetings. These were not held in front of the communities or elders, as is
customary. Afterward, their headman told them that he'd signed a paper
giving ProCana a large piece of the village's land. They have never seen
this paper. They do not want to give away their land, but ProCana came with
powerful people, and they are afraid. They have been told that they have
rights under the Land Law, that they can say no to ProCana, but they do not
have a copy of this law. Can I please send them one?

We drive in the 4x4 into ProCana's claim. The bush rustles and sings; birds
are everywhere, and the savanna is filled with gray-barked and
butterfly-leafed mopane trees, some of the biggest and oldest I have ever
seen. A giant baobab, centuries old, provides a backdrop for a screaming
flock of parrots, while a black-breasted snake eagle hovers overhead.
Holtzhausen told me his environmental people found no trees of value
here—charcoal burners, he said, cut them long ago. I'm not sure where
those experts looked, because here, in the perfectly cadenced afternoon
light, is paradise.

I ask the Limpopo park administrators in Massingir what they made of
ProCana swiping the resettlement land from under their noses. They won't
say much on the record except some boilerplate about it's being a fait
accompli, about the resettlement's being delayed but not scuttled, and that
ProCana's 2,000 jobs could be a good thing for the region. Other locals
tell me ProCana made it very clear that it had the support of "important
people," including President Armando Guebuza—a millionaire
politician-businessman who has his fingers in many pies and flew to
Massingir to officially open the project. Ominous rumors even link Nyimpine
Chissano, the late gangster son of former president Joaquim Chissano, to
ProCana.

I try numerous times, to no avail, to get formal government comment on
ProCana and Mozambique's broader plans for biofuels. A few administrators
do agree to talk—but only in secret. "ProCana were smart," one official
with intimate knowledge of the Limpopo park relocation tells me. "They
approached the leader of Chitar village"—the stroke-hobbled
Ngovene—"first. They made sure he said yes to the project because they
knew the other chiefs in the valley would follow."

Details of land rights in the Massingir area prove hard to find, but after
many quiet meetings I get my hands on several credible maps. They tell a
story of cascading land chaos following ProCana's arrival. The company's
claim on the Limpopo park land has left park officials scrambling to
identify another place for the relocatees' cattle. They've found one—but
much of this land was previously identified as a game reserve, in which a
US conservation group had already allocated hundreds of thousands of
dollars. The reserve project has now collapsed, and South Africans,
Americans, and Mozambican military officers are claiming fragments of it
for private safari operations. On one map, a big chunk of land adjacent to
ProCana's carries the legend "Emelia Machel"—apparently a relative of
Graça Machel. Local people tell me the Machel family keeps cattle there.

The maps make it clear that much of the land around Massingir has been
allocated to two, sometimes three, different people or entities. This is
widespread in Mozambique; in practice, land is owned by those who have the
most influence, or the money to fence or patrol it, no matter what the
documents say. Foreign governments and donor agencies—which supply fully
one-half the government's budget—generally won't get involved in land
disputes, even if these conflicts cause projects funded by their own
donors' or taxpayers' money to go up in smoke (or into Mercedes-Benzes and
Hummers for the corrupt elite). They refuse to upset the
government—which, as it happens, is busy handing out rights to a string
of potentially lucrative gas, oil, and coal deposits.

Carlos Castel-Branco, a respected local economist, tells me that the
primary function of politicians in Mozambique is to mediate between
competing private interests, including their own. They lack both the
political will and the administrative capacity, he says, to build a modern
state. The current land rush—for biofuel plantations, export-oriented
farms, and private hunting concessions—is the first stage in a war over
land that Mozambique's fragile democratic and legal systems might not
survive. "The government is not politically capable of stopping this
process of land speculation. People feel that the dignity of the state and
of themselves has been taken away. It's not hopeless, but it's going to be
a big fight."

I present a plausible nightmare scenario to ProCana's Corné Holtzhausen.
His 75,000-acre farm/factory will have serious ecological impacts—lost
wildlife habitat, greenhouse gases released as natural vegetation is
destroyed, massive water consumption, fertilizer and pesticide pollution.
On the greater scale of Africa, these might be considered small, but
ProCana is not alone. What about the hundreds of other big investors who
will rush in if he succeeds? Who will stop his beloved Mozambique, and much
of the rest of the continent, from being turned into vast
pesticide-and-fertilizer-soaked monocultures? He smiles, a great gotcha
smile, and pauses. "People like you," he says. "People like you who wear
cotton shirts that take 25,000 liters of water to make—you like to wear
them, because they're comfortable. People like you who drive private cars
and like to fly around the world in aeroplanes. The consumer. That's who
determines what happens."

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