Land grabbing: A new colonialism
A nascent oil palm plantation in
southeastern Sierra Leone owed by Socfin Agriculture Company, which in
March 2011 signed a 50-year lease with the government of Sierra Leone.
November 6, 2012 – Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal
— Since the global financial crisis of 2008 and its associated food
crisis that sent another 200 million people into malnutrition, there has
been a massive grab for land by large corporations around the world.
Worst hit has been Africa, where food security is already non-existent
for many people. Governments, including the Australian government,
welcome this “investment” in agriculture, some bizarrely claiming that
food security will be increased.
Estimates vary as to the extent, because there are no accurate
records and some deals are confidential, but the aid agency Oxfam
estimates that 227 million hectares in the developing world — the size
of north-western Europe — has been either sold, leased or licensed to
foreign corporations between 2000 and 2011, or is under negotiation. In
2009 alone, 50 million hectares were transferred from farmers to
corporations. Some of this land has been purchased while the majority
has taken on long-term leases of 25 to 99 years, usually renewable.
This includes 63% of all the arable land in Cambodia, 30% of Liberia
and 20% of Sierra Leone. Other countries that have lost more than 10% of
their agricultural land to foreign investors are Ethiopia, Indonesia,
Laos and the Philippines. More than half is in Africa.
There are several reasons for this land grab, none of which will
increase food security in the areas targeted. The most important impetus
is for biofuel production, particularly palm oil, soy and corn, as a
direct result of mandatory biofuel targets set by European and North
American countries for their domestic energy supplies.
The UK is the biggest investor in biofuel production in sub-Saharan
Africa, followed by the US, India, Norway and Germany. Land formerly
being used by small farmers for their own food needs is converted into
plantations and crop monocultures to feed the cars of the industrialised
world. Some land is also being used for forestry plantations used to
offset carbon emissions in the rich countries.
The second most significant reason for land grabbing is to ensure
food security in the country from which the investment comes.
Governments of those countries are often involved, organising the land
deals then sub-leasing to private corporations – standouts include
India, Libya, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The food
produced is for export, not for domestic consumption.
The third important factor in land grabbing is pure speculation.
Corporations involved, including superannuation and other funds
managers, and investment banks are looking for high returns, either from
increasing land values or short-term profits from the land
exploitation. Their aim is not food security but profit.
As George Soros, US billionaire, said in June 2009: “I’m convinced
that farmland is going to be one of the best investments of our time.
Eventually, of course, food prices will get high enough that the market
will be flooded with supply through development of new land or
technology or both, and the bull market will end. But that’s a long way
off yet” (quoted in The Great Food Robbery, p. 121).
Speculation in land is seen as less risky than shares, currency or
gold in the wake of the global financial crisis. A 2011 World Bank study
of land acquisitions found that 80% were not being used by the
investors, indicating that speculation is a prime motive. A total eight
times the size of the UK has either been left idle by speculators or is
being used for biofuel production.
George Schoneveld (in The Anatomy of Large Scale Farmland Acquisitions in Sub-Saharan Africa)
shows that in sub-Saharan Africa 43% of the alienated land is intended
exclusively for biofuels, 25% is for export food production and 20% for a
combination of biofuels and export food. About 9% is for forestry
plantations.
Martin Keulertz of King’s College, London, says that land grabbing is
really water grabbing. Most of the land acquisition agreements include
free and unlimited water access. Over-irrigation has depleted river and
ground water supplies in Australia, China, India, Pakistan, the Middle
East and the United States, and corporations are eying Africa where this
has so far not happened on such a scale. As corporations take up land
they increase pressure on governments to construct huge dams that will
displace people and increase water insecurity downstream, as well as
affecting the environment.
Examples of land acquisition
The Saudi company Foras International Investment aims by 2016 to
produce 7 million tons of rice in Senegal and Mali for export back to
Saudi Arabia, on 700,000 hectares of land. This is in countries where
people now have insufficient land for their own needs. The land being
taken over is not idle land waiting for investment to become productive,
it is prime irrigated land already in use. Under the agreement with the
Senegal government, the corporation will receive subsidies, and expects
an annual rate of return of 35%. Hundreds of thousands of farmers will
be affected. Local people are resisting, and are taking court action in
Mali to stop it.
The Tanzanian government has agreed to lease 800,000 hectares in
western Tanzania to AgriSol Energy, a US company, for 99 years at 200
shillings per hectare per year, plus payment of 500 shillings to the
district council. This is equivalent to about 50 cents per hectare in
total. The agreement includes the eviction of 160,000 refugees from
Burundi who have lived there for 40 years and have established homes,
fields, churches and other community facilities. AgriSol calls it
“abandoned refugee land”. The occupants have even been granted Tanzanian
citizenship, but this is conditional on them moving off the land. In
the meantime they are banned from planting crops and building new
houses. The compensation offer is 300,000 shillings per head ($200).
The company plans large-scale monoculture crops and beef feedlots,
which will inevitably use large amounts of chemicals, and has asked the
Tanzanian government to change its national biosafety laws to permit
genetically modified crops. Local government officials enthusiastically
claim that the deal will increase Tanzania’s food security, despite
the fact that it is an energy company. Under the agreement any disputes
will be arbitrated in London by the International Chamber of Commerce.
A further example is located in Río Negro province in Argentina. The
Chinese corporation Beidahuang has been given (not sold or leased,
given) 23,000 hectares to develop for irrigation farming for 20 years,
plus information on a further 234,000 hectares that they might be
interested in. The company is exempt from provincial taxes and charges
and receives free use of the port, free technical support, free office
space, and investment guarantees. The project is for soy production and
export to China. There is much local opposition to the project.
Ethiopia has allocated 3.6 million hectares for lease to foreign
investors of which deals had been concluded for a significant proportion
by 2011. This is “non-utilised land” according to the government,
though it is hard to imagine this much quality unused land exists in a
country with frequent food shortages. The land is to be used for export
crops of sugar cane, cotton and palm oil. Schoneveld estimates that by
2011, 807,000 hectares had been leased for biofuel production. The
government has committed to build the infrastructure of roads,
telecommunications and electricity.
The US corporation Farm Lands of Guinea Inc. has obtained 100,000
hectares of land in Guinea, West Africa, to produce corn and soy for
export and biofuels; it is looking for another 15 million hectares. A
South African group has obtained a 30-year lease on 80,000 hectares in
the Republic of Congo to be divided up into 30 farms for South Africans.
Atama Plantations, a Malaysian company, has been granted a lease on
470,000 hectares, also in the Congo, of which it has announced 180,000
will be used for oil palms. More than 500,000 hectares in each of the
following West African countries has been sold or leased to foreign
investors: Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and the
Republic of Congo. Several others are not far behind.
Australia is also a target, though the mechanism and effects are
different. In general the acquisitions do not require displacement of
people from the land and are less likely to affect food security in
Australia. The largest acquisition so far has been Terra Firma Capital, a
British firm with 3.2 million hectares (largely from buying out
Consolidated Pastoral Company). Second is the Qatar company Hassad Food,
with 750,000 hectares of wheat and sheep land, followed by 252,000
hectares taken up by the Alberta Investment Management Company of Canada
for forestry and agriculture (from the collapsed Great Southern
Plantations). Cubbie Station is another example.
Australian companies are not strongly involved in land acquisitions
overseas. An exception is BKK Partners (founded by Peter Costello,
former Liberal Party government minister), which has 100,000 hectares in
Cambodia for bananas, rice, palm oil, sugar cane and teak (still in the
planning stages in January 2012).
The effects
In many African and some Asian and Pacific countries land is not
bought and sold but used according to customary rights. Because
customary landholders do not have land titles governments can, in most
countries, legally evict them. George Schoneveld explains that:
“customary land users are seldom consulted or requested to acquiesce to
land alienation, typically with detrimental implications for livelihood
and social identity”.
The Oxfam report Land and Power documents the following example from Uganda.
Christine (not her real name) and her husband used to
grow enough food to feed their eight children on the six hectares of
land that they had farmed for over 20 years. By selling the surplus at
the market, they could afford to send their children to school. Instead
of living in their old six-room home, complete with kitchen, they now
struggle to pay rent for a cramped two-room house, where there is not
enough land to farm and grow food. Christine’s children often eat only
once a day and are no longer receiving an education, as it is too
expensive. She and her husband were once self-sufficient, but now depend
on the goodwill of friends and neighbours and whatever casual labour
can be found.
Christine is among more than twenty thousand people who claim that
they have been evicted from their homes and land in Kiboga district,
and nearby Mubende district, to make way for UK-based New Forests
Company (NFC) plantations. The Ugandan National Forestry Authority (NFA)
granted licences over the plantation areas to NFC in 2005 and
authorised the removal of the former residents, which took place by
February 2010 in Mubende and between 2006 and July 2010 in Kiboga. The
NFA says that the people living there were illegal encroachers on forest
land and that their evictions were justified.
Most say they were evicted from well-established villages, and
some of those who Oxfam spoke to had left behind homes which they had
inhabited for over 30 years. All those who talked to Oxfam are now
renting smaller houses or have put up fragile, temporary structures made
from polythene or straw and wood.
Pretorious Nkhata, a farmer from Mpongwe district in the
Copperbelt Province of Zambia explains what happened to him and his
community (quoted by Nebert Mulenga in “Foreign farmers undermine food
security in Zambia”):
They said we were squatters, we were intruders on that
land. I had 21 hectares … I lost it all… They (the South African
agribusiness) came with guns and threatened to shoot anyone who resisted
moving out. They burnt all our household properties without any notice.
We were almost 200 households. They burnt my food barns, clothes,
blankets, bedding, television set – they even burnt my fields.
The agribusiness has since sold the land and closed its operations in
Zambia but people have not been given their land back, or received any
compensation. The Zambian government has targeted 1.5 million hectares
for agribusiness development.
Any talk of food security really means food security for the
investing countries, not for the parts of the world most desperate for
food security. Even the World Bank said in a report in 2010 that there
were no wins for poor communities or countries, only losses. According
to Dr Mickey Mwala, dean of the school of agriculture at the University
of Zambia, large-scale land appropriation by agribusiness corporations
will compromise his country’s food security by driving peasant farmers,
responsible for most of Zambia’s food production, off the land and
increase poverty by increasing the number of people who can’t grow their
own food.
The Oxfam report Land and Power states: “Too many investments
have resulted in dispossession, deception, violation of human rights,
and destruction of livelihoods.”
Why do governments of the victim countries allow it?
One motivation is for export income to balance trade and a mistaken
justification that it will increase food security. The Ethiopian
government says it will generate foreign currency and facilitate
technology transfer, create jobs, reduce poverty and reduce food
insecurity, by developing “under-utilised land”. However, as the Oxfam
report says: “Despite claims to the contrary, investors target the best
lands. They seek land with access to water resources, fertile soil,
infrastructure, and proximity to markets to facilitate the profitability
and viability of their ventures”. Food security is a total myth –
hardly any of the land deals are designed to provide food for domestic
consumption, as almost all is for export. An example is Mozambique,
where approximately 35 per cent of households are chronically food
insecure: a mere 32,000 hectares out of the 433,000 approved for
agriculture investment between 2007 and 2009 were for food crops,
according to Oxfam.
Another factor in government compliance is pressure from the World
Trade Organization, World Bank, International Monetary Fund and aid
organisations, which make the “freeing up” of markets and foreign
investment controls a condition for continued foreign aid. The Bill and
Melinda Gates organisation Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa and
the US Millennium Challenge Corporation are strongly supporting the
abolition of any investment, export and land ownership regulations. As
well there are more than 2500 bilateral investment treaties around the
world, which protect investors from changes in government policy,
severely weakening the ability of governments to regulate their land,
water resources and promote food security and anti-poverty measures. In
other words, many governments have little choice.
The third reason is plain bribery. Transparency International’s
Global Corruption Barometer reported that 15 per cent of people dealing
with land administration services had to pay bribes. This is probably a
gross underestimate.
Land grabbing is one of the inevitable consequences of globalisation,
deregulation, free trade and the immense power of corporations to act
as they please with profit their sole motivation, with no concern for
the effects on people. The Oxfam report offers recommendations to curb
the worst effects, including better governance by the victim countries,
better regulation by the governments of the investing countries and
better scrutiny by the World Bank, which finances many of the
acquisitions. However the World Bank, while claiming that it “shares the
concerns” of Oxfam, has refused to intervene. Governments that do enact
sound food sovereignty and land tenure laws like Cuba, Venezuela,
Ecuador and Bolivia are labelled pariah states.
There is a strongly growing movement around the world to expose and
fight land grabbing. Local affected people are resisting as much as they
are able – many have been killed, especially in Honduras. It is only by
such resistance and the support by organisations in the richer
countries that will halt and reverse the curse.
References
Africa Report, “Ethiopia to lease out land to investors despite land grab concerns”, No. 44, October 2012.
Biron, Carey, “World Bank refuses call to halt land deals”, Inter Press Service, October 5, 2012.
GRAIN, The Great Food Robbery: How Corporations Control Food, Grab Land and Destroy the Climate, published by GRAIN and Pambazuka Press
GRAIN, “Land grab deals”, January 2012 (an extensive listing around the world)
GRAIN, “Land grabbing and food sovereignty in West and Central Africa”, September 12, 2012.
IRIN, “Food: Land-grabbing linked with hunger”, October 11, 2012
Kitabu, Gerald, “Green revolution or green plunder?”, Guardian on Sunday, July 31, 2011.
Mulenga, Nebert, “Foreign farmers undermine food security in Zambia”, IPS, November 1, 2012
Oakland Institute, “AgriSol land deal in Tanzania creates uncertain future for over 160,000”
Oxfam, Land and Power: The growing scandal surrounding the new wave of investments in land, 151 Oxfam Briefing Paper, September 22, 2011
Schoneveld, George, The Anatomy of Large Scale Farmland Acquisitions in Sub-Saharan Africa, Centre for International Forestry Research, Working Paper 85, Bogor, Indonesia, 2011, .
Vidal, John, “Economic disaster beckons as water-hungry investors buy up Africa’s land”, Guardian, August 31, 2012
Vidal, John, “Land acquired over past decade could have produced food for a billion people”, Guardian, October 4, 2012
Source: Globalfaultlines
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