A new colonial carve-up?
The must-have possession for do-good celebrities of late has been land. Hollywood stars have been acquiring chunks of the Amazon rainforest or Patagonia with the intention of protecting it against development, even though several well-regarded charities have been doing the same thing – to general approval by neutral observers – for years.
But anything that actors and environmentalists can do, corporations and governments can do bigger, although not necessarily better. In what has been described by the top echelons of UN as 'a neo-colonialist trend', land is changing hands between developing countries and buyers who range from national governments to huge food producers and speculators on the international stock exchanges.
Far from buying – or more typically, leasing – the land to safeguard its environmental value, these institutions appear to have only one motive: making a profit. Many of the acquisitions, generally viewed as land grabs by critics, are happening in Africa, which has led to fears of a 21st-century echo of the notorious 'scramble for Africa' by colonial powers during the late 19th century.
'Most land acquisitions are cloaked in humanitarian considerations and instigated by cash-rich countries with scarce resources seeking to secure reliable supplies of food and seeking to reduce their dependence on international markets for their own security,' says Olivier de Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food. 'They present humanitarian arguments that this develops marginal land for the benefit of local communities.
'The co-existence of profit-driven and humanitarian considerations shouldn't surprise us,' he continues. 'It has been a constant feature of colonial powers in the past, and how they presented their "civilising" mission in the territories they occupied and exploited.'
Plantation parallels
Many of the recent land deals have been characterised by long-term leases – sometimes 99-year renewable agreements that effectively hand the land over in perpetuity at a rate that echoes the historical tradition of establishing plantations in European-owned colonies.
But despite this obvious parallel, there are important differences, according to Professor Ian Scoones, a research fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) and coordinator of the Future Agricultures Consortium. 'Then, it was the colonial powers that were grabbing territory, but this is driven by market forces and speculation. Land can be bought dead cheap; speculators are taking gambles and it's probably a safe bet.'
And there is no shortage of investors queuing up and, as we'll see, some of the countries leasing the land argue that they benefit from the deals with more jobs, new technology, better infrastructure and extra tax revenues. The World Bank argues that such acquisitions can also 'jump-start' agricultural growth through large-scale farming.
But in most cases, the reality appears to be less rose-tinted. Rural dwellers, pastoralists and herdsmen have been pushed off land they have occupied for generations in countries such as Ethiopia, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Zambia, Cambodia and Laos. Africa is the epicentre of this trend, according to the World Bank, which reckons that of the 45 million hectares of land for which deals were struck in 2009, 70 per cent were in Africa. Others think that this is an underestimate: the International Land Coalition suggests that the true figure could be much higher, at about 80 million hectares, 64 per cent (about 50 million hectares) of which was in Africa.
Global grabs
Here's just a small selection of recent deals. In January this year, Beidahuang Group, a conglomerate of Chinese rice millers and soya producers, was acquiring thousands of hectares of soya beans, wheat and oilseed rape in Argentina's Rio Negro province to ship back to China, according to Grain, a Spanish advocacy group. The company has also reported agreements to develop 200,000 hectares of rice, corn and other crops in the Philippine province of Luzon. Last year, a 35,000-hectare deal was proposed for South African farmers to take over ailing state farms in Libya.
Elsewhere in Africa, South Sudan issued or negotiated leases on nine per cent of its land – even before it officially came into existence – according to the humanitarian organisation Norwegian People's Aid. And between 2004 and 2009, Sudan leased 376,000 hectares to Saudi Arabia to grow wheat and rice. Saudi Arabia has also proposed that Saudi business groups take control of 70 per cent of the rice-growing areas of Senegal. China has acquired the rights to grow oil palm on 2.8 million hectares of Congolese land; Qatar leased 20,000 hectares for fruit and vegetable cultivation in exchange for funding a US$2.3billion port in Kenya; in Ethiopia, India has invested US$4billion in agriculture, including flower-growing and sugar estates.
Some deals have been particularly controversial. In Madagascar, negotiations with Daewoo Logistics Corporation to lease 1.3 million hectares for maize and oil palm – almost half the country's arable land – reportedly played a role in the political conflict that led to the overthrow of the government in 2009.
The commodities involved suggest that such deals are being triggered by the search for food security, biofuels and minerals, accelerated by the spikes in food prices in 2008 and international targets for biofuel production. 'The food-price spikes of 2007–08 showed just how vulnerable food-importing nations are to fluctuations in global commodity markets,' says Ruth Hall, a researcher with the Future Agricultures Consortium. 'These led many, including the Gulf states and several East Asian countries, to re-evaluate their strategies and secure land and water elsewhere, essentially turning to "offshore" food production to supply their growing populations.'
However, some observers believe that the emphasis on food is overstated. 'The majority of land grabs don't involve anything to do with food,' says Dr Jun Borras, associate professor of rural development studies at the International Institute of Social Studies. 'Across the world, food production has stabilised at 50 per cent above what we need. There is a real issue in the future about the growing population, but at the moment, that's not the case.'
Instead, Borras argues, the drivers are biofuels and timber for pulp, which are characterised by large plantations of eucalyptus – a case supported by the World Bank, which found that 21 per cent of land deals in 2009 were for biofuel production, conjuring an image of southern Africa, in particular, as a new Middle East frontier for biofuels.
Aggressive agreements
But whatever the scale and causes of the phenomenon, few people doubt the negative impacts on local communities. Actual farming has so far only started on land involved in 21 per cent of the announced deals, says the World Bank, and where it has, the profitable projects don't generate satisfactory local benefits.
The World Bank, not generally known for positioning itself against big business, has been scathing about many of the deals. In a report released last autumn, the bank declared that 'given cultural and capacity gaps between investors and local communities, there is large scope for misunderstanding. Laws are often insufficient for ensuring that consultation is meaningful.' By way of example, the bank found that in Indonesia, adapt (indigenous) communities on oil-palm estates often considered money given to them to be compensation for the transfer of usage rights only, whereas companies considered the funds to be payment for the transfer of ownership rights.
'A lot of the deals are aggressive,' says Scoones. 'A transparent system, with more consultation and the upholding of human rights, is needed – but often this doesn't happen. It's skewed in favour of the investors. The deals are shrouded in secrecy, and very rarely are the terms of the deals made public.'
Even the World Bank hit a brick wall in trying to get to the bottom of many of the agreements. It found that 'access to information emerged as much more of a problem than anticipated. Even for data that should not be subject to any restrictions of confidentiality or within government departments, limited data sharing and gaps and inconsistencies in record keeping implied an astonishing lack of awareness of what is happening on the ground.'
Those local impacts can be dramatic, and involve changes to ways of life that have been conducted for hundreds of years. 'It's all very worrisome because of the character, pace and extent of the land grabs,' says Borras, 'especially when we see a lot of places where people get dispossessed and expelled from their communities.'
A major conference of international agencies working on local peoples' rights and land ownership, held at the IDS in Sussex this spring, was given details of 120 individual examples of land grabs, and according to Borras, 'not one of them involved the promised win–win scenario. We've looked into all the public sources and failed to find a single such case.'
The initial problem is that land is usually sold or leased at significantly less than its real value. In Liberia, for example, leases for agricultural concessions are US$0.50–US$2.00 per hectare per year. In some instances, according to Anuradha Mittal, executive director of the Oakland Institute, investors have secured land deals by giving a poor tribal chief a bottle of Johnny Walker Scotch.
'Some of it can even be handed over for free, or perhaps in return for guarantees for access to water,' says Henk Hobbelink, a coordinator at Grain. 'But whatever the cost, it's cheaper than it should be – it represents a very good business deal for the investor.'
Funding deals
There are also some awkward and uncomfortable truths for critics of the deals. Have you looked at where your pension is being invested lately? University endowment funds and pension funds are long-term investors in some of the hedge funds that are investing in agricultural land, according to an Oakland Institute report, although most experts reckon that while hedge-fund deals make for sensational impacts, they aren't that common.
And often the initiators of such deals are local, national or regional players. 'It's far more diverse and polycentric than the easy picture of the "new bad guys" – the Gulf states, China and South Korea,' says Borras. 'They don't constitute the majority. It's domestic capitalists and a lot of intra-regional deals.'
The reason for this, he points out, is that 'it's not the private companies who grab and dislocate the people from their land – only the state can facilitate that. The framing of the debate as big corporations against weak states is misplaced. Many of these states look fairly strong – Indonesia is the hotbed of land grabs; Cambodia's state governance is able to reclassifiy land and use police and the military to flush out local people.'
Whoever is doing the deals, the interest is often predicated on the notion that the land is empty, something that Hall describes as 'deeply and dangerously misleading'. In reality, she argues, shifting cultivation and dry-season grazing have been widespread in these regions. Small-scale farmers have been displaced; pastoralists have lost their grazing land; and rural people have lost access to crucial common property resources.
In practice, it's usually the most desirable land that's snapped up. 'The lower-lying wetter areas are captured first,' says Scoones. 'This is where people get excluded. Pastoralists arrive in the dry season [to] find a fence and security guards. That puts them in a difficult situation, and very often conflict arises. Displaced people may be reallocated land, but often they are just dumped in poorly constructed villages, away from anywhere, with no access to roads and resources.'
Generally, women suffer most from such deals, according to policy briefs researched by the International Food Policy Research Institute. Men, by contrast, are most likely
to benefit from access to employment in plantations or processing plants. 'Land deals will likely exacerbate these existing gender disparities in land access and ownership,' the authors conclude, pointing out that the lands on which women depend for collecting firewood, water, fodder and medicinal plants often have the most insecure tenure and may be designated as 'wasteland', and is thus the most likely candidates to be given up for outside investment.
Such cherry-picking also has significant implications for the environment, according to Hobbelink. 'These huge plantations use a lot of water and fertile soil. Nobody is asking whether this is all sustainable. You just have to look at the length of the Nile to see where the interest is – Sudan and Ethiopia are selling millions of hectares of land there. What are the implications for other countries that use the Nile, such as Egypt?'
Then there's the social impact of leasing the land to outsiders. 'Land is so much more than something to grow food on,' says Kate Geary, a policy adviser for Oxfam. 'It has social and cultural importance to communities. When people are forced off the land, it happens in unpredictable ways, and communities find it difficult to stay together. People move to towns, to slum areas, and you see a breakdown of social, cultural and economic cohesion.'
Reaping the benefits
At this juncture, it's worth pointing out an awkward truth – that not all countries leasing out land perceive themselves to be getting a raw deal. 'When done right, these sorts of arrangements can benefit everybody involved,' says Stephen O'Brien, UK parliamentary under-secretary of state for international development. 'But it's vital that the interests of the poorest and most marginalised groups are taken into account, both in the decision-making process when looking at whether to sell agricultural land, and in getting their fair share of the subsequent benefits, whether financial or food produced.'
Saudi Arabia argues that its land-procurement policy is responsible and that it has no choice but to cut back on wheat production on its home soil, which is irrigated with water drawn from aquifers that are no longer being replenished. And for many countries, the deals may seem attractive. Generations of governments in developing nations have been faced with cutting back costs and being unable to develop roads, infrastructure or health systems. Suddenly, a rich state or company comes along with the promise
of hard cash to execute such ambitions.
This can lead to some perverse scenarios: Ethiopia, a country that receives more than 700,000 tonnes of food and £1.8billion in aid a year and, during the 1980s, symbolised for many Africa's inability to feed itself, has transferred 350,000 hectares of agricultural land since 2009. In one deal, it gave 100,000 hectares in the Gambela region to the Indian firm Karuturi Global, which exports palm oil, sugar, rice and cut flowers.
'The Ethiopian government genuinely thinks that smallholder agriculture won't deliver national food security, and that Ethiopia must complement this with substantial investment in large-scale agriculture that will raise foreign exchange from high-value commodities,' says Scoones, who thinks that countries with naive expectations risk sleepwalking into unfavourable deals. 'That's a perfectly legitimate argument – you can see the rationale. But I don't think it's correct.'
Borras, who has investigated numerous land deals during field trips, has no quibble with the underlying principle. 'Commercialisation of agriculture isn't bad per se,' he argues. 'Under certain historic conditions, it's good when it meets ecological or social needs. But the way this is being done is very crude and cruel. People are being treated like chickens.'
Taking action
Quite what happens next is anyone's guess. The triggers for land deals – whether they be for food or energy security, or the chance to make a quick buck – seem unlikely to go away. The World Bank has suggested seven guiding principles for such deals, such as including women in the debates over whether they should take place, and avoiding environmental damage. But for most, these lofty ambitions are too vague. 'The concern is how to implement this when demand is high, when there's potential for corruption to slice off the benefits, and civil society is not strong,' says Scoones.
Some countries are taking unilateral action. According to Grain, Australia, Argentina, Brazil, New Zealand and Uruguay are debating whether to introduce restrictions on foreign ownership of farmland. Egypt is trying to limit farmland-investment programmes to domestic investors and the Philippines has blocked a land contract with China because of concerns about its terms and legal validity, and the impact on local food security. Mozambique has resisted the settlement of thousands of Chinese agricultural workers on leased lands – a situation that would limit the involvement of local labour in new agricultural investments.
According to the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), success is contingent on tenure, policy, culture and history, as well as on demographic considerations. But the IIED also reckons that no perfectly fair approach has yet been found. 'The willingness of the company to engage with more inclusive business models as a genuine economic component of their business, rather than as part of corporate responsibility programmes, is a key ingredient for more inclusive business models to work,' the institute concluded in a recent paper.
In a major new report on land grabs, to be published in September, Oxfam is expected to call for a rethink of the biofuel mandates that are among the key drivers of the phenomenon, along with a mechanism – probably within international law – to ensure that domestic food security always takes precedence in such deals. 'So far, the international responses have been nothing but a fig leaf,' says Geary.
Meanwhile, a moratorium should be placed on all such deals, argues Hobbelink. 'You need to put a hold on these agreements,' he says. 'We aren't saying there is no case for investment in agriculture – of course there is. But it's the question of how and in the hands of whom. You have to develop a mechanism so that agriculture is in the hands of farmers, not in the hands of business.'
Treaty with teeth
A major shift in tightening up such deals should emerge this autumn, when a report on land grabs for the UN is finalised. The report, researched by Borras and four other experts, will be handed to the UN's committee on food security. It's expected to push strongly for establishment of a treaty 'with teeth', according to Borras, that will invoke existing international treaties on human and local rights, to which most of the countries involved are signatories. 'We need clear-cut, workable mechanisms,' he says. 'It will be very difficult, but the UN has to move decisively. Intervention below the level of the UN won't work.'
Something, somewhere, will have to give, warns Scoones, or conflict and social unrest will escalate. 'I suspect that in some areas, there will be effective policies implemented soon enough to avoid major disruption and conflict. But some countries and companies will get seriously burnt. Huge plantation investments in the former colonies often failed, and to be honest, I don't see any particular reason why the situation is different now.'
Instead, Scoones argues that investors, instead of buying leases to land, could offer technical and marketing advice further up the chain, enabling smallholders to maintain access to their own land. 'This will allow smallholders to improve their livelihoods,' he says. 'The controversy over land grabs is not going to be resolved by nice voluntary guidelines, there will have to be some hard-nosed talk about rules, regulations and accountability in land deals. Unless that happens, there will always be someone who isn't prepared to play by the rules and who will be irresponsible.'
Not so empty
Mozambique fits the profile set by mainstream institutions seeking land to buy or lease – a land-abundant country where taking blocks of under-utilised territory is theoretically assumed not to result in livelihood disruption or displacement and the dispossession of local people. The reality is different, as became apparent after the Central African Mining and Exploration Company (CAMEC) announced that it was to invest US$510million in 30,000 hectares of land in Gaza province in 2008 under a 50-year renewable lease.
While the land in question wasn't under large-scale commercial use, a study by Dr Jun Borras and colleagues identified three key agricultural economic activities by the local communities: livestock raising by cattle herders, charcoal production and subsistence farming. The land also showed great potential for food production.
A major component of CAMEC's project was non-irrigated jatropha for biofuel production. But researchers pointed out that while jatropha plants may survive on dry lands, they are unlikely to be productive at a level that is commercially viable.
In October 2009, CAMEC announced that it was discontinuing its investment in biofuel projects and shortly afterwards, the Mozambican government closed the operation and began the search for new investors to develop the land.
Post-Soviet soil up for grabs
Although the focus of land grabs is in the developing world, they are also widespread in Russia, Ukraine and post-Soviet Central Asia, according to a research paper published recently in the Journal of Peasant Studies. Most of the world's unused agricultural land is located in the region – up to 40 million hectares of fertile, black-earth soil that was once the breadbasket of the Soviet Union. Much of it was bought up by domestic oil and gas companies seeking to diversify their risks in the turbulent energy market that followed the break-up of the union and now lies fallow.
Kazakhstan has recently considered leasing one million hectares of farmland to China for rapeseed and soya, while in September 2008, Saudi government representatives went to Kazakhstan to explore grain production and cattle raising. According to Grain, Dexion Capital's Global Farming fund, a British hedge fund, is trying to raise US$280million to buy more than 1.2 million hectares of land in Russia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine (as well as Australia and Latin America). Grain also calculates that China operates 80,400 hectares in Siberia, which it bought for US$21.4million.
Hunting for new land
Land grabs are far from new. One of the most notorious deals continues to wreak havoc on the Masai communities of Tanzania 19 years after it was first signed.
In 1992, the Otterlo Business Corporation, which is linked to royal families from the United Arab Emirates, was granted hunting rights within the Loliondo Game Controlled Area – settled and legally owned by Masai pastoralists. In 2009, 3,000 Masai were evicted from their villages and their homes were burned down. Those evictions coincided with a severe drought, and more than 60 per cent of the herder's cows are thought to have died. The dispute has escalated this year, and Masai campaigners, who have filed a constitutional case in Tanzania's High Court, now say a further 20,000 face eviction.
'If we lose the land, it will be the end of the Masai in northern Tanzania,' says Samwel Nangiria of the Ngorongoro NGO Network. 'That's the biggest worry for us. It has affected people mentally and socially. People will not move whatever the cost. Even when the houses and land are burned, they will return. People are using very hard language now. It will cause insecurity in the area and the effects will go beyond the pastoralists and affect tourism.'
August 2011
But anything that actors and environmentalists can do, corporations and governments can do bigger, although not necessarily better. In what has been described by the top echelons of UN as 'a neo-colonialist trend', land is changing hands between developing countries and buyers who range from national governments to huge food producers and speculators on the international stock exchanges.
Far from buying – or more typically, leasing – the land to safeguard its environmental value, these institutions appear to have only one motive: making a profit. Many of the acquisitions, generally viewed as land grabs by critics, are happening in Africa, which has led to fears of a 21st-century echo of the notorious 'scramble for Africa' by colonial powers during the late 19th century.
'Most land acquisitions are cloaked in humanitarian considerations and instigated by cash-rich countries with scarce resources seeking to secure reliable supplies of food and seeking to reduce their dependence on international markets for their own security,' says Olivier de Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food. 'They present humanitarian arguments that this develops marginal land for the benefit of local communities.
'The co-existence of profit-driven and humanitarian considerations shouldn't surprise us,' he continues. 'It has been a constant feature of colonial powers in the past, and how they presented their "civilising" mission in the territories they occupied and exploited.'
Plantation parallels
Many of the recent land deals have been characterised by long-term leases – sometimes 99-year renewable agreements that effectively hand the land over in perpetuity at a rate that echoes the historical tradition of establishing plantations in European-owned colonies.
But despite this obvious parallel, there are important differences, according to Professor Ian Scoones, a research fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) and coordinator of the Future Agricultures Consortium. 'Then, it was the colonial powers that were grabbing territory, but this is driven by market forces and speculation. Land can be bought dead cheap; speculators are taking gambles and it's probably a safe bet.'
And there is no shortage of investors queuing up and, as we'll see, some of the countries leasing the land argue that they benefit from the deals with more jobs, new technology, better infrastructure and extra tax revenues. The World Bank argues that such acquisitions can also 'jump-start' agricultural growth through large-scale farming.
But in most cases, the reality appears to be less rose-tinted. Rural dwellers, pastoralists and herdsmen have been pushed off land they have occupied for generations in countries such as Ethiopia, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Zambia, Cambodia and Laos. Africa is the epicentre of this trend, according to the World Bank, which reckons that of the 45 million hectares of land for which deals were struck in 2009, 70 per cent were in Africa. Others think that this is an underestimate: the International Land Coalition suggests that the true figure could be much higher, at about 80 million hectares, 64 per cent (about 50 million hectares) of which was in Africa.
Global grabs
Here's just a small selection of recent deals. In January this year, Beidahuang Group, a conglomerate of Chinese rice millers and soya producers, was acquiring thousands of hectares of soya beans, wheat and oilseed rape in Argentina's Rio Negro province to ship back to China, according to Grain, a Spanish advocacy group. The company has also reported agreements to develop 200,000 hectares of rice, corn and other crops in the Philippine province of Luzon. Last year, a 35,000-hectare deal was proposed for South African farmers to take over ailing state farms in Libya.
Elsewhere in Africa, South Sudan issued or negotiated leases on nine per cent of its land – even before it officially came into existence – according to the humanitarian organisation Norwegian People's Aid. And between 2004 and 2009, Sudan leased 376,000 hectares to Saudi Arabia to grow wheat and rice. Saudi Arabia has also proposed that Saudi business groups take control of 70 per cent of the rice-growing areas of Senegal. China has acquired the rights to grow oil palm on 2.8 million hectares of Congolese land; Qatar leased 20,000 hectares for fruit and vegetable cultivation in exchange for funding a US$2.3billion port in Kenya; in Ethiopia, India has invested US$4billion in agriculture, including flower-growing and sugar estates.
Some deals have been particularly controversial. In Madagascar, negotiations with Daewoo Logistics Corporation to lease 1.3 million hectares for maize and oil palm – almost half the country's arable land – reportedly played a role in the political conflict that led to the overthrow of the government in 2009.
The commodities involved suggest that such deals are being triggered by the search for food security, biofuels and minerals, accelerated by the spikes in food prices in 2008 and international targets for biofuel production. 'The food-price spikes of 2007–08 showed just how vulnerable food-importing nations are to fluctuations in global commodity markets,' says Ruth Hall, a researcher with the Future Agricultures Consortium. 'These led many, including the Gulf states and several East Asian countries, to re-evaluate their strategies and secure land and water elsewhere, essentially turning to "offshore" food production to supply their growing populations.'
However, some observers believe that the emphasis on food is overstated. 'The majority of land grabs don't involve anything to do with food,' says Dr Jun Borras, associate professor of rural development studies at the International Institute of Social Studies. 'Across the world, food production has stabilised at 50 per cent above what we need. There is a real issue in the future about the growing population, but at the moment, that's not the case.'
Instead, Borras argues, the drivers are biofuels and timber for pulp, which are characterised by large plantations of eucalyptus – a case supported by the World Bank, which found that 21 per cent of land deals in 2009 were for biofuel production, conjuring an image of southern Africa, in particular, as a new Middle East frontier for biofuels.
Aggressive agreements
But whatever the scale and causes of the phenomenon, few people doubt the negative impacts on local communities. Actual farming has so far only started on land involved in 21 per cent of the announced deals, says the World Bank, and where it has, the profitable projects don't generate satisfactory local benefits.
The World Bank, not generally known for positioning itself against big business, has been scathing about many of the deals. In a report released last autumn, the bank declared that 'given cultural and capacity gaps between investors and local communities, there is large scope for misunderstanding. Laws are often insufficient for ensuring that consultation is meaningful.' By way of example, the bank found that in Indonesia, adapt (indigenous) communities on oil-palm estates often considered money given to them to be compensation for the transfer of usage rights only, whereas companies considered the funds to be payment for the transfer of ownership rights.
'A lot of the deals are aggressive,' says Scoones. 'A transparent system, with more consultation and the upholding of human rights, is needed – but often this doesn't happen. It's skewed in favour of the investors. The deals are shrouded in secrecy, and very rarely are the terms of the deals made public.'
Even the World Bank hit a brick wall in trying to get to the bottom of many of the agreements. It found that 'access to information emerged as much more of a problem than anticipated. Even for data that should not be subject to any restrictions of confidentiality or within government departments, limited data sharing and gaps and inconsistencies in record keeping implied an astonishing lack of awareness of what is happening on the ground.'
Those local impacts can be dramatic, and involve changes to ways of life that have been conducted for hundreds of years. 'It's all very worrisome because of the character, pace and extent of the land grabs,' says Borras, 'especially when we see a lot of places where people get dispossessed and expelled from their communities.'
A major conference of international agencies working on local peoples' rights and land ownership, held at the IDS in Sussex this spring, was given details of 120 individual examples of land grabs, and according to Borras, 'not one of them involved the promised win–win scenario. We've looked into all the public sources and failed to find a single such case.'
The initial problem is that land is usually sold or leased at significantly less than its real value. In Liberia, for example, leases for agricultural concessions are US$0.50–US$2.00 per hectare per year. In some instances, according to Anuradha Mittal, executive director of the Oakland Institute, investors have secured land deals by giving a poor tribal chief a bottle of Johnny Walker Scotch.
'Some of it can even be handed over for free, or perhaps in return for guarantees for access to water,' says Henk Hobbelink, a coordinator at Grain. 'But whatever the cost, it's cheaper than it should be – it represents a very good business deal for the investor.'
Funding deals
There are also some awkward and uncomfortable truths for critics of the deals. Have you looked at where your pension is being invested lately? University endowment funds and pension funds are long-term investors in some of the hedge funds that are investing in agricultural land, according to an Oakland Institute report, although most experts reckon that while hedge-fund deals make for sensational impacts, they aren't that common.
And often the initiators of such deals are local, national or regional players. 'It's far more diverse and polycentric than the easy picture of the "new bad guys" – the Gulf states, China and South Korea,' says Borras. 'They don't constitute the majority. It's domestic capitalists and a lot of intra-regional deals.'
The reason for this, he points out, is that 'it's not the private companies who grab and dislocate the people from their land – only the state can facilitate that. The framing of the debate as big corporations against weak states is misplaced. Many of these states look fairly strong – Indonesia is the hotbed of land grabs; Cambodia's state governance is able to reclassifiy land and use police and the military to flush out local people.'
Whoever is doing the deals, the interest is often predicated on the notion that the land is empty, something that Hall describes as 'deeply and dangerously misleading'. In reality, she argues, shifting cultivation and dry-season grazing have been widespread in these regions. Small-scale farmers have been displaced; pastoralists have lost their grazing land; and rural people have lost access to crucial common property resources.
In practice, it's usually the most desirable land that's snapped up. 'The lower-lying wetter areas are captured first,' says Scoones. 'This is where people get excluded. Pastoralists arrive in the dry season [to] find a fence and security guards. That puts them in a difficult situation, and very often conflict arises. Displaced people may be reallocated land, but often they are just dumped in poorly constructed villages, away from anywhere, with no access to roads and resources.'
Generally, women suffer most from such deals, according to policy briefs researched by the International Food Policy Research Institute. Men, by contrast, are most likely
to benefit from access to employment in plantations or processing plants. 'Land deals will likely exacerbate these existing gender disparities in land access and ownership,' the authors conclude, pointing out that the lands on which women depend for collecting firewood, water, fodder and medicinal plants often have the most insecure tenure and may be designated as 'wasteland', and is thus the most likely candidates to be given up for outside investment.
Such cherry-picking also has significant implications for the environment, according to Hobbelink. 'These huge plantations use a lot of water and fertile soil. Nobody is asking whether this is all sustainable. You just have to look at the length of the Nile to see where the interest is – Sudan and Ethiopia are selling millions of hectares of land there. What are the implications for other countries that use the Nile, such as Egypt?'
Then there's the social impact of leasing the land to outsiders. 'Land is so much more than something to grow food on,' says Kate Geary, a policy adviser for Oxfam. 'It has social and cultural importance to communities. When people are forced off the land, it happens in unpredictable ways, and communities find it difficult to stay together. People move to towns, to slum areas, and you see a breakdown of social, cultural and economic cohesion.'
Reaping the benefits
At this juncture, it's worth pointing out an awkward truth – that not all countries leasing out land perceive themselves to be getting a raw deal. 'When done right, these sorts of arrangements can benefit everybody involved,' says Stephen O'Brien, UK parliamentary under-secretary of state for international development. 'But it's vital that the interests of the poorest and most marginalised groups are taken into account, both in the decision-making process when looking at whether to sell agricultural land, and in getting their fair share of the subsequent benefits, whether financial or food produced.'
Saudi Arabia argues that its land-procurement policy is responsible and that it has no choice but to cut back on wheat production on its home soil, which is irrigated with water drawn from aquifers that are no longer being replenished. And for many countries, the deals may seem attractive. Generations of governments in developing nations have been faced with cutting back costs and being unable to develop roads, infrastructure or health systems. Suddenly, a rich state or company comes along with the promise
of hard cash to execute such ambitions.
This can lead to some perverse scenarios: Ethiopia, a country that receives more than 700,000 tonnes of food and £1.8billion in aid a year and, during the 1980s, symbolised for many Africa's inability to feed itself, has transferred 350,000 hectares of agricultural land since 2009. In one deal, it gave 100,000 hectares in the Gambela region to the Indian firm Karuturi Global, which exports palm oil, sugar, rice and cut flowers.
'The Ethiopian government genuinely thinks that smallholder agriculture won't deliver national food security, and that Ethiopia must complement this with substantial investment in large-scale agriculture that will raise foreign exchange from high-value commodities,' says Scoones, who thinks that countries with naive expectations risk sleepwalking into unfavourable deals. 'That's a perfectly legitimate argument – you can see the rationale. But I don't think it's correct.'
Borras, who has investigated numerous land deals during field trips, has no quibble with the underlying principle. 'Commercialisation of agriculture isn't bad per se,' he argues. 'Under certain historic conditions, it's good when it meets ecological or social needs. But the way this is being done is very crude and cruel. People are being treated like chickens.'
Taking action
Quite what happens next is anyone's guess. The triggers for land deals – whether they be for food or energy security, or the chance to make a quick buck – seem unlikely to go away. The World Bank has suggested seven guiding principles for such deals, such as including women in the debates over whether they should take place, and avoiding environmental damage. But for most, these lofty ambitions are too vague. 'The concern is how to implement this when demand is high, when there's potential for corruption to slice off the benefits, and civil society is not strong,' says Scoones.
Some countries are taking unilateral action. According to Grain, Australia, Argentina, Brazil, New Zealand and Uruguay are debating whether to introduce restrictions on foreign ownership of farmland. Egypt is trying to limit farmland-investment programmes to domestic investors and the Philippines has blocked a land contract with China because of concerns about its terms and legal validity, and the impact on local food security. Mozambique has resisted the settlement of thousands of Chinese agricultural workers on leased lands – a situation that would limit the involvement of local labour in new agricultural investments.
According to the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), success is contingent on tenure, policy, culture and history, as well as on demographic considerations. But the IIED also reckons that no perfectly fair approach has yet been found. 'The willingness of the company to engage with more inclusive business models as a genuine economic component of their business, rather than as part of corporate responsibility programmes, is a key ingredient for more inclusive business models to work,' the institute concluded in a recent paper.
In a major new report on land grabs, to be published in September, Oxfam is expected to call for a rethink of the biofuel mandates that are among the key drivers of the phenomenon, along with a mechanism – probably within international law – to ensure that domestic food security always takes precedence in such deals. 'So far, the international responses have been nothing but a fig leaf,' says Geary.
Meanwhile, a moratorium should be placed on all such deals, argues Hobbelink. 'You need to put a hold on these agreements,' he says. 'We aren't saying there is no case for investment in agriculture – of course there is. But it's the question of how and in the hands of whom. You have to develop a mechanism so that agriculture is in the hands of farmers, not in the hands of business.'
Treaty with teeth
A major shift in tightening up such deals should emerge this autumn, when a report on land grabs for the UN is finalised. The report, researched by Borras and four other experts, will be handed to the UN's committee on food security. It's expected to push strongly for establishment of a treaty 'with teeth', according to Borras, that will invoke existing international treaties on human and local rights, to which most of the countries involved are signatories. 'We need clear-cut, workable mechanisms,' he says. 'It will be very difficult, but the UN has to move decisively. Intervention below the level of the UN won't work.'
Something, somewhere, will have to give, warns Scoones, or conflict and social unrest will escalate. 'I suspect that in some areas, there will be effective policies implemented soon enough to avoid major disruption and conflict. But some countries and companies will get seriously burnt. Huge plantation investments in the former colonies often failed, and to be honest, I don't see any particular reason why the situation is different now.'
Instead, Scoones argues that investors, instead of buying leases to land, could offer technical and marketing advice further up the chain, enabling smallholders to maintain access to their own land. 'This will allow smallholders to improve their livelihoods,' he says. 'The controversy over land grabs is not going to be resolved by nice voluntary guidelines, there will have to be some hard-nosed talk about rules, regulations and accountability in land deals. Unless that happens, there will always be someone who isn't prepared to play by the rules and who will be irresponsible.'
Not so empty
Mozambique fits the profile set by mainstream institutions seeking land to buy or lease – a land-abundant country where taking blocks of under-utilised territory is theoretically assumed not to result in livelihood disruption or displacement and the dispossession of local people. The reality is different, as became apparent after the Central African Mining and Exploration Company (CAMEC) announced that it was to invest US$510million in 30,000 hectares of land in Gaza province in 2008 under a 50-year renewable lease.
While the land in question wasn't under large-scale commercial use, a study by Dr Jun Borras and colleagues identified three key agricultural economic activities by the local communities: livestock raising by cattle herders, charcoal production and subsistence farming. The land also showed great potential for food production.
A major component of CAMEC's project was non-irrigated jatropha for biofuel production. But researchers pointed out that while jatropha plants may survive on dry lands, they are unlikely to be productive at a level that is commercially viable.
In October 2009, CAMEC announced that it was discontinuing its investment in biofuel projects and shortly afterwards, the Mozambican government closed the operation and began the search for new investors to develop the land.
Post-Soviet soil up for grabs
Although the focus of land grabs is in the developing world, they are also widespread in Russia, Ukraine and post-Soviet Central Asia, according to a research paper published recently in the Journal of Peasant Studies. Most of the world's unused agricultural land is located in the region – up to 40 million hectares of fertile, black-earth soil that was once the breadbasket of the Soviet Union. Much of it was bought up by domestic oil and gas companies seeking to diversify their risks in the turbulent energy market that followed the break-up of the union and now lies fallow.
Kazakhstan has recently considered leasing one million hectares of farmland to China for rapeseed and soya, while in September 2008, Saudi government representatives went to Kazakhstan to explore grain production and cattle raising. According to Grain, Dexion Capital's Global Farming fund, a British hedge fund, is trying to raise US$280million to buy more than 1.2 million hectares of land in Russia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine (as well as Australia and Latin America). Grain also calculates that China operates 80,400 hectares in Siberia, which it bought for US$21.4million.
Hunting for new land
Land grabs are far from new. One of the most notorious deals continues to wreak havoc on the Masai communities of Tanzania 19 years after it was first signed.
In 1992, the Otterlo Business Corporation, which is linked to royal families from the United Arab Emirates, was granted hunting rights within the Loliondo Game Controlled Area – settled and legally owned by Masai pastoralists. In 2009, 3,000 Masai were evicted from their villages and their homes were burned down. Those evictions coincided with a severe drought, and more than 60 per cent of the herder's cows are thought to have died. The dispute has escalated this year, and Masai campaigners, who have filed a constitutional case in Tanzania's High Court, now say a further 20,000 face eviction.
'If we lose the land, it will be the end of the Masai in northern Tanzania,' says Samwel Nangiria of the Ngorongoro NGO Network. 'That's the biggest worry for us. It has affected people mentally and socially. People will not move whatever the cost. Even when the houses and land are burned, they will return. People are using very hard language now. It will cause insecurity in the area and the effects will go beyond the pastoralists and affect tourism.'
August 2011
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