development

Africa up for grabs?

There has been a lot of interest in African land deals in the past few weeks. Amy Glass raised the case of Madagascar on this blog, and Gwynne Dyer in a syndicated article calls it a ‘neo-colonialist land grab’ noting the ‘new’ colonists now include a new set of powers including China India, South Korea and the Arab Gulf States. The scale of foreign companies entering the Africa land market is huge, and while all of these deals may not go through, the implications of the some that do go ahead have enormous implications for peasant agriculture on the continent. In Mozambique Adam Welz reports that bio fuel investors have applied for rights to use about 12 million acres, nearly one-seventh the country’s 89 million acres of arable land; unofficial tallies can double that. According to Dyer in Sudan the United Arab Emirates is seeking 400,000 hectares for a range of food crops while South Korea already has 690,000 hectares for wheat. China has acquired 2.8 million hectares in the Democratic Republic of Congo to create the world’s largest oil-palm plantation, and is negotiating for two million hectares in Zambia to grow jatropha. From Margareta Pagano in Independent:

Over the past few months, Saudi Arabian investors have paid $100m for an Ethiopian farm where they hope to grow wheat and barley, adding to the millions of acres they already own in the war-ravaged country, as well as in neighbouring Sudan. The Saudis also have land in Indonesia and Thailand for growing rice. China owns vast tracts of overseas land, mainly in Algeria and Zimbabwe, and one estimate suggests that more than a million ethnic Chinese farm workers will be living on the continent this year. Kenya and Tanzania have leased land while the Ugandans have been big sellers, allocating two million acres of land to Egypt for wheat and corn.

And we could go on. A more detailed discussion of this issue occurred last week at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars at a half day workshop ‘Land Grab: The Race for the World’s Farmland’

The key issues of course is what does this mean for food security for the host country, and ultimately this has security implications as was seen in Madagascar when a Government fell, in part over these types of land deals. While arguments can be made for the benefits of foreign investments in agriculture it is hard to see how they balance the social costs of dislocation of local peasant or subsistence systems, or the environmental and biodiversity implications of clear felling of rain-forest (e.g. in the Congo) for oil palm.

High food prices can have benefits for the peasant and other producers, as well as an often cost to the poor consumers, and that is what Governments have to balance in terms of their food security policy. The solution though of India or China and others to buy somebody else’s land to do this ultimately is not a sustainable solution, as the benefits to the host country can be relatively small given their poor bargaining power in such land deals. These deals do not provide any assurance of food security for the host country , or even jobs, if the story of a million Chinese farm workers in Africa is to be believed. In the end, Dyer as suggests, “the ‘neo-colonialists’ will make some money in the short term and enjoy a false sense of sectary for a while, but they will not get much money for their investment in the long run”. But the cost will be more social disruption, food riots, and political instability, with the loss of livelihoods and food security for the millions of Africans threatened by these land deals.

© 2009 People and Development.