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From: Tsegai Emmanuel (emmanuelt40@gmail.com)
Date: Wed Feb 17 2010 - 23:02:43 EST
Africa’s land and family farms – up for grabs?
Posted By GRAIN On 15 February 2010 @ 22:18 In AGRA | No Comments
GRAIN | Seedling magazine | January 2010
by Joan Baxter*
Over the years many Big Ideas have been imposed on Africa from
outside. The latest is that the region should sell or lease millions
of hectares of land to foreign investors, who will bring resources and
up-to-date technology. None of the blueprints has worked, and African
farmers have become increasingly impoverished. It is time for Africans
to turn to their own histories, knowledge and resources.
In the early 1990s, when I was living in northern Ghana, an elderly
woman farmer decided that I needed some education. In a rather long
lecture, she detailed the devastating effects that the Green
Revolution – the first one, which outside experts and donors launched
in Africa in the 1960s and 70s – had had on farmers’ crops, soils,
trees and lives. She said that the imported seeds, fertilisers,
pesticides and tractors, the instructions to plant row after row of
imported hybrid maize and cut down precious trees that protected the
soils and nourished the people – even the invaluable shea nut trees –
had ruined the diverse, productive farming systems that had always
sustained her people. When she finished, she cocked an eye at me and
asked, with a cagey grin, “Why do you bring your mistakes here?” By
“you” I think she meant the people – foreigners and Africans in their
employ – who tramp all over the continent implementing big development
ideas. These great schemes are generally concocted even higher up the
decision-making chain in distant world financial capitals, often by
free-market economists, bankers and billionaire philanthropists who
wouldn’t know a shea nut from a peanut.
At the time, I had no answer to her question. But now, two decades
later, I think I do. It’s taken years of patient teaching by African
farmers from Zambia to Uganda, from Kenya to Cameroon and Mali. And,
most recently, it was all summed up clearly for me by members of
COPAGEN, a coalition of African farmer associations, scientists, civil
society groups and activists who work to protect Africa’s genetic
heritage, farmers’ rights, and their sovereignty over their land,
seeds and food. These knowledgeable people have shown me that the
answer is quite straightforward: many of those imported mistakes,
disguised as solutions for Africa, are very, very profitable, at least
for those who design and make them.
Not, however, for the average African farming family or even the
average African whose interests, they would have us believe, are being
served by the big plans for progress and development. There have been
many such schemes over the years, nearly all of them promoting the
unfettered free market and the re-regulation of the private sector;
that is, the regulations that curtailed their cowboy capitalism had to
be lassoed and put down so that new ones to protect their profitable
stampede over the public sector could be put in place.
Hence all those years of structural adjustment programmes in Africa,
poverty reduction or alleviation schemes, the first Green Revolution
and liberalised trade that cranked open Africa’s doors to the dumping
on the continent of cheap imports and subsidised foodstuffs, which
stifled African industries and undermined African farmers who, the
same free-market gurus paradoxically said, should not be subsidised.
Triple whammy
These monetarist schemes have helped to make Africa poorer and ever
more dependent on foreign donor and investor capital, and thus more
vulnerable to still more of the Big Ideas and never-ending plans to
profit from Africa while pretending to develop it. So that now, even
as Africans struggle to confront the triple whammy of the global food
crisis, the financial crisis and climate change – all offspring of the
unfettered free-market financial system – the same big planners are at
it again with more of the same mistakes disguised as solutions for
Africa.
These days, they’re blowing a perfectly awful storm all the way across
Africa, this one designed to strike right at the heart of the
continent – its farms and the families and communities that work them,
who account for 70 per cent of Africa’s population. If left to blow
itself out, African farmers may find themselves, one day in the
not-so-distant future, without land to cultivate, their social
structures and communities destroyed. They may find themselves without
seed to call their own to share with each other. The crop varieties
their forefathers had developed will have been “improved” and then
privatised by foreigners who claim exclusive rights over their use.
Crucial water catchment areas and vast tracts of woodland needed to
combat climate change will have been converted to vast water- and
fossil-fuel-guzzling industrial plantations for food and agrofuels,
all run by giant agribusinesses and foreign investors, absent
landlords and bosses who may never in their lavish lives have soiled
their soft hands in a farm field.
The latest Big Idea is for massive “foreign direct investment” (FDI)
in Africa, and especially African agriculture, by countries, donors,
financial institutions, corporations, everyone who’s anyone in the
upper echelons of the world’s financial architecture, anyone awash
with capital on the look-out for high returns. The spin on FDI is that
it offers Africa wondrous “opportunities”, a “win–win” situation, the
only way to eradicate hunger and poverty. And just to make sure
there’s absolutely nothing impeding the onslaught of investment,
so-called donor nations, working in cahoots with their corporate
partners, international financial institutions and development banks,
are busy helping African governments to “harmonise” laws across the
continent to “improve the legal framework for business”, to set up
“one-stop shops” for investors, to “secure” landholdings by
privatising them, and to open the doors for genetically modified (GM)
crops and for the patenting of crop and tree varieties.
Across the continent, presidents are toeing the line, going along with
the spin, pleading for still more foreign investment, literally
putting their countries up for auction. The Tony Blair Foundation, and
indeed the former British prime minister himself, invited rich and
powerful investors to a meeting of the special Consultative Group on
Sierra Leone in November 2009, at which the impoverished West African
nation was, in essence, offering up its resources on a silver platter
to foreign investors interested in land, diamonds, bauxite … whatever
the war-ravaged country still has left to sell. Apparently, however,
the investors didn’t need to come to Sierra Leone to stake out their
claims; rather than hold the Great Sierra Leone Sale in Freetown, the
Tony Blair Foundation decided to host it in London.
School of neoliberal dogma
As if there were no tomorrow, African leaders, well schooled in the
neoliberal dogma of the World Bank and Wall Street, are welcoming the
land-grabbing “investors” who are flocking to Africa to acquire vast
tracts of land to produce food crops or agrofuels, depending on which
would be most profitable at any given moment in the market. Some are
just speculators, plain and simple, grabbing chunks of Africa as an
investment, the new favourite hedge fund.
It is almost impossible to know just how much of Africa has been sold
or leased out in the past two years because the deals are shrouded in
secrecy and happening at such a pace that GRAIN works daily to try to
keep up with the deals on its farmlandgrab website.[1] More than
US$100 billion has been mobilised in the past two years for investing
in land, the trick being, according to one analyst “not to harvest
food but to harvest money”.[2] There are estimates that in this
period, 30 million hectares (an area the size of Senegal and Benin
together) have been grabbed, in at least 28 countries in Africa.[3]
Ethiopia is offering more than a million hectares of what it calls
“virgin” land to foreign investors. Almost a third of Mozambique is,
quite literally, up for grabs. It was just such a land investment deal
between the South Korean company, Daewoo, and the former president of
Madagascar, which would have accorded Daewoo about half of the
country’s arable land for industrial monoculture – production of food
and agrofuels for export to Korea – that contributed to the political
turbulence and the overthrow of President Ravalomanana, and the
apparent cancellation of that particular deal. There is sure to be
more political turbulence and conflict, neither of which Africa needs,
as Africans realise what is happening to their land and farms.
Along with the African governments and chiefs who are happily and
quietly selling or leasing the land out from under their own people,
those running the show at the global level include the World Bank, its
International Finance Corporation (IFC), the International Rice
Research Institute (IRRI) of the Consultative Group on International
Agricultural Research (CGIAR), the European Bank for Reconstruction
and Development (EBRD), and many other powerful nations and
institutions. The US Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) is busy
reforming landownership laws in its member countries and proud to be
doing so, as I found out in their Benin office. Such privatisation
threatens to destroy traditional communal approaches to land ownership
in Africa, but it will make it easier to sell or lease land to foreign
investors.
Jacques Diouf, Director General of the UN Food and Agriculture
Organisation (FAO), originally called the land-grabbing a system of
“neo-colonialism”,[4] but since then the FAO appears to have joined
the ranks of the World Bank et al., who support the land-grabbing and
are working towards a “framework” that will promote “responsible”
investment to make it a “win–win” situation.[5] Which means, of
course, that there will be lots of fancy rhetoric, lofty promises,
high-level meetings and conferences, and business will continue as
usual. Africans lose–lose, investors win–win.
Investors never have been, are not, and never will be in the business
of helping hungry Africans to feed themselves and to solve the problem
of food insecurity, which has been so aggravated by earlier Big Ideas
to liberalise trade and revolutionise agriculture. The offshore
farming of food or of agrofuels for export, or just as investment, is
big business. For profit.
The greenwash factor
GRAIN and COPAGEN say that those grabbing Africa’s farmland are as
diverse as they are numerous. They note the complicity of African
governments and say that some African “barons” are also snapping up
land. Some grabbers are countries anxious to secure their own future
food supplies, such as China, India, Japan and other Asian countries,
Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States and Libya. Other land-grabbers are
buying and leasing vast tracts of land in Africa as a lucrative
investment, or, as one analyst puts it, “an asset like gold, only
better”.[6] Among them are multinational agribusinesses, and
investment houses, such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, that
cater to the super-rich. Others getting in on the new land rush are
energy and mining companies, who greenwash their fuel-guzzling
industrial plantation schemes in an attempt to cash in on public
goodwill to try to tackle climate change with large-scale production
of agrofuels from food crops such as palm oil, sugarcane and maize, or
non-food crops such as jatropha. All of these require enormous amounts
of water – and fossil fuels that cause climate change – to produce.
And this on land that should be in the hands of farming families.
Ah yes, Africa’s farm families. Those are the people for whom there is
another Very Big Idea going on. It’s the Alliance for a Green
Revolution in Africa (AGRA), which claims to be working in smallholder
farmers’ interests by “catalysing” a green revolution in Africa. Yes,
another one. AGRA’s Green Revolution Number Two is being bankrolled
primarily by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, along with the
Rockefeller Foundation, which bankrolled Green Revolution Number One.
But it has roped in many major development banks, UN agencies and the
CGIAR (among others) for the massive undertaking of revolutionising
African agriculture. AGRA is run by several people with close ties to
the biotech monster Monsanto, and, just like Green Revolution Number
One, it recommends “modern” technological solutions such as imported
fertilisers and purchased seeds. While it denies that GM crops are
necessarily involved, the Gates Foundation has also offered US$5.4
million to the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, a US institute
funded heavily by Monsanto, to expedite the acceptance by African
governments of GM crops for field testing.[7] One does want to ask the
worshippers of modern technology and proponents of industrial models
of commercial agriculture and agribusiness why, when these are
supposedly so productive, they are so heavily subsidised in Europe and
the US. To render African agriculture commercially profitable, as AGRA
aims to do, the Gates Foundation admits (not publicly, but in a leaked
document) that it may eventually be necessary to promote “land
mobility”, doublespeak for smallholder farmers being removed from
their land.[8]
AGRA closes the gates
Before it set out to re-invent the African farm, did AGRA revisit
liberalised trade policies that have suppressed prices for African
produce and hurt Africa’s farmers? Did it examine the economic dogma
imposed on Africa that destroyed agricultural extension programmes and
reduced government spending on agricultural investment, research and
infrastructure? Did it do its homework and take stock of the countless
studies of the myriad advantages of resilient, holistic, small-scale
farms that rely on the sharing of local seed varieties and traditional
knowledge and crop/tree diversity and that reduce risks? Did it
examine ways to promote and improve these environmentally sustainable
systems? Did it pay more than lip service to the landmark study, the
International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and
Technology for Development (IAASTD), carried out by dozens of
scientists over many years and initiated by the World Bank itself,
which in April 2009 concluded that agro-ecological agriculture by
smallholder farmers was the best solution of all? The answer to all of
these questions is: No.
More importantly, did AGRA even engage with Africa’s farmers and
involve them in its big plans? Not according to Simon Mwamba of the
Eastern and Southern Africa Small-Scale Farmers’ Forum. Speaking at a
dialogue on AGRA organised by Olivier De Schutter, the UN Special
Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Mwamba quipped, “You come. You buy
the land. You make a plan. You build a house. Now you ask me, what
colour do I want to paint the kitchen? This is not participation!”[9]
The experts and billionaires with Big Ideas that are bound to profit
multinational agribusinesses, foreign investors, hunger-profiteers and
greenwashers – all of whom masquerade as Africa’s saviours and mentors
– have already drawn budget lines and battle lines in Africa’s soils,
without bothering to inform Africa’s farmers of the intended fate of
their land and their livelihoods. By any stretch of the imagination,
it’s hardly a fair fight. On one side, many of the richest and most
powerful people, institutions and nations on earth, working in
alliance with African governments that toe the line. On the other,
some of the poorest people on earth, African farmers’ associations and
coalitions such as COPAGEN, and NGOs such as GRAIN, Friends of the
Earth in Africa and the African Biosafety Network, who are struggling
to inform African governments about the high stakes of these schemes
that threaten not just their food and seed sovereignty, but the
sovereignty of their land and even African nations themselves. These
groups would like African leaders to stop believing that wads of
foreign cash and Big Ideas are the solution for the continent, and
look instead to their own histories, knowledge and resources to
promote family farming systems that offer a range of social, economic
and environmental advantages over all those imported notions and plans
spawned by free-market dogma and riding tsunamis of foreign capital.
Put forward as solutions even though – as I learned all those years
ago – they are often just very big and very dangerous mistakes for
Africa.
___________________________
1 http://www.farmlandgrab.org [1]
2 http://www.grain.org/briefings/?id=212 [2]
3 Patrick Piro, “La course aux terres ne faiblit pas”, Politis, No.
1029, 17 September 2009.
4 Javier Blas, “UN warns of food neo-colonialism”, Financial Times,
19 August 2008.
5 Japan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “Promoting responsible
international investment in agriculture”, 29 September 2009:
http://www.mofa.go.jp/policy/economy/fishery/agriculture/investment.html
[3]
6 Chris Mayer, “This asset is like gold, only better”, DailyWealth, 4
October 2009: http://www.stockhouse.com/Columnists/2009/Oct/4/This-asset-is-like-gold,-only-better
[4]
7 Friends of the Earth (FOE) Ghana; Togo; Nigeria; Cameroon; Sierra
Leone; Tunisia; Swaziland; South Africa; Mauritius, AGRA & Monsanto &
Gates, Green Washing and Poor Washing, 6 April 2009:
http://crossedcrocodiles.wordpress.com/2009/04/06/agra-monsanto-gates-green-washing-poor-washing/
[5]
8 Raj Patel, Eric Holt-Gimenez & Annie Shattuck, “Ending Africa’s
Hunger”, The Nation, 21 September 2009:
http://crossedcrocodiles.wordpress.com/2009/04/06/agra-monsanto-gates-green-washing-poor-washing/
[5]
9 Ibid.
* Joan Baxter is a Canadian journalist and writer who has been
reporting on Africa for over two decades.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Article printed from Food crisis and the global land grab:
http://farmlandgrab.org
URL to article: http://farmlandgrab.org/11144
URLs in this post:
[1] http://www.farmlandgrab.org: http://www.farmlandgrab.org
[2] http://www.grain.org/briefings/?id=212:
http://www.grain.org/briefings/?id=212
[3] http://www.mofa.go.jp/policy/economy/fishery/agriculture/investment.html:
http://www.mofa.go.jp/policy/economy/fishery/agriculture/investment.html
[4] http://www.stockhouse.com/Columnists/2009/Oct/4/This-asset-is-like-gold,-only-better:
http://www.stockhouse.com/Columnists/2009/Oct/4/This-asset-is-like-gold,-only-better
[5] http://crossedcrocodiles.wordpress.com/2009/04/06/agra-monsanto-gates-green-washing-poor-washing/:
http://crossedcrocodiles.wordpress.com/2009/04/06/agra-monsanto-gates-green-washing-poor-washing/