Land grab drives famine in Africa

Global corporations and governments are exploiting traditional forms of land tenure to force through a global land grab. It is leading to a net export of calories from Africa and Asia to richer countries and is a major contributor to famine.

In Africa in particular, the neo-colonial forms that have emerged since independence are being exploited to force people off their land and let the corporations in, according to an investigation by the Oakland Institute, an independent think tank. Of the 60m hectares driven on the world market since 2009, 70% is in Africa.

For many years, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund bullied governments into enclosing and privatising land, in order to offer a stable capitalist land ownership model attractive to foreign investors.

The result has been the curse of big landlordism that has destroyed rural communities in India and Bangladesh, for example. Now many of those original private landlords have themselves grown into global corporations and are leading the thrust of Indian capitalism into Africa.

The process is taking an even cruder form under pressure from corporations and governments like the American who are not even waiting about for legal niceties.

Land tenure in many African countries is not by title or enclosure but by customary rights. This is being interpreted to mean that the government owns the land. And so governments are declaring huge tracts of land as “unused”, and declaring groups of their own people to be “squatters”.

This unused land includes millions of hectares used by pastoralists on a seasonal basis; tracts of land left fallow for some years in a centuries-old farming method that allows land to recover its fertility; and forest land that is crucial to people for timber and fruits and also for protecting the water supply. All of this is being classified as unused government-land and the corporations are being ushered in.

The US government is supporting a major push from corporations like Monsanto to force governments to repeal laws against GM crops, for example in Tanzania, where there was a legal framework designed to keep native species free of GM contamination. China is in stiff competition with the US in the rush for African land.

The resulting displacement of people and disruption of communities leads to a bizarre situation where formerly independent farmers are now reliant on food aid whilst the land they farmed is producing crops, using unsustainable modern farming methods, to be exported to richer countries.

Also coming into play are what the Oakland Institute calls “false climate solutions”, where the corrupt carbon emissions offsetting mechanisms are another driver of the global land grab. Some of the world's worst polluters can go on polluting if they plant a tree somewhere else, and often these trees are being inappropriately planted on land grabbed in Africa.

As the OI report says: "At the end of the day, Africans are losing their food-producing land and water resources to crops being used for agrofuels in other countries. The unwelcome surprise is that the production of these crops, with industrial fertilizers, equipment and processing, will do more harm heating the planet than provide climate solutions."

It may not be possible to restore the traditional land rights that prevailed across the world before capitalist forms of enclosure and privatisation, but we can develop and implement a new model.

We can only end famine, offer fair land rights and protect the ecology of the planets by formulating an idea for a democratic shared commons. There are plenty of models for this, from community land trusts on the Scottish islands to farmers' co-operatives, and of course traditional forms of tenure as well. The challenge is to bring about the political and economic transformation needed to implement such a project.

Penny Cole
Environment editor

Dump this 'climate justice' model now

The world is facing an unprecedented crisis in food production. Driving the potential calamity is rapid industrialisation in three decades of corporate-led globalisation and the consequences of intensive agriculture across swathes of Asia.

In the driving seat of the crisis is China, which is struggling to feed 22% of the world’s population with just 10% of its arable land. Speaking in Beijing yesterday, Han Jun, an expert on rural policy, said that maintaining “food security” was now a major challenge. In 30 years, urban residents would rise from the current 47% to 75% of the population, using more land for industry and infrastructure. In the cities, an increasingly meat-based western diet is replacing the more sustainable grain and vegetable-based rural diet.

“The deterioration in soil quality is now a very important problem,” Han told reporters. “I believe improving the quality [of soil] is of equal importance to protecting the amount of arable land.” His warnings come at a time, however, when twice as much nitrogen fertiliser is used on the average hectare of Chinese farmland compared with the global average. And more than a tenth of farmland is polluted by factory waste, including heavy metals and other toxins.

In effect, the wholesale adoption by the Chinese ruling Stalinist elites of corporate, profit-driven development, is creating a crisis for the rural and urban poor, while the bureaucrats get rich quick. They are in the forefront of buying up potential development land and selling it at vast premiums, for example.

Han’s plea for a more scientific use of fertilisers, including the use of organic fertiliser from human waste is a much more sustainable approach. But his appeal contradicts the latest decisions of the Chinese government.

It has approved two new strains of genetically modified rice, threatening indigenous strains and forcing farmers to buy seed from corporations. And, Beijing is also supporting “agricultural entrepreneurs” in buying up plantation land in neighbouring Russia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

It is even possible it could become profitable to export to China food grown on the thousands of hectares of African plantations now owned by Chinese agri-businesses. Initially the aim was to grow food for local sale but that could change. Taking this food out of the African market would increase prices and undermine food security even further.

So the notion that carbon emissions should be cut in the developed economies in order that China, India and Indonesia can increase theirs while continuing down this well-worn and disastrous profit-driven road, is not “climate justice” or justice of any kind.

Fair and equal development can only be achieved within an international model, which challenges the right of the corporations and their client governments – wherever they are in the world – to go on destroying land, people and eco-systems in pursuit of profit.

As we say in our Manifesto of Revolutionary Solutions: “The concept of climate justice, which underpins the ‘contraction and convergence’ idea, needs to be expanded to include justice within countries and not just between them...

“A new kind of international co-operation would bring together the peoples of the planet in a democratic forum to plan together to halt the growth in emissions and to mitigate the impacts that are now inevitable. They would draw on all the expertise represented by climate scientists, world food and health experts and support each others’ development towards self-government and economic independence.”

Join us in helping to win people over to this truly revolutionary idea, with a view to putting it into practice with some urgency.

Penny Cole
Environment editor