Land Grab: The Scramble for Africa

A Pres­by­ter­ian Hunger Pro­gram Arti­cle

The com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion of agri­cul­ture, food, and land, spurred in part by the 2008 food and finan­cial cri­sis, has led to the pur­chase of enor­mous por­tions of land through­out Africa. As cor­po­ra­tions, invest­ment firms, and out­side gov­ern­ments real­ized the invest­ment poten­tial in agri­cul­ture, var­i­ous African gov­ern­ments signed off on deals ush­er­ing in the phe­nom­e­non now com­monly referred to as “land grab”. In 2009 alone, nearly 60 mil­lion hectares (or roughly 148,263,228 acres) of land was pur­chased or leased through­out the world, over 70 per­cent of which was in Africa,  for the pro­duc­tion and export of food, cut flow­ers, and agro­fuel crops.

Accord­ing to the Oak­land Insti­tute, a lead­ing pol­icy think tank which has been research­ing for­eign land invest­ments in Africa, West­ern firms, wealthy U.S. and Euro­pean indi­vid­u­als, and invest­ment funds with ties to major banks such as Gold­man Sachs and JP Mor­gan have played a role in land grab along with Amer­i­can uni­ver­si­ties such as Har­vard, Spell­man, and Van­der­bilt who are also tak­ing part in these land invest­ments. Food inse­cure nations are also par­tic­i­pat­ing in these land deals for the pur­pose of food pro­duc­tion for their home coun­tries. Of course, the biggest insti­tu­tional role in land grab goes to the World Bank Group’s pri­vate sec­tion arm, the Inter­na­tional Finan­cial Cor­po­ra­tion which pro­motes land grab through pri­vate sec­tor fund­ing and ‘Tech­ni­cal Assis­tance and Advi­sory Services’.

These largely unreg­u­lated trans­ac­tions that have guar­an­tees that they will help the local pop­u­la­tions, cre­ate infra­struc­ture or employ­ment, have con­se­quences which include decreased food secu­rity, envi­ron­men­tal degra­da­tion, com­mu­nity repres­sion and forced relo­ca­tion, and increased reliance on aid.

In Ethiopia, the process of trans­fer­ing land to vil­lage con­trol in an area tar­geted for land invest­ments has relo­cated 700,000 indige­nous peo­ple. In Samana Dugu, Mali, in 2010, bull­doz­ers came in to clear land and when the com­mu­nity protested, they were met by police forces who beat and arrested them. Invest­ment sites in var­i­ous African coun­tries vis­ited by the Oak­land Insti­tute reveal a loss of local farm­land where the lands held a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent uses and social/ecological value.

In var­i­ous coun­tries, forests and national reserves that are home to vital ani­mal, fish and plant species and are places where com­mu­ni­ties have found alter­na­tive sus­te­nance in times of food scarcity, have been burned and cleared out. To com­pound mat­ters, the prac­tice of indus­trial agri­cul­ture leads to increased tox­i­c­ity, dis­rup­tion of nature’s sys­tem of pest con­trol, cre­ation of new weeds or virus strains, loss of bio­di­ver­sity, and the spread of genetically-engineered genes to indige­nous plants.

Over­all, land grab spells dis­as­ter for the com­mu­ni­ties and lands tar­geted. As Anu­radha Mit­tal, Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of the Oak­land Insti­tute notes, “The same finan­cial firms that drove us into a global reces­sion by inflat­ing the real estate bub­ble through risky finan­cial maneu­vers are now doing the same with the world’s food sup­ply. In Africa this is result­ing in the dis­place­ment of small farm­ers, envi­ron­men­tal dev­as­ta­tion, water loss and fur­ther polit­i­cal insta­bil­ity such as the food riots that pre­ceded the Tunisian and Egypt­ian revolutions.”

Learn more about the Oak­land Institute’s work on land rights.

Read an Open Let­ter to Pres­i­dent Obama.