land reform in Africa

Yeros reflected upon our contemporary moment. We have witnessed, he argued, a shift from the more rural-based social movements of the early 21st century to the more urban-based social movements of the last eight years or so. This turn is suggested in the sweeping protests in many African urban centers around rising food and fuel costs (2007 and 2008), the “Arab Spring” (2010 and 2011) and the “African Awakenings” (2010, 2011, 2012), the “Occupy Movement” against economic inequality (2011 and 2012), the “15-M Movement” in Spain (2011), anti-austerity movements in Greece (2011), and related socio-economic-political movements in which the occupation of an urban square or an urban center has been a powerful organizing mechanism.

Despite facing considerable constraints and obstacles (including state violence and intimidation of protestors and state appropriations of movements, as demonstrated by Olympio Barbanti's discussion of resistance in the Amazon), the scale of current rural resistance is considerable—enough so to challenge Yeros’ perhaps preemptive declaration that we have witnessed a shift towards urban-centered struggle. At least, this shift is in no way totalizing.

At the School, our discussions of agrarian resistance included struggles that are organized, non-organized, widespread, small-scale, non-movements, grassroots, feminist/womanist, Marxist, populist, and ecological—including struggles that incorporate and/or are incorporated by NGOs and struggles opposed to NGO involvement.

The Gulabi Gang (a.k.a. the “pink brigade”) is made up of 400,000 women protestors united against caste discrimination, domestic abuse, and corruption. Similarly, the 10-year long Aaroh campaign includes 42,000 women and 15,000 men members who demand legal land ownership. The slogan, Kelkar explained, urges recognition of women farmers: “We work 70 percent of the land, we want 70 percent of it!”

Despite endemic hunger in South Sudan, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, and across the Sahel, Joseph Chiombola explained, the land targeted for mechanization and plantation development is most often “breadbasket land.” As our activist and practitioner colleagues—among them Joseph Chiombola, Massay, Sophie Ogutu, Adwoa Sakyi, and Ngoni Chikowe—reminded us, “peace space is shrinking.” 

My work along the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline demonstrates some of the structural challenges to rural resistance projects that contribute to this shrinking of space for peace. Connected by an oil pipeline, disparate communities in Cameroon struggle to unite, often without knowledge of the pipeline’s ecological and social destructions in neighboring towns. Moreover, neoliberal capitalists operate through obscure processes, involving dozens of agents, agencies, and institutions. This plethora of subcontracting agencies and consortiums means that people often do not know which corporate, financial, or state agency to address with their grievances. 

Our collective endeavor was to bring into practice a Southern Scholarship from and in the South. At the same time, we recognized the need to reach out farther into the South for future Schools, to encourage even broader Southern participation, including from activists and scholars in Colombia, Mexico, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Palestine, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Carlos Mielitz introduced the new Higher Education Cooperation Plan of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), which seeks to support the maintenance of South-South connections for meaningful knowledge exchanges on topics related to rural wellbeing and hunger (Mielitz is himself a representative of FAO). This session was powerful for bringing representatives of a hugely influential and powerful institution, the FAO, into a room of activists-academics who have devoted much of their adult lives to confronting the challenges of capitalism’s exploitation of the countryside. Our discussion emphasized the need to be critical as we seek meaningful platforms and relationships of exchange.

Several participants delivered presentations nearly exclusively citing Northern academics, demonstrating the globalized dominance of Northern scholarship even in an intentionally Southern intellectual and academic space. Attention was brought to these epistemological gaps during the Q&As.

We agreed to circulate a resource list of critical Southern scholarships—making connections between our project and others, including the Why Is My Curriculum so White? campaign.

This diversity allowed us to retain an emphasis on the co-creation of relevant academic theory at the same time that many of our conversations and presentations emphasized the practical applications of these theories in the societies and cultures around us. We had a number of knowledge-sharing and informational sessions on concrete, contemporary activism within various agrarian organizations, including NCOM (Ghana’s National Coalition on Mining), International Union of Food (IUF – an organization that unites food, farm, and hotel workers), the World March of Women, and La Via Campesina (an International Peasant Movement).

Tetteh Hormeku, the Head of Programmes at the Third World Network-Africa, presented a documentary film, “National Coalition on Mining (NCOM): Fighting for Equity in Ghana’s Mining Sector.” NCOM is the only mining collective in Ghana. It arose in response to community exploitation and environmental degradation by Newmont Mines and AngloGold Ashanti. Farmers in the film explain that mining companies “took advantage of our knowledge-gap to mistreat us.” After advocacy and community education initiatives from NCOM, “we [the farmers] know a farmer’s consent is very important.”

Watching the film and listening to the perspectives of Ghanaian farmers, I recalled a scene from an American Discovery Chanel reality TV series tellingly titled, “Jungle Gold.” During one episode, a Ghanaian farmer (whose land has been appropriated by two American brothers who have recently come to Ghana to mine its gold) walks boldly into the mining site, demanding sufficient payment for the loss of his land. A Ghanaian guard (hired by the American brothers) pushes the farmer into the mining site’s water pit. Meanwhile, the American brothers dismiss the farmer as greedy, claiming that they have already paid him for the land.   In these scenes, the farmer’s dispossession is reduced to cheap entertainment. His humiliation is complete. Thinking back to this TV episode emphasized the importance of venues like the Summer School to celebrate agrarian struggle and peasant life even as we acknowledge the considerable capitalist forces and actors repressing, co-opting, and subsequently humiliating rural people.

At the same time that we observe the range of successes achieved by NCOM, we hear echoes in this statement of a subtle NGO-ization of resistance. Some participants in the School have argued that NGOs too often play a strategic role in perpetuating neoliberal capitalism by capturing resistance and directing it at negotiations (at “dialogue”) for survival within capitalism, rather than struggle for emancipation from—or transformation of—the system (see Issa Shivji’s powerful article, “The Silences in NGO Discourse”).

We maintained a steady focus on the historical and material actors and forces that produce and sustain global capitalism (imperialism), the differentiation of struggle (including an awareness of the social, gendered, economic, political, “ethnic,” and caste inequalities within rural societies), the intersection of oppressions, and material hardships produced within agrarian places and bodies.   Many of our conversations emphasized the need to place gender at the center of the “land question” in the South. This placement moves beyond “add gender and stir” approaches more popular in the neoliberal corporate academy, governmental policy, and established developmental organizations.

Shivji summarized central themes from Tsikata and Marjorie Mbiliny’s plenary as (1) the need, as posited by Tsikata, to embed “the gender question” within the radical political economy and (2) the need, following Mbiliny, to emphasize the “bigger picture” of global capitalist hegemony and patriarchal relations. The latter, I think, is an emphasis on the interrelationship between capitalist hegemony with patriarchal relations.

Confronting global capitalism requires serious and sustained conversations about South-South political and economic relations. Bon Monjane’s examination of Brazilian capitalist investments in Mozambique demonstrated the risks of idealizing South-South relations. “South-south cooperation is camouflaged to advance investment and financing,” he explained, in the case of ProSavana, a Brazilian agribusiness investor. ProSavana’s promotional slogan, “Africans are thirsty for Brazil,” seeks to dispossess farmers in the Nacala corridor of Mozambique. The ProSavana project will transform the corridor into an export zone of industrial soybean plantation in what has been referred to as Africa’s “biggest land grab.”

Shivji’s assertion that women “subsidize capital” through her super-exploitation by capital (as a laborer/producer) and her exploitation within the household (as unpaid laborer/reproducer) is helpful in conceptualizing women’s integration within neoliberal capitalism, particularly rural women (whose household/reproductive labor is often greater than women in urban areas).

In the Blue Skies out-grower production structure in Ghana, women make up 60 percent of the employees, yet, Joseph Yaro explained, women’s positions are the least secure and the poorest remunerated. In such rural out-growing production schemes, women have become “permanent casuals” in a context of labor overabundance. While hegemonic developmental paradigms espouse “employment creation” as a goal in poverty reduction needs, we must advance a nuanced reconceptualization of what this “employment creation” looks like, as social differentiation, casualization, and insecure conditions generate “winners” and “losers” in out-grower value chains.

In a context of an aggressive promotion of agro-business and policies of gender mainstreaming (which are often in diametrical opposition to women’s wellbeing), Gaynor Parodza warned, “Policy-makers treat women as homogenous and this risks harming and excluding the most vulnerable or those with the most fragile rights.”

Our Q&A discussion emphasized the lived realities of gendered land tenure, including a need to recognize that women live in legal pluralities, often navigating both statutory and customary laws. Statutory and customary are not somehow discrete, separate systems: In Ghana, for example, a person is given the land from the chief but still must get the title from the state.

Following the Summer School, Chambi Chachage and Deborah Bryceson offered rejoinders to Shivji’s notes (see Chachage’s response and Bryceson’s response) although neither attended the School. While I support projects to spread the knowledge shared and co-created during the School as widely as possible and I am passionate about critical exchanges of ideas to advance our projects, I am troubled by a wider tendency in academia to over-problematize minutiae in ways that are counter-productive for movement making.

Alongside the geographical diversity of participants, the School brought together scholars, activists, practitioners, policy-makers, and farmers. Among the activists present was Sophie Dowllar from the World March of Women in Kenya, who was arrested with five of her colleagues in March 2000 for organizing a week of cultural celebration and activities in the Ogiek community in rural Kenya (read an interview with Sophie here). David Calleb Otieno joined the group from Kenyan Peasant’s League (KPL), an organization that is fostering important solidarity links with social justice activists and political refugees across the region.

Taken holistically in the context of the Agrarian South Summer School—a place that we are struggling to protect and sustain, where we come together to address devastating poverties that trigger thousands of annual farmer suicides in India and that disproportionally disadvantage the elderly, women, and children—we must work to ensure that our provocations advance political momentums and struggles against neoliberal capitalism (imperialism)’s violence against entire ecosystems. 

In Africa this is evident through such processes as land grabbing by global financial interests assisted by the state, and other forms of resource expropriation. The land is usually concessioned to foreign investors for purposes of investing in export crop production. The state in most cases will guarantee tenure security (usually in the form of very long term leases), tax breaks, as well as repatriation of profits and other favorable terms of investment. As with colonial dispossession, the combination of land alienation, extra-economic regulation and taxes will turn the agrarian economies of participating countries into labour reserve economies reliant on cheap domestic labour, and sometimes also on migrant labour.

The dispossession and proletarianization of the peasantry is contested in many different ways by the dispossessed. But principally the contestations focus on the conditions under which labour is deployed in the accumulation process (led by labour movements) and the distribution of the benefits of accumulation (or rather the privatization of the benefits of accumulation by a small national and global elite (this contestation is usually led by social movements and NGOs).

Moreover, among such groups food insecurity is endemic. This is because these groups depend on food supplies purchased from commercial sources, and are thus dependent on direct or indirect access to cash to secure their food supplies . Access to cash is not secure as unemployment levels are high.

Institutions that have evolved over long periods of common property management, and which have become highly sophisticated in governing relations between stakeholders at the local level, and between local and other stakeholders, will be distorted by land alienations, leading to the weakening of local regulations regarding resource use and thus precipitating unprecedented natural resource degradation. This is likely to have negative ramifications for adaptation to climate change, reduce the potential of the commons to contribute to food security, and lead to downstream erosion of the capacities of local communities to exercise their citizenship rights in society.

The foundational hypothesis guiding this investigation is that land alienation is occurring in communal tenure regimes precisely because the African states have maintained ambiguous legal status of these regimes in order to allow for arbitrary state intervention in the governance of lands and natural resources held in common.

Meanwhile in the convention your company signed with the Government of the Republic of Cameroon, your company has been given the absolute rights to logging, water and clay and if any mineral is discovered in the concession area, be it oil, gold, diamond, and so on, the government of Cameroon will only be able to explore and exploit it with your approval. After all, that very government also gave you the right not to allow any indigenous person to trespass in the concession area as well as the right to arrest and persecute trespassers.

Maybe you should be reminded that your company Herakles Farms is not a charitable organization that selflessly goes on doing good things for communities for the good of humankind. You are a venture capital investment corporation that seeks optimum profit so that those who invested in your project will end up with high dividends, irrespective of the environmental and social disaster that may befall the natives of the area of your operations. Other agribusinesses have offered scholarship at the beginning of their projects but cut them off when they had their boots on the ground.

You are dealing with a new generation of Africans who always question what they hear or see and have no reason to believe that others know best. We are able to gather and share information on what your company says and does. We are not fooled by gifts of fish and rice. We are fully capable of deciding for ourselves what sort of development we want for our region.

But the practice has been increasing for at least a decade. The Land Matrix Partnership estimates that 227 million hectares of land have been ‘grabbed’ worldwide since 2001. And according to the World Bank, 70% of the current demand for forest and arable land is concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, with its vast parcels of “cheap” and “unoccupied” terrains. Liberia, for example, has reportedly sold off three-tenths of its territory in five years.

“When the government takes this land and gives it out in a lease for 40, 50 or up to 99 years, the people often lose access to these commons resources”, Michael Richards, Natural Resources Economist with the UK-based Forest Trends, notes. “In some cases, they do allow access for the extraction of certain products. But in other cases, they put great fences which stop communities having access.” Land grabbers also usually obtain unlimited rights to water use, Richards adds, implying curtailed availability for downstream users.

For displaced communities and global activists, the fight goes on and debates regarding who owns Africa's lands are gathering momentum. But at the same time, fresh findings suggest wealthy nationals and elites are keeping busy too and increasingly joining the rush for land.

“We are calling on the support of RRI and other partners because we want to build a network of traditional rulers to constitute a lobby to defend our rights”, says HM Bruno Mvondo, bureau member of the Council of Traditional Rulers of Cameroon. “For us traditional rulers, the land belongs to the community. But in front of modern law, our customs don’t have any strength. We’re begging the authorities to take into account our traditional law.”

A June 2011 study by the International Land Coalition suggested that land grabbing concerned around 80 million hectares, 64 percent of which are located in Africa, [4] whereas the latest update by the same organization refers to more than 200 million hectares, that is, eight times the size of Britain, or the entire North-West Europe. [5]

Data shows that BRICS investors play an increasingly crucial role (except Russia, which remains at the margin of the rush probably due to the amount of available land) demonstrating that land grabbing is happening not only from the traditional core to the peripheries, but also transversally on the geopolitical map of the world.

Indian investors are particularly active in Indonesia, Malaysia and in the eastern part of Africa (especially Ethiopia [8] and Kenya), while Brazilian interests appear to be reduced and limited to Eastern Africa. Interestingly, South African capital is crossing the borders of Mozambique, Zambia [9] and Swaziland, [10] but also of the Democratic Republic of Congo, [11] Angola, Benin, Congo and Ethiopia. [12] Finally, according to the available data, China is the most active investor, with more than five million hectares of land accessed in all the continents, with a stronger presence in Southern Asia, [13] Oceania and South America, rather than in Africa. [14]

Brazilian rhetoric – the ‘dawn of a new economic era between Africa and Brazil’ [15] – is belied by President Dilma’s recently-concluded agreement with Mozambique and Japan to develop a 14 million hectares agricultural project in the north of Mozambique. [16] Indeed Brazil is leading the pack when it come to land grabbing. [17]

China, India and South Africa have adopted legal reforms that favour the delocalization of food and energy production. In contrast, Brazil has used its legislative autonomy to reduce access to Brazilian land by foreign investors, while the ongoing accumulation of Russian land is the consequence of the privatization that took place in the 1990s.

Brazil’s approach toward large-scale investments in land is very strategic, not to say hypocritical. On the one hand, parliament has been debating for almost one year the introduction of new legislation to prohibit foreign ownership of Brazilian land [19] while at the same time pursuing a policy of land concentration and massive industrialization, both nationally and abroad, with specific attention to the production of agrofuels. [20]

While it is true that the Lula administration introduced some initiatives that were favourable to small-scale farmers, including the 2009 revision of the productivity indexes that determine which properties are subjected to expropriation, and while the pressure exercised by the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra (MST) has achieved some good results such as securing access to land for 800,000 families, the power of agribusiness and levels of land concentration continue to rise. [22]

Land grabbing has been facilitated by the expansion of bilateral investment treaties (BITs) which amplify economic and power asymmetries. The surge in BITs represents the switch from the universal multilateralism of the past to a more fragmented bilateralism.

China has concluded BITs with developing and LICs countries (Chad, Costa Rica, Cuba, Republic of Korea, Cote d’Ivoire, Gabon, Seychelles, Laos, Libya, Mali, Myanmar/Burma, Madagascar, Ethiopia, Uganda, etc.). Sixty percent of the BITs concluded by China between 2002 and 2007 were with developing countries, mainly African. [27]

although RSA has decided to adopt a policy of not renewing BITs concluded during the apartheid period which impose a huge burden over state’s prerogatives – such as the ones with Luxembourg and Belgium [29] – in the same period, South Africa was adopting the same approach when concluding a BIT with Zimbabwe. Looking at the 2009 BIT concluded between the two African countries, it clearly replicates the same legal architecture that is so openly criticized – included an extremely generous expropriation clause which requires the state to fully compensate the market value in any case of nationalization, expropriation or equivalent measures, with no admitted exceptions. [30]

One of the most striking elements contained in the contracts involving BRICS investors is the use of sovereignty in order to define land as void and immediately disposable, particularly in the case of Sub-Saharan Africa.

As in the case of North-South investments by hedge funds, pension funds, and agrobusiness, BRICS relationships with African LICs are based on investment contracts that emerge from asymmetrical positions, and codify and crystallize the legal order that best fits the interests of the investors. In this way, it is not only the communities and the environment that are kept outside the framework, but public scrutiny as a whole.

Conditional within land lease agreements is the requirement that the government will clear the area of “encumbrances”, meaning indigenous people – families, children and pastoralists, as well as cattle, wildlife, forests, anything in fact that will interfere with the levelling of the land, building of [foreign] workers’ accommodation, roads and the eventual sowing of crops.

Along with pastoralists, who number around 300,000 in Gambella alone, villagers are herded, sometimes literally, always metaphorically, at the end of a rifle, into Villagisation camps. Despite Government promises to “provide basic resources and infrastructure, the new villages”, HRW found “have inadequate food, agricultural support, and health and education facilities”.

The government proclaims land sales are part of a strategic, long-term approach to agricultural reforms and economic development, that foreign investment will fund infrastructure projects, create employment opportunities, help to eradicate hunger and poverty and benefit the community, local and national. The term “development” is itself an interesting one: distorted, linked and commonly limited almost exclusively to economic targets, meaning growth of GDP, established principally by the World Bank, whose policies and practices in relation to land sales, the OI discovered, “have glossed over critical issues such as human rights, food security and human dignity for local populations”, and its philanthropic sister, the International Monetary Fund. Meanwhile market fundamentalism drives the exported (one size fits all) policies, of both ideologically entrenched organisations, that promote models of development seeking to fulfill corporate interests first, last and at every stage in between.

Protagonists laying claim to the all-inclusive healing powers of agriculture and agro-industrial projects, contradict, the OI states, “the basic facts and evidence showing growing impoverishment experienced on the ground”. What about the bumper benefits promised, particularly the numerous employment opportunities? It turns out industrialised farming is highly mechanised and offers few jobs; overseas companies are not concerned with providing employment for local people and care little for their well-being, making good bed mates for the ruling party. They bring the workers they need, and are allowed to do so by the Ethiopian government, which places no constraints on their operations.