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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.

The terms differ from country to country, with the bulk of Ghana’s leased land allocated for export, in contrast to Ethiopia’s mixed status, but the issue remains one of control and exploitation, whether it is over local food monopolies or exported crops.

over 100 known specialised land funds and investments firms have embarked on ‘private sector’ land grabs, including well-known entities such as Morgan Stanley. Facilitating this process is the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector arm of the World Bank group, ensuring for investors the ‘enabling environments’ and positive ‘investment climates’ required for the extractive industries, such as repatriation of profits and tax ‘competition’. From 1991-2002, deregulation proposed by IFIs composed 95 per cent of changes implemented in host countries.

development finance siphoned from Africa, whether through the extractive industries, or land grabs, are unlikely to be revealed as the IMF scrapped mandatory information exchange. Global watchdogs, such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) remained beholden to high-income nations as a ‘subsidiary’ unit in the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Meanwhile, the International Accounting Standard Board (IASB), founded and finance by the ‘big four’ accounting firms – maintaining units in secrecy jurisdictions such as the Cayman Islands – prefers multinationals to self-regulate trade via arms length transfer. What this effectively does is enable multinationals, conducting 60 per cent of global trade within rather than between corporations, to determine the future of entire continents such as Africa, where primary commodities – extracted by corporations, account for 80 per cent of exports.

Studies by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) revealed, ‘Many countries do not have sufficient mechanisms to protect local rights and take account of local interests, livelihoods, and welfare. Moreover, local communities are rarely adequately informed about the land concessions that are made to private companies. Insecure local land rights, inaccessible registration procedures, vaguely defined productive use requirements, legislative gaps, and other factors all too often undermine the position of local people vis-à-vis international actors.’[1]

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.

By expanding its presence in both production and transport, the Bolloré Group is developing a model of integration, which covers a range of activities geared toward the extraction of natural resources from developing countries, particularly Africa. The Group is increasingly reaching a situation of monopoly or quasi-monopoly over critical economic sectors, including transport in many countries.

The Oakland Institute is also proud to have sponsored the first ever assembly of communities impacted by large-scale land investments in Sierra Leone. The event was organized by Green Scenery, together with the Sierra Leone Network on the Right to Food. In April 2012, nearly 100 farmers and small land owners assembled in Freetown to have their voices heard and strategize a way forward.

At the international level, one shocking discovery in the course of our research was the incredibly impenetrable institutional set-up of Socfin and the Bolloré Group. Some of the subsidiaries, with names like Société Bordelaise Africaine or Forestière Equatoriale sound like coming directly from the colonial times. What some call an ‘empire’ operates through a web of dozens of different companies, registred in many countries, including several tax havens.

Our research shows that the government has the primary responsibility of what is happening around land investments in the country. In Sierra Leone, like in other African countries, it is the government who invites investors and offers them mouthwatering conditions in terms of land lease rates, fiscal incentives and tax holidays. It is also the government who is implementing an unfair policy that gives more opportunities to large-scale foreign investors than to local smallholders.

Once he had permitted and nurtured the land invasions in the wake of the shocking February 2000 defeat, Mugabe came to rely upon the war veterans and their followers as a paramilitary force. And yet notwithstanding the resurgence of populist rhetoric and a few material concessions from the state, poor and working people saw their incomes—and even their ability to gain access to the staple food, maize—under unprecedented threat by the time of the recent (March 9–10, 2002) presidential election.

Geopolitical pressure on Mugabe is mediated primarily through these suspect sources. But for all the Western hypocrisy, the Mugabe victory was nonetheless the product of brutal force. And the division between the observer missions did not break down cleanly along North-South, national, racial, or class lines.

One government stands ready and anxious to mediate an elite solution to the Zimbabwe crisis, if one can be found: South Africa. The same government has positioned itself as the main third world arbiter of globalization, in arenas such as trade, finance, aid, sustainable development, racism, non-aligned politics, and many others.

In 1976, Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith was summoned to meet South African premier John Vorster and U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger in Pretoria. In an uncomfortable encounter, Smith was told that his dream of delaying black majority rule in Zimbabwe for “a thousand years” was over. Accommodation with the liberation movements would be necessary, both for the sake of the West’s legitimacy in the struggle against the Soviet Union and simply because Smith’s position—defending legalized racial domination by a quarter of a million white settlers over more than six million indigenous black people, of whom fifty thousand were in the process of taking up arms, at a time of unprecedented economic crisis—was untenable. Smith resisted the inevitable with a mix of ineffectual concessions and heightened repression, but the power that South Africa held over imports and exports was decisive. Simultaneously, guerrilla war intensified and Smith could no longer count on Pretoria’s military backing. Three years after the ultimatum from Vorster and Kissinger, Smith and his conservative black allies were forced to the Lancaster House negotiating table in London, where Zimbabwe was born. Thanks to what Smith termed “the great betrayal” by South Africa and Britain, Zanu and its allies laid down their arms and swept the first democratic election in February 1980. A quarter of a century after that fateful meeting in Pretoria, an analogous moment reappeared in the relations between Zimbabwe and South Africa. In Zimbabwe, thirteen million black Zimbabweans suffer under the rule of an undemocratic, exploitative elite and of a repressive state machinery serving the class interests of a few tens of thousands of well-connected bureaucrats, military, and paramilitary leaders. And this is in the context of unprecedented economic crisis. In South Africa, meanwhile, it is not difficult to posit a similar trajectory of material decline, ruling-party political illegitimacy, and ascendant opposition, as the rand crashed by more than 50 percent over a two-year period and trade union critiques of neoliberal policies harden.

Mugabe’s “huge social spending spree” was, in reality, a brief two-year period of rising education and health expenditures, followed by systematic cutbacks and deprivation under IMF and World Bank guidance. The needs of trade unionists were as little respected as were those of any other sector of society.

To misread Zimbabwe’s situation so blatantly and self-servingly was not new in Pretoria. As another example that gets to the heart of the exhausted nationalist contradiction, consider the case of former ANC Land Minister Derek Hanekom, who also used Zimbabwe as a whipping boy beginning in 1997. At that stage, land hunger was causing organic land invasions (not war-veteran induced) and farmworker strikes in several areas of rural Zimbabwe. In November, of that year, Mugabe announced that the Land Designation Act would finally be implemented. For South Africa, the specter of large-scale land reform in Zimbabwe would have been terrible for investor confidence at a time when Mbeki’s own Washington-centric structural adjustment program—the misnamed Growth, Employment, and Redistribution strategy—was already failing noticeably.

around February 2000, two options emerged: hunker down and mindlessly defend the Zanu government against its critics; or move into a “constructive engagement” mode that might serve as the basis for an “honest broker” role on some future deal-making occasion. A third option—active support Zimbabwe’s social-justice movements, so as to ensure Mugabe authorized genuinely free and fair elections—presumably did not warrant attention; no doubt for fear that the last bullet would inspire South African trade unionists to do the same, and in the near future.

Vorster, Kissinger, and ultimately the British managers of Zimbabwe’s transition together hoped for a typical neocolonial solution, in which property rights would be the foundation of a new constitution, willing-seller/willing-buyer land policy would allow rural social relations to be undisturbed, and nationalization of productive economic activity would be kept to a minimum. A black government would, moreover, have greater capacity to quell labor unrest, strikes, and other challenges to law and order.

The romance of Southern African liberation struggles made it logical for radical activists across the world to intensify pressure first for the liberation of the Portuguese colonies Angola and Mozambique (1975), then the former British colony Zimbabwe (1980), then Namibia (1990), and finally South Africa (1994). That kind of solidarity was colony specific. Something more universal has subsequently emerged: North-South unity of progressive activists fighting a common scourge, international neoliberalism. What is most needed, in this new context, is a set of processes that help identify and implement popular solidarity.

At the fore of those who would repel both the kleptocratic elite and the generalized economic crisis associated with globalization are progressive civil society groups.

what lessons does this confusing period in Zimbabwe’s post-independence experience provide to other third world progressive social forces? The appropriate normative formula is not the dismissal of strengthened state sovereignty as a short–medium term objective. Instead, aligned simultaneously with international popular struggle against Washington and transnational corporate headquarters, the goal must be the rekindling of nation state sovereignty, but under fundamentally different assumptions about power relations and development objectives than during the nationalist epoch. Such power relations can probably only be changed sufficiently if the masses of oppressed people contest those comprador forces who run virtually all their nation states. To do so will require the articulation of a multifaceted post-nationalist political program, grounded in post-neoliberal economic formulations.

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.

There is a mass wave of protests worldwide against the reforms in education.

unless there is an understanding of capital’s role in this situation, and unless precisely this fact is determined, broken down and fought against, that the very protests themselves are an additional new frontier for capitalist appropriation.

The only way to truly accomplish radical change is to link different social struggles, which are all implicated in capital’s appropriation of every sphere of life”

when the deep antagonisms of this society escalated, civic organizations and ordinary citizens were faced with a confounding dilemma: either to tolerate the suspension of the rule of law and go for a historic breakthrough; or defend the rule of law and defend perpetual inequalities and backwardness. In our case, we defended the land reform not because we are “undemocratic,” but because we believe in a deeper form of democracy, one that can only be set on a more meaningful and stable footing by structural changes. Despite the casualties identified by Mamdani, the land reform has indeed created the social and economic foundation for a more meaningful democratization.

There is need now to address the deficiencies of the land reform process, to rebuild the hard-won democratic institutions, and to lay the seeds for the next phase of the national democratic revolution.

land reform was not “hijacked” by “cronies”; although cronyism has indeed operated, it has been marginal to the whole process. The land reform has been broad-based and largely egalitarian. It has benefited directly 140,000 families, mainly among the rural poor, but also among their urban counterparts, who on average have acquired 20 hectares of land, constituting 70% of the land acquired.

Moreover, various new dynamics are underway in the countryside in terms of labor mobilization, investment in infrastructure, new small industries, new commodity chains, and the formation of cooperatives. And despite the adverse economic conditions, land utilization levels have already surpassed the 40% mark that prevailed on white farms after a whole century of state subsidies and racial privilege. That the crop yields remain low is largely due to input shortages, not the lack of entrepreneurial spirit or expertise by the new farmers, as is so often claimed. The new agrarian structure in Zimbabwe now holds out the promise of obtaining food sovereignty (which it had never obtained before), creating new domestic inter-sectoral linkages, and formulating a new model of agro-industrial development with organized peasants in the forefront.

Needless to say, a number of scholars have never recognized this potential. On the contrary, they continue to speculate about “crony capitalism” (Patrick Bond) and the “destruction of the agriculture sector” (Horace Campbell), without having conducted any concrete research of their own, or properly interrogated the new research that has emerged.

The most serious contradiction of the whole process has been the shrinking of political space, especially for progressive social forces. The state apparatus has continued to resort to brute force, long after the land reform.

It became very clear to us, as the rural and urban land movements dissipated or succumbed, that neither political party was capable of advancing the national democratic revolution to the next phase: if the opposition was a lost cause from the beginning, the ruling party had suffered a terminal class shift. We suggested that the only way forward was for social movements themselves to take the initiative, but not by contesting the control of the state apparatus.

We called for a retreat from dogmatic party politics and a return to grassroots political work, with the objective of building durable and democratic structures in the countryside, especially cooperatives, building alliances with urban workers, and beginning once again to change the correlation of forces (Moyo and Yeros 2007a).

Horace Campbell and Patrick Bond, especially, have gone to great lengths to say that there are no sanctions on Zimbabwe and that the economic decline is wholly self-inflicted. Indeed, they have given the impression that imperialism has suddenly been suspended in the case of Zimbabwe. Scarnecchia, et.al. have gone even further to call Mamdani “dishonest” for attributing blame to sanctions. This absurd chorus became complete when supposed ideological adversaries claimed that the West is actually saving Zimbabwe: “USAID was prolific in sending out its food support,” says Bond; “Western food aid has been a lifeline,” say Scarnecchia, et al.

the USA tried to re-establish its military presence in the region, initially in Zimbabwe, and partially succeeded by building an air strip in Botswana. It should have been expected, therefore, that relations would heat up in the late 1990s, when Zimbabwe abandoned structural adjustment in 1996, initiated extensive compulsory land acquisition in 1997, mobilized Angola and Namibia in 1998 to intervene against the US-sponsored invasion of the DRC by Rwanda and Uganda, and finally turned on its neo-colonial constitution in 2000. This was a major shift in the correlation of forces. Did the West really turn the other cheek at this point, as Campbell and Bond seem to suggest?

However, we must be clear that none of this is a problem of “patrimonialism”, as our detractors claim — a problem which could be eradicated by “regime change.” The insufficiency and incoherence of economic policy is a reflection of the changing balance of class forces in the country and the weakness of urban and rural working-class organizations themselves. Regime change will not change this fact.

peasant production should be made the pillar of the economic recovery, through subsidized inputs, fair prices, and secure tenure (which does not mean freehold).

food sovereignty

resolution of the farmworker question, an underclass of “cheap labor,”

trade and industrial policy should be reformulated to secure the recovery of strategic industries and their re-orientation to wage goods and to the technical upgrading of agriculture.

mining sector must also be guarded closely

Of course, many have argued that the removal of Robert Mugabe and his replacement by Morgan Tsvangirai is the precondition for the re-opening of political space and “effective” economic policy. But Mugabe’s removal would by no means guarantee the re-opening of political space, given that the opposition has been consistently clear about its support for an extroverted recovery program, which in turn could only be implemented on the back of a new round of political repression.

“The MDC and most in civil society have formally opposed Western-style sanctions,” declares Bond. But they never put up a fight, and this is because their main electoral strategy has always been to drive the economy into the ground, not to organize the working class on a working-class platform. “Zimbabweans who want transformation must oppose the neo-liberal forces within the MDC,” Campbell tells us. But who are these opposing forces within the MDC? And why should we expect them to bite the hand that feeds them? And if they did so, why should we expect them to be spared of a new round of destabilization? For us, the task remains for social forces, including the trade unions and farmers’ organizations, to step back from their political party alliances and resist a return to an elite pact and IMF tutelage.

another big plan is buffeting Africa’s farmers. It’s the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), which claims it is working in smallholder farmers’ interests by 'catalysing' a Green Revolution in Africa. Green Revolution Number Two.

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. 

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.”