Group items tagged

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.

But the emerging picture is neither one of grand capitalist transformation and agricultural revival, nor one of all-out land grab that is leading to dispossession and growing impoverishment of ever more Sudanese. There is a striking gap between the spectacular headline announcements and the reality that little actual investment seems to have transpired. There are Gulf funds that have announced humungous agro-projects without a single agro-engineer among their ranks.

The land grab phenomenon in Sudan and in many (though not all) African countries thus increasingly resembles a fata morgana, a mirage in the desert which completely distorts the object on which it is based. Not only is far more thorough and non-ideology driven research needed on foreign investment and, where it actually takes place, its impact on local communities and national welfare.