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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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

To critics, voluntary guidelines and principles are just that: voluntary. At best, they present a mechanism to protect indigenous rights. But at worst they provide a smokescreen, behind which lies the exploitation of workers and their rights to food security and land tenure.

The campaign, spearheaded by NGOs GRAIN, Food First Information and Action Network (FIAN), Land Research Action Network (LRAN) and La Via Campesina, calls for an immediate end to land grabbing, claiming that it “denies land for local communities, destroys livelihoods, reduces the political space for peasant oriented agricultural policies and distorts markets towards increasingly concentrated agribusiness interests and global trade rather than towards sustainable peasant/smallhold production for local and national markets.”

In an interview with Nourishing the Planet, writer and activist Raj Patel denounced land-grabs as “modern forms of colonialism, except with colonialism there was the argument that the colonizers were bringing civilization to the people they were colonizing. This time around, they don’t bother with that justification. There’s not even the pretense of bringing civilization – now it’s just about efficiency.”

Patel noted that when people tout these land deals as an effective means to end hunger, they often ignore the fact that many deals are not growing food at all, but instead pursuing the rapidly expanding biofuels market. “When you’re talking about turning arable land into zones of cultivation for jatropha, you’ve a hard time arguing that anyone’s belly is going to be fuller as a result,” he said.

The issue of capturing water in these deals is also often not discussed, but it was mentioned in the April statement, as an example of the many factors that need to be included when assessing the value of the land being leased or sold.

The signatories of the April statement (of which Patel was one), demand true agrarian reform, which includes investment in research and training programs for small-holder farmers, overhauling trade policies, supporting regional markets, enforcing strict regulations to foreign direct investment, and promoting “community-oriented food and farming systems hinged on local people’s control over land, water and biodiversity.”

The report by the IIED observed that "effective safeguards in national law, and skilfully and transparently negotiated contracts, are key to securing local land and water rights." But according to Camilla Toulmin, who heads the institute, "a lot of these contracts are being negotiated behind closed doors. Some are pathetically thin and a few grant substantial preferential rights to access water to the investors."

"The real question is how we can persuade governments and the private sector that it’s in their best interest to have a broader social consensus as agricultural land is vulnerable to sabotage and, if the local population is not on board, it is not an easy asset to protect," Toulmin concludes. (END)

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.

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]

Guy Parfait Songue is a political science lecturer at the University of Douala. He’s the main speaker at ongoing public debates on the new scramble for African farmlands organized by ACDIC. He says the shortsighted policy will eventually plunge the country into chaos: “Our government needs to see exactly what our population needs in the future. Our generation does not yet see the problem but I think that the next generation [will face very serious problems] that we need to prevent now.”

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.