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BRICS states, except Russia, are enhancing and facilitating land grabs abroad in a way that is inconsistent with their proclamations of sustainable development, cooperation solidarity, and respect of national sovereignty.

Some differences do exist between the way in which Northern donors and BRICS conceive receiving countries’ sovereignty and their independence when official development assistance is at stake. But not so with foreign direct investments (FDI) in land; for when access to this precious resource is at stake, the approaches and positions of both the North and the South toward low-income countries (LICs) countries converge more significantly than it might be thought.

Looking at where the investments come from, the lack of a central driving region is striking. What we see is the coexistence of actors (public, private and mixed) from the North, Gulf States, emerging economies – including BRICS – and, in some cases, from Low Income Countries themselves.

Many of these investors, described as the “new water barons” in Jo-Shing Yang’s article ”Profiting from Your Thirst as Global Elite Rush to Control Water Worldwide,” are the same ones who have profited from speculating on agricultural contracts and contributing to the food crisis of the past few years. The food crisis and recent droughts have confirmed that controlling the source of food—the land and the water that flows under or by it—are equally or even more important. A closer look at the land-related investments in Africa, for example, show that land grabbing is not simply an investment, but also an attempt to capture the water underneath.

The second, usually supported by numerous farmers’ groups and non-profit organizations like La Via Campesina, the Oakland Institute, GRAIN and Food First, believe that these land grabs are exploitative and colonialist, kicking people off of their land and decreasing food security for “host” countries.

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that in order to feed the anticipated 9.1 billion people in 2050, agricultural production worldwide needs to increase by 70 percent. Historically, the response to global hunger has focused on food aid and agricultural investment in chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and increasingly, genetically engineered seeds. More recently, governments of wealthy countries lacking in fertile, arable land or abundant water supplies have begun to buy or lease large tracts of land in poorer countries for agricultural production and export.

He emphasized the importance of land sovereignty and investments in smallholder agriculture to food security and indigenous identity, but also spoke about how foreign deals could be a “win-win” solution for those involved. He highlighted the need for more community-investor partnerships which “don’t require large-scale transfer of land rights. What is important is that they should be long-term. That they should balance profit with social responsibility. And they should be supported by governments, civil society organizations, and the private sector, to ensure that they are mutually beneficial.”

Reading the news release on your company's website as can be seen in this link, http://heraklesfarms.com/docs/INTLHFNewYearsPressRelease.pdf all I gather is that the people whose ancestral lands you are desperate to grab are irresponsible, useless, and hungry and cannot afford to feed themselves. So you provide them with food stuffs in their desperate situation so that they will give their land to you and your Cameroonian surrogates. This is nothing less than re-colonization and re-enslavement of Africa under the guise of 'investment,' carried out by multi-national corporations like yours.

Reading through the website of Herakles Farms, I discovered that you are telling the world how you are helping to develop the continent of Africa by building hydroelectric power stations in Uganda, bringing internet cables to the continent of Africa, establishing palm plantations in Ghana and grabbing land in Cameroon. I learned, too, that your NGO, All For Africa, has a program, Palm oil Out of Poverty (POP). I think the acronym P.O.P. should stand for Palm oil On to Poverty because razing the forest for your proposed plantation and employing just 7000 - 8000 out of the 58,000 people who depend on that forest for their livelihoods, food, medicine and wood for fuel and building, will lead to increased poverty and early deaths.

After reading your concession agreement, the convention your company signed with the government of the Republic of Cameroon, your rebuttal to the Oakland institute campaign and now your Questions and Answers with regards your Cameroon project, I discovered many contradictions and double-standards, which a business man of your magnitude should have avoided.

In the last three years, a virulent debate has unfolded between two camps with diametrically opposed views. In one corner, we find global agro-business, the international financial institutions and governments of emerging powers like China, India and the Gulf Arab states.

The other camp, consisting of international and African NGOs and skeptical academics, rejects this logic as an unconvincing excuse for lucrative collusion between African and foreign elites, largely at the expense of the rural masses.

The basic logic, as presented by the Sudanese government and its Gulf Arab partners during grand televised conferences, is sound: Sudan has historically underused its vast agricultural potential and low productivity is one of the key problems locking farming communities in poverty. Investment, foreign or domestic, in agriculture has been woefully low for 30 years; the agricultural crisis of rural Sudan is one of the great drivers of widening inequality, vulnerability to climatic changes and civil strife in the peripheries.

Although such investments have been hailed by the World Bank as a way to generate jobs and infrastructure, the report states, “investors are targeting countries with weak laws, buying arable land on the cheap, and failing to deliver on promises of jobs and investments,” and in some cases inflict serious damage on the local resource base.

Following the publication of its reports, The Great Land Grab: Rush for World’s Farmland Threatens Food Security for the Poor (2009) and (Mis)Investment in Agriculture: The Role of the International Finance Corporation in the Global Land Grab (2010), the Oakland Institute is continuing to examine and document land deals in an effort to expose their impact and how this trend impedes the urgent and critical task of improving food security for the world’s most vulnerable.

In Madagascar, a 99-year lease on 3.2 million acres of land – 50 per cent of Madagascar’s arable land, granted to multinational Daewoo ‘ensuring food security’ for South Korea, lead to a coup. ‘In the constitution, it is stipulated that Madagascar’s land is neither for sale nor for rent, so the agreement with Daewoo is cancelled,’ said current president Andry Rajoelina, a baby-faced former DJ, backed by the army – and allegedly, the majority of Malagasys, 70 per cent of whom depend on farmland for income. ‘One of the biggest problems for farmers in Madagascar is land ownership, and we think it’s unfair for the government to be selling or leasing land to foreigners when local farmers do not have enough land,’ an official from Madagascar’s Farmer’s Confederation revealed to Reuters.

The mentality of ‘grabbers’ could not be more different. ‘We are not farmers…’ stated an official from SLC Agricola, Brazil’s largest ‘farm’ corporation. ‘The same way you have shoemakers and computer manufacturers, we produce agricultural commodities.’

But with Africa losing an estimated US$148 billion in development finance each year, 60 per cent as a result of multinational mispricing, in addition to the direct servicing of odious debts – (amounting to a global figure of US$560 billion per annum of an outstanding US$2.9 trillion), little or no rents derived from the liquidation of exhaustible resources is redistributed in intangible capital. This is precisely because across Africa citizens are not required to finance the state budget – as occurs in high-income countries through intangible capital – they lack the political representation necessary to influence policies and usurped power structures.

“Our ancestors settled here in 1903. We considered the land ours until 1947 when the colonial government suddenly seized it as private state property, arresting anyone cutting down trees for firewood or to build”, explains Adjap tribal chief, Marcellin Biang.

In Akom I, chieftain Luther Abessolo says his subjects are increasingly lazy as a result of the prevailing tenure insecurity. “We live in utter uncertainty because the government can decide to seize our land at short notice anytime. Our people lack motivation to cultivate the land”, he tells Think Africa Press.

Less fortunate, however, are some 14,000 villagers in Cameroon’s southwest whose existence – as well as that of numerous endangered floral and faunal species – is under threat. US-owned agribusiness, Herakles Farms, is razing some 73,000 hectares of dense natural forests for a $600 million oil palm plantation despite local objections.

Corrupt land cartels have been very divisive on the issue of land. Most of them have chunks of land that they do not use, land that was given to them illegally, while on the other side, we have landless Kenyans who deserve basic social and economic rights. This new constitution will rectify past wrongs and make better use of potentially productive land. The land issue has been part of the reforms promised since the two principals signed an accord to have a government of national unity. Land ownership is one of the issues that has long led to violence and it affects millions of people.  Many people were displaced and chased away from the land.  It has been a big deal in Kenya and unless resolved it will continue to affect millions of people.  The new constitution allows Kenyans to own land anywhere in the country. This new constitution is `pro poor’ and it addresses historic injustices.

The climate change, however, is only one of many threats imposed by the First World, including a growing trend called the ‘land-grab’ (Pagano, 2009).   A recent quote in the Washington Post clearly illustrates that trend, calling Ethiopia’s farmland the ‘hottest commodity in the market’ (cited in: gadaa.com, 2009).

Additionally, one needs to view the structure of financing in terms of measures of discipline. Discipline is exercised in the name of ‘development.’ Therefore, it is important to relate this analysis of education to reproductive and disciplinary apparatuses to see how subjectivities are controlled and managed and how education functions as a self-affirmative apparatus.

Education is not only being maintained as an ideological state apparatus, it has entered the military-industrial-complex, in which a triad between private corporate profit, state defense and militarization and a general regulation of ideology ensues.

So what do the world’s great investors have their eyes on in Africa, in addition to the usual natural resources – minerals, petroleum and timber – that they’ve always coveted? In a word, land. Lots of it. The land-grabbing 'investors' are purchasing or leasing large chunks of African land to produce food crops or agrofuels or both, or just scooping up farmland as an investment,

At the moment, the grabbing of Africa’s land is shrouded in secrecy and proceeding at an unprecedented rate, spurred on by the global food and financial crises. GRAIN, a non-profit organisation that supports farm families in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems, works daily to try to keep up with the deals on its farmlandgrab.org website.[vi]

Apart from the African governments and chiefs who are happily and quietly selling or leasing the land right out from under their own citizens, those who are promoting the new wave of rapacious investment include the World Bank, its International Finance Corporation (IFC), the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and many other powerful nations and institutions. The US Millennium Challenge Corporation is helping to reform new land ownership laws – privatising land – in some of its member countries. The imported idea that user rights are not sufficient, that land must be privately owned, will efface traditional approaches to land use in Africa, and make the selling off of Africa even easier. GRAIN notes the complicity of African elites and says some African 'barons' are also snapping up land.

We regularly read in the press that Saudi Arabia ↑ has purchased enormous areas of crop land for rice production, and several members of the government possess large areas of land in some of Burkina Faso’s most fertile areas without even being farmers! The recently adopted land tenure law is encouraging the development of these destabilising trends.

Let me give an example. In 1999, a rural Burkinabé woman, Nagbila Aisseta, accepted ↑ the Hunger Project Africa Prize awarded to the 'women farmers of Africa'. She was a poor woman aged 35 who had not left her village since birth, had never entered a car, knew nothing at all of modern life, but who, little by little, had developed initiatives to create a large organisation involved in livestock farming, agriculture, and market gardening to tackle malnutrition in her area. She was invited to receive her prize at a ceremony at the United Nations headquarters and asked to submit her speech prior to the event in the national Mooré language. It was to be translated into English, which she did not speak, for another person to read out during the ceremony. But she said “No. If it is me that has received the prize then I should speak directly to those who gave it to me. The way I was brought up, when you thank someone you thank them directly, without a go-between.” She asked the United Nations to find a Burkinabé interpreter who could understand both Mooré and English in order to ensure simultaneous interpretation. And this is how it was done. She knew her rights -  in this case the right to speak!

Over the last decade or so unprecedented amounts of land have been concessioned, leased or sold by developing country governments at bargain basement prices to new investors with the support and funding of international financial institutions and hedge funds. “

Africa is the site of most of these new investments in land because land is cheaper in Africa than anywhere else. This is possible because it is customary land that is expropriated and whose prices are arbitrarily set by governments in negotiations with the investors which typically do not include any consultations with or prior informed consent of the affected communities. Again this is possible because landholders under customary tenure regimes are considered to be merely in possession of the land without any real legal status in most African countries.

Agrarian labour relations are based on specific land-labour utilization relations that are created principally through land dispossession. Land ownership is central to the emergence of these agrarian labour relations . Land owners are typically hirers of labour while the landless are forced to sell their labour power.

Private companies are resisting a global code of conduct that would ensure transparency and local elites continue to benefit from deals that encourage corruption and increase food insecurity.

Private companies are resisting a global code of conduct that would ensure transparency and local elites continue to benefit from deals that encourage corruption and increase food insecurity.

South Korean firm Daewoo’s announcement that it had leased some 1.3 million hectares of land in Madagascar in November 2008 sparked furious opposition, contributing to riots which toppled the government.

According to Barclays Capital, some US$320 billion of institutional funds are now invested in commodities, compared to just US$6 billion ten years ago.

The big picture shows that: the largest institutional investors are planning to double their portfolio holdings in agricultural commodities, including farmland; they are reportedly going to do it very soon; the new surge in money will push up global food prices; high food prices will hit poor, rural and working-class communities hard.

A coalition of family farm, faith-based and anti-hunger groups, along with business associations, have initiated a campaign to persuade investors to pull out of commodity index funds.