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Pambazuka - Land grabs: Africa's new ‘resource curse’?

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food security international crisis development pambazuka foodsecurity agribusiness biofuels agriculture mozambique resource curse on 2009-11-27
- 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]
- 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.
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- - 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.
  - 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.
TRADE: What Will China’s Legacy in Africa be by 2049? - IPS ipsnews.net

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on 2009-10-28
Nobel economics prize won by first woman | Science | The Guardian

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orstrom nobel economics on 2009-10-26
Mwalimu Nyerere’s ideas on land

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pambazuka nyerere mwalimu land tenure reform pastoralists agriculture development international on 2009-10-18
- Vandana Shiva, who dismisses the Western conception of property which respects only capital investment and not the fact that conception of non-western indigenous communities and cultures recognise that investment can also be of labour and nurturance“ (Shiva 2001: 44). Although Nyerere held this view, in practice his government acted to the contrary. Like the colonial state before him, more and more land, especially of the pastoralist communities was alienated.
- his views are in many ways similar to those of Karl Polanyi on what he calls fictitious commodities.
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- - under the neoliberal era even money itself becomes a commodity, as Polanyi alludes to. Originally money (M) in possession of a capitalist would be used to buy capital goods (C) and at the end of a cycle of production process the capitalist would have earned more money than originally invested (M1) and hence Marxist formulation of M – C – M1 where M1 is greater than M. Under neoliberalism, because of the shift from economics of production to economics of speculation, money buys money and hence the formulation M – M – M1. This has been part of the gambling (casino capitalism) economies dominating the neo- liberal economic practices.
  - It is correct that the system of land tenure the colonial government wanted to promote was alien to a non-capitalist society, which, as Walter Rodney would say, was following an independent path of development. But obviously the system was not alien to capitalism and its imperial interests in the colonies.
  - It was thus not just an attitude of mind of capitalism, as Nyerere tries to suggest, but a historical outcome of the process which brought into being private property, commodification, and expropriation
  - of the masses within the capitalists countries and overseas.
  - The misconception that pastoralists wander randomly gives rise to the belief that pastoral claims to particular land are fluid and temporary. This and the supposition that land not grazed at any one time is ‘free’, have resulted in the pastoralists losing a great deal of land without receiving compensation (Lane 1998: 155).
    
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  - such dependence upon others would endanger our independence and our ability to choose our own political policies” (Ibid, p. 25). There is no doubt about this but to really be able to address this question it was not enough to disqualify the need for foreign aid without addressing and restructuring the dependent economy, a survival of the colonial economy, designed to serve imperial interests. It is partly because of failure to address structural dependency that Tanzania was brought to its knees by the World Bank and the IMF
    
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  - Agriculture is difficult to socialize.

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Arabica Robusta

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Updated on 2009-11-27
Created on 2009-10-18

Category: Government & Politics

land tenure reform africa pastoralists agriculture neoliberalism

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Arabica Robusta's List: land tenure in Africa

Pambazuka - Land grabs: Africa's new ‘resource curse’?

TRADE: What Will China’s Legacy in Africa be by 2049? - IPS ipsnews.net

Nobel economics prize won by first woman | Science | The Guardian

Mwalimu Nyerere’s ideas on land

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