The Land Grabbers: The New Fight over Who Owns the Earth

by Fred Pearce

  Who is next? The Tana River delta is Kenya’s largest coastal wetland, rich in wildlife and home to some twenty-five thousand traditional pastoralists. There, Bedford Biofuels, a company run by an ebullient Canadian businessman, David McClure, has acquired a forty-five-year lease on 400,000 acres. The Alberta-based company wants to grow jatropha. It claims the “underutilized land” provides “some of the best conditions for growing jatropha in the world.” It plans to “employ thousands of workers . . . within the first three years of development.” In July 2011, Bedford Biofuels announced that “after three years of fund-raising” it was “breaking ground” on land leased to the company by Orma pastoralists. But there is a long history of acrimonious disputes on the delta. Herders there say they have been sold out by elders living in Nairobi. But they are not giving up. And prominent environmental NGOs, such as Birdlife International, have sided with those trying to prevent development of the wetland. They have won past battles. They may win again.

  Across the continent, the West African state of Ghana emerged as a major center for jatropha production. More than twenty companies obtained more than 2 million acres of land to grow the crop. Stavanger-based Scanfarm for a while cultivated jatropha on the lands of the Agogo people, part of the Ashanti tribe, close to the city of Kusami. But yields were poor and it switched to growing corn on part of the 32,000 acres it had acquired (not the million acres that has sometimes been claimed). Italy’s Agroils, with its local subsidiary Smart Oil, planted jatropha on some of its 260,000 acres beside Lake Volta. Israel’s Galten Global Alternative Energy claimed 25,000 acres near Kadima. And Canada’s Kimminic Corporation had 160,000 acres in central Ghana.

  Britain’s Jatropha Africa operates from a suburban house in south London, and claims to have a lease on 120,000 acres and an option on another 170,000 acres, but despite being on the ground since 2006, it had by late 2011 planted only 250 acres and exported just 10 tons—to a biofuel company in Japan. As its CEO, Clive Coker, told me: “Having access to vast areas of scrub land is one thing, having the resources to turn that land into a jatropha farm is another.”

  If you believe its claims, the biggest land grab in Ghana may be by Gold Star Farms, a small U.S. company that thinks big and boasts of operating in fifteen countries. It claims to have been promised 5 million acres, though it has never revealed where this land is and only 14,000 acres have been planted. Gold Star’s owner, Jack Holden, whose Ghanaian subsidiary is owned by his Ghanaian wife, Diana Holden, says it shares profits with landowners, employs workers year round, pays good wages, and supplies medical insurance to workers.

  How did all these deals happen? In Ghana, traditional chiefs still have a lot of power. Activists in other countries often say local power is the key to making sure communities are not trampled by governments when land grabbers come calling. But Ghana suggests it doesn’t always work out like that. Ghanaian forest researchers Eric Nutakor and George Schoneveld and Laura German of the Indonesia-based Center for International Forestry Research investigated land deals in the country. They found that large areas “were easily obtained by foreign companies through direct negotiations with traditional authorities, often through opaque, non-participatory and partially documented negotiations . . . locking up large tracts of land for periods of up to 50 years.”

  Chiefs dispensed their thumbprints carelessly. They received “drink money,” which some critics regard as a bribe but is a customary practice recognized by the government. But whether bribed, confused, or simply acting out of ignorance, the chiefs and the people whose livelihoods hinge on the decisions they made were getting bad deals. Many households did not even get compensation for their lost land. The researchers concluded that greater government scrutiny could improve things. For it seems that “only a small minority of foreign companies in Ghana registered at the appropriate government agencies” before getting those thumbprints.

  The biofuels business went crazy in about 2007. The European Union’s decision to require that biofuels be added to all vehicle fuel meant there was a legally guaranteed market. Many governments were emboldened to get into biofuels after hearing George W. Bush call for a biofuels drive in his State of the Union address in January 2006. And financiers were seduced by a gung ho prospectus for jatropha from Goldman Sachs. They saw big profits and major development opportunities. Back then, Brazil was talking about replacing a tenth of the world’s fossil fuels with sugar ethanol. Malaysia and Indonesia both said they would set aside up to 40 percent of future palm oil plantations for biodiesel. Even oil companies joined in. Chevron claimed to have a million acres of land set aside for biofuels in the United States. And Western entrepreneurs headed for Africa in search of cheap land to grow old-style vegetable oils, sugar for ethanol, or new wonder-crops like jatropha. NGOs counted more than a hundred biofuels projects in Africa, operated by fifty companies in twenty countries. At one stage it was estimated that such projects covered as much as 27 million acres.

  The bubble has been partly deflated by the practical problems, by the discovery that quick profits are unlikely, by anger about the mess left by some of the early arrivals, and also by a new environmental realism that questions the simple belief that biofuels automatically cut global carbon emissions. Africa will be living with the consequences for decades to come as dubiously obtained leases play out.

  Some mourn the bursting of the bubble, and hope that it may prove only a temporary setback. But before we are seduced by the benefits of biofuels, it is worth asking what they are supposed to deliver.

  The original environmental case was this. Like any other carbon-based fuel, when biofuels are burned, they release the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But if the fuel comes from a crop, then growing the plant will absorb the same amount of carbon dioxide from the air as is eventually released by the burning. Carbon in; carbon out. A cycle is created, in which growing new plants neutralizes the emissions. The logic is impeccable, but it leaves out two things. First, there is the carbon “footprint” of growing, transporting, and processing the crop. And second, the question of what else might have happened on that land and what its carbon consequences would be.

  The first can be calculated. The math makes growing corn for ethanol look dumb. The large amount of energy needed to manufacture fertilizer to grow the corn, and then to process that corn into ethanol, often means it would be more climate friendly to stick with regular fossil oil. Other ethanol crops, such as sugarcane, look better because they need less fertilizer and less processing. Most of the vegetable oils slated to replace diesel look quite good, because processing is easy. You just squeeze. If it grows well, jatropha can deliver a two-thirds emissions saving, for instance. Soy looks sensible, and oil palm even better. These are the calculations used to justify both growing biofuels and the EU laws that require mixing biofuels with regular fuel. Biofuels, the regulators say, don’t eliminate emissions, but they do reduce them.

  But what about the second issue? Biofuels require land. The calculation above only works if nothing else would have grown on the land in question. Usually, that is not the situation. Not many biofuels grow in deserts. If biofuels replace something else, whether a crop or natural vegetation, that has to be taken into account. The most dramatic example is oil palm. It is often grown on land formerly occupied by rain forest and carbon-rich peat bogs. Clearing the forests and draining the peat bogs will create a huge carbon footprint. Taking that into account, the overall carbon footprint of biodiesel from palm oil is often much greater than that of fossil oil.

  More often, biofuels are grown on former pastures, in which case we need to know how much carbon the grass would have absorbed. Or they might be grown on fields that once grew food. Assuming the food now has to be grown somewhere else, we then need to know where it is grown, and what the carbon footprint of the food crop is. Maybe someone somewhere chopped down a forest to keep people fed. Or added extra fertilizer to another field to inc
rease yields. Making fertilizer is an extremely energy-intensive, carbon-producing activity.

  Very often, answering this chain of questions may reveal that biofuels come at a carbon cost greater than the fossil fuels they replace. It seems rather obvious. You might presume that the carbon calculators had taken this into account. But no. Tim Searchinger of Princeton University, who has campaigned among scientists for answers to these questions, says the land issue is still not being assessed by most regulators plotting our route to a low-carbon future. And it is true. Regulators I have spoken to say they have left the land bit out because it is too hard for anyone to calculate with any accuracy. That is often true. But until this carbon accounting error is fixed, regulators often simply don’t know if, or when, biofuels are worth it.

  Chapter 23. Zimbabwe: On the Fast Track

  One of the most notorious land grabs of the new century was not by foreign corporations or sovereign funds or speculators. It was an old-fashioned state land grab—by Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party and the war veterans of Zimbabwe. Many of the “veterans” were too young to have fought in the long war to liberate Zimbabwe from a white supremacist government which had ruled the country in defiance of British attempts to grant independence. But they regarded themselves as completing that war by taking over land still occupied by whites.

  The chaotic and often violent land reform—much of which was ruled illegal by the country’s supreme court—was played out in graphic detail on TV a decade ago. Many of the outcomes have been disastrous. Many of the new settlers had neither the know-how nor the means to maintain productivity on the land. Agricultural output from large farms collapsed. There followed an economic crisis, growing poverty, and hunger. But, says Ian Scoones of the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex in England, it was not all bad.

  Scoones and a team of Zimbabwean colleagues have pieced together what happened in the southeast of the country, Masvingo province, in the decade after the reforms. The resulting book, Zimbabwe’s Land Reforms: Myths and Realities, is a remarkable piece of sustained on-the-ground research, conducted under often difficult conditions. Their findings may not be typical of the whole country, but they do reveal a more nuanced story than normally painted. In some areas, especially where the previous landowners had run private ranches and plantations largely devoid of people, the gains from new settlements have been important.

  What everyone agrees is that reform was needed. Foreigners, particularly the British government, had promised to fund it. But in the first twenty years of independence, up to 1999, the old landed elite of some six thousand mostly white commercial farmers, along with some organizations like churches, had clung on. They had cut their holdings only marginally, from 37 million acres to 30 million acres. They still had 30 percent of the country. Progress on redistribution was slowing as the British and Zimbabwean authorities failed to agree on how to do it. Something had to give.

  President Mugabe decided not to wait any longer, or to bother with legal niceties. After 1999, his “fast track” land reform resulted in 17 million acres changing hands—some by government decree, and some through freelance invasions by “war veterans.” As the big farms succumbed, established markets in commodities like wheat, tobacco, and coffee collapsed. Around 150,000 workers on the large commercial farms lost their jobs, and often their homes, as the veterans invaded white-owned property. But Scoones and his colleagues examined what happened next. While war veterans and political cronies undoubtedly got more than their fair share of the redistributed land, some 180,000 smallholders also benefited, often acquiring land for the first time. Some older people went back to land they remembered as children, before they were evicted to make way for commercial farmers.

  It wasn’t just big farms that imploded. Much of the country’s economy collapsed, because of the destruction of its mainly exporting agribusinesses, and because of chronic mismanagement of the escalating crisis by central government, including the money printing that created hyperinflation. Only foreign exchange had any value. With shops empty and trading almost impossible, people turned to subsistence and barter. But there was another side. As the war veterans and other settlers took over parcels of land on the vast estates, production and informal trade in farm commodities boomed. Small grains like sorghum, the traditional produce of dryland African farms, did well. Cotton production, another smallholder crop, flourished, says Scoones. And, despite the collapse of the big ranches, livestock prospered and the country probably ended up with as many cattle, pigs, and sheep as before the reforms. The research team found that “half of the 400 households sampled were accumulating and investing, often employing labor and increasing their farming operations . . . agriculture has not collapsed.”

  The most obvious gains, says Scoones, came from the takeover of the big white-owned ranches. Typical was Edenvale cattle ranch, which had covered 45,000 acres but employed just forty herders to look after four thousand cattle. The same land now supports eighteen villages, each with several hundred inhabitants. These new settlements created growth in the rest of the local economy at a time when the government was broke and riddled with corruption, and when aid agencies were largely absent. Some smallholder farms diversified into brick-making and craft work, fishing and retailing. Since the economy stabilized in 2009, new commercial centers have developed in the occupied lands.

  But today, the land reforms have moved to a new and darker phase, rather more like the land grabs in other places. Powerful politicians, military figures, and their friends are capturing land for their own purposes. Mostly, the new elites are not trying to take the farms occupied by large numbers of smallholders. That would be too obvious a betrayal of the reforms. But the new land grabbers are moving in on the remaining large white holdings that, whether by accident or design, survived the original reforms.

  The takeovers include sugar estates such as Hippo Valley and Triangle, and a network of wildlife ranches in the southeast of the country. Mugabe and his wife are said to own fourteen farms covering 40,000 acres. Widely reported claims that party loyalists and leading military and police figures have between them grabbed some 12 million acres are “grossly exaggerated,” says Scoones. But there is nonetheless a real danger that one landed elite is being replaced by another.

  One convoluted case concerns the 870,000-acre Nuanetsi ranch in Masvingo. It was owned by Imperial Cold Storage Company of South Africa until being bought in 1989 by the Development Trust of Zimbabwe, an organization set up by Joshua Nkomo, Zimbabwean vice president and a famous and respected political leader in the fight for independence. Profits from the Trust’s many commercial activities were intended to develop the economy of his native Matabeleland. Nkomo died in 1999, as the land reforms got under way. And soon after, a new figure emerged on the Trust’s board—Billy Rautenbach, a white Zimbabwean businessman with strong links to Mugabe.

  It has been alleged that Mugabe’s ministers secured substantial sections of the Nkomo estate for Rautenbach in return for financial support and other favors for his party. The opposition Movement for Democratic Change accused Rautenbach of hounding its officials. Rautenbach, who has been banned from entering both Britain and the United States since 2008 because of his links to Mugabe, had also been a business partner in the metals exploits of Phil Edmonds (see chapter 22). Under his influence, the Development Trust of Zimbabwe has joined up with Zimbabwe Bio-Energy for what the latter calls a billion-dollar development of the estate that will include growing sugarcane, installing a quarter million reptiles on a crocodile farm, cattle ranching, and moving a thousand buffalo from a national park to create a game reserve.

  Game is the big new thing. Bigger than biofuels.

  The big survivors of the original reforms were wildlife ranches in the Lowveld of southern Zimbabwe. Former cattle ranches, they linked up in the 1990s to create a series of wildlife “conservancies” protected by high-security electric fences. They extend i
n an arc across the country from the Bubye Valley Conservancy in the west through Save Valley Conservancy to the Chipinge Safari Area near the Mozambique border. The Save Valley Conservancy claims to be the largest private conservancy in the world, covering 840,000 acres. Though the Save conservancy combines twenty-six ranches, its heart is the huge Devuli Ranch, originally created by one of the great British imperial land grabbers, Lucas Bridges, with land he bought in 1919 from the British South Africa Company, the creation of the African imperialist Cecil Rhodes who created Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in his own name. (As I say in chapter 13, Bridges also created the huge Chacabuco sheep ranch in Patagonia, later bought by American conservationists Doug and Kris Tompkins.)

  Rhinos are the prime conservation interest in the Lowveld, though the conservancies also play host to passing lions, elephants, cheetahs, wild dogs, and antelopes. Rhino ranching has been a very whites-only business. One of the founders of the conservancy idea was Raoul du Toit, a white Zimbabwean conservationist who formed the Lowveld Rhino Trust. The trust was funded by the Beit family trust, which had been created a century before by Alfred Beit, a friend of Rhodes.

  In conservation terms, the idea has worked. The rhino ranches together now cover 1.2 million acres and have 80 percent of the surviving rhinos in Zimbabwe. Behind the fences, the animals are generally safe from poachers. But the plan, back in the 1990s, was for tourists to pay the bills. And since the country’s collapse into chaos, tourists have been thin on the ground. Even so, some rich entrepreneurs have moved in. Wall Street’s Paul Tudor Jones, owner of the Grumeti game reserve in Tanzania’s Serengeti, bought the 106,000-acre Malilangwe Wildlife Reserve. “He has been a great source of help; he is paying to move rhinos around,” says du Toit.