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

by Fred Pearce

  Chapter 25. Inner Niger Delta, Mali: West African Water Grab

  Daouda Sanankoua is an aquatic mayor, and proud of it. The elected boss of Deboye district in the West African state of Mali arrived for our meeting by overnight ferry through flooded forests and submerged banks of hippo grass. In the wet season, the majority of his district is flooded. Thank goodness. “More water is good,” he said, waving a long elegant finger and peering at his foreign inquisitor over his glasses. “Everything here depends on the water, but the government is taking our water. They are giving it to foreign farmers.”

  Mali is a landlocked state on the fringes of the Sahara. Its 15 million people are among the poorest in the world, mainly dependent on irrigated agriculture and fishing. Much of this activity is sustained by the River Niger, which snakes through the country’s populated south. The Malian government has decided that the best way to make the country richer is to bring in foreigners to boost productivity from its land by expanding irrigated agriculture. To do that, a major land grab is going on. But land means nothing in an arid place like this without water. So just as important is the simultaneous water grab, to irrigate that new farmland. And that is what is angering Daouda.

  Daouda’s district is in the center of the inner Niger Delta, a wetland the size of Belgium, where the great river spreads out, flooding the desert in a maze of lakes, waterways, and wetlands before gathering its waters again and heading on through Niger and Nigeria to the ocean. The delta is an immense smudge of green and blue on the edge of the Sahara, and a wintering ground for millions of birds migrating from Europe. During my journey through the delta, I constantly grabbed binoculars to spot kingfishers, marsh harriers, cormorants, and purple herons. Out there too, though I did not spot any, are hippos, African manatees, and the odd crocodile.

  I spoke to the scholarly-looking mayor Daouda in the tiny schoolyard of Akka village, a few yards from the lapping waters of Lake Deboye in the heart of the delta. Women rushed around putting mats on the ground, bringing bowls of rice and then fish—all products of the lake. The headlines around the world that week brought news of flood disasters in Pakistan, Australia, Brazil, and Sri Lanka. But Daouda and the various ethnic groups that inhabit the delta were grateful for their flood.

  The waters nurture abundant fish for the Bozo people. Probably the area’s original inhabitants, the Bozo punt and row and sail their six-seater pirogues from dawn to dusk, laying their nets and catching around 100,000 tons of fish each year. As the dry season approaches, the receding waters leave behind wet soils in which the Bambara people, founders of the great thirteenth-century Mali Empire, plant their millet and rice. The waters also nurture vast aquatic pastures of hippo grass, locally called bourgou, that sustain cattle and goats brought by nomadic Fulani herders from as far away as Mauritania and Burkina Faso. When everywhere else in the region is dry and dead, the delta still provides rich pastures.

  I was there in January, as the floodwaters began to recede. I watched the arrival of the Fulani with their cattle to settle for a few months in their distinctive square mud homes on islands in the delta. I talked to Bozo fishing families as they packed up their homes—loading mats, bedding, bags of rice and sweet potatoes, firewood, cooking pots, chairs, sound systems, even TVs, into their boats—to set up temporary camps beside the deep-water pools where fish would concentrate in the weeks ahead. The rights to harvest the delta’s fish, plant crops, and graze pastures are based on long-standing custom neither known nor recognized beyond its borders. Land and water are inseparable. Different people use different resources at different times. Sustainability has no better model.

  But this rare and magnificently productive ecosystem, on which a million inhabitants depend, is facing unprecedented threats from water grabs just upstream of the delta. Others want this water. Over a torch-lit evening meal of Nile perch, millet porridge, and bananas—all fruits of the wetland—the mayor said that water abstractions were diverting water, drying out fields, damaging the bourgou pastures, and upsetting fish breeding.

  Later in the year, an environmental disaster loomed as huge water abstractions for irrigation combined with a drought upstream to drastically lower water levels in the wetland. People were leaving. Temporary outward migration is a traditional coping strategy here during droughts, but the exodus nonetheless underlined the precarious state of this vast oasis in the desert.

  This is not yet a dying ecosystem. But the people are having to adapt to the changes. So far they are doing this with some success. The next morning, I walked across caked and cracked soil, grazed by three desultory donkeys, with a large contingent of Akka’s three hundred women. They have created a small oasis on the edge of the village, where tiny amounts of water taken from the lake irrigate small plots of onions, chilies, eggplant, and lettuces. They eat most of the produce in the village and sell the rest at the market in Youvarou, just across the water, or in Mopti, the big town on the edge of the delta. Meanwhile, men on the delta are starting to rear animals in pens rather than on pastures. Mayor Daouda said he had ten sheep fattening in a pen at home, fed on bourgou.

  Bourgou is vital here. Villagers call it “starvation food.” They eat it when their millet crops fail. It tastes rather like couscous, and ferments to make a popular sweet beer. So, with wild bourgou in decline as the delta diminishes, they have begun cultivating it. On a short boat ride from Akka, I saw a 75-acre stand that attracts fish—another benefit. The fish attracted birds. Thousands of cormorants and pelicans gathered round. I asked if the villagers were not concerned about the birds taking their fish. But they said the bird droppings made the water more productive. “The more birds there are, the more fish we get,” said the haughty, purple-robed Alpha Fofana, who was in charge of the bourgou project.

  That night in Akka, young women were watching French soap operas late into the evening on the village’s only TV, powered by batteries recharged during the day from a photovoltaic panel on the school roof. Later still, a lone male motorcyclist rode up and down the shore for several hours. The delta and its people are changing. But they still understand their ecosystem.

  The next morning I headed for Kakagna, a few hours south across the delta. It is a village on a small hill with myriad narrow alleys leading to minute domestic compounds and imposing mud mosques. The riverbank at the tiny jetty was covered in the products of a thriving village pottery business. There were brightly painted clay pots for water and incense, for oil and cooking. Women ushered me to huts where they made the pots, turning them by hand in depressions on the mud floors, and baking them by covering them in straw and setting a fire.

  Kakagna was dominated by women. Some were Bozo fishers and others Fulani, with traditional rings through their noses and cuts in their cheeks from initiation rites. Embarrassingly, both groups of women separately brought us food from their competing kitchen gardens—and then parting gifts of mats, pots, and wooden models of boats. To augment the lake fisheries, they run a small aquaculture project. Every year, as the dry season approaches, they dredge a small channel to direct remaining water into ponds where they grow fish. The women take their pots and surplus fish to market in Mopti. They also sell mats made from wetland grasses, as well as fish and birds netted on the wetland. Business is still good. Fish on sale in Mopti were being smoked, dried, or packed up with ice for trucking in huge boxes throughout Mali and to Burkina Faso, Ghana, and Cote d’Ivoire.

  But behind all this effort to sustain livelihoods on the delta, there was no disguising the fact that the wetland ecosystem is not as wet as it was. Mayor Daouda blamed the government, and in particular its agency in charge of irrigation projects upstream of the delta, called the Office du Niger. “We don’t hear from the Office du Niger,” he said with a hard stare. “They damage our fish, but they don’t come and tell us their plans, and they don’t listen to us. The government is not interested in our local concerns.” I left the delta to find out more—to investigate
the water grab.

  The Office du Niger is a geographical area as well as an administration. It was established by the French administrators in 1932 in a thinly populated desert region immediately upstream of the inner Niger Delta. They built a barrage on the river, dug irrigation canals, and brought in hundreds of thousands of farmers to till the land. The administration was in effect a state within a state, and since independence in 1960 it has been answerable only to the president or prime minister.

  Progress on meeting the government’s dream of irrigating 2.5 million acres of farmland here has been slow. The 816-meter Markala barrage, with its 488 sluices, was eventually completed in 1947. It is an impressive structure, controlling the flow of the mighty river and distributing its water down three giant canals to the irrigation zones. But more than half a century on, fewer than 250,000 acres are irrigated, a tenth of the intended area. A large map of the Office du Niger’s domain sits on the Niger bank by the barrage. It shows a few small areas painted green, because they are being irrigated, and a wide area still covered in peeling yellow paint, showing it is awaiting irrigation.

  The government chose to grow thirsty crops here in the irrigated desert. First it concentrated on cotton, then since 1970 on rice, augmented recently with sugarcane. Most of the farming till now has been done by smallholders who pay rent in the form of water charges. Most of the irrigation equipment is dilapidated and very wasteful. Enough water is put into the canals to flood each acre of fields to a depth of almost 10 feet during the course of a year—at least twice any sensible requirement for growing rice. As a result, the fields become waterlogged, while the standing waters attract malarial mosquitoes, harbor snails that cause bilharzia, and spread cholera.

  So in 2003, Mali began looking for foreign investors to rehabilitate the system and speed up progress to its 2.5-million-acre target. In Segou town, I went to the headquarters of the Office du Niger. With his president’s portrait behind him, and two cell phones and a national flag on his desk, the then CEO, Kassoum Denon, was every inch the trusted bureaucrat. He told me his first task was to double irrigation to more than 500,000 acres by 2020, “but if private investors can help us go faster, we are open to working with them.” On the roads outside his office, the outcome of his ambition was obvious. Fulani men herding long lines of cattle to pastures on the wetland were fighting for space on the roads with trucks bringing in building materials and taking out rice.

  The effort to “go faster” and speed up economic development follows a familiar pattern of land grab. Some grabbers are local opportunists. Modibo Keita, the boss of Grand Distributeur Cerealier du Mali, a major distributor of cereals, bullied villagers off 18,000 acres of grazing land near the Markala barrage, where he wanted to grow wheat. When they were not encouraged to leave by gifts of soccer balls and jerseys, and promises to build a school, a hospital, and even a windmill, he sent his engineers to dig a canal, dumping the mud on the villagers’ millet fields. The standoff ended in a pitched battle between stick-wielding policemen and villagers armed with farm tools, in which children were beaten and two pregnant women miscarried.

  Most of the big land allocations being made by the Office du Niger have been to foreigners, however. Four of the biggest, covering 385,000 acres, went to developers from Libya, South Africa, China, and the United States. The land is not currently irrigated, but it has cattle pastures and some millet farms and orchards, and is crossed by cattle trails used by Fulani herders. The new occupiers will pay no rent, provided they invest.

  Illovo, the British-owned South African–managed sugar giant, aims to join with government agencies to cultivate some 35,000 acres of sugarcane, irrigated from 210 giant pivots (see chapter 21). Thousands of jobs will be created at its $550 million Markala sugar project, Illovo says. But its contract stipulates that the Office du Niger must first remove the 1,600 people currently occupying the land, and that the project’s water needs must be fully met before anyone else on the distribution canal can receive anything.

  If there is any water left, that is. For sugar is one of the world’s thirstiest crops. The project will take more than 5,000 gallons of water a second from the River Niger during the first phase alone. If an option of cultivating a further 42,000 acres is taken up, the contract says the project can take 9,000 gallons a second. Since sugar requires year-round irrigation, that could amount to 264 billion gallons of water a year. Yet an assessment of environmental and social impacts published by the African Development Fund, another partner in the project, fails to even consider how this abstraction could impact water users downstream.

  A second scheme, close by, is the 50,000-acre N’Sukala sugar farm, in which the Mali government has a 40 percent shareholding, and the remainder is held by the Chinese state-owned China Light Industrial Corporation for Foreign Economic and Technical Cooperation. Contract documents do not specify how much water will be required, but they do say that all the project’s water needs must be met before those of other takers. It is likely to require at least as much water as the first phase of the Markala sugar project.

  The U.S. government’s Millennium Challenge Corporation—which is trying to stimulate economic growth to achieve the UN’s millennium development goals—has taken charge of 40,000 acres along the Canal du Sahel, the largest distributor of water from the Markala barrage. Its $230 million Alatona Project is converting the land to rice cultivation and handing over 12-acre plots to thousands of local cattle herders. To help them become rice farmers, the herders will also receive starter kits, including plows, wagons, fertilizer, and seeds, and the assistance of experts from MCC’s American contractors, the nonprofit development agency ACDI/VOCA, the product of a 1997 merger between Agricultural Cooperative Development International and Volunteers in Overseas Cooperative Assistance. The experts, says the agency, will train them “in the practice of sedentary rice farming, irrigation system management, producer organization and agricultural credit management.”

  U.S. embassy representatives were on hand in June 2010 when the first water flowed to the relocated eight hundred former inhabitants of Beldenadji village, the first of thirty-three villages that, in the words of ACDI/VOCA, are being “targeted to relocate to their new village site.” Will it work? Can American technical advisers turn cattle herders into capitalist rice farmers? Or will the herders, as some locals wearily suggest, end up selling the land to bigger landowners, including perhaps foreign investors, and returning to their cattle and goats? We shall see. But whatever the local benefits of the MCC’s plan, it is another drain on the water resources of the river. The MMC’s project includes drastically deepening the Canal du Sahel. Its current capacity of 26,000 gallons per second will be almost doubled to 50,000 gallons a second.

  The largest and most controversial of the four foreign schemes is a Libyan enterprise slated to cover 250,000 acres. The Malibya project was part of a grand plan by Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi to make his desert nation self-sufficient in food through land deals with nearby countries. He signed a secret deal with Mali’s president Amadou Toumani Toure, under which the Libyans got a fifty-year lease on the land, plus as much water as they need, in return for putting cash from Libya’s sovereign investment fund, the Libya Africa Portfolio Fund for Investment, into the project.

  Details are sketchy, and the whole project was on hold at the time of writing because of the fall of the Gaddafi regime. But if it goes ahead, the Malibya project is likely to grow rice, which will probably be trucked across the Sahara to Libya. There is no published social and environmental impact assessment of the project. But the terms require the land to be handed over to the Libyans free of occupants. It is far from clear how many families will lose their land if the project is completed, but the Office du Niger must find new land for those farmers. Meanwhile, the project could require more water than the other three big foreign projects put together.

  The project was under way before the fall of Gaddafi.
I saw contractors from the Chinese state-owned China Geo-Engineering Corporation constructing a large canal and road for the 25 miles from the river to the project area. They have already bulldozed orchards and fields, and divided villages in two. As I drove down the road, I noticed a family cultivating the thin strip of land between road and canal. They were growing onions to sell in the local village market. Children were watering the precious crop in the desert heat by bringing water in an endless succession of bowls and buckets dipped into the canal. “Malibya took all our millet fields to build the canal,” their leader told me. “They gave us compensation for knocking down our house, but we got nothing for the lost land. So we came here.” My guide from the local branch of Office du Niger frowned. He was in charge of compensation.

  The Malibya canal is a monster. The canal’s intake has the capacity to grab as much as 210 cubic meters a second, potentially more than doubling the amount of water taken from the river for irrigation. The director-general of Malibya, Abdalilah Youssef, boasted in 2008 that his new canal could supply up to 3.2 million acre-feet of water a year to his project.

  Why did Toure sign up for this? Local campaigners say the Mali government had become dependent on Libya and had little choice. Many of its civil servants work in offices built by Libya. International visitors stay at Libyan-built hotels. Also, as Lamine Coulibaly, head of communications for the Mali small farmers’ union, CNOP, told me when we met in one of those hotels: “The government is so obsessed with getting investment for its agriculture that it cannot see when that investment will do more harm than good to its people. It will turn our farmers into agricultural laborers.”