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

by Fred Pearce

  During my visit, Mali’s roads carried hundreds of billboards advertising “Malibya Agriculture: Projet des 100,000 hectares a Macina.” There was relief on the delta a few weeks later when the civil war in Libya cut off the cash and the bulldozers stopped. Malibya may collapse. But at the time of writing that was far from clear. The new administration in Tripoli may decide to revive the project in the interests of feeding its people.

  Irrigation in the Office du Niger produces more than 300,000 tons of rice, 40 percent of national consumption. It provides income for a claimed 280,000 people. None of this should be ignored. But the trouble is that for every winner in the rice fields there are four losers on the delta just downstream. The current water take from all the existing irrigation projects in the Office du Niger is 2.2 million acre-feet a year, or just over 8 percent of the typical total annual flow of the River Niger, according to the Office du Niger’s records. Some years it is a much higher proportion. In the dry season, the irrigators remove up to 70 percent of the flow.

  The engineers at the Markala barrage are in charge of maintaining both river flow downstream to the delta and water diversions into the irrigation canals. They decide how much or how little is diverted. I asked them about the rules. “The official minimum flow through the barrage is forty cubic meters,” said Lansana Keita as we sat watching water running through the sluices. “We do our best to release that much, but irrigation has the priority. Last year, the actual minimum was thirty-eight cubic meters.”

  According to Office du Niger data, since 2006, the barrage has regularly failed to deliver the official minimum discharge between January and May. There simply isn’t enough water now. Yet the system is about to be asked to triple the amount diverted. The four foreign projects alone, if completed, have the potential to take some 5 million acre-feet out of the River Niger each year. So what does that mean for the inner delta? Will this water grab leave the herders, fishers, and farmers there high and dry?

  Leo Zwarts, a hydrologist at the Dutch ministry of public works and water management, reckons that existing irrigation off-takes from the Markala dam have cut the area of the delta that is flooded by an average of 230 square miles, or between 3 and 7 percent. Combined with the effects of drought, and changes in river flow caused by the Selingue hydroelectric dam further upstream, this has killed several formerly flooded forests and at least half of the bourgou fields vital to grazing cattle. There are clear effects on fishing, too. A dramatic pair of graphs produced by Zwarts shows how the amount of fish sold in the market at Mopti goes up and down with the size of the delta inundation the previous year. In recent years, both have been going down. Water levels even correlate well with the breeding population of purple herons back in Europe.

  Engineers are working hard on enlarging the three canals from the barrage to ensure that the land grabs can have the water they need. The Canal du Sahel currently extracts 3,500 cubic feet a second, but the Millennium Challenge Corporation has promised to almost double that to 6,700 cubic feet a second. The smaller Canal Costes-Ingoiba has for many years extracted 460 cubic feet a second. But when I visited, it had recently been upgraded to 1,600 cubic feet a second, in order to supply the new Chinese sugar project, N’Sukala. But the biggest expansion is intended for the Canal du Macina. Till recently it has been removing up to 2,600 cubic feet a second. But the massive new Malibya intake means it can now take up to 7,400 cubic feet a second.

  Thus the plan is to almost triple the maximum amount of water that these three canals can extract from the river, from 6,560 to 15,700 cubic feet a second. That won’t be possible just yet. The short waterway that connects the river to the point where the three canals begin is not big enough. It is currently being dredged to allow it to carry 11,000 cubic feet a second. The ambition is clear. Ever more water will be taken.

  Equally clear are the consequences. If all this goes ahead, perhaps 20 percent of the wetland will dry out. There will be virtually no flow during the dry season. The bourgou grasses and flooded forests could all but disappear. And there would be drastic declines in fisheries across the delta. Mali may soon be awash with rice, but starved of fish.

  Land with year-round sun and water for irrigation is an increasingly valuable commodity round the world. That’s why the Libyans and Chinese and South Africans are in Mali. Water is now the limiting factor for agriculture on roughly a quarter of the world’s fields. Yet nobody that I could find in government in Mali is thinking seriously about water as a limit on its own development. When I interviewed him at his office in Segou, the then head of the Office du Niger, Kassoum Denon, was boasting that the president had just allocated him an extra 250,000 acres—presumably to compensate for the 250,000 acres taken out of his control by the Malibya deal. That means that the land theoretically allocated in the area for irrigation is now 2.7 million acres. Where do they imagine the water will come from?

  Kassoum and his president measure progress in terms of investment made in irrigation works, and in rice production. They see saving the wetland as an environmental luxury that must not divert them from their primary task. But out on the delta, the real economy is about fish and cattle and bourgou and bananas and firewood and millet. “More people will lose than win from most irrigation projects in Mali,” says Jane Madgwick, CEO of Netherlands-based Wetlands International, with whom I traveled across the delta. “These projects will decrease food security in Mali by damaging the livelihoods of those most vulnerable. What they are trying to do at the moment makes no sense because there is simply not enough water.”

  Mali of course needs development. It is changing and so are the wants and needs of its people. Out on the delta, schools and clinics are starting to appear. Every fishing encampment has a TV antenna. There is sporadic cell-phone coverage. I tuned into several local radio stations. In Kakagna, the young village men broke the still wetland night with rap music on their car-battery-powered sound system. The fishing nets are now made of nylon and come from China. The kids wear Obama T-shirts and gear advertising European soccer teams like Chelsea and Barcelona. Motorbikes are starting to replace donkeys as the motive power of choice—though people still ride motorbikes as if they were donkeys, sitting far back on the seat and holding the handlebars like reins.

  These days too, traditional lines of ethnicity and livelihood are blurred. I saw Fulani cattle herders going fishing, Bozo fishers harvesting grain, and Bambara millet farmers herding goats. But the fecundity of the delta remains the basis of their survival in one of the poorest countries on Earth. And the most valuable resource here on the edge of the desert has no dollar signs attached, and does not appear in anyone’s account book. It is a commonly owned but vital resource: the water of the River Niger.

  As we left the heart of the wetland, our boat kept grounding on the bottom of the narrowing waterways. Macaques laughed as we waded into the shallow water to find sufficient depth to resume our journey. The low water was simply a sign of the changing season, but it felt like an omen for the wetland.

  Chapter 26. Badia, Jordan: On the Commons

  Mohammed is a modern Bedouin from the Badia, the arid “outback” of eastern Jordan. He exchanged his camels years ago for a truck and a big motorized water tanker. For much of the year, he lives a sedentary life in his village in the Tafila district in southern Jordan. He keeps his sheep close by, nourished on subsidized feed. But in spring, he phones his friends to discover where the rains have fallen and the grass is lush, then loads his flock into trucks, fills his water tanker, and heads for distant pastures. This part-time nomadism is at the center of a debate that could determine the future of both the Bedouin and the Badia. And could help determine the fate of Mohammed’s fellow pastoralists worldwide.

  A generation ago, the Bedouin and their camels roamed the deserts of the Middle East. It wasn’t a free-for-all. Rights of ownership and access were tightly negotiated and policed, but without fences, formal laws, or national boundar
ies. Mohammed’s forefathers, members of the Anizzah tribe, traveled between the River Jordan and the Euphrates, 600 miles across the desert, and south into Arabia. They lived a largely self-contained, nomadic existence. Today, they are stuck behind the national boundaries of Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. The camels are disappearing. In the northern Badia, fewer than 1 percent of households own camels, once a sign of nobility among the Bedouin. But 99 percent own sheep, which they rear for the cash that their meat, wool, and milk will earn.

  The Bedouin are settling down to a less noble, but more profitable, existence. Most have a family home in a village. Their children go to school and take jobs in business or government. Only a minority of households now depend on livestock for their main income, and many hire others to look after their flocks for much of the year. Even so, a quarter of families in the Badia still migrate hundreds of miles each year to find grazing pastures. Though Mohammed can no longer pass unhindered into neighboring countries, his sheep can. Many Bedouin sell their animals across the border for a season to a fellow tribe member, and then buy them back later.

  The Badia, the backyard of Jordan, remains the country’s main region for livestock production. But the contrast between the old life and the new is often bizarre. Desert tents made of exquisite woolen fabric are patched with old fertilizer bags. Trucks bump across the Badia delivering barrels of water. Shepherds follow their flocks on donkeys before driving into Safawi, a truckstop on the road to Iraq, to hear the latest gossip. Farmers, new settlements, roads, and other infrastructure are all invading the pastures. In the villages, vegetables grow under plastic. The Badia has become a market garden for Amman, and for export.

  The Jordanian government would like more permanent settlements and more farmers. Many claim that people like Mohammed are overgrazing the pastures, destroying the fragile grasslands and creating new desert. But the evidence for permanent ecological decline is scant. Many ecologists say the Badia is alive and well in the hands of the Bedouin, and that it is the development plans that could destroy it. If true, that leaves Mohammed, with his feedlots and his phone calls, as the unlikely ecological hero of the Badia. Jordan’s seminomadic shepherds may just turn out to be the wise men.

  The story of the Badia is being played out across the world. Pastoralists often flourish where they are allowed to do so. The world has hundreds of millions of them, and probably another billion people who combine farming with keeping livestock that graze on common pastures. By some estimates, they occupy 45 percent of the planet’s land surface—approaching four times more than farmers who till the soil.

  The grass may not always be green, but the pastures are certainly productive. The livestock of Mongolia are responsible for a third of that country’s GDP. In Morocco they deliver 25 percent. In Sudan and Senegal, 80 percent of agricultural productivity comes from pastures. The herds of alpaca, vicuna, llama, and guanaco in the Andes provide food, fuel, clothing, and transportation. Cashmere goats are moneymakers in Tibet. Cattle dung is the main fuel and fertilizer in rural India. Yaks feed millions in central Asia. The global market for camel milk is $10 billion. While minding their animals, pastoralists tend trees producing gum arabic that turns up in everything from Coca-Cola to paint; they harvest thousands of tons of medicinal plants and honey by the tanker load; they escort desert tourists and guard wildlife. Oh, and they produce meat—the most popular foodstuff on Earth.

  Pastoralism’s PR is dreadful. Stories of overgrazing and “desertification” spread around the world, often told by farmers who want the pastoralists’ land. Pastoralists are seen as the big villains in the environmentalists’ narrative of the “tragedy of the commons,” in which the American ecologist Garrett Hardin posited that sharing the environment doesn’t work. According to Hardin, when there are common pastures, those with the most animals will make the most profit, while everyone, however many or few animals they have, will share in the suffering as the pasture is overgrazed. The only rational response is therefore to graze as many animals as you can till the pasture turns to dust. Remedy: privatize the lot. The tragedy of the commons is a land grabbers’ charter.

  Nice theory; shame about the facts. First, herders have long traditions of collectively managing their pastures. Whatever it may look like to the outsider, there is no free-for-all. And second, ecologists now realize that reports of desertification are greatly exaggerated. In fact, in most places, cattle and other animals grazing the grasses and browsing the bush are, as a recent report from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature put it, “vital for ecosystem health and productivity.” Far from wrecking the land, pastoralists and their animals have for thousands of years conserved biodiversity, held back the desert, stored carbon, and prevented erosion. Pastoralism is the best way of managing the fickle climate of the dry grasslands of Africa and elsewhere. If climate is going to be less reliable in the future, perhaps even drier, then the skills and knowledge of pastoralists will be of even greater value.

  In places like the Badia, it is the spread of the plow—especially in the hands of outsiders—that is the real threat, both because it obliterates the natural grasslands, and because it hems in cattle herders and shepherds. Pastoralists need to be as flexible as the ecosystem they inhabit. They need to react quickly to changing circumstances, altering the sizes of their herds and migrating to areas where the vegetation is best that year, unencumbered by rules of individual land ownership, and unfettered by state boundaries.

  Ethiopia is just one country where pastoralists are being systematically marginalized—demonized as environmental destroyers while their economic contribution goes largely unrecognized. Pastoralists make up a tenth of Ethiopia’s population and still occupy a third of its land, which they consider to be their ancestral territories. In return, they raise 40 percent of the country’s cattle, 75 percent of its goats, a quarter of its sheep, and all its camels. Leather production in Ethiopia, the country’s second-largest foreign exchange earner, comes largely from pastoral herds on common land. But pastoralists are losing their land fast, to the plow and sometimes to misguided conservation schemes.

  Take the Oromo, the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia, with some 30 million members. Their main pastures east of the capital, Addis Ababa, have come under sustained attack. In 1961, the government fenced off 185,000 acres to create the Awash National Park. Then a Dutch company took over 37,000 acres to create the Metehara sugar estate. Big ranches moved in next, taking a further 84,000 acres. “The community, the original owners of the land, were not consulted when the land was illegally taken from them,” says Eyasu Elias of the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research and Wageningen University in the Netherlands. “Instead they are charged huge fees for their cattle to be allowed access to the ranches during extended drought.”

  Most recently, in 2008, the Ethiopian government gave an Indian company, Chadha Agro, 54,000 acres to grow yet more sugar in Oromia, in return for Indian investment in a sugar refinery. The new sugar estate “took some of the best dry-season grazing areas along the Awash River,” says Elias. After armed protests from the Oromo, the Ethiopian government nationalized the farm and brought in soldiers to protect it.

  Altogether, the Oromo have lost 60 percent of their land. As a result, they have been overgrazing some of their remaining pastures. And they have fought over land with the Afar people, who live on the other side of the Awash park. In despair, some are giving up their animals and switching to farming, charcoal burning, and smuggling. Others are heading for Addis, which is less than three hours away by bus. But not all. As I write this, Reuters is reporting that the Ethiopian police have arrested twenty-nine people “for plotting to carry out bomb attacks.” All allegedly “had links with the Oromo Liberation Front, a secessionist group Addis Ababa blacklisted as terrorists last year.”

  From Afghanistan to West Africa, the revenge of the pastoralists looks like it is becoming an important political issue
. Go west from Oromia to Niger and Mali, and there are plenty of Tuareg tribesmen, who have been progressively deprived of their pastures by farmers. Some have joined Al Qaeda, and begun kidnapping and murdering foreigners across the Sahel from Mauritania to Burkina Faso. In Mali, tourist trips to the fabled Dogon highlands effectively ended in 2011 due to kidnappings. Aid agencies I met in Mopti told me they had recently abandoned driving to Tombouctou because of armed carjackings. We can pay a heavy price for ignoring pastoralists.

  To discuss all this, I flew to Kenya and met Liz Alden Wily in the Village Market. Despite its name, the Village Market is a giant shopping mall in northern Nairobi—the new Kenya masquerading as the old. The only Maasai people you will see here are selling trinkets in the shops. We drank coffee for hours as she discussed Africa, customary land rights, and the fate of pastoralists. Alden Wily is a political economist and land reform expert in demand around the world. And she tells a story not often heard, about some of the world’s most marginalized and persecuted people. About people that even old Africa hands don’t often see—until perhaps they hit the headlines wielding a Kalashnikov or a rocket launcher.

  Pastoralists, along with forest dwellers, occupy many of the planet’s surviving commons. Those who pursue their traditional lives mostly spend their time far from towns or even roads, ignoring national laws and even national boundaries. Most African politicians I have met were brought up in such places. But most of them have the zeal of newcomers to city life. They believe that the people of the commons are historical leftovers, wild people who need to be tamed and settled, brought within national laws and norms. For their good and for ours. They should shop in the Village Market, not a real village market.

  Alden Wily calls this dangerous nonsense.