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

by Fred Pearce

Most places have commons. They vary in size from English village greens to the world’s largest rain forests. But only in Africa is most of the land in some form of common ownership. About four-fifths of the continent’s 6 billion acres is not formally owned by anyone other than the state. There is no legal title, but rural inhabitants regard it as theirs. As Alden Wily began one of her trenchant papers on the topic: “Whether recognized by statutory law or not, African rural communities consider themselves to be the traditional owners of not just their house plots and farms, but also the forests, pastures and other naturally collective resources which fall within their domains.”

  That’s the rub. For what we are talking about is the land that the World Bank calls “the world’s last great reserve of underused land.” These are the supposedly empty plains of Africa that governments want to give to land grabbers in the cause of economic development. Again as I write, Mozambique has declared 15 million acres of this “empty” land open to foreign investors on fifty-year leases at an annual rent of around $9 an acre, and forty fellow Portuguese-speaking Brazilian soy farmers were about to go over and take a look.

  But to equate uncultivated with unused or unowned is a bad mistake, says Alden Wily. “In fact, virtually every inch of the continent is owned under customary norms and used in accordance with custom, for shifting cultivation, grazing, hunting, wood and non-wood extraction or as spare land for expanding farming when needed.” Common lands are also where domesticated livestock and wildlife have coexisted for thousands of years. They are the conservationists’ “Pleistocene landscapes.”

  Africa is the last great stronghold of the commons, though the customary rights they entail often exist in parallel with, or in defiance of, formal law. European colonists never accepted the commons, though they mostly left the pastoralists to their own devices. Post-independence African states either expunged the customary rights or overrode them by nationalizing the common pastures and forests in the name of socialism. Socialism is out of favor today. So the great sell-off has begun—in the name of economic development. Parcel it all out and all will be well.

  Alden Wily wants neither state control nor privatization. Instead she wants a renaissance for customary land tenure, by enshrining it in national laws. That is no panacea. As we saw in Ghana, tribal chiefs can be as venal as government ministers when a foreigner comes calling with a checkbook. But without some change to vest land rights in the community, she believes that most of the commons are doomed. “Half a billion Africans will remain tenants of a state that can perfectly legally sell or lease their farms and commons from beneath their feet.”

  From Gambella to Mozambique, and South Sudan to Liberia, the great pastures and forests today are the only surviving places on the planet that “provide the scale of contiguous and intact estates sought by large-scale investors.” That is why they are under attack as never before. The current land rush, she says, “is a tipping point in the penetration of capital into agrarian societies.” We could be witnessing the beginning of the final enclosure of the world’s unfenced lands, and with it the “final extinction of customary land rights.”

  It need not happen. In the rich world, some indigenous cultures in remote regions have beaten back the tide and successfully claimed their right to hold and manage large areas of land according to their own ways—whether the Inuit of Canada, the Sami of Scandinavia, the Aborigines of Australia, or the Native Americans on their reservations. Alden Wily will, she says, “not rest until the four billion hectares of customary land are legally entrenched in the hands of their rightful owners, the world’s two billion rural poor.”

  Brave words. For hundreds of millions of people across the planet—from Omot on his waterbuck skin in Gambella, to Mohammed with his water tanker in the Jordanian Badia—the results of her battle will define their lives, and those of future generations. There are few more important issues for the twenty-first century than the fate of the world’s commons.

  Chapter 27. London, England: Feeding the World

  The specter of Malthusian famines has returned to haunt the world. The British government’s chief scientist, John Beddington, forecasts a “perfect storm”—a combination of climate change, rising world population, disintegrating ecosystems, and land and water shortages. The storm will trigger a global food crisis that could see hundreds of millions starve. “We are at a unique moment in history,” he says. “We have twenty years to deliver 40 percent more food . . . this is really urgent.”

  Who will deliver that food? The answer, according to Beddington, is agribusiness. “Small scale is not going to feed the world.” And he is part of a chorus of Western experts arguing that it is only by handing over the world’s farmland to the land grabbers that the world can be fed. The World Bank’s former research director, Paul Collier, author of influential books like The Bottom Billion and The Plundered Planet, says that “peasant farming is not well suited to innovation and investment” and that the “most realistic way” of bringing down world food prices “is to replicate the Brazilian model of large, technologically sophisticated agro-companies.” There are, he says, “still many areas of the world—including large swathes of Africa—that have good land that could be used far more productively if it were properly managed by large companies.”

  Investors are keen. The perfect storm is a perfect opportunity for land grabbers, says Richard Ferguson, head of global agriculture at the investment bank Renaissance Capital, and a cheerleader for mechanized, globalized, agricultural giantism. “The latest great industrialization process is under way. Farms will get much bigger and more industrial,” he says. “A free market with transparent pricing, enforceable property rights, and liberalized trade would solve just about every agricultural problem under the sun.” Ferguson predicts that Africa and its food future will be transformed by “industrial-sized farms of a million hectares.”

  Let’s pick all this apart, starting with Beddington’s planetary threats. They are real, but need to be seen in perspective. The actual outcomes of climate change are far from certain. It could cut farm yields in some parts of Africa by 50 percent by mid-century, and trigger monsoon failures in south Asia. But other regions, particularly the northern hemisphere outside the tropics, could see increased yields. Much will also depend on how cleverly farmers respond to changing weather by switching crops, and how good science is at developing more heat- and drought-tolerant varieties. World population will probably stabilize by mid-century at 9 billion or so people. That is still 2 billion more than today, and sub-Saharan Africa’s population may double. But the head counts in many countries outside Africa will probably be contracting by then, including most of Europe and much of Asia, including China.

  Water shortages are worsening. Farms use most of our water, especially in the drier places. Many rivers tapped for irrigation are running dry. Cities are also demanding ever more. Water grabs could trigger water wars. But the potential for using water more efficiently, and for recycling urban wastewater for irrigation, is immense. Ecosystems, especially forests, underpin much agriculture by maintaining climate, river flows, soils, and coastlines, and by providing more esoteric services such as pollinating insects. But the impact of their local degradation is hard to predict.

  Finally, good new land fit for the plow is running short in some countries. But we won’t “run out” of land. Only 12 percent of the world’s land is currently used for cultivation, much of it at very low yields. Most agree we need to protect forests and wetlands from encroachment. But a critical question is how much of our unfenced and commonly owned grasslands and grazing pastures we want to, or can safely, give up. That, of course, has huge ramifications for the land grab debate, as we saw in the previous chapter. But there are choices. So what choices should we make? Do we need to hand over those commons, along with millions of cultivated smallholdings, to agribusiness in order to feed the world? Or is that part of the mythology behind the land grab?

&n
bsp; For modernists such as Collier and Beddington, feeding a world of 9 billion or more requires an urgent revolution in the way the world grows its food. That revolution must harness Western markets and technology, especially in Africa. Efficiency is the watchword—in production and trade.

  Take trade first. “Food security is best served by fair and fully functioning markets,” Beddington wrote in a report, The Future of Food and Farming, published by his government think tank in early 2011. The 2008 food price spike happened because of restrictions placed on exports by food producers. So “greater powers need to be given to international institutions to prevent trade restrictions at times of crisis.” In an aside, he agreed that “empirical evidence” does not allow him to assess the importance of market speculators in pushing up prices during those dangerous months. But he absolves them anyway, by concluding that “improving the functioning of commodity markets can reduce the element of volatility that does not reflect underlying market fundamentals.”

  As we saw in chapter 2, not many people in the financial markets seem to agree with the professor’s sanguine assessment of how more and freer international trade will stabilize prices and feed the world. Several said so in their responses to Beddington’s report. “In reality, open markets do not necessarily deliver either affordability or balance to the market for food,” said Nick Tapp, the head of agribusiness at Bidwells, the London-based international property consultants. “The rapid price movements of early 2011 suggest an altogether more volatile market going forwards, as market pricing responds increasingly to the daily signals and sentiments flashed across newswires.” Hitching the food business more tightly to global financial markets will, as it did in 2008 and 2011, pump up price fluctuations and decrease food security. “Periods of shortage and related hunger are endemic to a laissez-faire approach to markets,” he added.

  If the modernists’ enthusiasm for unfettered markets seems questionable, how about their assessment of the relative merits of peasants and agribusiness? Do we need to turn independent peasant farmers into agricultural laborers as fast as we can? Many experts strongly disagree with the bleak assessment of Collier and others about peasant agriculture’s potential. “There is a cultural prejudice against peasants,” says Olivier De Schutter, UN special rapporteur on the right to food. “They are seen as backward, not worthy partners. These ideas are self-fulfilling.” One of Beddington’s coauthors told me that the chief scientist’s planned revolution stands a good chance of making the poor poorer. Big farms and big investment risk exacerbating the trends that bring hunger amidst plenty. We could have both more food and more famines.

  And that view seems to be shared by Bob Watson, a former chief scientist at the World Bank. He must have had some interesting conversations with Collier. In 2008, Watson chaired an international study of the future of the world’s farming. The 2,500-page report of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) reached rather different conclusions from Collier and Beddington. It proposed “strengthening food security” by “making the small-scale farming sector profitable,” rather than by dismantling it. Far from embracing unfettered global markets, Watson warned that “opening national agricultural markets to international competition . . . can undermine the agricultural sector, with long-term negative effects for poverty, food security and the environment.” Watson warned that extending the power of markets and agribusiness “would mean the earth’s haves and have-nots splitting further apart.”

  Some will say Beddington and Collier are cold-eyed realists, while Watson and De Schutter are befuddled victims of political correctness. Collier says the latter are guilty of a “retreat into romanticism.” But the prescription depends on the diagnosis.

  Beddington and Collier see feeding the world as, in large measure, a matter of growing more food. And to do that they want to unleash commercial agriculture. To fill the grain hoppers, and improve Cargill’s turnover. So they support plowing up African pastures and grabbing the smallholdings of millions of peasant farmers to create large, more “efficient” farms. Watson, on the other hand, sees the biggest problems as poverty, lack of development in poor rural communities, and the uneven distribution of food. After all, he points out, we produce enough food now to feed the world, but still 1 billion people go hungry. He says the agribusiness prescription could kill the patient.

  Half the world’s undernourished people, and three-quarters of Africa’s undernourished children, live on small farms. Watson says the best way to feed them is to help them feed themselves and their communities, by “empowering the small farmer.” Beddington wants to take away their land in order “to make agriculture more efficient.” But Watson asks: more efficient for whom? Are we most interested in the efficient use of capital or labor? In the efficient delivery of food to markets or to the poor? In healthy children or healthy bottom lines? If these different efficiencies have different requirements, then Beddington’s efficient farms may not solve the problem as he hopes.

  There is no doubting that much peasant farming is in a mess, and nowhere more than in Africa. Per-capita food production in Africa has only recently returned to the levels of the early 1960s—whereas it has doubled in Asia and risen by 60 percent in Latin America. But while a repeat of the dramatic success of Brazil in transforming the cerrado into a high-tech prairie might suit investors keen to profit from Africa’s newfound reputation as the “last frontier” for agribusiness, it may not suit Africans so well. As Raj Patel of the University of California at Berkeley put it for Foreign Policy, “big agriculture tends to work most lucratively with large-scale plantations and operations to which small farmers are little more than an impediment.”

  There is another blueprint. It rejects Beddington’s notions of “efficiency,” Collier’s Brazilian aspiration, and Ferguson’s dreams of giantism. It holds that the idea of uprooting half a billion peasants who grow 90 percent of the continent’s food is a global capitalist version of the disastrous socialist experiments attempted by Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. According to this blueprint, mixed farming systems operated by most of the world’s smallholders have at least as much productive potential as big farms with their monocultures. As Patel said, “if you’re keen to make the world’s poorest people better off, it’s smarter to invest in their farms . . . than to send them packing to the cities.”

  Simple measures of tons of grain per acre may suggest big is best. But small farmers bring many other things to the kitchen table. Official statistics often ignore the fact that they use every corner of their plots, planting kitchen gardens where mechanized farms have vehicle yards. They gather fruits from the hedgerows. They have chickens running in the yard. They feed animals on farm waste and apply the animals’ manure to their fields. They raise fish in their flooded paddies. Big farmers may have access to more capital. But ultimately their purpose is to generate returns for that capital—to please their investors, rather than to feed families.

  “There can be a green revolution in Africa,” said Gordon Conway, former president of the Rockefeller Foundation, launching his Montpellier Panel report on African agriculture in 2010. “But it will be driven by smallholders—the 33 million smallholders in Africa with less than two hectares. The people from whom that continent gets 90 percent of its food. It is their productivity we have to improve.”

  Dig into the literature and you find that this view is widely held among many experts on world agriculture, even those working for organizations more associated with gung-ho agri-capitalism. The World Bank’s 2008 World Development Report concluded that investment in peasant farming was among the most efficient and effective ways of raising people out of poverty. Its 2009 study on “awakening Africa’s sleeping giant” is widely claimed to be a manifesto for big farming and land grabs. But even a cursory reading suggests not. The report notes, for instance, that “despite recent efforts, mainly by foreign investors, to launch large-scale
agribusiness ventures in Africa, there is little evidence that the large-scale farming model is either necessary or even particularly promising for Africa.”

  Asia’s green revolution is often cited as a triumph for agribusiness. But a 2011 study by Diana Hunt and Michael Lipton at London’s Chatham House, Green Revolutions for sub-Saharan Africa?, says the real Asian lesson for Africa is that “employment-intensive, small-scale farming [is] both more efficient and more pro-poor.” Vietnam, a country with a booming economy and fast-rising population, has gone from running a regular food deficit to being a major food exporter by investing in smallholder farming.

  Big farms hollow out communities, while investment in small farms sustains and improves them, says a 2007 study by the Washington, D.C.-based International Food Policy Research Institute. “When small farm households spend their incomes, they tend to spend them on locally produced goods and services, thereby stimulating the rural non-farm economy and creating additional jobs,” says IFPRI’s Peter Hazell. Small farms also nurture local agricultural know-how, and networks of marketing and other expertise. Such “social capital” underpins wider development, but could never emerge from turning smallholders into laborers for corporate farms. “Unless key policymakers adopt a more assertive agenda towards small-farm agriculture, there is a growing risk that rural poverty will rise dramatically,” says Hazell.

  Pretending that big commercial farming can, or even wants to, feed the world, is dangerous, according to a 2010 report from the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi. “It is not big efficient farms on high potential lands but rather 1 billion small family farms, tending rice paddies or cultivating corn and beans while raising a few chicken and pigs, a herd of goats or a cow or two . . . who feed most of the world’s poor people today,” write Susan MacMillan and Carlos Seré in Back to the Future. Small farms are good for the planet, too. They “make up the biggest and most environmentally sustainable agricultural system in the world.” The world needs more of them, since “this same group is likely to play the biggest role in global food security over the next several decades . . . Governments and researchers are mistaken to continue looking to high-potential lands and single commodity farming systems as the answer to world hunger.” Hooray to that.