Talk on the issue of land grabbing for biofuel production in Africa and whether or not it can be sustainable. Organised by the University of Sheffield African Affairs Network. Speakers: Lionel Cliffe Emeritus Professor – University of Leeds Founding editor of the Review of African Political Economy. 'Distinguished Africanist Award' from UK African Studies Association 2002 Dr Elisa Greco, Research Associate , Institute for Development Policy and Management University of Manchester

1. Biofuels and Land Grabbing in
Africa
African Affairs
Network
7th March

2. • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XurxqSFp
K3s
• http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/vide
o/2011/nov/09/biofuel-tanzania-video

3. Dr Elisa Greco

4. Land grabs
General overview
Referring to the talk organised by the
African Affairs Network - Sheffield
7.3.2013
Dr Elisa Greco
Researcher, School of Environment and
Development, University of Manchester
4

5. What is a land grab?
Rapid and large surge of
international investment and
speculation
in land
mostly in poor, non industrial countries
Investment: creation of large
farms, plantations, monocultures
Speculation: absentee landlords kicking out
people and waiting to resell the land, or the
stocks attached to it, to third parties
5

6. Whose land? And why bother?
1. Expropriation and eviction of local people
2. Deforestation: forest lands converted to
monocultures
3. Intensification: marginal or extensively used
lands converted to monocultures
Most concerning cases:
1. From food production to fuel production
2. From production consumed locally –
nationally to production for export

7. The «war on data»
• more than 60 countries targeted
• hundreds of investment groups and a
few governments involved
World Bank (2011) : 56 million hectares
leased or sold 2008-9
ILC (2011) : 80 m hectares since 2001
Land Matrix (2012) : 227 million hectares
Clear trend

8. Why – and why now?
Triple crisis : feed – food – fuel
1. biofuels
2. the 2007/8 food price hike
3. financial crisis: speculation on food –
land - agriculture
Investments in land aim at securing:
- Food
- Biofuel
- Land in itself
- Speculation 8

9. Change in use for food and feed versus
use for biofuel, grains (2005-2012)

10. What is new?
1. capital goes into previously disregarded
places
• risky countries : political instability, corruption
• poorly serviced regions : no infrastructures, no easy
access to markets
• environmentally marginal areas
2. capital does not come from ex-colonial
powers only
BRICS -Brazil, Russia, India,China, South Africa
+ Middle Eastern governments
3. financial capital and speculation 10

11. What is old?
Enclosures
Earliest historical example: British enclosures (1500 - 1700).
Colonialism: continued enclosure - land alienation.
Natives are dispossessed.
Get the land and you’ll control the people = workers
Dispossessing people of land is an act of class power.
Land dispossession
as primitive accumulation
What happens to the dispossessed?
11

12. They are forced to work for somebody else.
But:
disconnect between dispossession and
proletarianisation
In many poor areas, wage labour is not
immediately available:
• people become destitute
• they work for increasingly lower wages
floating population + reserve army of
labour

13. «Land acquisitions»…
1. there is plenty of idle land there!
“vacant land” argument
1. capital injection = development
i) infrastructures
ii) employment
iii) more market access
2. poor countries do not have the necessary
capital to develop rural areas: therefore
Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is a solution13

14. …or land grabbing
1. No land is vacant: eviction and dispossession.
Easier when people haven’t formal land titles
2. This is business and speculation:
i) No investment : speculation and financialisation
ii) No employment : highly mechanized / importing
labour
iii) No infrastructural development
iv) Endangering local food systems : non food crops
/ food export
3. National investors : lose out to international
capital or become «partners»

15. Why Africa ?
• It’s cheap : labor and land are cheap
• It’s easy
Law: citizens are «tenants» of the State ;
¾ of land in Africa is not titled
«weak governance»
Global Land Project (2010) : 62 m hectares,
27 countries
Oakland Institute (2011) says 50 m ha in 20
countries. 15

16. Just a problem of governance?
1. trasparency
2. participation: Free, Prior and
Informed Consent (FPIC)
16

17. Is land titling a possible solution?
Formal land titling often works to the
advantage of stronger social groups
• class bias : middle classes
• gender bias : male owners
• agrarian bias: less evident land uses
rural > agrarian
- pastoral uses
- multiple uses
- seasonal uses
17

18. Option 1- International governance
1. Responsible Agricultural
Investments Principles(RAI)
Code of Conduct
- World Bank
- UNCTAD
- IFAD and FAO
For whom?
Private investors
18

19. Option 2 - International law
2. Voluntary Guidelines on the
Responsible Governance of Tenure of
Land, Fisheries and Forests in the
Context of National Food Security
- transnational agrarian movements and NGOs
- Committee on Food Security (CFS) – inside
FAO
For whom?
Governments
especially of target countries

20. Both RAI and the Guidelines are :
non- binding
voluntary
= no sanctions against offenders
UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to
Food :
- “trying to discipline the land deals”
- “providing policymakers with a
checklist to destroy the global
peasantry responsibly”

21. Option 3 – simply the economy,
stupid!
Private companies abandon projects of
plantations and large estates:
shift to outgrower schemes
and
contract farming

22. contract farming
- vertical integration of small farmers into the
global food regime
- Less risk of failure, less politics
Corporate Social Responsibility:
Unilever, Nestlé, Kraft – large agribusiness which
are vertically integrated
Not so appealing for the big five of agribusiness:
ADM, Cargill, Bunge
Biofuel companies
22

23. Chose what, and with whom!
• Rights and Resources Initiative: convince
private investors that land grabbing is risky.
Contract farming as positive solution for all.
• Oxfam: convince the WB to freeze land deals.
Call to freeze International Financial
Corporation’s (IFC)support to «bad investors».
• La Via Campesina : fight against investors on
the ground, get them to go away and give up,
and refuse to become contract farmers by
building concrete alternatives to the corporate
food sytem : short chain,low input farming

24. Activism can help existing resistance!
Or: thinking outside the three options box
• Land grab : threat of dispossession of small
rural producers.
• Pushing people out of the land :
dispossession, involuntary resettlement
• Dispossession and proletarianisation :
disappearance of small rural producers
( «death of the peasantry»)
• Many different people are fighting back
• 2012: increasing repression against land
activists
24

25. Global food sovereignty
In poor countries: regain local control over resources and
production. 1) agribusiness power 2) Green Revolutions 3) cheap
food imports (including food aid and dumping)
In rich countries:
1) agrarian reform and repopulation of the countryside
2) reconstruction of shorter commodity chains and local food
systems
Market supply and demand do not meet real food
needs: they meet corporate needs.
Agriculture must stop:
- working for the rich and producing stuffed and
starved : obesity epidemics and chronic hunger both
caused by the same global food system
- consuming more energy than it produces 25

26. Less obvious actions
1. Support and solidarity to local land activists
- 2012 has been the year of increasing violence
against land activists
- Cambodia, Laos
• ILC has set up an emergency fund for them
2. Close monitoring of post- investment plans
What happens when a land grab is stopped?
Sometime the land is effectively returned to
previous occupiers, but stays in the hands of
state agencies

27. reflections on the land grabs in Tanzania
1. Land dispossession and environmental
enclosures
2. A land grab ante litteram
3. Land grabs
- 1/ongoing
- 2/unclear
- 3/ gone..but!
4. Land dispossession, class and the role of the
State

28. Environmental enclosures in Tanzania
Source: Tanzania GIS Community

29. environmental enclosures
Roderick Neumann 1998; Dan Brockington 2005
forced evictions from protected areas
• Restricted or prohibited: agriculture, hunting,
charcoal making, wood collection, cattle-
keeping
13.787 km2 - totally inaccessible
37.428 km2 – partially restricted
out of total 94.509 km2
about 39% of the country

30. Privatisation of
state farms:
Kapunga
a land grab
ante litteram

31. evidence of land concentration and class formation
2005 elections : collective land claims and politics
local large farmers + urban professionals investing in
agriculture
Vs.
precarious alliance: middle producers allied with small
rural producers, wage labourers, landless and too poor
to farm
• All lose out : privatised estates sold to large investors.
• International capital involved: IFC – Carlyle Group
• Land grabs build on this pre-existing class hegemony

32. Land grabs in Tanzania
FELISA
4,250
hectares
Oil palm
AGRISOL
Downsized:
320,000
hectares
now 35,000
KITO
MONDO
ex Sekab
2,000
hectares
Aim: 200,000
Ex - Korea
Ex – Sekab
Now
government
RUBADA
Rufiji District

33. • Long-term leasehold contracts : legal transfer
(= expropriation) from Village Land to Public
Land/General Land
• Once the land is put under lease, redistribution to
local people is unlikely to happen
• One investor may leave; the lease is under control of
the Ministry of Lands
• The Tanzania Investment Centre signals it as
available to new investors
• Speculation
• Role of the state
• Clear trend of dispossession

34. Opposition parties and the land grab
• Since general elections 2005: opposition
parties increasingly vocal on the land grab
• Ministry of Land and ex- UN Habitat Executive
Anna Tibaijuka announces land ceiling to be
imposed to foreign land acquistion
• Ceiling: 3,000 hectares

35. Basic resources - check these out!
• Transnational Institute group on Agrarian
Justice:
http://www.tni.org/work-area/agrarian-justice
Analysis and campaigns on land deals
• Genetic Resources Action International -
GRAIN
http://farmlandgrab.org/
Daily and weekly news on land deals
• International Land Coalition ILC
http://landportal.info/landmatrix
Large database on land deals

36. Professor Lionel Cliffe

37. LAND GRABBING FOR BIOFUEL &
OTHER PRODUCTS
What is behind it?
What is ahead for Africa?

38. WHAT BIOFUELS?
• Food crops: sugar, maize and other grain –
– But high cost production in money and energy
• Jatropha, supposed to be OK on marginal land
– but production may often use water
• Palm oil, by afr the highest yields but may be
at expense of forest or farmland

39. BIOFUELS: the Scale
• 50 million hectares worldwide acquired for
biofuels in recent years
• EU’s Renewable Energy Directive target of 25%
requires another 40 m. ha.
• In Tanzania two allocations of 200,000+ ha.,
several in range of 20 – 80,000

40. Range of other Land Grabs
• Long history: land grabs central to colonialism
• Land grabs by local elites e.g. Kenya
• Wide variety of Contemporary grabs:
- Vast plantations
- Irrigation schemes
- Blocs of farms and gated villages
- Displaced S African and Zimbabwe white farmers
- Food and industrial crops, for export and local

41. SYSTEMIC DRIVERS OF GRABS
Exponential growth since 2005
Not simply response to new levels of food and
fuel demands
Global shifts in AGRICULTURAL COMMODITY
MARKETS
Dynamic and crisis of FINANCIAL SYSTEMS

42. THE NEW LOGIC:
Control of the Planet’s Land
• Speculative motives for commodity and land
investment require CONTROL of the ultimate
resource.
• Is a compromise possible based on instituting
Secure PROPERTY Rights - for investors and
locals?
• Or is dispossession via an African ENCLOSURE
PORCESS INEVITABLE?