Eleven years ago, this journal published a special issue on ‘The Struggle for Land’ in Africa (volume 27, issue 84, June 2000). Its focus was on struggles over access to land and land rights, probing the relationship between town and country and how land and agricultural strategies are shaped by political power. It also looked at how different struggles over land helped shape the ways in which African states were unevenly incorporated into a world economy shaped by imperialist intervention.
At first glance it seems that the processes of underdevelopment identified in that issue are being repeated in the contemporary period: the World Bank and other international financial institutions remain heavily fixated on promoting individual and privatised land tenure. People's rights to access and the more general rights that rural Africans seek to promote remain central issues of contested politics and class struggle, whilst recurrent food insecurity propels a rationale for liberalised markets to promote entrepreneurial initiative, in the vain hope that this will produce improved well-being. Yet contemporary debate about land in Africa and about land ‘grabbing’ suggests that all these processes have recently intensified. Driven by dispossession, rural protest and urban food riots, the centrality of land and struggles over access to it and how it is to be worked and owned are once again at the fore of political debate and policy-making interventions. The issues of 10 years ago are not simply being repeated, albeit this time on a greater scale. There is now a qualitative difference in the ways in which land and land transformation are shaping Africa's political economy.1
One of the most important distinguishing features of contemporary debate about land in Africa is indeed the scale of recent dispossession. Accuracy in figures to account for what exactly is happening in relation to land transfers and foreign capital intervention is elusive. This is a point made well in this volume by Hall who problematises, among other things, the language used to describe land transfers and the purposes to which the land is eventually used. The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) estimates, for example, that between 15 million and 20 million hectares in developing countries changed hands between 2006 and 2009. And it seems that the assumption underpinning the stance of international financial institutions and transnational companies, not only in the North, but also from the Global South, is that Africa has a lot of land that is simply idle – and what better purpose for available liquidity than to facilitate access to land? Land can be used as a hedge against crisis-ridden international financial markets; it allows for investment in agricultural production, usually of high-value luxury (low nutritious) food or horticultural products for export, or for the production of biofuels at a time when global energy prices have been at an unprecedented high.
The myriad set of reasons for accessing African land link the continent immediately into the vagaries of the international market and provide evidence for accumulation of international capital on the back of African land, livelihoods and resources. Thus one of the most recently contentious land deals has involved South African farmers accessing 172,000 of the 10 million hectares of land that the government of Republic of Congo has identified as ‘vacant’ and available for foreign use (Reuters Africa 2011). In fact, there does not seem to have been any actual transfer in funds – the Government of Congo has not received payment for South African famers accessing land that is characterised as empty and idle. The benefits to Congo will instead, it is claimed, be through the development of important infrastructure and market development in an area twice the size of Switzerland for the growing of maize and soya, poultry and dairy – many products that are not part of the local staple diet and which will be exported for revenue accruing to South African commercial farmers. This is just one of several deals South African farmers are exploring in Africa. Others include projected land deals in Tanzania, Malawi and Uganda, agreements in Mozambique and enquiries from Ghana, Gabon and Guinea to attract South African farmer interest. Are these projected land deals symptomatic of South Africa's sub-imperial reach in the continent, or white farmers fleeing the spectre of ‘land reform’ within South Africa itself? Perhaps it is both.
Boosting biofuel production is one of the drivers for foreign capital to promote land transfers in Africa. Although only about 2% of the world's arable land is used for oil palm, sugarcane, maize or jatropha – about 14 million hectares – it is estimated that by 2030 this figure will have doubled to 4%, and by 2050 to 20%.
The contemporary struggles over land in Africa are distinguishable from previous land sales because they now seem to be at the heart of a capitalist crisis of fuel, food and finance (see the article by Hall in this issue). Food-importing Gulf countries, for example, are able to exercise financial muscle to purchase land in the Greater Horn to ensure that new sources of food are guaranteed. The Gulf's food import bill rose from US$8 billion in 2002 to US$20 billion in 2007, while Egypt is focused on ensuring that its wheat import dependency can be partly offset by land purchases in northern Sudan. These are both the result of bilateral government negotiations and private corporate deals by firms like Egyptian equity finance company Citadel Capital. Citadel Capital already has offices in Juba and Addis Ababa, and its corporate involvement illustrates that the struggle for African land is not driven only by the international financial institutions and United States or European multinational corporations like the UK-based Sun Biofuels or Germany's Acazis AG.
The struggle for access to African land is now central to debate about how the continent might make the most from its resource base, and adds yet another dimension to the current ‘scramble’ on the continent for its metals, minerals and marine resources. This journal has noted recently how the race for the continent's mineral wealth has driven excessive optimism about the prospect for African growth and development, and similarly the World Bank has been keen to argue that corporate interest in African land need not be a negative consequence of economic transformation (Deininger et al. 2011; GRAIN 2010; Share the World's Resources [STWR] 2011). Indeed, the World Bank has assembled a code of conduct for land deals which asserts the need, among other things, to respect existing land rights, the rule of law, environmental sustainability and not to jeopardise food security. Borras, Fig and Monsalve Suárez criticise this code of conduct, and point out that Mozambique had its own six-point policy and strategy on biofuels; while Buur demonstrates that the Mozambican strategy on rehabilitation of the sugar industry was at times implemented in the face of World Bank opposition. GRAIN, Via Campesina and other advocacy groups have stressed that ‘no principle in the world can justify land grabbing’.2 The World Bank's idealistic targets for donor responsibility (who could possibly be against them?) legitimise a process of commodification of African land, whether or not by Western interests. The World Bank position is challenged by the agendas for land and food sovereignty that criticise the idea that business is able to self-regulate and that see contemporary dispossession aggravating food insecurity and promoting famine. The World Bank assumes that market transfers in land are simply a feature of modernisation. The enclosure of land, dispossessing farmers and limiting people's access to it are necessary consequences of business raising productivity, and with it the opportunity for African governments to increase revenue generation.
The articles in this issue question this simplistic treatment of African land deals. To begin with, they expose the role of the African state in this process. States should exist to guarantee the protection of their citizens from foreign expropriation. Instead, for reasons of weakness or venality, or because the political class has direct interests in the outcomes, they often facilitate land deals which dispossess large swathes of their people. The articles here explore the complexity underpinning and also resulting from patterns of dispossession and accumulation. They insist on the need to examine the social relations of production and reproduction in land use and thus the gender and class dynamics linked to dispossession. They ask questions about what is produced by whom, and for what purpose? The articles by Borras, Fig and Monsalve Suárez and by Buur both empirically ground the debate about rural transformation and agrarian change and the consequences of land-leases and commodification in Mozambique. In the case of ProCana, Borras, Fig and Monsalve Suárez illustrate the fate of many prospective land deals in Africa – which is barely to get off the drawing board. (In Tanzania, land ‘investments’ by commercial companies have in theory to go through a process of consultation with local communities which can slow the process considerably, though not where state backing allows consultation to be circumvented.) In the other case (of the sugar industry), Buur shows that some such deals, prefaced by colonial dispossession and reaffirmed as the post-colonial nationalisation of land under ‘socialism’, can lead to the consolidation of quite productive economic sectors.
There are three themes in Africa's political economy around which this journal is keen to advance debate. The first is the persistence of food insecurity and struggles around food sovereignty. Both the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) and the World Food Programme note that while there may now be for the first time fewer than one billion, or 16%, of the population in developing countries who are undernourished, African countries dominate the list of the most insecure and vulnerable. Improved food security in Asia has reduced the figures of those undernourished globally, whilst 17 out of the 22 countries identified by the FAO in 2010 as having protracted food insecurity are in Africa. Many of these states are landlocked in Central Africa, or remain structured by conflict like D.R. Congo, Sudan, Côte d'Ivoire and Zimbabwe. Many are also involved in land deals with external capitalist companies. The Ethiopian government in March 2011 rebuffed criticism about large-scale land-leasing, arguing that it provided access to foreign exchange to reduce poverty and boost food security. Yet it seems that at least one of the rationales for land-lease deals in Gambella in the west of the country has been wrongly to characterise land leased to foreign companies as idle and underutilised. Such deals have thereby intensified poverty as they have led to the threat of expulsion from land which fed peasants and pastoralists. The Ethiopian government has also promoted the villagisation of agriculturalists and restricted access to grazing by local pastoralists. One villager noted, ‘We are pastoralists. How can we stay here for more than three or four months?’, and, summarising the impact of the Gambella resettlement, one commentator said: ‘These are pastoralist communities whose lives depend on grazing lands, water and pasture. They have their own pattern of movement from one place to the other, hence services like water, health and school must follow the movement pattern. Otherwise it will lead to land degradation and resource depletion’ (quoted in IRIN 2011).
Africa's food insecurity is pervasive. It is not restricted to the states the FAO has recently identified, but encroaches on and is shaped by class conflict and gender dynamics throughout the continent. This is the second important dimension related to land and dispossession that is introduced in this volume. It is the class dimension to the impacts that particular strategies for agricultural modernisation generate. The World Bank views positively the international interest in Africa's land and the benefits that may accrue from sales, leases and new cropping patterns – in other words, from the extension of capitalist relations of production in agriculture. But the excitement promoted by the international financial institutions creates yet again false expectations based on limited analysis and weak policy. Donors promote a view of the inevitability of unilinear paths of development. ‘Modernisation’ will take the form of increased urbanisation driven by rural enclosures and dispossession of farmers and the near landless from their land. As agriculture becomes more capital intensive, farmers will be displaced to work either as agricultural labourers or as proletarians in the town. Seldom has this pattern of capitalist development taken place uniformly in Africa. It went furthest in settler colonies like Kenya, Zimbabwe, South Africa, parts of lusophone Africa and in the Maghreb, where agricultural productivity is now among the highest on the continent, though land hunger and poverty have also intensified for some.
The contemporary land debate in Africa has seldom explored the agrarian questions of rural classes in political struggles for freedom from exploitation, emancipation and justice, or whether there is an actual increase in the productive forces in an agricultural transition to capitalism, and whether and to what extent the proposed or tangible rural transformation promotes capital accumulation as a prerequisite for industrialisation (Bernstein 2010, also Mueller 2011). The preoccupation with land has sometimes ensured that the social classes that work it are ignored, and this failure to understand the social relations of rural classes is inevitable if states and agricultural ministries are seduced by the promise of fast money from land-leases on the back of the falsehood that the land is idle and no one farms or grazes on it.
This links closely with a third theme around which we encourage further contributions. Just why and how is land in the contemporary period politically over-determined? Land is often a commodity and it functions as territory. Land is a means of production that is highly contested. In Africa the rhetoric of its abundance needs to be located in relation to people who are available, and healthy and able to work it. And yet we know too that as territory, states covet its control, and use their control over it as a mechanism for asserting sovereignty and the exertion of political and economic power. Land is both a mechanism to enrich and promote an agenda for capital accumulation and also a vehicle for exerting the power of states to shape their authority and legitimacy. The essays in this issue explore the circumstances under which landholder rights are transformed and the ways in which the state manages access to land to exert authority.
That authority can sometimes be exercised to redress past inequalities, which is why in Zimbabwe the term ‘land grabbing’ raises other critical debates. Sam Moyo indicates how the revolution of accelerated seizure of (largely white) commercial farms by war veterans, with the backing of the Mugabe regime, suggests, contrary to most commentary on state land grabbing, greater equality of land distribution, and a positive outcome for agricultural production and improved rural livelihoods. At the same time, Moyo reminds us that large-scale commercial production persists under state control and with high foreign investment. This highlights an under-theorised aspect of land deals, namely that the focus on looking at where there have been deals, what the value of them has been and what the promise of improving productivity may or may not be, seldom raises questions about the processes of agrarian transformation. We need to look more broadly at issues of agrarian reform, the character of accumulation and of dispossession, and the costs and consequences for rural producers. The likelihood is that the current land scramble will create or re-create a set of enclaves – enclosed areas of capital-intensive agricultural production amid high-surplus labour environments. And where processes of capital accumulation create displacement and dispossession there is no guarantee of sequencing or generating work for the landless. Accumulation by dispossession seems to be a continuous feature of Africa's uneven and combined incorporation into the world economy. It is underpinned by the persistence of violence and at best only the partial transformation of peasantries into workers or proletarians divorced from their means of rural existence. Many workers continue to access land which may be of poor quality and size, but that very access has been crucial in sustaining livelihoods at times of crisis. Retaining that access is threatened by the scramble for Africa's land, however shaped by contemporary imperialism and African underdevelopment. Harvey (2003) reminded us that the primitive accumulation of capital is not only a prelude to capitalism; it is a process fed by the continuing accumulation of dispossession of marginalised rural areas.
We cannot end this editorial without reference to the latest imperialist intervention in Africa: in Libya. Under the guise of humanitarianism driven by the United States, Britain and France, United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 is a proxy for deposing an African head of state, albeit a maverick and brutal one. There is little good feeling between Muammar Gadaffi and African leaders or leaders elsewhere: at best he challenges orthodox behaviour in the ‘community of states’, and at worse he is a savage dictator who has subjected Libyans and people in the region and beyond to barbarous and outrageous acts of terror. Yet the United Nations is choosy about which groups struggling for democratisation and political reform it is prepared to support. There was no resolution defending Bahrainis against the royal dynasty, or Shias from the tyranny of Saudi rulers. There may even have been a deal between the Gulf, Saudi Arabia, the United States and the European Union to agree to United Nations Resolution 1973 as long as hegemony is maintained and criticism for the way tyranny continues in the Gulf remains mute.
The United States and the European Union have already began to map their strategy for reconstruction in Tunisia and Egypt. In this issue, Ray Bush describes the situation in Egypt for the revolutionaries in Tahrir Square and beyond; while Marion Dixon highlights the concerns that activists and democrats have with the persistence of imperialism in North Africa. The closeness of Washington to Egypt's military gives a glimpse as to why the transition after the 25 January revolution remains fraught and fragile and why counter-revolution is never far away.