politics | having stolen africa's precious stones and metal, now they have come for their farm land....

Riz Khan - Land Grab or Investment - 19 Nov 09 - Part 1

Some of the countries in Africa may be among the world's pporest but their lush farmlands and natural resources are the envy of more prosperous nations, mostly in Western Europe and the Middle east.

They say African farmland represents a new economic opportunity but are new investments in African resources simply a land grab at the expense of the people living there?

Riz Khan - Land Grab or Investment - 19 Nov 09 - Part 2

Will Africa’s farmland become a “resource curse”?

In his Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis teases out the mechanisms of famine in British-ruled 19th century India. When a drought would wipe out a grain harvest in one region of India, the price of grain would spike. People all over the subcontinent would suddenly find themselves priced out of grain markets—even in places where grain harvests went well. Grain would then flow out of India to the “mother country,” where people could afford it, and literally millions of Indians would starve. That’s one way relatively minor natural disasters become vast human catastrophes.
Devastatingly, Davis details how the British Empire (wittingly or not) used these eminently avoidable famines to consolidate its grip over the Indian Raj.

I got to thinking of Davis’ dark masterpiece while reading Andrew Rice’s excellent, nuanced report, “Is There Such a Thing as Agro-Imperialism?,” in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine.
Rice follows the gusher of money flowing from cash-rich, arable-land-poor countries like Saudi Arabia to buy up or lease farmland in Africa.
One thing that strikes me is the disconnect in what we hear about the quality of African farmland from rich investors, and what we hear about it from rich philanthropists.

Gates Foundation rhetoric makes Africa sound like a basket case, land-wise: references to “depleted” or “degraded” soils.
We hear relatively little about the continent’s vast agricultural assets—which wealthy investors are now busily snapping up. Andrew Rice visits Africa’s “billion-acre Guinea Savannah zone,” which he describes as “a crescent-shaped swath that runs east across Africa all the way to Ethiopia, and southward to Congo and Angola. “The World Bank and the FAO have declared the tract “one of the earth’s last large reserves of underused land,” Rice reports.
It evidently won’t be for long. A stampede of investors, ranging from governments like Saudi Arabia’s to U.S. hedge funds, are moving in. And many of the region’s pro-Westen, “modernizing” governments are inviting them. Ethiopia, for example, is planning to lease out 3.5 million acres of prime farmland to foreign interests for 50 cents an acre, Rice reports.MORE

La Vida Locavore says

"Is there such a thing as agro-imperialism?" The article correctly looks at the huge farm land grab going on these days, and they are right on to point out Middle Eastern countries buying up land in Africa. But what about the other type of agro-imperialism? The type where we look to poor people in other countries as "markets" for our farm inputs (seeds, fertilizer, pesticides), so they can produce commodity crops to sell for cheap to our corporations.