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Secretive, one-sided land deals displace Africans and threaten the environmentIn order to fuel their recent explosive growth, China has looked to Africa for minerals and energy. Now, a crippling drought has affected 12.75 million acres of China's 35 million acres of wheat fields, according to a February 8 United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization special alert, leading Dr. Randolph Kent of the Humanitarian Futures Programme to ask "whether falling agricultural output in China will have a knock-on effect in Africa."
But, says former senior official at the African Development Bank Sanou Mbaye in The Guardian , "Africa will not put up with a colonialist China." Yet he also wonders, "Might Chinese manufacturers then look to Africa as a base for production, using the facilities they have built and the hordes of workers they have been steadily exporting there?"
These are good questions. But it's not just China that is looking at the vast expanses of land in Africa that remains undeveloped or underdeveloped, because as Abou Sow, the executive director of Mali's Office du Niger, notes, "Even if you gave the population there the land, they do not have the means to develop it, nor does the state. His public agency is responsible for three million acres along the Niger River.
Abou "listed countries whose governments or private sectors have already made investments or expressed interest," according to Neil MacFarquhar in the New York Times . "China and South Africa in sugar cane; Libya and Saudi Arabia in rice; and Canada, Belgium, France, South Korea, India, the Netherlands and multinational organizations like the West African Development Bank."
But something is very amiss, and on a very large scale, according to a new report by Lorenzo Cotula, Senior Researcher in Law and Sustainable Development at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), "Land deals in Africa: What is in the contracts?"
An IIED press release contends that "rushed, secretive and one-sided deals...fail to deliver real benefits or create new social and environmental problems."
"In many of the contracts reviewed, local people appear to have been marginalised in decision-making -- it is the government that usually calls the shots in contracting and land allocation procedures," writes Cotula. "So even in the better negotiated contracts, the gap between legality (whereby the government may formally own the land and freely allocate it to investors) and legitimacy (whereby local people feel the land they have used for generations is theirs) exposes local groups to the risk of dispossession and investors to that of contestation."
"People have been pushed off land in countries like Ethiopia, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia and Zambia," said MacFarquhar. "It is not even uncommon for investors to arrive on land that was supposedly empty."
The IIED study found Liberian contracts with extended terms up to 50 years. A 50-year Mali contract was found to be renewable for another term for a total of 100 years. Contracts with Sudan and Senegal were renewable for a total of 99 years.
"Such long durations mean that, where local people lose their land, they will be separated from it for several generations," Cotula writes.
In his 2002 book Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11 , New York Times columnist Tom Friedman wrote, "There is a message in this bottle for America: For too many years we've treated the Arab world as just a big dumb gas station, and as long as the top leader kept the oil flowing, or was nice to Israel, we didn't really care what was happening to the women and children out back -- where bad governance, rising unemployment, and a soaring birthrate were killing the Arab future."
China and other countries signing unfair deals with Africa should take a moment to read the message in the bottle.
