Biofuels and Land Grabbing in Africa - Mokoro

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Burma ‘Myanmar drafts new foreign investment rules’, 19-25 March 2012, and ‘Expert [one Robin Palmer] cautions on “land grab” model’, 27 February – 4 March, are both interesting in the context of political changes in the country. China A variety of headlines include ‘China has no colonial designs on Africa: FM [Foreign Ministry]’, ‘China refutes “land grab” claims in Africa’, ‘China to look to Africa for food: study’. ‘China rejects [German] claims of Africa land buy-ups’, 29 July 2011, ‘China has never had plans to buy land overseas and China has never purchased land in Africa...The claim is completely unfounded. China had set up 10 agricultural demonstration centres in Africa and dispatched nearly 1,000 experts and technical staff to help countries there handle food safety issues which had been warmly welcomed’. India There has been a spate of media coverage of current Indian engagement in Africa, typified by ‘India: 900m Hectares of Arable Land Wasted in Africa’, 19 March 2012, ‘Food Security: Government mulls private purchase of farm land abroad’, 5 March, ‘India has no plans to buy farmland abroad – agriculture min’, 5 March, ‘India joins the rush to grab African farmlands’, 7 January, ‘Is Indian investment in Ethiopia a “land grab?”’, 23 December 2011, ‘Indian agribusiness sets sight on land in east Africa’, 24 August, ‘Low cost, high returns make Africa attractive to India Inc’, 5 April, ‘Farmers eye fertile land in African countries’, 29 January, ‘India Billionaires Go On Buying Spree in “Last Frontier” Africa’, 24 October 2010, and ‘Ethiopia: Fear expressed over India’s massive land grabs in Gambela’, 26 August. ‘This Time for Africa: Africa calling Indian farmers’, 11 August, is interesting, as is ‘Punjab’s African plot’, 11 July, which stresses the advantage of ‘easy access to the lucrative European market’, while ‘The New Landlords’, 26 September 2009 provides a useful analysis of Indian companies farming abroad. ‘Africa, squatting always at the bottom of the food chain, is rapidly being turned into a giant land mall. The irony of a famine-prone continent being used to bail out the world’s food crisis is lost on no one.’ 24
IV: JOURNAL ARTICLES The April 2011 conference on global land grabbing at IDS, Sussex, has certainly accelerated the pace of journal articles. It was co-sponsored by the Journal of Peasant Studies which issued a set of papers on land grabbing on the eve of the conference (38, 2, March 2011) and published another (though with no articles on Africa) on new frontiers of land control (39, 4, September 2011) and will later be publishing a selection on ‘green grabs’. In (39, 1, January 2012) it published two articles on land deals in Ethiopia (by Fouad Makki and Tom Lavers), one on the Chinese global land grabs discourse (by Ima Hofman and Peter Lo), and another on the gender implications of large-scale land deals (by Julia Behrman, Ruth Meinzen-Dick and Agnes Quisumbing). Two further articles on Ethiopia appeared recently, Elias N. Stebek in Mizan Law Review, 5, 2, December 2011 and Jon Abbink in Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 29, 4, October 2011. The article by Borras and Franco, discussed below, has been yet further revised and appeared in the Journal of Agrarian Change, 12, 1, January 2012. In June 2011, the Review of African Political Economy included (38, 128) very useful articles by Roth Hall on land grabbing in Southern Africa and by Saturnino M. Borras, David Fig and Sofia Monsalve Suarez on the infamous ProCana case in Mozambique. In the same month, Nature produced, as a supplement, a collection of short articles on biofuels. In March there appeared a series of articles on global land grabs in Development, 54, 1, while in September 2100 there was an excellent collection on the politics of biofuels, land and agrarian change in the Journal of Peasant Studies, 37, 4, October 2010. In addition, Nidhi Tandon’s article in Gender and Development, 18, 3, November 2010, on the impacts of land grabbing for women farmers – ‘wholesale sell-out’ - is worth drawing attention to, as is Ruth Hall’s work in progress piece on land deals in Southern Africa in ICAS Review Paper Series, 2, February 2011. Scientific journals have carried articles on biofuels, usefully collated in African Agriculture and Nature. Below are highlights from some of the key journal articles cited in my bibliography. In the Journal of Peasant Studies, 37, 2, April 2010, Annelies Zoomers adopts a broader perspective of this complex phenomenon by examining ‘seven processes during the current land grab’: 1. offshore farming – FDI in food production; 2. FDI in non-food agricultural commodities and biofuels; 3. development of protected areas, nature reserves, ecotourism and hideaways; 4. Special Economic Zones (SEZs), large-scale infrastructure works, urban extensions; 5. large-scale tourist complexes; 6. retirement and residential migration; 7. land purchases by migrants in their countries of origin. She argues that because the ‘processes of land grabbing are broader and deeper than assumed, codes of conduct or contractual arrangements will neither help to stop nor turn the tide.’ (430). Moreover, ‘the global land grab is to a large extent the result of the liberalisation of land markets, which became a major policy goal in the course of the 1990s and has contributed to the commoditisation of land and other natural resources.’ (431). Codes of conduct are likely to ‘pave the way for further land commoditisation’ (443) while, she believes, ‘creating a win-win situation is hardly possible.’ (444) 25
Page 1 and 2: APRIL 2012 ANNOTATED GUIDE TO THE B
Page 3 and 4: perspective by Chris Huggins. With
Page 5 and 6: The Gaia Foundation’s Opening Pan
Page 7 and 8: Spire has a useful study of land in
Page 9 and 10: ‘Poor losing out from large land
Page 11 and 12: fine line between supporting the fa
Page 13 and 14: Coalition and the IDS Sussex confer
Page 15 and 16: electronic version. The title was c
Page 17 and 18: deals in Ethiopia bring food self-s
Page 19 and 20: ‘Libyan land grab of Mali’s ric
Page 21 and 22: ‘Sudan Looks to Attract Middle Ea
Page 23: Zambia ‘Can industrialised farmin
Page 27 and 28: the one hand, and small farmers on
Page 29 and 30: question whether [they] are the mos
Page 31 and 32: simplification of media-driven unde
Page 33 and 34: multinationals over marketing.’ (
Page 35 and 36: Third, also in November 2010, Zed B
Page 37 and 38: Fourth and finally, in June 2011 Ze
Page 39 and 40: TV & VIDEO IS LIBERIA LAND GRAB BY
Page 41 and 42: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdqp
Page 43 and 44: THE RUSH FOR AFRICA’S LAND: MALIA
Page 45 and 46: A glossy from Saudi-East African Fo
Page 47 and 48: http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/episod

Biofuels and Land Grabbing in Africa - Mokoro

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