Introduction
African states are finally getting what they have so long sought – foreign investment – but in forms and on terms that are exposing fractures and division among African societies, within communities, and between citizens and states. In Southern Africa, as elsewhere on the continent and in the developing world, mounting pressures towards the commercialisation of land have in recent years been accelerated, transformed and overtaken by the widespread leasing or sale of public lands to foreign companies and governments for food production, for tourism developments, for biofuel production, and for other commercial agricultural uses. These pressures are part of a global phenomenon that dates to the oil price spikes of the mid-2000s, accelerated rapidly in the wake of the ‘food price crisis’ of 2007–2008, and gathered further momentum with the crisis in world financial markets in 2008 and the onset of global recession into 2009.
The outcomes in Southern Africa are not without historical precedent in this region of settler colonialism and anti-colonial struggle. At the same time, they are distinctive, as new global ‘drivers’ are refracted through the particularity of current configurations of land relations and political economies of countries in the region. What forms, then, does what one might term ‘new-wave land grabbing’ take in Southern Africa?
The emerging picture globally and in Africa
‘Land grabbing’ or ‘the farms race’ in Africa has been described as a new neo-colonial push by foreign companies and governments to annex key natural resources. Critics charge that ‘rich countries are buying poor countries’ soil fertility, water and sun to ship food and fuel back home, in a kind of neo-colonial dynamic' (Leahy 2009). The vast majority of these investments are thought to be for production of food crops for foreign markets, but about one-third are understood to be for plantations of crops for biofuels (World Bank 2010). The deals typically involve the leasing or other concessions (rather than sale) of large areas of land usually for production for foreign markets, by foreign companies and governments concerned with hedging against the risks of food price increases on global markets (Cotula and Vermeulen 2009a).
China, India, South Korea and the Gulf States are among those at the forefront of this agricultural expansion, as they seek to produce food overseas for their growing populations. Most deals are private investments (GRAIN 2009b). Among these are European and North American banks and financial investors seeking alternatives to volatile international financial markets. In 2009, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) estimated that deals on 15–20 million ha of farmland in developing countries were under negotiation between 2006 and 2009 (von Braun and Meinzen-Dick 2009). The International Institute for Environment and Development's (IIED) quantitative inventory of five African countries found just under 2.5 million ha allocated in such transnational deals between 2006 and 2009 (Cotula et al. 2009), suggesting that IFPRI's global estimate may have under-represented the scale of such acquisitions.
The World Bank's euphemistically titled report, Rising Global Interest in Farmland, suggests the scale is bigger; 45 million ha was under negotiation in 2009 alone, and 70% of it was in Africa (World Bank 2010). Its report focused on low productivity (and yield gaps), and defines much of Sub-Saharan Africa as being under-utilised, where rain-fed cultivation could be massively intensified. If properly regulated, it argues, land deals could facilitate the transfer of land rights from less to more efficient producers – the logic underlying its market-based land and agricultural reforms over the past two decades. Because low population densities and low mobility prevail, agricultural intensification will require larger farm sizes – a conclusion derived from aggregate data (World Bank 2010, p. 64). This position deviates from the bank's long-professed adherence to an ‘inverse size–productivity relationship’ favouring small farms (Deininger and Binswanger 1992, Binswanger et al. 1995). While still, in general, advocating a small farm growth path as the best means of poverty reduction, the Bank's economists now appear sceptical as to whether this is feasible in many African contexts.
Mounting evidence shows that leases or concessions have been granted on communal land that is already claimed, occupied and used by local people (Cotula et al. 2009, Sulle and Nelson 2009; World Bank 2010). Even though land laws to secure such rights are in place in most countries in the region, these deals potentially threaten the livelihoods of farming households and the prospects for the continent's 80 million smallholder farms, which contribute 30% to Africa's gross domestic product and 40% to its exports and sustain many of its poorest citizens. They may also precipitate new, or aggravate existing, contestations over land and related natural resources (especially water) when private investors, sanctioned by national governments and other authorities, divert these natural resources for their own commercial uses (Duvane 2010, Matondi 2010).
The stakes to define the terms of debate are high, and influential institutions are generating and referring to their own (highly variable) data sets. This paper is a response to the apparent inadequacy of these major reports to capture dynamics at more local level. It is also motivated by an unease at the media-driven understandings of ‘land grabbing’ that have enormously over-simplified what appear to be variegated and complex processes of agrarian change, some of which reflect historical continuity, while others may involve qualitative redirections in processes of agrarian change or the intensification or speeding up of such processes – but may also involve countervailing trends. It aims to build on the work of Borras and Franco (2010a), who, with similar motives to my own, developed a schematic characterisation of the range of directions of change in both land use and land-based social relations, many of which have been lumped under the catch-all phrase ‘land grabs’. Theirs was a bold initiative to map these varied trajectories at a global level, and to illustrate them with reference to processes underway in Asia, Africa and Latin America. My paper is a response from a Southern African perspective: a first attempt to propose an initial typology of these trends as they manifest in the region, based on available information, desk-based research and interviews with some key informants (some of which is summarised in Appendix A).
Thinking schematically about changes in land use and social relations
The notion of land grabbing makes claims about the direction, pace and extent of change – that these are, respectively, unidirectional (towards intensive food and fuel production), rapid and massive. Borras and Franco (2010a) identify four directions of land-use change associated with recent large transnational land deals (Figure 1). Types A and B represent the displacement of food production for consumption and domestic exchange by either commodified food production or biofuel production (for the domestic market or for export). Types C and D represent an intensification of land uses, often from forest or marginal (‘idle’) lands to cultivation of food or biofuel crops, respectively.
Within each quadrant, they argue, a great diversity of change is occurring, including changes which run counter-current to ‘land grabs’ and involve the subdivision of estate agriculture into smallholder plots, such as redistributive land reforms in Brazil and under Zimbabwe's fast-track land reform programme. Yet these are outliers. Within the ambit of what is now being called ‘land grabbing’, the most objectionable changes in land use are those related to, within Type A, the conversion of food production for consumption or domestic sale to production of food for export (especially in countries with chronically food insecure populations); within Type B, conversion of food production to production of biofuels for export; within Type C, indigenous forest clearance for food production for export; and within Type D, indigenous forest clearance for production of biofuels for export (Borras and Franco 2010a, pp. 13–19). The contested ‘vacant land’, ‘idle land’ and ‘wasteland’ discourses – which characterise acquired land as unoccupied and unused, or at least under-utilised – suggest that new investments have not displaced local land uses and users (Hall 2010). It appears then that Type A deals may be justified by presenting them as Type C, while Type B deals are similarly characterised as Type D (Borras and Franco 2010a, Cotula et al. 2009, Hall 2010).
Changes in land use, though, may or may not involve changes in social relations of production, and it is largely these that underpin protest and contestation over land deals, rather than changes in land use per se. Recognising this, Borras and Franco (2010a, pp. 25–28) further distinguish between four directions of change in land-based social relations (Figure 2). Type A is redistribution of land property relations, through a ‘zero-sum’ reform process that alters the relative shares of landed and landless (or near-landless) classes in society; Type B is distribution of land to the landless for free or for marginal cost, through a ‘positive-sum’ reform in which landed classes are fully compensated, as in market-based reforms; Type C is non-(re)distribution where land policies formalise inequality, restore ownership but not control, or privatise public lands; and Type D is (re)concentration which may involve elite or corporate capture of resources or ‘perverse’ redistribution as in titling schemes, lopsided joint ventures and land leases.
These two schematic frameworks present a basis for distinguishing between the currents of agrarian change underway in Southern Africa, and I return to them below.
Drivers and trends in Southern Africa
No composite data set exists on major transnational land-based investments across the large and diverse region of Southern Africa. Where information about such acquisitions has come into the public realm, it is frequently partial, the result of local resistance and investigative journalism. Indeed, the secretive nature of such deals (the identities of the investors, the terms of the deals and the distribution of rents from them) is a feature of ‘land grabbing’ globally, partly because of the contested authority of states to allocate lands to which citizens might have a prior competing claim (Alden Wily 2010). For these reasons, the analysis presented here is necessarily patchy. This section focuses on five themes (both sectoral and geographic) to illustrate the spectrum of ‘land grabbing’ in the region.
Biofuels everywhere (but not enough to eat)
The rapid expansion of land acquisitions to produce biofuels was what initially drew public attention to the rush for Southern Africa's farmland. This was driven in part by companies seeking to meet the European Union's demand for renewable fuel stocks to meet its target of 10% by 2020, despite the evident cost to food production (Oxfam 2008). This interest converged with shifts in energy policy among Southern African countries which recognised the possibility of meeting future energy needs from their own natural resources, limiting dependence on future oil imports and limiting exposure to the price volatility these necessarily involve (Sulle and Nelson 2009). This has taken the form of the expanding production across the region of jatropha curcas, the Latin American shrub from whose seeds oil can be extracted and refined to produce biodiesel, as well as sugar for ethanol production and other agrofuels.
The widespread uptake of jatropha and sugarcane (for ethanol) has been seen across the region, in Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Angola, Madagascar and South Africa. Both crops are grown by smallholders supplying processing companies, as well as in larger estate forms of agriculture. These biofuels therefore involve very different social relations of production, and different trajectories of change. The conflict between ‘food and fuel’ in the region is exemplified in the failed Daewoo Logistics deal for 1.3 million ha in Madagascar (over half the arable land of the country) for maize for food and palm oil for biofuel; this was among the factors that, in early 2009, contributed to the overthrow of the government. Daewoo's purpose was to secure future fuel stocks and boost Korea's food security by providing half of its maize imports from Madagascar alone (Ramiaramanana 2010). China also reportedly seeks 2.8 million ha in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for biofuels, and 2.8 million ha in Zambia.
Mozambique, though, has without doubt been the frontrunner in embracing biofuels since its 2004 election when the ruling Frelimo party urged all farmers to plant jatropha on all marginal and unused lands to ensure that Mozambique could become an ‘oil exporting country’ (Schut et al. 2010). Despite poor performance, and evidence that the ‘miracle crop’ could not withstand harsh agro-ecological conditions, investors initiated processing facilities for the production of biodiesel from jatropha, established large-scale sites for cultivation, and also entered into contract farming arrangements (Bijman et al. 2010). Following the rapid spread of jatropha, and its uneven performance, was the conversion of existing sugarcane production systems to ethanol, and the expansion of sugarcane cultivation to increase supply to processors (Schut et al. 2010). After at least four large land deals for jatropha were concluded, protest from civil society organisations and a one-year moratorium on new biofuel deals, the government adopted a biofuels policy in 2009 which aims to promote the industry while limiting negative outcomes. It also cancelled one contract in which the investor had not abided by stipulated conditions, and revived negotiations with 17 investors for new land allocations: two-thirds for biodiesel crops like jatropha and one-third for bio-ethanol crops like sugar (Schut et al. 2010, p. 5153). None of the implemented projects has thus far met its promised targets for job creation and most have focused on supplying external markets rather than the domestic market (Schut et al. 2010, p. 5165).
In the past two years oil price volatility has called into question the economic viability of large agrofuel initiatives. Crude prices spiked in 2007/08, but later declined to US$70 a barrel in 2009/10, prompting scepticism about the profitability of jatropha, sugar and other feedstock for biofuels in view of oil price trends. The initial rush for biofuels waned substantially as oil prices dipped, and also as the costs of producing, refining and transporting them became more apparent (Cotula et al. 2008). Yet political reasons for pursuing the biofuels route may explain the continued insistence of some governments in the region on biofuels as part of their national energy strategies, exemplified in what Matondi (2010) terms the ‘wacky fuel-economics’ of Zimbabwe.
Meanwhile, the development of a small-scale processing industry to enable local farmers to generate fuel from their own feedstock – to provide for the energy needs of rural households – has been slow to emerge. The nationalist arguments in favour of harnessing natural resources for energy generation to contribute to meeting national energy demand appear to have given way to a reality of corporate refining for external markets. Overall, the direction of biofuels in Mozambique, as elsewhere, appears to have been largely diverted away from the vision of smallholder production and refining.
Extractive industries: mining and forestry
Extractive industries represent a second dimension of land deals in Southern Africa. These might be understood as non-sustainable forms of resource extraction that are repatriated as profits to corporations (or governments) outside the locality. Foremost among the cases of land acquisitions for natural resource extraction are the mining and forestry sectors. While new mining investments are planned or underway in most countries in the region, this form is exemplified in the case of Angola, where local communities have been forcefully dispossessed to make way for mining, as well as oil and natural gas exploitation, and where such processes are highly militarised, being enforced through state military or private paramilitary forces employed by mining corporations (Chanda 2010). Acquisitions in the past few years have included those for aluminium mining in Bathucarta; natural gas projects by international consortia in Soyo, close to the border with Congo, to deliver 2 million barrels per day by 2013; silver mining in Dondo by the Portuguese; copper and gold mining by the Chinese in Damba; and diamond mining in Lunda, among others (Chanda 2010).
Elsewhere, too, recent years have seen the continuation and intensification of contestations between mining companies, national governments granting prospecting rights or mining permits, local and traditional authorities that act as gate-keepers and deal-makers, and communities on whose land such developments are envisaged. These trends are evident in the growth of uranium mining in Malawi and copper expansion in Zambia (Machina 2010). They are also evident in South Africa, where major new platinum mines are being established in the northern regions of Limpopo province by mining houses including Anglo Platinum. While purchase of white-owned farms for new mines is impeded by pending land restitution claims, many of the new mining developments are on communal land in the ex-Bantustans of Lebowa, Gazankulu and Venda. These have provoked violent clashes with police, acting on orders from political leaders, and led local communities to form solidarity groups with other mining-affected communities under the rubric of the ‘Jubilee South Africa’ campaign and with legal support from human rights organisations (Dolo 2010). In early 2010, seven villages were involved in violent altercations with police brought in by local councillors who had allegedly been paid by mining companies to facilitate their forced removal from their land (Jubilee Mokopane Platinum Committee 2010).
Forestry deals present similar opportunities for resource extraction, given the substantial indigenous forest cover in some countries of the region. Several deals include plans for new (exotic) plantations and processing mills for pulp and paper. In her aptly named Chinese Takeaway! report on forestry in Mozambique's Zambézia province, McKenzie (2006, p. vi) found that
Asian timber buyers, local business people and members of the Government of Mozambique and their forest services are colluding to strip precious tropical hardwoods from these slowgrowing, semi-arid and dry tropical forests at a rate that could see the resource exhausted in 5–10 years.
Duvane (2010) confirms that most indigenous forest in Zambézia has now been concessioned while large-scale logging is underway in three other provinces. Here, the private interests of public officials in the forestry, wildlife and agriculture sectors constitute a ‘timber mafia’, who use their authority in government to allocate annual logging licences and manipulate regulations while extracting rents and outright bribes, and in some instances even invest in logging companies themselves, with the apparent (at least tacit) support of national party leaders. A follow-up study entitled Tristezas Tropicais (tropical sadness) demonstrated that, while China might be the destination of the takeaway, those doing the taking away were mainly of other nationalities – Indian, Korean, South African, Taiwanese – as well as several multinational companies (McKenzie 2009). More generally, widespread perceptions of the role of ‘the Chinese in Africa’ may originate at least in part in the many non-Chinese actors who recognise and capitalise on growing demand in China, and seek to supply it. Distinguishing between grabbers, investors and destination markets remains a conceptual and empirical challenge in this area of research.
Sulle (2010) has also shown how forest clearance forms part of non-forestry land deals, including, in the case of Tanzania, large allocations of forested land for biofuel cultivation. At Kilwa, for example, a 34,000-ha allocation of indigenous forest prompted a ‘biofuels’ investor to install the largest sawmill in the region, harvesting up to 800,000 m3 of timber (more than the total harvested in the whole of southern Tanzania at the previous peak of logging in 2003), all in pursuit of a ‘pilot’ jatropha plantation – though obviously the change in land use was irreversible. The value of indigenous forest resources in this and other cases has been grossly under-calculated, offering a cheap route to extraction of forest products: compensation of US$9.50/ha was distributed on a ratio of 60:40 to the district and to the village (the legal manager, under customary tenure) (Sulle 2010).
Reversals and state capitalism in Zimbabwe
The term ‘land grabs’ has been widely invoked to describe the illegal occupation of Zimbabwe's commercial farms (largely) by poor people since 2000. In this context, the term denoted a redistributive process which, for all its violence, messiness and (initial) illegality, altered the pre-existing agrarian structure in ways that sought to unravel and reverse the impacts of colonial land grabbing by white settlers and their governments (Cousins 2010). Scoones et al. (2010) have shown how, at least in Masvingo province, empirical evidence on land uses by the ‘grabbers’ challenges the pervasive and media-driven myths about unproductive land uses, low investment and resource capture by political elites. Household survey data show that beneficiaries were mostly local, poor households, who have invested in their new land and derive substantial livelihood benefits. These patterns may well be locality-specific, yet more recent data also confirms that, elsewhere in the country, the productivity of land uses post-fast track reform has recovered somewhat.
Now it appears that this land grabbing may be giving way to countervailing trends. Land grabbing ‘from below’ such as was seen during the 2000s may have dismantled a system of private property rights, but in the absence of political and legal momentum behind granting tenure rights to land occupiers, this renders what Scoones et al. (2010) characterise as the ‘new smallholders’ vulnerable to second-wave elite (and state-sponsored) land grabs. Such a reversal appears underway in the case of Chisumbanje in Manicaland, and extending to the Sabie River basin, where a deal has been concluded for 40,000 ha of sugarcane (Kawadza 2010) through a public–private partnership involving former South African rogue businessman Billy Rautenbach and ZANU-PF – the party with which he is so closely associated that the European Union and United States include him among the individuals listed for targeted sanctions (Sibanda 2010). The Chisumbanje deal is to take the form of a partnership with the parastatal Agriculture and Rural Development Authority (ARDA) and to include an ethanol plant at an expected cost of US$600 million. A second case, in Nuanetsi at Mwenezi, also in Masvingo province, follows a similar model of a major domestic investor partnering with a state institution. At Chisumbanje, while the government considered what compensation would be required – and officials made assurances that existing occupiers would be allowed to harvest their standing crops prior to removal – traditional leaders were allowed to determine whose names would be put forward to become suppliers to the new ethanol industry, and therefore (instead of being displaced) be accommodated as small cane outgrowers alongside the central estate (Kawadza 2010).
These developments have produced discursive reversals: now, the ‘settlers’ being threatened with removal are those black Zimbabweans who occupied farms in the early 2000s and have spent some years (re)building their livelihoods on them. The ‘grabbers’ may yet become the ‘grabbees’. Allegedly, some of the settlers being targeted and threatened with removal are those in constituencies of the opposition Tsvangirai faction of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC-T). Foreign companies are involved as contractors for engineering and other technical services, but the investors themselves are domestic. Matondi (2011) suggests that some of the domestic investors involved in such deals are former white commercial farmers finding new forms of investment in agriculture, now with the blessing of the state. Emerging outcomes include narrow accumulation by party-connected political elites.
The next Great Trek? South Africans head north
South Africa's (still almost exclusively) white commercial farmers have over the past two decades experienced dramatic changes in their political and economic situation. A combination of pressures has put these farmers – once a primary political constituency of the National Party apartheid government – into new difficulties, both objective and subjective. These pressures have been well documented and arise from agricultural deregulation; the rapid liberalisation of trade in agricultural products; and sharp increases in the prices of key farming inputs, particularly diesel and electricity (Bernstein 1996, Vink and Hall 2010). Further pressures include the introduction of basic labour rights and minimum wages for farm workers, the extension of tenure rights to farm workers and their families (Atkinson 2007) and historical land claims to large areas of commercial farmland by former black occupiers, owners and tenants (Walker et al. 2010). One response by white farmers has been, rather than diversifying or quitting farming, to move out of South Africa, elsewhere on the continent. While for the past decade at least small numbers of South African farmers have moved to Zambia, Mozambique, Nigeria and several other countries (Hammar 2010, Sjaastad 2010), this trend seems to be undergoing both a quantitative and a qualitative shift.
As of 2010, Agri South Africa (AgriSA), the dominant commercial farmers' association, was engaged in discussions with 22 African governments concerning land acquisitions in their countries. Chief negotiator and deputy president of AgriSA, Theo de Jager, has led numerous delegations of farmers to meet with governments offering land. As of mid-2010, among the proposed deals were allocations of land for sugarcane production in Mozambique and Sudan's Nile Delta, and horticultural expansion in Egypt and Libya (while Libya was itself concluding its own deals in Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi and even the Ukraine) (Groenewald 2009, Shacinda 2010). The major constraint on further deals is the absence of bilateral investment treaties to secure investors' assets and the right to repatriate profits (Cotula and Vermeulen 2009b, Southern African Confederation of Agricultural Unions (SACAU) 2010).
Whereas in the past they migrated largely individually or in small groups, now their migration is being more centrally organised and coordinated, enabling large concessions for newly formed consortia of farmers and agribusinesses. South African agribusinesses are extending their operations into neighbouring countries, and in some cases further afield. South African investor interests increasingly extend beyond ‘agriculture’ and ‘farmers’ to other economic sectors; the South African agribusinesses partner with construction, engineering and financial institutions to expand into grain storage, road construction, and financial services (Donnelly 2009, Maluleke 2009). Less visible is the degree to which financial speculation and investment are driving South African capital into African farmland. As part of a growing trend, two asset management firms established a R3 billion investment fund, offering ‘access to stable, long-term returns within the context of continuing development in the agricultural sector’ (Reuters 2010).
The most significant recent deal offering African farmland to South African farmers was in the Congo (Brazzaville). In October 2009 the government of the Congo signed an agreement with AgriSA in which it allocated to a consortium of South African commercial farmers an initial area of 200,000 ha of former state farms, with the option of expanding to 10 million ha – an area twice the size of Switzerland. The country imports 95% of its food requirements, and its agriculture minister claimed that the deal would stimulate agriculture as part of its New Plan of Action (South Africa Press Agency (SAPA) 2009). Although initially mooted as a 99-year lease, it appears that a renewable 30-year lease was signed, in terms of which no rent is payable, agricultural inputs may be imported tariff-free, the right to export produce (planned to include vegetables and poultry) is unlimited, and these rights are heritable. A Congolese human rights organisation alleges that communities in the affected areas, which hold customary land rights, were not adequately consulted,1 though official sources claim that the land was vacant and unused, while also promising that local people will benefit from employment (SAPA 2009).
Also expanding are South African agribusiness and processing industries, prime among them the oligopolistic sugar industry. South Africa's two sugar giants, Illovo and Tongaat-Hulett, are both involved in regional expansion of their estates and outgrower schemes for sugarcane (much of which is for ethanol production) in Mozambique, Zambia and Tanzania among others (Richardson 2010). Both are subject to extensive land claims in South Africa. A major target for Illovo in particular is Malawi, at Nchalo Sugar in the south and Dwangwa Sugar in the north. Their consultants and business partners are moving with them. The South African engineering firm PGBI has been commissioned by the International Finance Corporation (under the World Bank Group) to produce a guide for investors in the sugar industry, including information on how to address land, social, and environmental issues, and has itself also obtained contracts for building sugar mills and ethanol plants in a number of African countries.2
Although land acquisitions elsewhere in the region have been spearheaded by organised agriculture, the South African government has extended its support as part of its strategy to assure food (and fuel) supplies while pursuing regional integration. As of late 2009, bilateral government talks were underway with Angola, DRC, Sudan, Uganda and Zambia. As Minister of Agriculture Tina Joemat-Pettersson assured the AgriSA congress, ‘If we can't find opportunities for white South African farmers in this country, we must do it elsewhere in the continent’; this she characterised as ‘an equal relationship between people of the African continent’ (cited in Hoffstatter 2009).
South African expansion in the region is not only for farming (or mining) but also for tourism, taking the form of coastal developments (including some illegal fencing) in Mozambique and Tanzania in particular, and game farms, safari and hunting operations in several other countries through the region (Piliso 2010). Enclosures for conservation and recreation have their own long history in this region, involving large areas and provoking (sometimes violent) contestations over resource rights.
Where is the food?
If ‘land grabbing’ is a response to volatility in global food markets, as is widely claimed (by IFPRI among others), then what is striking in Southern Africa is the prevalence of land acquisitions for purposes other than food production. While modest numbers of South African and Zimbabwean farmers have invested in horticulture and livestock production in Zambia, Mozambique and elsewhere, large food production deals seem scarce indeed.
The major food commodity being promoted by foreign investors in the region is rice, and rice expansion has taken several different forms, as the examples of Madagascar and Mozambique illustrate. Ironically, in Madagascar the Rajoelina government that came into power on the back of the 2009 coup prompted by the failed Daewoo biofuels deal has since acceded to two alternative deals, one with Daewoo and a second with another South Korean company, Varun. The deals, not yet implemented, involve the companies contracting with 13 farmer associations for rice cropping in the livestock producing areas of the west, hence displacing food production for local markets, and in the east, which is largely covered by indigenous rainforest and protected areas (Ramiaramanana 2010). In total, this would affect about half of the area initially foreseen in the stalled Daewoo deal, this time achieving similar objectives through different institutional forms, now through contract farming for the most part rather than estates.
A second example of rice expansion is the case of the 20,000 ha Mauritian deal in Mozambique, which appeared an intraregional deal, but turned out to involve the onward transfer by the Mauritians of the land rights they acquired for rice cultivation to a producer of hybrid rice eager to extend its client base – Singaporean biotechnology company Vitagrain (GRAIN 2009a). This partnership includes joint research and development on hybrids, capital investment for production by Vitagrain, and securing of concessions in the region by the government of Mauritius through its various diplomatic missions. The Mauritians and Singaporeans (and in turn their Australian financial backers) are not alone in seeing Mozambique as a prime location for seed development. Chinese and Vietnamese farmer settlement in parts of Mozambique – Tete and Zambézia – may also focus on testing hybrid rice varieties (GRAIN 2009a). All the deals envisage large-scale and capital-intensive production.
Mapping the dimensions of land grabbing
Making sense of the diversity of deals described above requires addressing what I suggest are the 12 main dimensions of land acquisitions (Table 1). These include the size, duration and source of the investments; the commodities and the business models through which they are implemented; the tenure arrangements and resources accessed; the terms of leases and compensation; the degree of displacement; labour regimes and employment creation; and changes in settlement and infrastructure. The purpose here is to not to make any claims to what is typical, but rather to illustrate the variety of land deals (i.e. major transnational land acquisitions) in the region.
| Dimension | Range of experiences documented |
|---|---|
| Size of investment | Focus of studies is on deals over 1000 ha; a huge variation ranging up to deals of 500,000 ha and plans of deals up to 10 million ha |
| Duration of investment | Short- to medium-term, but mostly long-term, as in 15–25-year (often renewable) leases, and up to 50- or 99-year leases |
| Source of investment | Domestic private investors, foreign private investors (both individuals and large companies), parastatals, foreign sovereign wealth funds |
| Commodity | Jatropha, sugar, rice, other foods, forestry, various minerals, also tourism experiences |
| Business model | Large commercial estates, nucleus estates with outgrowers, outgrowers and processor, smallholder model |
| Tenure arrangements | Purchase (rare), lease, concession, illegal enclosure |
| Resources accessed | Land, water, minerals, marine resources, wildlife, forestry (and labour) |
| Lease/compensation payments | Vary according to value, the method of calculation, timing (once-off or repeat, e.g. annual payments) and distribution to local communities; traditional leaders; and local, district, provincial and national government |
| Degrees of displacement | ‘Vacant’ and ‘unused’ land, claimed land, grazing land, cultivated lands, lands used for natural resource harvesting |
| Labour regimes | Locally hired labour, imported labour, self-employment as outgrower |
| Settlement | Changes in settlement (e.g. villagisation), de-agrarianisation |
| Infrastructure | Investment in infrastructure for production, processing, transport (roads, ports), and social infrastructure (schools, clinics) |
Applying Borras and Franco's framework to the emerging empirical data on Southern Africa draws attention to the predominance of land use changes of Types B and D over Types A and C (i.e. towards biofuels rather than towards food). A gap in the framework, though, and a significant trend in the region, is the conversion of land use from food to non-food (other than biofuels), as in the displacement of local food production and other land uses by mining, tourism and forestry deals. This suggests the need for a third column, ‘to Non-food’ with Type E (Food to non-food) and Type F (Non-food to non-food).
This schema also helps to illuminate how these trends are unravelling the modest gains made in the region towards securing and redistributing rights to land (Figure 4). Land reforms are still unfolding alongside concentration – which is reversing such reforms (as in Zimbabwe, Type A) and/or affecting different populations (as in South Africa). Dynamics of land grabbing are less pronounced in South Africa, where land grabbing took place decades and even centuries ago, and where private title extends over most of the territory. The typology, then, is useful in connecting processes of ‘land grabbing’ underway in the region (Type D) with faltering initiatives to redistribute land (Type B), initiatives which are increasingly giving way to narrow forms of de-racialisation without wider changes in farm sizes, land uses, production technologies or employment, and without altering unequal class relations (Type C).Figure 3.
However, the scheme proposed by Borras and Franco (2010a) does not address the institutional forms, or business models, through which these social relations are perpetuated or transformed, and in what direction. The focus on ‘land relations’ is limiting, and needs to be expanded to ‘agrarian class relations’.
Building on these observations, and elaborating on one dimension of land deals in Table 1, I would like to propose a five-fold typology of the business models through which land grabbing is taking place in Southern Africa, in the hope that this will serve as a basis for future investigation, criticism and elaboration. First, an extraction model involves the stripping of resources without longer-term investment or production, and is by definition an unsustainable business model. Second is an enclave model involving outright takeover of land and related resources (perhaps displacing others) and the construction of related infrastructure, partly to provide inputs to and process output of a commercial enterprise, but also to provide the social and physical infrastructure required for commercial operations. These are what Ferguson (2006) terms ‘enclave economies’ that are poorly integrated into their surrounding society and economy. Third is a colonist model involving the introduction of commercial operators who take over a block or area, as has been seen in parts of Mozambique and Zambia, for instance, with the introduction of white commercial farmers from Zimbabwe and South Africa (Hammar 2010, Sjaastad 2010). Fourth is an outgrower model, involving the development of processing facilities (usually with a core commercially operated estate), through which small producers are incorporated into commercial value chains. Fifth is a model of commercialisation in situ, in which small producers and other land users are incorporated into new or transformed commercial value chains in the absence of any core estate or sometimes even any processing facility – in which case the form of commercialisation is primary commodity production with resonances to past modes of accumulation.
These may be seen as points along a spectrum representing the degree to which land-based social relations are altered through exclusion of local users and others with claims to the natural resource base. Although the discourses of ‘land grabbing’ suggest extraction and enclaves (the first and second models above) – for instance the rumours of the Chinese bringing in all their input supplies including (prison) labour, even though little evidence is available to corroborate such a view – much of what we do know is underway in the region is along the lines of an intensification of existing trends of colonisation programmes for the settlement of commercial farmers (the third model), now on a grander scale, and the massive expansion of outgrower schemes and the commercialisation in situ of smallholder agriculture (the fourth and fifth models). The latter have been driven by the demands of national governments for food security, but also of agroprocessors for commodity supplies and feedstock.
Reflecting on these trends: what fresh insights?
Attracting foreign investment is not a new priority for governments in Southern Africa; indeed the orientations of state investment policy demonstrate more continuity than change. This is a demand-side boom for which governments – and citizens – in the region were poorly prepared. Understandings of ‘land grabbing’ in Southern Africa may now need to be moderated, taking into account the degree of attrition involved between proposed deals and concluded deals; concluded deals and actual investment; actual investment and displacement of local people and their land uses. Simultaneously, and paradoxically, media-driven depictions of the rush for farmland for food and biofuels by the Chinese and Koreans with the backing of their governments and by Western corporations may be missing the mark, as equally profound but less visible transformations gather pace.
First, the current investment rush is riding a tide of state-sponsored grabbing of resources from citizens. If Africa and Southern Africa in particular are the hottest targets for land grabbing, why is this the case? The World Bank (2009, 2010) argues that this is a ‘vast under-utilised reserve’ and the answer to the forecast global food deficits. This serves more as prescription than explanation. An alternative and more compelling explanation is that it is rendered cheap because the property rights of those with uses and claims on the land are not recognised either in law or in practice. The lessor is frequently not the holder of land rights, having failed legally to extinguish pre-existing customary land rights – thus the ‘grabber’ is usually the state rather than foreign investors (Alden Wily 2010). Despite efforts to decentralise the administration of land rights, poor local communities have been pitted against global capital, with local, provincial and national state authorities playing ambiguous, sometimes contradictory roles. Yet, as inconclusive as it may be, the hiatus on new biofuels deals in Tanzania, in response to evidence of negative impacts on local people, shows that democratic pressure can be brought to bear (Sulle 2010).
Second, and following the point above, the investor rush has produced stalemates and reversals in the land reforms underway in the region. The flurry of land rights law and policy development of the 1990s in the region has given way to deeply ambivalent positions of states on the question of citizens' land rights vis-à-vis state authority over land. Mozambique exemplifies this tension: its progressive land rights framework gives statutory recognition to de facto land rights, yet it is also a centre of grabbing, as the current government appears intent on dismantling much of what is innovative about its legal framework. Others, like Angola and Zambia, appear chronically unable to conclude their protracted processes of developing national land policy and law.
Third, in Southern Africa the lessees are often not the investors, as onward transfers (from domestic to foreign companies) of leases, concessions or other acquired rights is widely practiced, spurred in part by increasingly diverse and speculative interests in land. Whether investment is domestic or transnational, then, may be obscured. According to the Bank's study (World Bank 2010, p. xiv), the domestic share of Mozambican land allocated is 53%; anecdotal evidence shows though that much of this ostensibly domestic investment involves onward transfers of rights for resource extraction and utilisation. Similar patterns might explain the surprisingly high domestic shares of large land acquisitions elsewhere, in countries like Ethiopia (49%), Sudan (78%) and Nigeria (97%), as reported by the World Bank (2010, p. xiv).
Fourth, the presumption that land grabbing produces ‘development-induced displacement’ of smallholder farmers may obscure the degree to which, in parts of Southern Africa at least, it incorporates smallholder producers in new social relations and patterns of accumulation. In biofuels, initial models of large estate agriculture appear to have given way to smallholder production, largely through outgrower schemes. Similar patterns are emerging with respect to the (largely South African) sugar rush, though in this case the substantial fixed capital investments associated with establishing new sugar mills necessitates a core estate to assure supply for processing in addition to small cane growers. The conversion from independent producer to contract farmer to labourer involves rapid rural proletarianisation – rather than de-agrarianisation as the gradual outcome of long trajectories of rural-to-urban migration and growing rural demand for goods and services considered by Bryceson (1996) (also Bryceson and Jamal 1997).
Conclusions
A growing body of evidence is addressing the nature and scale of land deals in the Southern African region, yet it falls far short of a comprehensive picture of these dramatic changes in land rights and use that are unfolding. This article, too, is far from comprehensive. The purpose here is to highlight selected trends and contribute to the task of establishing ‘analytical signposts’ in the literature on land grabbing. This, it is hoped, might assist in differentiating amongst land acquisitions in Southern Africa in order to determine deeper underlying drivers of the trend, to uncover the (contradictory) interests at work within the region, and also to contribute to an agenda for research.
Underlying the diversity depicted in this article is nevertheless a common direction of agrarian transformation – towards the ‘South Africanisation’ of the region, not in the literal sense of South Africa becoming the coloniser of the region (though elements of that view may indeed be true!) but rather in the sense that the changes underway – concentration of control over land, labour and value chains (capital) – are rendering the agrarian structure of several countries more like that of a settler state like South Africa. One outcome of these enclosures and concentrations of control over land may be a narrowing of the contrast between those countries with a history of settler colonialism and those without.
These perspectives draw into question the (political) purpose of responses from international financial and development institutions, which have tended to prioritise procedural safeguards to curb the excesses of ‘grabbing’ in the forms of a ‘code of conduct’ or ‘principles to guide responsible agro-investment’ (Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) et al. 2010, criticised by Borras and Franco 2010b, among others), rather than questioning the paradigm of development that promotes such deals, and the directions of agrarian change that they precipitate.
The focus of the land grabbing discourse on ‘mega’ land deals obscures the multilayered processes underway that both confirm concerns about ‘land grabbing’ and yet which defy the associations of that term with illegality, large-scale acquisitions, and the displacement of local people. While such grabs are indeed in evidence, these are relatively isolated instances and – in response to media attention, civil society mobilisation and pressure from the international aid and development community – may be on the wane. In contrast, the rise of pro-smallholder and green revolution policy discourses may present a route by which trends towards outgrowing and commercialisation in situ are accelerated.
This review exposes the degree to which established conceptions in international political economy – of the global North and global South – founder when confronted with dynamic adjustments in the face of threat and opportunity brought on by the multiple crises in food, fuel and financial systems. Perceptions of ‘land grabbing’ (and the innuendo of the term itself) require some nuancing in response to the complex realities unfolding in Southern Africa. First, what is being grabbed is not only the land but also the water and the minerals and, I would argue, the cheap labour with which to exploit these. Second, although the concept has been consistently linked to ‘foreign’ investors, in this region at least, it is clearly not all transnational; indeed, many of the processes described above involve domestic investors, intra-regional grabbing or domestic investors in partnership with parastatals and other regional investors. Third, and perhaps in contrast with trends elsewhere on the continent, it is largely legal – even if this entails amendments to national laws, and even if contrary to international human rights agreements.
The term ‘land grabbing’ – while mobilising – patently fails to capture the range of actual experiences. It is not so much that the term lumps together ‘apples and oranges’; it is more like ‘apples and combine harvesters’. Is the term useful, then, in the analysis of major (trans)national land-based investments in Southern Africa? Insofar as it precipitates questions about what is being grabbed, by whom, from whom, for what, and with what effects, and draws attention to injustice and elite capture of resources, it remains a relevant concept. Yet I would argue that in its current use, it draws attention away from trends that involve not the mere capture of land but the capture of labour, water, and most of all, the adverse incorporation – rather than exclusion – of smallholder agriculture into new value chains, patterns of accumulation, and the wider transformations in agrarian structure and agro-food systems that these precipitate. In Southern Africa, then, among the areas for further enquiry is the nature of this adverse incorporation. This implies addressing questions not only about how these deals come to be, their implications for displacement and impacts on livelihoods (i.e., what is being threatened or destroyed), but also asking what land grabbing produces: what new social relations, land politics, labour markets and modes of accumulation are being produced?
Note on contributor
Ruth Hall is a senior researcher at the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. She is one of the convenors of the Land Deal Politics Initiative (LDPI) – an international research network on the recent wave of corporate land grabbing in developing countries – and she coordinates the work of the Future Agricultures Consortium on land in Africa.