Introduction
The simultaneous convergence of financial, food and energy crises in 2009 paved the way for the emergence of one of the most serious global economic and political crises since the Wall Street crash of 1929. Although the financial defaults emerged in the Western countries, the costs of the crisis have been felt everywhere. In Africa in particular the perceived abundance of land and low land prices came to represent for investors a secure form of investment. Many financial companies found themselves in the aftermath of the crisis without a secure location for their speculative ‘hot money’. At the same time the rise in food prices, generated by overinvestment and control by financial capital of the food sector, pushed many food insecure states to invest in farmlands.
Processes of land grabbing started to appear, meaning by this the exponential growth of large-scale commercial agricultural deals (Zoomers 2010) that brought to the same negotiating table transnational corporations and Western states, developing countries' governments and traditional authorities. A plethora of interesting academic studies followed, and the global media started to give some attention to the phenomenon. Historically, land dispossession by concessionary companies and colonial states existed for a long time. It has been one of the main processes that have sustained the installation of white colonies in Africa and the persistent exploitation of natural resources. However, the ongoing nature of processes of capitalist enclosure must be placed side by side with change, as the scope and nature of the contemporary forms of land commoditisation showed both discontinuities and continuities of historical significance. Land grabbing, as a new form of capital accumulation and natural resources privatisation, received a lot of interest.
Land grabbing could not be considered as simply an epiphenomenon of the crisis and could not be reduced to agriculture-related production activities. The rush for land was not only driven by the attempt of states and private interests to secure farmlands for agricultural purposes. It was also an outcome of the attempt of transnational corporations and states to convert agricultural land into land devoted to the production of biofuels. So, whether or not the control over agricultural production has been the main factor behind land grabbing, it is evident that land is today at the core of intense social, economic, political and ideological conflicts to determine who has control and access to land and who decides how to use it.
Nowadays land dispossession can be driven by the vertiginous expansion of gold extraction in Ghana's artisanal mining communities (Bush 2008), by the savage forest cutting with the consequent expulsion of indigenous communities through war as in the case of the Moyen Cavally in the west of Côte d'Ivoire (Bush et al. 2011), by the voracious appetite of the Libyan state that convinced the government in Mali to grant 800,000 ha at zero cost for 99 years to produce rice and maize to be repatriated back to Libya (Lallau 2011; Baxter 2011), by the expanding tourism industry which is transforming collective and communal resources into conservation areas, game reserves and luxurious private resorts and so on in Eastern and Southern Africa (Kelly 2011; Sarukera and Fakir 2004). In all these cases coercive evictions of local populations, dramatic changes in the forms of social organisation and local governance and damage to ecosystems and local economies, represented the norm rather than an exception.
The World Bank, the FAO, IFAD and UNCTAD defined the global land grab as a ‘development opportunity’ and designed a code of conduct for land deals to fulfil such expectations. The guidelines issued by the joint work of these institutions emphasise the importance of principles of responsible agricultural investments (RAI) such as transparency, respecting land rights, and promoting social and environmental sustainability and consultative practices (FAO et al. 2010). Transnational peasant movements have vigorously contested this assault on African land, proposing alternative paradigms of agro-ecology, food sovereignty and agrarian reforms (La Via Campesina 2011). They argue that land grabbing converts areas originally and currently devoted to food production for subsistence and domestic consumption, land devoted to forests, to either food production for exports or production of biofuels (Borras and Franco 2012).
This ‘Debate’ piece aims to conduct a preliminary analysis of the emerging forms of local, national and international resistance through the lens of the gathering of transnational peasants and civil society organisations held in late November 2011 at Nyéléni in Mali. It will ask how these different organisations came together, what were the political and ideological platforms that cemented alliances, what strategies of resistance and struggle have been proposed and how these, in turn, impact upon processes of agrarian change. This is because the recent literature has often been characterised by a triumphalist attitude towards social movements in general. Those silences in the contemporary scholarship concern ‘issues of class relations and other bases of social differentiation and inequalities among farmers and people of the land’ (Bernstein and Byres 2008, xi).
Mali conference on resistance to land grabbing
The conference, held in Nyéléni between 17 and 20 November, was organised by the Confederation Nationale des Organisations Paysannes of Mali (CNOP) and the Réseau des Organisations Paysannes et des Producteurs de l'Afrique de l'Ouest (ROPPA), under the stimulus and support of La Via Campesina to which these organisations belong. The conference regrouped peasant organisations from Brazil to Indonesia with a vibrant presence of African peasant organisations mostly coming from Mali, Senegal, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and South Africa. The conference was also attended by international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) who have sympathised with peasant organisations, although from different perspectives, with regard to issues of access to land by indigenous communities. It aimed from its beginning to share experiences and analysis of the current processes of land grabbing, with the aim of cementing alliances and promoting common strategies of struggle.
These struggles have arisen in a context where the dominant discourse has argued that, in response to the rising prices of agricultural commodities and under the pressure of global development institutions, African countries need to develop and modernise their agriculture. The current mainstream narrative implies that they need to develop secure property rights with tangible title deeds in land in order to reassure the investors and propel the functioning of the markets. To do this they need financial resources which are not easily available, especially in this period of financial crisis that has reduced the capacity of African states to borrow money.
Although land grabbing is ravaging the entire African continent, the participation of northern and eastern African organisations has been marginal. The difficulty of including all the geographical regions might be linked on one hand to the lack of financial resources and active communication. On the other it might have been the intended or unintended outcome of the effort to mobilise and integrate regionally based organisations. This is because in many instances African peasant organisations are looking for spaces of political viability within national states. Regional alliances especially within West Africa are moreover being shaped and strengthened with the aim of bringing to the attention of national states the plight of peasant communities and the inauspicious impact of land grabbing. The conflicted role of the state and the centrality of the state strongly emerge: on one hand the state is the force for capital accumulation, it promotes land investments and also regulates the expulsion of peasants, and on the other it has to provide public investments to its rural populations and needs the legitimisation from its own citizens. The state is thus seen as extremely ambivalent, as part of the problem but also a part of the solution.
Starting from analysis, presented by local peasant organisations, of the specificities of the Malian social agrarian formation and of the devastating consequences that global land grabbing is producing in social, political economic and ecological terms, the conference debate proceeded to explore the scope and complexities of incipient processes of land dispossession on a continental scale. Although land dispossession had been a pillar of colonialism as a mode of economic exploitation and political domination, the scope of the contemporary large-scale agricultural deals is without precedent. While the process has gained momentum under the push of transnational corporations, its operation has moved beyond the classical axis of North–South geo-political and agro-economic relations and included also South–South or North–South–South relations. Grabbers are states and multinational corporations which are based not only in the West but also in Brazil, Malaysia, Egypt, China, India, South Africa and so on. Although the nature of the drivers of land grabbing is hugely differentiated -, for example, unlike China's investment in Africa, which is led mostly by state-owned companies, Indian investment is mainly led by the private sector - the significance of a(n) (inter)national ruling class, which embodies and expresses the economic and political interests of diverse fractions of capital, is under widespread scrutiny. Data are scattered and difficult to uncover also because many deals are secret, which makes any counting a rough approximation (Global Witness 2012). Early statistics from 2005 to 2009 show that approximately 20 million ha were transferred to foreign investors (Cotula et al. 2009; GRAIN 2008). According to the World Bank, 45 million hectares of land have been alienated in 2009 (Voegele 2010, vi). The land acquisitions, which combine both coercive and commercial elements, are presumed to take place on idle, vacant or non-occupied land. This assumption reverberates with the old Latin dictum of terra nullius used by colonial powers in order to find a justification for colonial dispossession. According to this principle, European powers could settle on land which did not belong to anyone. Such presuppositions, besides being very instrumental to the advancement of the combined operation of land dispossession and land law, that is the codification of private property rights, missed fundamental elements of mobility, fluidity and social – organisation of African social formations.
As stated by Ibrahim Coulibaly, President of the CNOP, stated, humanity has never been confronted with a problem of such depth, as the actual processes of land alienation represent a denial of historical rights to land of indigenous people, which are centuries or sometimes millennia old (Coulibaly 2011). If we consider that 80% of the population in Mali draws its reproduction from agricultural activities, then we further appreciate the impact of land dispossession, especially in a context of rising global food prices. Farmers' communities have been forcibly evicted from their lands and their lands sold – or in the majority of cases rented – to transnational agribusiness companies, despite the fact that legislation actually in force does not permit this. Governments are therefore playing a vital role in facilitating and accelerating the pace of land acquisitions by foreign companies. As is the case in Mali, foreign companies are even exempted from taxation in an attempt to attract their investments with the aim of forging private–public private partnerships. Parastatal companies take a share in the business and turn a blind eye to the social and ecological catastrophes that are being produced. Small-scale, family-based, agriculture that draws its survival from its capacity to mobilise human labour is being replaced by intensive, large-scale, plantation-based agricultural systems mostly based on a more capital-intensive production system. These ‘modernised’ agricultural enclaves are oriented towards production for export. Consequently, they do not support the growth of local agricultural markets as they are dependent on the importation of machines and chemical fertilisers.
Activists further note that large-scale agricultural deals are fuelling corruption of government officials by foreign investors. The use of public power for private, personal enrichment is profoundly expanding the gap of dialogue between government and the affected communities. Governments regard the international business community as their interlocutor, marginalising the participation in the decision-making of local communities. The relationship between rulers and ruled, elected and electors, is altered and the nexus of responsibility by which they are bound is eroded. This contradiction is manifested in the attempt of the Malian authority to strengthen its business class, enhancing practices of favouritism and fraudulent land allocation while at the same time trying to maintain - not always successfully – order in the rural areas through allied traditional authorities.
Mali case study
An enlightening case study is represented by the current project of ‘agricultural modernisation’ in Mali. Libya in this case offered its services, providing capital to invest in the land while the Malian government made available 100,000 ha of land in the hydro-agricultural area of the Office du Niger. This body had been created by the colonial French administration in 1932 in the surrounding areas of the Niger River up to the city of Segou, to favour irrigation and experimentation. Inherited by the newly independent government in the 1960s, it became a semi-autonomous state agency charged with managing a large area of land with water diverted from the Niger River by the Markala Dam. The purpose was to lease out irrigated land to small-scale holders who would pay for water provided by irrigation schemes, produce rice and engage in market gardening. Small-scale farmers in the Office du Niger used to provide more than half of the country's rice needs – 380,000 cubic tons per year (Baxter 2011, 15). In 1996 wider authority on land and water management was given to the Office du Niger to the develop the delta of the Niger River, bringing it close to the role of a state within the state.
In 2011, before the coup d'état, the secretary of state in Mali in charge of development of the Office du Niger started to send out calls for investors, with very good contractual terms and financial conditions. One of these deals involves the participation of an enterprise with 100% Libyan capital, Malibya, to implement the project. The agreement involves a 50-year renewable lease with the intention of producing hybrid rice, tomatoes and livestock. Malibya has the right to use all the surface and subterranean water needed between June and December each year. However, the project requires the creation of infrastructure necessary for the canalisation of water in the area. To this end a Chinese enterprise with a team of topographers and geometers has been charged with building a 40-km canal with the aim of diverting the waters of the Niger into the valley near the Markala Dam (Adamczewski and Jamin 2011). The agreement between Libya and Mali, sanctioned by the Malian code of investments, assumes that the canal has a capacity of 130 cubic metres per second, permitting irrigation using 11 million of cubic metres per day or 4 billion cubic metres per year (Office du Niger 2010). However, during the dry season the Niger River cannot provide more than 50 cubic metres of water per second. This problem places to the fore the issue of unequal access to water resources for peasant and fishing communities who depend for their social reproduction on access to natural resources.
Uncaring of the ecological and social consequences of the project, the Malian state seems only interested in dislodging from the land people whose rights are not recognised, preventing them also from having indemnisation. In the name of development the Malian state aims at issuing secure title deeds and property rights as well as creating the legal preconditions for capital investment, promoting land policies that pave the way for land acquisitions. The monopoly of the state coercive power is fully exerted. According to local activists, people who have tried to resist the evictions have been beaten, or arrested. The same area where local peasant communities used to produce sorghum and breeding cattle and sheep for centuries is now being inundated with water, causing a radical change in the ecosystem to produce rice and re-export it to Libya.
A local farmer, Abdousouf, reported that local people have not been included in the discussion of the benefits or the appropriateness of the project and only a few of them have been integrated as rural workers (field notes, November 2011). Only 10,000 workers will be incorporated as rural labourers while the population in the Segou area reaches 2.5 million people. He further noted that those local leaders who opposed the project have been jailed while those who support it have betrayed, the promises made to their people (ibid.). The worsening economic conditions have been here used as a sword of Damocles in order to push people to accept small monetary compensations. However, community assemblies unanimously declared their opposition to the compensation, which is just ‘a drop in the ocean’ and cannot be a substitute for life-long livelihood strategies. Moreover, the impact of land expropriation is already being felt on the ground. According to local sources there is already an ongoing migratory process towards urban areas as the viability of the ‘peasant way of life’ has been drastically undermined. Edy Jara, a farmer of Kolongo, the place where the Malibya project starts, declared that the project is in its implementation phase and already 170 villages that have been there for 500 years have been taken away (field notes, November 2011). Jara also complains that local inhabitants have not been informed about the logistics and the schedule of the project. So when infrastructural work started, crops had still to be harvested. He claimed that the infrastructural works had violated the place where the graves of their ancestors lay (ibid.).
Theoretical and organisational implications of the conference
Does this means that – when respected – these principles of ‘responsible agricultural investment’ can mitigate the negative consequences of land grabbing and create opportunities that might be beneficial to local communities? The peasant organisations that have animated the ‘Stop Land Grabbing’ conference have been clear about the impossibility of finding a middle way. Land grabbing cannot be mediated. There is no such a thing as responsible land grabbing. The violent process of separation of the agricultural producers from their means of production and social reproduction represents an outcome which cannot be compensated for with a small amount of money. Land to Africans does not represent a factor of production to be added into the general formula of capital accumulation; it is a mixture of territory, culture, relations with ancestors, dynamic equilibrium with nature, and a perpetual source of livelihoods and social security. It is in other words their dominium eminens [eminent domain] (Mafeje 1991).
However, the other side of land grabbing is given by the mobilisations of farmers' organisations that are resisting forceful expulsion from their lands and the consequent privatisation of the countryside. The conference in Mali was essentially planned with the aim of sharing experiences on a continental scale on practices of land expropriation, developing common analysis and expanding international solidarity alliances with groups sympathetic to their plight.
Under the impetus of the transnational peasant movement, La Via Campesina, the conference produced a fruitful exchange of experiences between peasant organisations, establishing the preconditions to forge a global alliance against land grabbing. Learning from the experiences on the ground in Latin America, East Asia and Africa above all, has helped the movement to reach a common understanding of the phenomenon and therefore gain authenticity and reality. As specified by Paul Nicholson, one of the historical leaders of La Via Campesina, the forging of a global alliance is aimed not only at discrediting and fighting land grabbing; it means supporting a family-based agricultural model (Nicholson, interview, November 2011). This is not an ephemeral struggle against capitalist and neoliberal policies; it is a struggle to defend common goods and natural assets that are vital to agricultural, pastoral and fishing communities. It is therefore an ideological contest between the model of large-scale chemically intensive industrialisation of agriculture and a model of small-scale ecologically sustainable family farming. While land grabbing has been considered by some international development agencies as an improvement, a step towards the modernisation of the economy, peasant activists are contesting the notion that technology is a solution to fight hunger. Rather than a model of agriculture based on fertilisers and incipient biotechnologies, peasant movements are struggling to defend agro-ecology as the only socially and environmentally viable system of agricultural production and exchange. The latter provides an alternative because of its intensive utilisation of labour which limits the depth of under-employment and reduces the rural exodus experienced in the last few decades. It mitigates the ‘artificialisation’ of ecosystems while at the same time reducing the environmental pollution and over-exploitation of rural work. Finally, it enhances the development of local markets as well as favouring the relationship with other social groups such as artisans in their profitable economic interactions (Lallau 2011).
Peasant movements reject technical solutions to development and are against the spoliations of the land of the world, the enclosing of water sources and the patenting of seeds. Farmers' communities and rural workers need to mould global alliances to strengthen the democratic power of the people and build a development model based on agro-ecology and food sovereignty. This is not a struggle that concerns only rural people; it is a social struggle that requires the effort of multiple social components in each country and globally (Nicholson, interview, November 2011). Therefore besides highlighting the gravity of the process and the devastating social and ecological consequences of land grabbing, activists tried to elaborate common visions, articulate praxis of struggle and guiding principles to enforce the fight against land grabbing, promote encompassing and redistributive agrarian reforms and defend a socially based use of the soil and natural resources.
Land grabbing therefore constituted the common denominator in the Mali conference that pushed many distant rural communities to share their experiences and discuss hypotheses and forms of struggle. Fragmented and often disconnected from each other and from the wider political arena on a continental scale, peasant organisations face a David against Goliath scenario within which the coercive power of public or private armies of nation states and transnational corporations is brutally deployed. Thus, the strategy of moulding continental and global alliances goes hand in hand with the attempt to consolidate a political praxis and ideology aimed at carving out movements of resistance to the neoliberal hegemony. Social movements in Africa have been described as a ‘nightmare’ by Joao Pedro Staedile, one of the leaders of the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST). Although not structured in the form of a large assemblage of politicised organisations of peasants, landless or and rural workers as it has been and is the case of Latin and Central America, the practice of community-based, indigenous-led social resistance has been diffused, and such resistance has taken a central stage in the struggles over land. It seems that African social movements gained momentum especially as a result of the African social forums in Nairobi in 2007 and in Maputo in 2008. The current practices of land expropriation on a continental scale are creating the common ground, which is promoting the cementing of political alliances. After 15 to 20 years of mobilisation initiated by the transnational peasant network La Via Campesina, the organisation of the anti-land grabbing conference in Mali constitutes a landmark in the trajectory of social struggles in the African countryside.
Organisational modalities of rural social movements
In the first instance, the relationship between the global, regional, national and local organisations should be placed under serious scrutiny. This is because the relationships between different organisations that meet within these spaces of discussion and organisation enormously impact upon the issue framing and demand-making. Often it happens that the transmission of knowledge and experiences by stronger peasant organisations to the smaller ones inhibits the endogenous and autonomous process of analysis and evaluation of the problem and making demands in accordance with historical, geographical and sociological peculiarities and specificities.
The creation of a hierarchy within Transnational Agrarian Movements has also been identified by Belletti et al. (2008) with reference to the relationship between the MST in Brazil and one of its branches, the Landless People's Movement in South Africa. This development of a hierarchy emerged by the cross-contamination in the global scene. They argue that stronger organisations play an hegemonic role in the determination of appropriate theories and interpretations of land grabbing as well as of practices of struggle and resistance (Ibid.). This is tantamount to ‘homogenising' the multiple and dialectic insights coming from a variegated array of historical and geographical experiences and instances of resistance to land grabbing by local communities during colonial and post-colonial periods. It also consciously or unconsciously sets up a series of predetermined steps and strategies that need to be replicated in order to achieve the successful experiences of stronger movements. This also tends to underplay the importance of differentiated drivers and catalysts of organised political action and mobilisation.
In the specific case of ROPPA and CNOP, the former a regional network that regroups different peasant organisations, the latter one of the most consolidated organisations of peasants and small farmers in the region, it is important to stress the variegated repertoire of actions and sites of struggles in which they have been involved, opposing WTO meetings, GM crops and test sites, unfair trade rules and market-based land reforms (Borras et al. 2008, 30). These peasant organisations have also struggled for innovative approaches to development within the national and international arenas. It is imperative, however, to recognise the salience of the role of local structures of authority and power, often articulated through ethnic belonging, in enhancing mobilisations from below. Traditional chiefs have also represented a transmission belt of coercion and violence from the state to the local communities. They have often been caught in cases of corruption. Nonetheless it is not rare to find cases where grievances and forms of localised resistance gained momentum also because of the involvement of local leaders and traditional authorities in opposing violent dispossession of land. Land in this case embodies a set of identity practices and histories that forge new contours of peasant class consciousness which, rather than simply based on objective material conditions, is the outcome of a convergence of multiple meanings around the notion of land as a territory. This multi-dimensional understanding of land, interpreted not as an economic asset, not as a factor of production but as the nucleus of historical, social, cultural, political and ecological practices reveals the significance of the new notion of land sovereignty as the core of a new paradigm.
Organisations like the CNOP and other African peasant organisations have however maintained high degrees of autonomy, having been able to depict themselves as the social actors who have been at the forefront of the contestations of state-imposed agricultural neoliberal policies of the 1980s. In other words, African peasant organisations have a heritage of experiences and struggles that make them the legitimate actors in the political arena around which to catalyse an effort of mobilisation.
Discourses of international NGOs
Another point worthy of examination refers to the relationship between peasant organisations and NGOs. The Mali conference in fact was organised and funded mainly by the hosting organisations – CNOP and ROPPA – although some funding has also been received by NGOs. In the course of a number of years, the relationship between social movements and civil society organisations has been dual in character. In some cases NGOs have used their logistical, financial and organisational capacities to support mobilisation around specific causes marshalled by social movements. In other cases NGOs have used their influence and financial capacity to bring to the public attention themes and issues that pertain to their specific social and political agenda and objectives. The recent global focus on land grabbing has been prolonged not only by resurgent rural struggles against land commoditisation but also by the attention of international media and NGOs. Today, many civil society organisations, NGOs and think tanks are talking of land grabbing. They support meetings and conferences around the world on this subject and offer advocacy to local civil society and communities as well as engaging in debates with government officials in the global South to reach sustainable solutions to this challenge.
With few exceptions, much of the discourse articulated by NGOs and think tanks that adhere to the International Land Coalition on land grabbing is framed in a legalistic and rights-based approach that tends to misunderstand the nature of power relations, which are enmeshed within legal institutions, and ignores the complexities of socio-economic forces at play. From a blinkered scrutiny the issue of land grabbing is seen as lack of a legal right to land, but law and legal institutions are the crystallisation of political and economic complexes that articulate into specific social relations that determine access, control and use of land. This discourse produces a universalising and homogenising tendency that makes individualised, formalised, private property the sanctuary of the protection of people's rights to land. The absence of titling and private property explains land grabbing, and gives to it its justification. The discourse of obscure customary rights that cannot prevent land grabbing because they are inadequately formalised does not withstand historical scrutiny and does not do justice to the numerous resistances produced in the same process of land dispossession and labour commoditisation.
Formalising land rights through freehold, leasehold and certificates of customary ownership as is occurring nowadays in Uganda, or through the Traditional Property Associations as in KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, reveals the existence of pressures to expand land markets and enhances processes of accumulation by dispossession in the countryside in the form of mining exploitation, forestry industry, agribusiness and enclosing land for tourism. Framing the issue of land grabbing in the universalising lexicon of legally enforced and secured land rights distances us from an accurate understanding of locally based social relations, the relations of power between different classes and land tenure regimes, their genealogy, their transformations and how these in turn are related to the modes of land use and political organisation. While some human rights mechanisms have revealed the importance of defending the victims, a strictly legalistic and institutional approach to the land and agrarian questions obscures the social and political dynamics of ‘societies structured in dominance’ (Hall 1980). In particular, it obscures how the state manipulates differential access to civic and political rights in order to constantly produce uneven power and class relationships.
The idea that secure land property rights are the necessary condition to enhance poverty alleviation mechanisms by developing rural land markets and creating access to credit is postulated by Hernando de Soto (de Soto 2000). In his view, long-term rural development is engendered ‘by bringing life into a dead asset’, land. It takes place through a virtuous process that starts with titling, formalising and securing access to land and completes its course with access to rural credit by using land as collateral. In many historico-geographical settings in Africa the affirmation of private property tends to occur at the expense of other historical notions and forms of ownership that have played an important socio-cultural role in the structuring of equilibrated relations with the environment. In countries like South Africa, Mali, Tanzania and Uganda the expansion of private property in the countryside is synonymous with increased processes of class formation and social stratification at the local level. Such governments, through national land policies, and capitalist interests place increased pressures for more commercialisation and market integration of small-scale farming via secure land rights as a catalyst for rural investments. The form this takes in its productive aspects is the coexistence of small-scale farming that is constantly under the exaction of state taxation and merchant classes' surplus extraction, with large-scale plantations farming that has highly intensive use of chemicals, irrigation schemes and external market orientation. The unevenness in the land holding pattern that it drives is expressed in increasingly individualised, privatised and male-dominated claims to land and notions of landownership. It therefore inhibits the constitutive potential of collective reclaiming of access to common goods and natural resources under different denominations, being then based on communal or collective (ethnic) membership or constituted by use groups of women and youths, landless and rural poor. Individualising land rights unavoidably means demarcating, consolidating and protecting and securing property in an exclusionary way. It is also translated into a process of enclosing spaces which prevents or potentially undermines access to the commons.
This NGO segment of international civil society, whose existence is inextricably linked to the funding of European governments, global development agencies and private foundations and to the geopolitical exigencies of foreign policies of Western countries, is in fact promoting supposedly win–win solutions to make land grabbing workable and socially acceptable. In fact, they seem to accept uncritically the set of RAI (Responsible Agricultural Investments) principles that are paraded as the inducement through which a discourse and practice of responsible agricultural development are framed. This global process of capitalist enclosing must be read, as the development sociologist Fouad Makki (2011) defines it, as development by dispossession. Alternative discourses to land grabbing should also pay more attention to the role of community organisation and resistance articulated into what Scott would define as ‘the weapons of the weak’ (Scott 1985). Analyses and testimonies of peasant and family farmers, rooted in the peculiarity of local, cultural, ecological and geographical narratives of place and space, have revealed experiences of land dispossession. The anti-land grabbing conference in this regard expressed without exception a rebuttal of the ‘everyone wins’ myth and of ultra-neoliberal policies of the World Bank and other global development institutions.
Conclusion
There is an urgency to undertake community organisation work on the actual or potential site of land grabbing, which is often different to the site of mass-based organisations. Local actions are crucial, but these have been easily defeated by the forces of reaction. There is therefore a need for coordinating local, national, regional and global collective action. Negotiation with central states is very important in order to integrate within the national political agenda the issues of land privatisation and dispossession, but this has to be combined with militant action. Without militant forms of action complementing state negotiations, there is no clear leverage and pressure. The difficulty in consolidating structures of militant political action comes also from the fact that land grabbing has a differential impact on different social groups. There is moreover the recognised need to move beyond defensive struggles that happen in the face of land dispossession towards more constitutive, engaging and offensive struggles that project the front of the struggle into different political, social, economic and cultural domains with the aim of securing equitable access to the commons and transforming the language and praxis of politics. With the insights of historical analysis, the capitalist enclosures today are just the latest episode in capitalist land grabbing initiated during the global colonial enterprise. This anti-capitalist characterisation is not only nominal, it rather has to be interpreted to open up the debate over the social forms and practices of resistance, their discursive and constitutive powers as well as to ascertain the different claims of multiple subject positions to access, control and use of the common goods. Against a capitalist mode of agrarian exploitation that promotes land privatisation and concentration, social movements and rural communities on the African continent are debating and experimenting with alternatives.
Note on contributor
Dr Giuliano Martiniello is Research Fellow in Political Economy at the Makerere Institute of Social Research, Makerere University. In 2011 he received a PhD in Politics at the School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds. He holds an MA in ‘Africa: Human and Sustainable Development’ at the University of Leeds, and a BA and MA in International and Diplomatic Relations at the University of Naples L'Orientale. His current research interests are centred on the political economy and political ecology of agrarian change in Africa.