The transnational land rush in Africa: a decade after the spike, edited by Logan Cochrane and Nathan Andrews, is a good collection of works on the recent transnational land rush in Africa, a decade after the 2007/2008 spike in commodity prices. From the onset, the book provides a well elaborated explanation of its relevance within the context of International Political Economy (IPE). It attributes the limited attention to the ‘land question’ in IPE contributions to the influence of scholarship that has engendered a focus on ‘positivism, objectivity, and reductionism’, relegating the land issue to the sphere of local political economy analyses (5).
Contrary to the widely held notion that the 2007/2008 commodity prices spike was the primary driver of the land rush in Africa, most of the cases in the book show that the land rush began before the spike. Nevertheless, most of the writers acknowledge that the land rush gained further impetus during the period. Many of the spikes were short lived following regulatory reforms (in Ethiopia, Senegal and Cameroon) and political uncertainties (in South Sudan) ‘which placed new restrictions on foreign investment’ (230).
While the existing literature on land rush in Africa has largely focused on the agency of foreign investors, the book has brought a more balanced perspective by highlighting the agency of domestic actors (local elites) and existing government strategies in facilitating the land rush on the continent. This is termed ‘glocal’: a combination of domestic and international actors (271–273). In contexts such as Cameroon (Chapter 2, ‘Agri-business development in Cameroon: colonial legacies and recent tensions’, by Steffi Hamann and Adam Sneyd), foreign actors took advantage of the poor regulatory environment to acquire much of the country’s arable land. This also accounted for an initial surge in land deals in Senegal (Chapter 3, ‘The faltering land rush and the limits to extractive capitalism in Senegal’, by Marie Gagné and Ashley Fent). The weak regulatory environment in South Sudan (Chapter 4, ‘Epilogue of a short-lived land rush: private, rural, and urban tenure in South Sudan’, by Patrick Wight) provides ‘opportunities for personal enrichment, often at the expense of marginalized groups’ by local elites (110). Chris Huggins’ chapter, ‘Overlaps, overestimates and oversights: understanding domestic and foreign factors in the land rush in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’ (Chapter 10), gives the case of Democratic Republic of Congo and shows asymmetrical demands from foreign and domestic investors. While foreign investors are expected to live up to certain standards which have repercussions for their ‘reputational risk’ as well as the possibility of ‘name and shame’ and ‘legal restrictions on ownership of land’, these standards are not expected from their domestic counterparts (256).
The contradictory behaviour of the Senegalese state (Chapter 3) is insightful in relation to the land rush literature. On the one hand, it encourages large-scale land investments through legislative incentives, and on the other hand, state officials support local resistance to land deals. This could be described as political expediency, where political leaders do not want to be in the ‘bad books’ of foreign governments, and at the same time want to be seen as advancing the cause of the local populace. This is similar to the Ethiopian case where the state ‘first attracted foreign investors and then enacted policies and regulations to set the terms of their engagement’ (231).
The book highlights the increasing role of Asian countries in the land rush in Africa. Companies traditionally known for large-scale land investment in the continent emanated from the USA and the European Union (EU) – former colonial powers. Although most of these Western investors still have a significant presence in the continent, actors from countries such as India, Saudi Arabia and China are emerging in the rush for Africa’s lands. For example, in addition to domestic actors, the biggest investors in the Ethiopian case are ‘from India, Saudi Arabia, and the EU’ (230).
The agency of civil society organisations (CSOs) and local groups in curtailing the land rush in the continent is admirable. In Chapter 2, mega palm oil deals involving transnational corporations were unsuccessful due to ‘close scrutiny to which they were subjected’ by CSOs (47) that stimulated ‘evolving forms of local resistance’ (48). In the chapters on Zimbabwe (Chapter 8, ‘The politics of “land grabs” and development contradictions in Zimbabwe: the case of the Chisumbanje ethanol project’, by Prosper B. Matondi and Blair Rutherford) and on Nigeria (Chapter 5, ‘Behind accumulation and dispossession: state and large-scale agricultural land investments in Nigeria’, by Noah Echa Attah), the simmering land disputes emanated from indifferent consultation routes with limited community involvement. In Senegal (Chapter 3), ‘local stakeholders are frequently prevented from participating in negotiations or from fully understanding the implications of these investments, raising after-the-fact concerns’ (71). The sidelining of local groups in the processes of securing these land deals fuelled violent resistance in the case of Nigeria, Senegal and Zimbabwe. Consequently, the contemporary land rush in Africa, according to the book, has yielded little or no benefit to the local population, the majority of whom derive their livelihoods from farmlands.
Part II of the book is a collection of studies (Chapters 6 to 8) on the increasing ‘informality and “new” customary land tenure landscapes’ in Africa. These chapters are Ricarda Roesch’s piece, ‘Under the disguise of participation: community forestry as a new form of land rush in Liberia’; Solomon Peter Gabanie and Alec Thornton’s chapter ‘Agro-industrial mega-land deals in Sierra Leone: beyond the rhetoric of beneficiation, employment and economic development’; and Matondi and Rutherford’s contribution mentioned above. This part provides a good insight into the local dynamics in the land rush debate. The Liberian case particularly stood out for me, considering the fact that the government carefully designed community forestry legislation to divest itself of forest resource management and to make communities own and decide the use of ‘all forest resources within these community forests’ (145). It is intriguing how such a well-intended system has metamorphosed into ‘a new form of land grabbing’ with little or no community participation as envisaged by the community forestry legislation (167).
These interesting elaborations on transnational land rush debates in Africa have political resonance for two main reasons: first, in helping political actors to understand the dynamics of the land rush and their implications for the state; second, the book provides inspiration for the design of policies to guarantee transparency in land deals as well as ensure that local communities actually benefit from large-scale land investment in their territories, in addition to safeguarding their livelihoods. The book is an important contribution to debates about ‘the need for a critical and multidimensional exploration of the continuities and changes in the study of contemporary IPE’ (263).
Nonetheless, emerging issues of ‘climate change, human rights-based perspectives, and social differentiation’ (261) are seldom covered in this collection. For example, how does climate change affect the transnational land rush and how does this dynamic impact on governments’ climate change mitigation strategies intended to safeguard the livelihoods of rural farmers? As highlighted in the concluding reflections of the book by Logan Cochrane, John Hopeson Anku and Nathan Andrews, ‘climate change is expected to push tens of millions into poverty’ (273). Thus, a more detailed discussion of the dynamics of climate change and the land rush could have further stirred the climate change discourse in IPE scholarship. Also, the reliability of the Land Matrix data which provided the basis of the analysis in a majority of the cases in the book are questionable, as many contributors acknowledge that a significant number of land deals are not recorded in these data. Moreover, reports on existing deals on the Land Matrix often contain very limited details, suggesting that these data should be taken as suggestive of patterns rather than as an authoritative and complete resource. Nevertheless, the book is an engaging collection with thought-provoking perspectives on the sources, drivers, resistance and ramifications of the transnational land rush in Africa a decade after the 2007/2008 spike.