Lives on Lease

Despite their ageless traditions,stunned villagers are discovering that African governments typically own their land and have been leasing it,often at bargain prices,to private investors and foreign governments for decades to come. Organisations like the United Nations and the World Bank say the practice,if done equitably,could help feed the growing global population by introducing largescale commercial farming to places without it.

But others condemn the deals as neocolonial land grabs that destroy villages,and create a volatile mass of landless poor. Making matters worse,they contend,much of the food is bound for wealthier nations.

A World Bank study released in September tallied farmland deals covering at least 110 million acres during the first 11 months of 2009 alone. More than 70 per cent of those deals were for land in Africa,with Sudan,Mozambique and Ethiopia among those nations transferring millions of acres to investors.

Before 2008,the global average for such deals was less than 10 million acres per year,the report said. But the food crisis that spring,which set off riots in at least a dozen countries,prompted the spree. The prospect of future scarcity attracted both wealthy governments lacking the arable land needed to feed their own people and hedge funds drawn to a dwindling commodity.

You see interest in land acquisition continuing at a very high level, said Klaus Deininger,the World Bank economist who wrote the report. Clearly,this is not over.

The report,while generally supportive of the investments,detailed mixed results.

Many investments appear to be pure speculation that leaves land fallow,the report found. Farmers have been displaced without compensation,land has been leased well below value,those evicted end up encroaching on parkland and the new ventures have created far fewer jobs than promised,it said.

In Madagascar,a deal that would have handed over almost half the countrys arable land to a South Korean conglomerate helped crystallise opposition to an already unpopular president and contributed to his overthrow in 2009.

People have been pushed off land in countries like Ethiopia,Uganda,the Democratic Republic of Congo,Liberia and Zambia. In Mozambique,one investment company discovered an entire village with its own post office on what had been described as vacant land,said Olivier De Schutter,the United Nations food rapporteur.

In Mali,about three million acres along the Niger River and its inland delta are controlled by a state-run trust called the Office du Niger. In nearly 80 years,only 200,000 acres of the land have been irrigated,so the government considers new investors a boon.

Even if you gave the population there the land,they do not have the means to develop it,nor does the state, said Abou Sow,the executive director of Office du Niger.

He listed governments or private sectors that have already made investments or expressed interest: China and South Africa in sugarcane; Libya and Saudi Arabia in rice; and Canada,Belgium,France,South Korea,India,the Netherlands and multinational organisations like the West African Development Bank.

As with many of the deals,the money Mali might earn from the leases remains murky. The agreement signed with the Libyans grants them the land for at least 50 years simply in exchange for developing it.

The Libyans want to produce rice for Libyans,not for Malians, said Mamadou Goita,the director of a nonprofit research organisation in Mali. He and other opponents contend that the government is privatising a scarce national resource without improving the domestic food supply.

Officials noted that Libya already spent more than 50 million building a 24-mile canal and road,constructed by a Chinese company,benefiting local villages. Every farmer affected,Sow added,including as many as 20,000 affected by the Libyan project,will receive compensation. If they lose a single tree,we will pay them the value of that tree, he said.

But anger and distrust run high. In a rally last month,hundreds of farmers demanded that the government halt such deals until they get a voice. The famine will start very soon, shouted Ibrahima Coulibaly,the head of the coordinating committee for farmer organisations in Mali. If people do not stand up for their rights,they will lose everything!

Kassoum Denon,the regional head for the Office du Niger,accused the Malian opponents of being paid by Western groups that are ideologically opposed to largescale farming.

We are responsible for developing Mali, he said. If the civil society does not agree with the way we are doing it,they can go jump in a lake. NEIL MacFARQUHAR