An apparent surge in the purchase of African land by foreign companies and governments to grow food and other crops for export has set alarm bells ringing on and off the continent. The headlines have been strident: “The Second Scramble for Africa Starts”, “Quest for Food Security Breeds Neo-Colonists”, “Food Security or Economic Slavery?”
The outcries reflect the continuing impact of the continent’s history, when as recently as the last century colonial powers and foreign settler populations arbitrarily seized African land and displaced those who lived on it, lending considerable emotion to the current volatile issue. Some agricultural experts have wondered whether such land deals could lead to a form of “neo-colonialism”. But immediate, practical concerns are also prominent. “This is a worrisome trend,” noted Akinwumi Adesina, the then vice president of the advocacy group Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). Such foreign land acquisitions, he argued, have the potential to hurt domestic efforts to raise food production and could limit broad-based economic growth. Many deals have little oversight, transparency or regulation, have no environmental safeguards and fail to protect smallholder farmers from losing their customary rights to use land, added Adesina, now Nigeria’s minister for agriculture.
The sheer size of some of the land agreements has added to the alarm. A deal to allow South Korea’s Daewoo Corporation to lease 1.3m hectares was a key factor in building support for the ouster ofMadagascar’s President Marc Ravalomanana in March 2009. In Kenya the government struggled to overcome local opposition to a proposal to give Qatar and others rights over some 40,000 hectares in the Tana River Valley in return for building a deep-sea port. READ MORE
Source: www.howwemadeitinafrica.com #IFAMAFRICA
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