Investors ‘take over’ African land

‘RUSHED, secretive and one-sided’’ land deals with foreign investors fail to deliver real benefits or create new social and environmental problems in Africa, says a report from the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).

An analysis of 12 recent contracts in East, Central and Southern Africa through which investors have leased large tracts of land appear to be ‘heavily biased’ in favour of the investors, granting them long-term access to land at very low cost. One contract was clinched in Sudan for less than one US dollar per year; many contracts make no mention of land fees at all, or allocate land for free, like it was found to be the case in Mali. Expected benefits are expected to be in the forms of jobs for irrigation and infrastructure development, but many of the contracts have shown not to include enforceable commitments, says the environmental group. In return, little is required of the investors in the form of benefits for local people and safeguards to protect the environment. ‘Contracts define the terms of an investment project, and the way risks, costs and benefits are distributed but most contracts for large-scale land deals in Africa are negotiated in secret,’ says the author of the report, Lorenzo Cotula. Cotula claims that only rarely do local landholders have a say in these negotiations and few contracts are publicly available after they have been signed. ‘Even in the better negotiated contracts, the gap between legality – whereby the government owns the land and can allocate it to investors – and legitimacy – whereby local people feel the land is theirs – exposes local groups to the risk of dispossession and investors to the risks of contestation,’ Cotula says. Over the years, he said, agribusiness, investment funds and government agencies have been acquiring long-term rights over large tracts of land, raising fears of a renewed ‘land grab’. Leases of land are commonly over a 100-year period, meaning that many indigenous communities are alienated from their land for generations. Moreover, the report says, some contracts with investors grant priority rights over water. The nature of these contracts, the IIED says, threatens to eradicate longstanding livelihood strategies and agricultural knowledge.