How about a bit of controversy for a Monday morning? At Shelter Offshore we’re not into controversy for controversy’s sake – however, where there is a myth being widely disseminated and accepted as fact by the world’s media, and we have evidence to support an argument against the general perception, we are not going to shy away from presenting it to you for your consideration.
Today we’re going to be looking at the perceived land grab that’s allegedly being made by large international corporations in countries in Africa, which has been the subject of much international news of late. In the humble opinion of our Africa correspondent, it can be no coincidence that the world’s media is focusing on this story at the same time as the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is in the process of developing guidelines for developing countries to help them manage their land resources.
The development of these UN FAO guidelines has been based on very limited consultation, generally excluding the very corporations accused of greed and profiting from poor Africans, (see recent articles in the UK’s Guardian and Observer newspapers for examples of this). So it is all too easy to portray evil, land-hungry corporations as displacing poor Africans - but do you really think this is the whole story?
On the one hand we are told that subsistence farmers in poor countries should have their land rights protected as these are more or less the only rights they have, and on the other we are told that subsistence farmers in Africa are among the poorest people on the planet. Surely there is some room between these two ideas to come up with an equitable solution therefore.
I agree that the protection of land rights is essential, indeed protection of property rights is a cornerstone for economic development in any country. But protection of rights also allows for the freedom of the owner to sell or transfer such rights. Are we therefore saying that a subsistence farmer who has title to his low producing fields cannot get together with his neighbours and rent or sell the land they occupy to a third party in exchange for immediate cash or ongoing rent, and the offer of paid employment? There seems to be a paternalist attitude at work which wants to keep the poor farmer and his family on the land so that he can keep almost starving and keep receiving aid.
Many farmers I know, in developed and less developed environments, don’t actually want to be farmers at all. It’s a back-breaking job requiring a person to be outside in all weathers, and, given the attitudes of many city dwellers towards those who come from the country, a pretty thankless task in all. In developing countries many of those who subsist through farming do so only because they have no other choice. Would they rather the stability of regular paid employment, even if this is farm work on a large commercial farm, at minimum wage? In many cases yes they would – they would certainly welcome the choice - security of income and security of future actually trump the romantic notion of tilling your own little patch of land and being subject to the vagaries of nature for most people!
I am not saying that all those seeking to acquire large tracts of Africa should be allowed to do so with impunity. Heaven forbid. Indeed there are a number of decidedly dodgy looking land deals going on involving corruption and displacement of populations in various parts of the continent at the moment, but generally these would have taken place with or without UN guidelines.
There is a strong demand for land, particularly for commercial agricultural production, and we should recognise that this demand will not reduce as the world’s population grows. There are equitable, honest investors out there who seek to farm commercially for profit, (which is probably actually the dirty word in this whole equation I suspect), and who are prepared to treat those who work for them fairly.
One answer to the “land grab” issue would therefore be to ensure that small farmers have the right to their land and that this right it guaranteed by their government, and then to ensure that farmers have enough information to enable them to make an informed choice about selling or renting out their land if they choose to. At the same time, governments should be concerned enough about the economic futures of their countries to carefully assess the type of investors they allow in, and to ensure that property rights of all those in their country are respected.
In my view this cannot be achieved by UN agencies and the press demonising investors and demanding ever more onerous and impractical commitments to community development from them. Investors will only invest if it makes financial sense. They will not invest if they, like the farmers they acquire land from, do not have their rights protected. If they are allowed and encouraged and supported to invest, they will automatically create jobs, and, given the right incentives, can ensure that many of those jobs are given to the people who previously used the land now being farmed commercially. It is only jobs that will lift people out of poverty, and for most of those scratching a meagre living from the soil around here a job is something to aspire to. It is time to look beyond the paternalistic rhetoric about African subsistence farmers and the “solely bad” view of corporations, and find a solution that is beneficial to everyone involved, (except perhaps the UN, which in an ideal world would go out of business with no one to feed)!
