The Land Grabbers: The New Fight over Who Owns the Earth

299 Pages·2012·2.18 MB·English

by  Fred Pearce

The Land Grabbers
The New Fight over Who Owns the Earth
Fred Pearce
Beacon Press
Boston
Contents
Introduction
Part 1: Land Wars
Chapter 1. Gambella, Ethiopia: Tragedy in the Commons
Chapter 2. Chicago, U.S.A.: The Price of Food
Chapter 3. Saudi Arabia: Plowing in the Petrodollars
Chapter 4. South Sudan: Up the Nile with the Capitalists of Chaos
Part 2: White Men in Africa
Chapter 5. Yala Swamp, Kenya: One Man’s Dominion
Chapter 6. Liberia: The Resource Curse
Chapter 7. Palm Bay, Liberia: Return of the Oil Palm
Chapter 8. London, England: Pinstripes and Pitchforks
Part 3: Across the Globe
Chapter 9. Ukraine: Lebensraum
Chapter 10. Western Bahia, Brazil: Soylandia
Chapter 11. Chaco, Paraguay: Chaco Apocalyptico
Chapter 12. Latin America: The New Conquistadors
Chapter 13. Patagonia: The Last Place on Earth
Chapter 14. Australia: Under the Shade of a Coolibah Tree
Part 4: China’s Backyard
Chapter 15. Sumatra, Indonesia: Pulping the Jungle
Chapter 16. Papua New Guinea: “A Truly Wild Island”
Chapter 17. Cambodia: Sweet and Sour
Chapter 18. Southeast Asia: Rubber Hits the Road to China
Part 5: African Dreams
Chapter 19. Maasailand, Tanzania: The White People’s Place
Chapter 20. South Africa: Green Grab
Chapter 21. Africa: The Second Great Trek
Chapter 22. Mozambique: The Biofuels Bubble
Chapter 23. Zimbabwe: On the Fast Track
Part 6: The Last Enclosure
Chapter 24. Central Africa: Laws of the Jungle
Chapter 25. Inner Niger Delta, Mali: West African Water Grab
Chapter 26. Badia, Jordan: On the Commons
Chapter 27. London, England: Feeding the World
Notes on Sources
Index
Introduction
“Buy land. They’re not making it any more.”
—Mark Twain
Soaring grain prices and fears about future food supplies are triggering a global
land grab. Gulf sheikhs, Chinese state corporations, Wall Street speculators,
Russian oligarchs, Indian microchip billionaires, doomsday fatalists, Midwestern
missionaries, and City of London hedge-fund slickers are scouring the globe for
cheap land to feed their people, their bottom lines, or their consciences. Chunks
of land the size of small countries are exchanging hands for a song. So who
precisely are the buyers—and whose land is being taken over?
I spent a year circling the globe to find out, interviewing the grabbers and
the grabbed on every continent, from Jeddah, London, and Chicago to Sumatra,
Paraguay, and Liberia. Almost everyone seems to be a land grabber today. My
cast of characters includes super-financier George Soros and super-industrialist
Richard Branson; Colombian narco-terrorists and Italian heiresses; an Irish dairy
farmer in the Saudi desert and the recent commander of British land forces, now
tilling soil in Guinea; gun runners and the couple who sold the world high
fashion with the Patagonia brand before buying the wild lands of the same name.
I discovered how logging concessions in central Africa may have helped
elect Nicolas Sarkozy as president of France; what Lord Rothschild and a
legendary 1970s asset stripper are doing in the backwoods of Brazil; who is
buying Laos and Liberia, and who already owns Swaziland; how Goldman Sachs
added tens of millions to the world’s starving; the dramatic contrast between
Kenya’s Happy Valley and Zimbabwe’s Hippo Valley; who grabbed a tenth of
the new state of South Sudan even before it raised its flag; why Qatar is
everywhere; and what links a black-skinned Saudi billionaire to Bill Clinton,
Ethiopia’s ex-freedom-fighting prime minister, and rich cattle pastures at the
head of the Nile.
I found an evangelical American ex–prison boss draining bogs on the
shores of Lake Victoria; a dapper English banker plowing up the Brazilian
cerrado grasslands; Saudi sheikhs in Sudan, extending the world’s largest sugar
farm; the Moonies seeking “heavenly life” by grabbing Paraguayan jungles; and
Gaddafi’s doomed henchmen annexing black earth in Ukraine and yellow sands
in Mali. The Kidmans and Windsors and Gettys and Khashoggis and
Oppenheimers are in there too—and most likely you, or at least your pension
fund, have a slice of the action.
Some regard the term land grabbers as pejorative. But it is widely used,
and the subject of academic conferences. I use it here to describe any contentious
acquisition of large-scale land rights by a foreigner or other “outsider,” whatever
the legal status of the transaction. It’s not all bad, but it all merits attention. And
that is the purpose of this book.
I have been in awe at the grabbers’ sheer ambition, and sometimes at their
open-hearted altruism too. Some want to save their nations from a coming
“perfect storm” of rising population, changing diets, and climate change. Others
look forward to making a killing as the storm hits. Many believe they will do
good along the way. But I have been appalled at the damage that often results
from their actions.
Their hosts share much of the blame for what goes wrong. After years of
neglecting their agriculture, African governments are suddenly keen to invest.
Their desire for a quick fix to deep-seated problems makes foreign investors,
with their big promises, attractive. Many governments ask few questions when
investors come calling. They clear the land of existing inhabitants, and often
don’t even ask for rent. There is often an unspoken cultural cringe, in which
foreign is always considered best. The investment, ministers believe, will
inevitably bring food and jobs to their people. But such easy assurances rarely
work out, for reasons that are social, environmental, economic, geopolitical—
and sometimes a toxic mix of all four.
There is much uncertainty about how much land has been “grabbed,” and
how firm the grasp of the grabbers is. In 2010, the World Bank came up with a
figure of 120 million acres. The Global Land Project, an international research
network, hazarded 150 million acres. The Land Deal Politics Initiative, another
network of researchers that helped organize a conference in Britain on land
grabbing in mid-2011, totted up 200 million acres. Within weeks, Oxfam, an aid
agency, published its own estimate of 560 million acres. The truth is nobody
knows. There is no central register; there is little national transparency. Some of
the largest deals were done in secret and unknown even to the most diligent
NGOs, while other deals have attracted headlines but have never come to
fruition. I have tried to disentangle the truth about individual projects, but I have
not attempted any global figure.
I hope I have reported fairly. I did find new mega-farms with thoughtful
managers who make sure to offer secure jobs, food, and basic social services to
their workers and their families. I found others with vibrant “outgrower”
schemes that supported nearby peasant farmers and bought their produce. I
found investors with a long-term view. But I also found poor farmers and cattle
herders who woke up to find themselves evicted from their ancestral lands;
corporate potentates running enclave fiefdoms oblivious to the country beyond
their fences; warlords selling land they don’t own to financiers they have never
met; hungry nations forced to export their food to the wealthy; and speculators
who buy land and then disappear without trace. I was reminded repeatedly of
scenes from books like John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness.
This is not about ideology. It is about what works. What will feed the world
and what will feed the world’s poorest. But what works has to do with human
rights and access to natural resources, as well as maximizing tons per acre. As
one agribusiness proponent, James Siggs of Toronto-based Feronia, admitted at
an investment conference in 2011, “exclusively industrial-scale farming
displaces and alienates peoples, creates few jobs and causes social disruption.”
Yet industrial-scale farming is what most land grabbers have in mind.
According to Graham Davies, consultant to the British private equity company
Altima Partners, the “vast majority” of investors in Africa are only interested in
commercial Western-style agriculture, “largely ignoring” the continent’s 60
million small farms that produce 80 percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s farm
produce.
It is important to know what agribusiness can and cannot deliver. But it is
equally important to be angered by the appalling injustice of people having their
ancestral land pulled from beneath their feet. And to question the arrogance and
ignorance surrounding claims, by home governments and Western investors
alike, that huge areas of Africa are “empty” lands only awaiting the magic of
foreign hands and foreign capital. And to balk at the patina of virtue that often
surrounds environmentalists eagerly taking other people’s land in the interests of
protecting wildlife. What right do “green grabbers” have to take peasant fields
and pastures to grow biofuels, cordon off rich pastures for nature conservation,
shut up forests as carbon stores, and fence in wilderness as playpens and hunting
grounds for rich sponsors? They are cooking up a “tragedy of the commons” in
reverse.
Over the next few decades I believe land grabbing will matter more, to
more of the planet’s people, even than climate change. The new land rush looks
increasingly like a final enclosure of the planet’s wild places, a last roundup on
the global commons. Is this the inevitable cost of feeding the world and
protecting its surviving wildlife? Must the world’s billion or so peasants and
pastoralists give up their hinterlands in order to nourish the rest of us? Or is this
a new colonialism that should be confronted—the moment when localism and
communalism fight back?
I began and ended my journey round the world in the cockpit of the greatest
land grab in history—the unfenced plains of Africa, where governments,
corporations, and peasants seem set to fight for the soil of their continent. I
started with a man called Omot.
Part 1: Land Wars

Chapter 1. Gambella, Ethiopia: Tragedy in the
Commons
Omot Ochan was sitting in a remnant of forest on an old waterbuck skin and
eating corn from a calabash gourd. He was lean and tall, wearing only a pair of
combat pants. Behind him was a straw hut, where bare-breasted women and
barefooted children were busy cooking fish on an open fire. A little way off were
other huts, the remains of what was once a sizable village. Omot said he and his
family were from the Anuak tribe. They had lived in the forest for ten