Fears over new scramble for Africa

THE half-dozen strangers who descended on this remote West African village brought its hand-to-mouth farmers alarming news: their humble fields, tilled from one generation to the next, were now controlled by Libya's leader, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, and the farmers would all have to leave.

"They told us this would be the last rainy season for us to cultivate our fields; after that, they will level all the houses and take the land," said Mama Keita, 73, the leader of this village veiled behind dense, thorny scrubland. "We were told that Gaddafi owns this land."

Across Africa and the developing world, a new global land rush is gobbling up large expanses of arable land. 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 UN and the World Bank say the practice, if done equitably, could help feed the growing global population by introducing large-scale commercial farming to places without it.

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

"The food security of the country concerned must be first and foremost in everybody's mind," said Kofi Annan, the former UN Secretary General, now working on the issue of African agriculture. "Otherwise it is straightforward exploitation and it won't work. We have seen a scramble for Africa before. I don't think we want to see a second scramble of that kind."

A World Bank study has tallied farmland deals covering at least 110 million acres — the size of California and West Virginia combined — announced 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."

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.

In all, Sow said, about 60 deals covered at least 600,000 acres in Mali, although some organisations said more than 1.5 million acres had been committed.

He argued that the bulk of the investors were Malians growing food for the domestic market. But he acknowledged that outside investors like the Libyans, who are leasing 250,000 acres here, are expected to ship their rice, beef and other agricultural products home. "What advantage would they gain by investing in Mali if they could not even take their own production?" Sow 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. Several said that they had been beaten and jailed by soldiers, but that they were ready to die to keep their land.

"The famine will start very soon," shouted Ibrahima Coulibaly, the head of the co-ordinating committee for farmer organisations in Mali. "If people do not stand up for their rights, they will lose everything!"

Sekou Traor, 69, a Soumouni village elder, was dumbfounded when government officials said last year that Libya now controlled his land and began measuring the fields. He had always considered it his own, passed down from grandfather to father to son.

"All we want before they break our houses and take our fields is for them to show us the new houses where we will live, and the new fields where we will work," he said at the rally last month. "We are all so afraid," he said of the village's 2,229 residents. "We will be the victims of this situation, we are sure of that."