From A World
To Wind News Service;
The
planet is facing a serious food crisis. The unsustainable use of resources,
from the land to the sea, due to the violent rush for profit, poses a great threat
to humanity and the planet. But rivalry for control of food production and
distribution under the profit-driven capitalist system is still sharpening,
taking new forms and causing greater misery for the world's people. The
land-grab going on in Africa and other parts
of the world is part of this trend.
Africa, whose people were kidnapped by the millions for the
slave trade and ground down and bled under colonialism and since, a continent
whose resources has been sacked for centuries and which has suffered so much
from wars spurred by big-power rivalry, faces a new form of looting today.
Corporations, private banks, pension funds and many multinational companies
have grabbed fertile land all over the continent. With the connivance of
corrupt and client governments dependent on foreign investment, they have
secured long leases by paying as little as half a U.S. dollar per hectare per
year.
Although this kind of land acquisition is far from new,
there has been a spectacular jump since 2008. In the following year, investors
bought or leased more than 56 million hectares in Asia, Latin America and
especially Africa , roughly 15 times more land
that the yearly average in the preceding half century. (Farah Stockman, Boston Globe, 24 February
2013)
Writing in the 11 July 2012 issue of the Web magazine Around
Africa, Aniede Okure gives the following examples:
- Ethiopia
has leased or sold 3.6 million hectares of farmland to foreign companies from India , Saudi
Arabia , Europe and Israel . The leases require them to
pay $0.80 (U.S. dollars) per hectare per year. This deal has displaced 1.5
million people from their farmlands.
- The U.S.-based SG Sustainable Oils in
- Sime Darby Plantation, a Malaysian based company, signed a 63 year agreement with the Liberian government to lease 220,000 hectares.
- 67 percent of farmland in Liberia, 15 percent in Sierra Leone, 7 percent in Tanzania, 10 percent in Ethiopia, 6 percent in the Democratic Republic of Congo, 8 percent in Gabon, 11 percent in Guinea and 6 percent in Mozambique are controlled by foreign investors who pay from $0.50-$7.10 per hectare per year.
What do these transactions mean for millions of poor farmers
who are already struggling to feed their families? The land grab means that
these farmers are stripped of their livelihood. It means that they are evicted
forcefully from where they were born, lived and worked for generations. It
means the destruction of their lives and the lives of their children. They are
being driven into a situation where even those lucky enough to find jobs have
no choice but to accept working under the harshest and most difficult
conditions, with wages often not enough to feed themselves and their family. If
they are hired by a foreign-owned plantation on what was once their land, they
will now mainly produce food for export, not for their country's people.
Compensation is almost nil in these evictions. In Liberia , Sime
Darby Plantation, which wants to grow palm trees, paid $200 compensation to
each evicted farmer for a 63-year lease, only $3 for every year. (The Guardian,
17 October 2012) According to a 2011 publication by NU Wire Investor, one
hectare of land in the U.S.
costs $32,000, but in the poorer countries of Africa
it costs less than the price of a cup of coffee.
It is often argued that in many places farmers have been
unable to make a living from their small plots, and jobs will bring them more
income than farming. But in general in the third world, the shift to
large-scale commercial farming is part of an unbalanced model of development in
which people are robbed of their land and then basically cast aside. Whether
the foreign investment comes from the imperialist powers or other reactionary
states, it usually leads to greater dependency on the world market and
submission to monopoly capital and its institutions such as the IMF, the World
Bank, the UN and certain NGOs.
An ancient African saying no longer applies: "We who
are alive now do not inherit the land from our ancestors; we borrow it from our
children." Sustainability, ecological impact and the consequences on
people and nature may be touted in corporate brochures, but they are not and
cannot be a real part of the "business model", even if some investors
feel pressured to claim otherwise in their sponsored ecological and
developmental impact studies and other public relations propaganda. Instead,
the inexorable capitalist logic of the extraction of the maximum profit in the
shortest time and the rivalry between competing capitals takes command and is
the primary driver of investment.
Further, once the "gold rush" is on, companies and
states who don't get in on the land grab now risk being excluded in the future,
losing out to those who got there first.
No comments:
Post a Comment