Asian Land Acquisitions in Africa: Beyond the ‘New Bandung’ or a ‘New Colonialism’?

Abstract

The ‘New Bandung’ framework presumes a stable North/South order and opposition to it. This article examines how reigning orthodoxies on the acquisition of land and agricultural investments in Africa by Asian states and corporations do not fit this model. This holds even for core-centric models such as ‘accumulation by dispossession’, which fail to capture the collapse of accumulation strategies in the global North as they relate to new powers, policies and movements in the South. Rather than a crisis of accumulation, Asian investment represents an attempt to cater to higher food demands of rising elites in the ‘emerging economies’ and a class collaboration between them and African elites. This represents the end of a process of expansion of the global North that had begun circa 1750. It follows that the future can no longer rely upon North/South polar models and theories.

Keywords

Africa Asia land grabs imperialism

Introduction

Scrambled and Scramblers, Africa and Asia

While visiting Lusaka in June 2011, US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke of a ‘new colonialism’ as a looming threat to Africa—with China being the thinly veiled threat. ‘We saw that during colonial times’, she said, ‘it is easy to come in, take out natural resources, pay off leaders, and leave’ (Reuters 2011). The Governor of Nigeria’s Central Bank, Lamido Sanusi (2013), has been equally blunt: ‘China takes our primary goods and sells us manufactured ones. This was also the essence of colonialism.’ Not only has China displaced the United States as the biggest trade partner for many African countries, and for the continent as a whole, it has also lent more money to States in Africa than the World Bank.¹ Anuradha Mittal of Oakland Institute similarly declaimed that India ‘[i]n its new avatar as an economic superpower … has also joined the neo-colonial race to take over land in poor African nations to outsource food and energy production’ (Rowden 2011: 35). Even the Financial Times worried about ‘the nightmare scenario of crops being transported out of fortified farms as hungry locals look on’ (Blas and England 2008). The head of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Jacques Diouf, agreed, warning of a new form of ‘neo-colonialism’, with poor states producing food for the rich North at the expense of the South’s own hungry populations (The Guardian 2008).

Such warnings are easily situated within what the international media, international organizations and international scholars tell us is a ‘new scramble for Africa’ (Alden 2007; Carmody 2011; Cheru 2010; Rotberg 2008; Southall and Melber 2009). If the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was marked by European imperial conquest, the coming century will be signified, we are told, by an unstoppable, exploitative race for the continent’s oil, mineral, forest and food resources. Popular and academic reports diverge on the key actors: for many, the new scramble is led by Asian and Persian Gulf States; for yet others, the new scramble is being led, as before, by Euro-American firms and states. Proponents of the ‘New Bandung’ highlight a common history of resistance by the global South to a rapacious North, while Western media and policymakers focus, often in a racially tinged discourse (Ayers 2013: 228–30), on Asia’s and particularly China’s insatiable appetite for oil, minerals and foodstuffs.

No phenomenon figures more prominently in these narratives than that of ‘land grabs,’ a term that has spread right across quite varied political, policy, intellectual and ideological positions. As the most common accounts charge, capital-rich but land—and water-poor states from Asia and the Persian Gulf are rapidly leasing and buying massive estates right across the continent. Prominent cases of ‘land grabbing’ range from East Africa (Ethiopia, Kenya) to West Africa (Liberia, Nigeria); from North (Libya, Egypt) to Central (DR Congo) to Southern Africa (Mozambique, South Africa).

There is, to be sure, a certain plausibility to the idea of a land grab in Africa by China, India and other Asian and petroleum-rich Middle Eastern states. Accompanying the economic rise of China and India, the propensity of their large middle classes to consume greater quantities of animal products and grains has become more pronounced, while their economic growth has also encroached on agricultural land, especially areas close to major cities. Between 1997 and 2010, China lost some 8.2 million hectares of arable land and the country became a net importer of food by 2003–04. Given that past increases in food production have taken place by increasing acreage under cultivation, it is no surprise that Chinese economists have argued that land acquisitions overseas are vital to China’s food security, particularly if North American States were to use ‘food as a weapon’ (Brautigam 2011; Hofman and Ho 2012: 8). A recent analysis based on the Land Matrix data set, the largest database on new land acquisitions, similarly suggests that the logic for Asia’s land grabs follows the pattern established by the Gulf States: ‘Eastern Asian investors, mainly from China and South Korea, also appear to follow a food security strategy … Chinese and Korean land acquisitions for food production account for 42 projects mainly in South-East Asia and East Africa’ (Anseeuw et al. 2012: 30). Such claims are buttressed by data that show China is already the world’s largest importer of oilseeds, vegetable oil and soybeans—even if most of these imports are from Latin America (especially Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Peru), rather than from Africa (Gallager and Porzecanski 2010: 18–20).

India faces related pressures. The number of Indians who do not receive the minimum daily calorie requirement (2,200 rural/2,100 urban) is equal to the population of Europe (Mukherjee 2012), while over the last two decades there has been a net daily loss of 2,000 farmers (Sainath 2013). This trend is likely to continue, as WTO rules prohibit New Delhi from sharply hiking minimum support prices to farmers that remain well below open market rates and hence render them defenceless against the inflow of cheap food grains and dairy products from the core (Sukumar 2013). In India itself, the displacement of farmers has been in no small measure due to a corporate land grab: by April 2013, some 4.6 million hectares of cultivated land were leased or bought and converted to non-agricultural use. In one celebrated instance, Mission New Energy, a joint venture by Australian and New Zealand corporations, acquired 194,000 hectares to cultivate jatropha. What is more, the Indian government itself converted some 2.3 million hectares for jatropha cultivation (D’Monte 2013).

The Indian government, like the Chinese, is also encouraging local firms to move outward—with the cost of agricultural production in Africa being half, by some estimates, of the cost of production in India itself, due primarily to the cheaper cost of land (Carmody 2013: 88–89). The acute scarcity of food is only likely to worsen, as forecasts suggest that India will add some 110 million to the workforce between 2010 and 2020—and will account for 20 per cent of the global workforce—while China is expected to add only 15 million (The Deccan Herald 2010). Similarly, the population of petroleum-rich Persian Gulf States is forecast to double from 30 million in 2000 to almost 60 million by 2030, even as cereal production there is declining and their food imports rose from US$ 8 billion in 2002 to US$ 20 billion in 2007 (Bush et al. 2011: 188; Cotula 2012: 668).

Such figures and projections underwrote the targeting of Asia and the Persian Gulf as key land grabbers, particularly in GRAIN’s widely cited 2008 report which argued that China and the Gulf states were the ‘biggest players’ (GRAIN 2008: 4):

[f]rom Kazakhstan to Queensland, and from Mozambique to the Philippines, a steady and familiar process is under way, with Chinese companies leasing or buying up land, setting up large farms, flying in farmers, scientists and extension workers, and getting down to the work of crop production ….

And:

[t]he seriousness of the Gulf States’ drive should not be underestimated. Between March and August 2008, individual GCC countries or industrial consortia leased under contract millions of hectares of farmland....

Although often in conflict, but both the World Bank and anti-neoliberal organizations find seemingly common ground on at least one claim: land grabs, particularly from Asia and the Gulf states, represent a new transnational and accelerated phase of the commodification of the continent’s land and labour. By 2010–11, estimates of new land grab revolved around 80 million hectares, with 50 million hectares in Africa alone (Deininger and World Bank 2011; GRAIN 2008). Oxfam (2011: 2) generated an even higher figure:

In developing countries, as many as 227 million hectares of land—an area the size of Western Europe—has been sold or leased since 2001, mostly to international investors. The bulk of these land acquisitions has taken place over the past two years ….

Empirical Moderation and Topical Typologies

The exuberance of these claims followed quite closely upon the commodity price surge of 2007–08 (Holden and Pagel 2013: 3). However, as the commodity boom stalled and local resistance to land seizures grew, many of the largest projects, particularly those from Asia and the Persian Gulf, have been rolled back or abandoned altogether. The most spectacular collapse took place in Madagascar, where the government signed a deal with Daewoo Logistic, a South Korean firm, for half the island’s arable land (1.3 million hectares) to be used to produce corn and palm oil. Mass protests lead to the government’s downfall and the whole deal fell apart (Cotula et al. 2009). Reports that China was investing US$ 800 million to grow export rice in Mozambique, and would import 20,000 Chinese labourers to do it, proved equally illusory, as were claims that China had invested in 2.8 million hectares in the DR Congo in order to produce export palm oil (Brautigam 2013; Brautigam and Ekman 2012). The Chinese press, citing Deborah Brautigam (the most prolific chronicler of positive Chinese relations with Africa), noted that ‘[a]s of March 2012, there do not appear to be any documented cases of Chinese companies implementing investments in agricultural operations above 10,000 hectares, and few above 5,000 hectares’ (Zuo 2013).

Cases of vast Indian land grabbing have been similarly challenged, particularly in the major case of Ethiopia. In 2008, Karuturi Global based in Bangalore leased 300,000 hectares of land in southern Ethiopia with aims to become the biggest food producer in the world. Plagued by problems ranging from floods, high debts, lack of working capital and resistance by the local population, the government renegotiated the lease and reduced its size to 100,000 acres, of which the company has only been able to develop only 5 per cent. In 2011, another Indian firm, Emami Biotech, which had contracted to develop a 40,000 hectare jatropha plantation in Ethiopia, also pulled out citing the high cost of land development, resistance by the local population, inadequate infrastructure, and the lack of cooperation from the local administration (Sethi 2013).

More systematic comparisons of land grab announcements to actual activity on the ground have produced similar results, significantly limiting the claims made at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century (Cotula 2012). As the ‘High level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition’ of the United Nations’ Committee on World Food Security concluded in 2011 regarding the large swaths of land in Africa that had been ‘grabbed’ by international investors, more than 75 per cent of the announced deals ‘have yet to demonstrate tangible investment in terms of agricultural output’ (High Level Panel of Experts 2011: 9). The Land Matrix group, while still reporting 755 land deals for over 32 million hectare worldwide, nevertheless concedes in a June 2013 newsletter that only 1.7 million hectare worldwide, or 5 per cent of contracted acreage, have actually been put in production (Land Matrix 2013: 3).

Tempering grandiose claims does not, however, deny the steady growth of land acquisitions in the midst of high commodity prices—and the dispossession and exploitative possibilities they entail. Against easy claims of China’s ‘mutually beneficial’ aid and China’s innately ‘amicable capitalism’ stand reports of conflict between employers and workers in Chinese agricultural, mining and industrial enterprises. While claiming that they provided their employees with housing and subsidized utilities, Chinese-owned farms in Zambia paid their workers less than the national minimum wage, and have faced a strike at least once every year (Yan Hairong and Sautman 2010: 319). In Karuturi’s palm oil fields in Ethiopia, the Ethiopian Review reported that the daily wage was about US$ 0.70 and that children were frequently employed. Meanwhile, the Confederation of Ethiopian Trade Unions charged that Chinese and Indian enterprises violated labour laws by prohibiting their employees from forming trade unions (Rowden 2011: 22). In Kenya, more than 3,000 workers went on strike against Karuturi in their flower farm near Lake Naivasha protesting their working conditions (Kilambi 2013b). The Kenyan government in April 2013 also charged Karuturi of using ‘transfer mispricing’ to avoid paying US$ 11 million in corporate income tax—the first time any African government had taken a multinational to court according to GRAIN (2013). Moreover, while foreign investment promised to provide large-scale employment, this has in fact not been true and the few positions that have been created were largely seasonal, low wage jobs. In Mali, for instance, it has been estimated that the areas subject to land deals could have sustained well over half a million people but is now controlled by just 22 investors who will create, at best, a few thousand jobs (Abate 2011).

More significantly, Human Rights Watch reports that the lease of land to foreign investors in Ethiopia—in the Gambella, Afar, Somali and Benishangui-Gomez regions—has led to the forced removal of populations, under a ‘villagization’ programme, to arid lands without the provision of seeds, fertilizers, tools and other forms of assistance. Their interviews indicate that the forced relocations were brutal and the first relocations occurred at the worst possible time, in October and November, just as villagers were preparing to harvest the maize crop. By compelling shifting cultivators to grow crops in a single location and pastoralists to become sedentary cultivators without any training, the ‘villagization’ programme is violently disrupting historical livelihoods in a manner that is life threatening. Since pastoralists and shifting cultivators had no permanent title to their lands, these lands were classified as ‘uninhabited’ or ‘under-utilized’. A farmer interviewed by Human Rights Watch said that at the government’s initial meeting with the village, officials told them: ‘We will invite investors who grow cash crops. You do not use the land well. It is lying idle’ (Human Rights Watch 2012: 54).

The Search for Drivers of the Land Grab Bus

These and related revelations have driven research in two directions. First, much more attention is being paid to work on the ground, which is more carefully delineating local peoples’ responses and the often determinant role of the state.² Second, and more critical for us here, a new and more careful search has emerged for the ‘drivers’ behind the epiphenomena of ‘land grabbing’.

The search for ‘drivers’ has generated new topologies, sorting generic cases into ideal-typical matrices (Borras and Franco 2010, 2012; Hall 2011). These efforts ripple across the pages of the most commonly cited journals, the Journal of Peasant Studies and Journal of Agrarian Change, and dominate the discussions and research funded by the major land institutes and consortia, most notably the Land Deal Politics Initiative (LDPI)³ which hosted two large and well-funded conferences in 2012 and 2013, as well as a swath of articles in, and special issues of, the Journal of Peasant Studies (Vol. 37(4), 2010; Vol. 38(2), 2011; Vol. 39(3–4), 2012). This effort has led, in turn, to a greater attention to the historical and theoretical models that have underpinned comparative and global analyses of ‘land grabs’. Yet, most accounts remain rooted in core-centric accounts of capital accumulation, and proceed from partial theories of accumulation in Europe and North America. These efforts fail, in our view, to unearth the historical and relational processes of accumulation and resistance that constitute modern capitalism.

This is especially evident in the major conceptions utilized to analyse land grabs, most notably and persistently the notion of ‘primitive accumulation’. The force, power and relevance of the concept appear compelling: it offers a path to locate today’s rapid commodification of land and labour within long-term processes and crises of capital accumulation. In introducing a special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies, the self-defined LDPI ‘Group of Five’ readily returned to Marx, the historic enclosures in England, and the conception of primitive accumulation (White et al. 2012: 621–27). As is well known, Marx (1967: 713–16) anchored the birth of capitalism in a primitive or ‘original’ accumulation that entailed plunder, expropriation, conquest and enslavement. In the era of late-nineteenth century imperialism and the original ‘scramble for Africa’, primitive accumulation was revived to explain colonial ‘land grabbing’, most notably by Luxemburg (1951: 369–70).

The utility of the conception to ‘land grabbing’ in the neoliberal epoch is immediate: it has been widely used to explain the privatization of the welfare state in the North and the commons in the South (see, for example, Midnight Notes 1990; Glassman 2006; Perelman 2000; Zarembka 2002). David Harvey’s book, The New Imperialism (2003), has been most influential by locating the term in relation to crises of over-accumulation that are resolved by accelerated ‘accumulation by dispossession’ which seizes ‘non-capitalist’ assets at low or zero costs, turns them to profitable uses, and thus lowers the prices of commodities, expands consumption, and increases the rate of profit (2003: 149).

As we have argued elsewhere (Martin 2013), these conceptions tell us more of capitalist development in the North than land and agriculture in the global South. Left aside or only acted upon are agricultural labour and local states, firms, and local elites. Indeed, this occurs by definition, since these areas and peoples are deemed to lie outside the determining actors and circuits of capital accumulation proper and the crises they engender. The celebrated ‘spatial fix’ that the South provides to crises of accumulation in the North cements this conception, as the South and its small predatory elite remain outside the normal circuits of capital and enter only as an object to resolve crises in the North. Indeed the rural South becomes all too readily an almost a historical zone of ‘traditional’ or ‘non-capitalist’ areas and peoples, with ‘peasants’ dropped into an essentialized, historically-dying and homogeneous category.⁴ Anomalies abound: while the creation of capital and an industrial working class in the North was made possible through separation of rural cultivators from the land via primitive accumulation, in Africa today dispossession has created a surplus non-wage population, on the one hand, and successful mobilizations for ‘re-peasantization’, on the other. As an explanation of the global, relational processes that produce ‘land grabbing’, primitive accumulation is, in our view, too far bound with partial core-centric accounts and conceptions to be very useful. We need, quite simply, much more concrete and careful attention to not just local but novel transcontinental relations.

A New Agrarian Question?

Characterizations of foreign investment in agriculture in Africa as a new ‘scramble for Africa’ or as a ‘new colonialism’ recognize a key difference between the two phenomena: in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, Africa was important chiefly for its natural resources and cash crops. Today, it is alleged that investments in Africa by petroleum-rich Gulf States, and the ‘emerging economies’—Brazil, China, India, and from within the continent itself, South Africa—are for the cultivation of food and biofuels for export (Carmody 2013: 84). Since industrial production is progressively being relocated from the global North to the global South, the provisioning of industrial workers in the ‘emerging economies’ with cheap food from Africa to lower the reproduction costs of labour would parallel the flows of cheap grains from the Americas and cheap meat from Latin America and Australasia to Europe in the late nineteenth century. It was the attendant undermining of capitalist agriculture in Europe that Karl Kautsky famously called ‘the agrarian question’. Yet, there is little indication that agricultural investments in Africa by the ‘emerging economies’ are designed to export food grains to feed industrial labour in their home countries, as we shall see.

Contemporary foreign investments in land for agriculture in Africa have stemmed from two factors. The first is a convergence of interests between African states and elites, international institutions like the World Bank and FAO, and corporate capital in promoting investments in land in the continent. These factors pre-date the early twenty-first century concerns with land grabs, and need to be set alongside the long-term data and vicissitudes of African agriculture. Despite some investments in the late colonial and early independence era—provision of subsidized fertilizers, pesticides and seeds to small farmers, and state marketing agencies to procure their outputs—productivity of agriculture remained low throughout the last half of the last century and has fallen markedly behind other areas of the global South in the last several decades, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1

Source: FAO (2013).

The imposition of structural adjustment policies in the 1980s and 1990s played a significant role, sharply lowering state outlays in agriculture and irrigation, while overseas development aid to the farm sector declined by 50 per cent between 1985 and 2000 (Woodhouse 2012: 780). Correspondingly, the output of cereals on a per capita basis declined by 33 per cent in the six most populous sub-Saharan states accounting for two-thirds of the regional population—and four of these states had been compelled to adopt structural adjustment policies. The decline in cereal production continued in the following decade, though it was not as drastic, while the export of crops ranged from a 6 per cent annual rate of increase in Kenya to 13 per cent in the Sudan (Patnaik 2012: 240).

The imposition of structural adjustment, weakened states and declining flows of aid subsequently propelled many African governments and their political elites to seek foreign alliances and investments in agriculture. Privatization of state assets, which had enriched political elites across the world, could now be extended to agriculture. Concerns in the North regarding human-induced climate change and ecological degradation led companies to try and acquire large blocks of land with very little commitment to actually invest on the ground as they expected to earn revenues from carbon credits through reduced land use. The World Bank and the FAO further facilitated foreign investments in land in Africa by buttressing claims that large swaths of land were unoccupied or unproductively used. The FAO estimated, for instance, that only 14 per cent of the 184 million hectares of arable land in Africa is under cultivation. The World Bank for its part reported that the lands in the African countries of most interest to investors were only at 30 per cent of their potential yield, stimulating a new wave of investment in land in the continent (McMichael 2012b: 691; Modi 2012: 126). Since most African governments claimed to own title to most of the continent’s land, by classifying land as unoccupied, abandoned or underutilized, companies could acquire large swaths of land cheaply—Africa has been called the ‘Green OPEC’ (Cotula 2012: 658, 664; McMichael 2010: 614; Zoomers 2010: 435–36).⁵

The assessment of the ‘unproductive’ or under-utilized land in Africa reflected, of course, a capitalist and administrative definition of these terms, rather than an assessment of actual use or cultivation practices. As Michael Taylor of the International Land Coalition notes, ‘[i]f land in Africa hasn’t been planted, it’s probably for a reason. Maybe it’s used to graze livestock, or deliberately left fallow to prevent nutrient depletion and erosion … there is no land in Ethiopia that has no owners and users’ (Vidal 2010). Equally problematical has been the coexistence of large-scale and small-scale farms, when the lack of access to credit and machinery make the aggregate output of smaller farms—and hence their family incomes—much smaller, even though they may typically be more productive per hectare. In particular, land characterized as idle, unoccupied or unproductive by governments provide vital sources of income for poor and marginalized population groups (De Schutter 2011: 260–61; McMichael 2010: 619; Rahmato 2011). Meanwhile, foreign direct investment in agriculture worldwide is estimated by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development to have risen from an annual average of US$ 600 million in the 1990s to US$ 3 billion in 2005–07 (De Schutter 2011: 250–51).

One important corollary in promoting foreign investments in agriculture has been a concern with energy security for the global North as oil prices started climbing steeply since 2003. The high price of oil triggered government subsidies to biofuels in the United States and the European Union—totalling US$ 10 billion in 2006 and US$ 8 billion in 2009. Biofuels consumes almost 40 per cent of maize production in the United States and 60 per cent of vegetable oil production in the European Union, and the biofuel boom is estimated to have increased world food prices by one-third to two-thirds. Flows of investment to agriculture grew exponentially with the adoption of the Commodity Futures Moderation Act by the US Congress in 2,000 which permitted trade in financial derivatives based on commodities, and especially the commodity index fund which is estimated to have increased by 500 per cent between 2005 and 2008, when they amounted to US$ 250 billion in investments (McMichael 2010: 610, 2012b: 689, Woodhouse 2012: 778).

A second, and far more conjunctural, factor behind foreign investment in African land was, of course, the spike in food prices in 2007–08.⁶ This led to a confluence of interests among African governments, petroleum-rich Persian Gulf states, and the governments of the ‘emerging economies’—all of which have often been at odds with the interests of the global North. And this accounts, in turn, for why the World Bank and the FAO both proclaim that large swaths of land in Africa are unutilized or not productively utilized, and decry the ‘land grab’ by the ‘emerging economies’ and the Gulf states. A lack of investment in agriculture in many African countries since the 1980s meant that most African states—including some which had been self-sufficient earlier—had become net food-importing countries, especially as grains from the global North were flooding the world markets. The spike in food prices in 2007–08 demonstrated the costs of being food-dependent on world markets, especially when exchange values of currencies fluctuated widely.

Under these conditions it was in the interests of regional governments to seek investors to expand production for the local market (De Schutter 2011: 252). Some investors like the sovereign wealth funds of the Gulf states were already prospecting for locations to invest in agriculture because of concerns for their own food security (Cotula 2012: 668). Other states with surplus capital have also been investing widely in the global South. Investments by Chinese state-owned enterprises in Africa, largely in the natural resource sector, represent a gradual move away from US Treasuries rather than to import food to China.⁷ Since both China and India had large government stockpiles of grains, the food price hikes of 2007–08 did not affect them, as their governments released stocks and banned exports (Woodhouse 2012: 779). Hence, in contrast to the Gulf states, Chinese investments in African agriculture have not been driven by the need for food imports. Indeed, Chinese state investments continue, as in the last 40 years, to be centred on agricultural demonstration projects rather than investments in large plantations and commercial farms. These projects have not, as yet, contributed significantly to increasing African agricultural productivity. While Chinese farming is in key respects closer to African farming than Northern agro-business models—based, as Chinese farming is, on small-scale production using little mechanization—vast differences remain, ranging from China’s much higher, long-term state investment in human capital and agricultural and rural industries to vast differences in labour resources, land density, fallow practices, water resources and crop and seed patterns (including African resistance to GMO seeds and crops). There is little evidence that China’s developmental state and rural development models, even from the 1980s and 1990s, much less more recent years, provide much of a model for Africa.

Chinese private investment in African agriculture has, however, steadily grown, producing largely for the local markets (Brautigam 2011; Yan Hairong and Sautman 2010: 314). A few Chinese companies—sugar from Togo and Sierra Leone, organic vegetables from Senegal and vanilla from Uganda—export to Europe and North America (Brautigam 2011).⁸ Apart from timber, there is no evidence that China is creating offshore farms and Chinese ministry officials have underlined that it is cheaper to buy grain from exporting countries than to set up farms in Africa, from where export of food is also politically counter-productive since it is a continent with acute food scarcity (ibid.; Yan Hairong and Sautman 2010: 323).

Indian investments in agriculture have largely been by private corporations rather than by state-owned enterprises. However, here too, there has not been much export of crops back to India—the most prominent investment being by Karuturi Global in Ethiopia to grow roses for the European market (Sethi 2013). Projected Indian investments in Ethiopia are indicated in Table 1.

India’s Siva Group has also invested heavily in oil palm production, acquiring a 200,000 hectare plantation in Cameroon and at least 100,000 hectares in Sierra Leone and in Cote d’Ivoire, a 50 per cent share in a 170,000 hectare plantation in Liberia, and shares in palm oil and soybean production in the DRC (Kilambi 2013a). While these figures provide an indication of the range of activities of Indian corporations in Ethiopia, as we have seen many of these projects never came to fruition or were implemented on a far smaller scale than initially envisaged.

Table 1

Projected Indian investments in African agriculture

Company	Size in Hectares	Crops	Land Lease Rate
Karuturi Global	300,000 (100,000 in the first phase, 200,000 in second phase	Palm oil, cereals pulses	20 birr/ha for 50 years
Emami Biotech	100,000	Jatropha and edible oil seeds
S&P Energy Solutions	50,000	Biofuels, edible oil crops	143.4 bitt/ha for 50 years
Shapoorii Pallonii	50,000
Almidha	28,000	Sugar
BHO Agro Plc	27,000	Cereals, pulses, edible oils	111 birr/ha for 50 years
CLC Industries	25,000	Cotton	655.85 birr/ha 25 years
Ruchi Soya	25,000	Soya bean	111 birr/ha 25 years
Sannati Agro Farm Enterprises	10,000	Rice, cereals, pulses	158 birr/ha 25 years
Whitefied Cotton Farm	10,000	Cotton	158 birr/ha 25 years
Vedanta Harvests	3.012	Tea and allied crops	111 birr/ha 25 years
Total	628,012

Source: The Oakland Institute (2013).

Contrasting Food Regimes, Present Phenomena and Future Patterns

These developing Asian–African relationships mark a significant break with past North–South patterns, as well as current extrapolations from the crisis in Africa’s relations with the North. Contrasting current developments with even the most sophisticated conception of global food regimes illustrates this quite directly. Developed in the 1980s and 1990s (Friedman 1982; Friedman and McMichael 1989), ‘food regimes’ refer to ‘systems of rule based in particular forms of agriculture, social diets, and power relations on a geopolitical scale’ (McMichael 2012a: 101). They demarcate, in McMichael’s words, ‘stable periodic arrangements in the production and circulation of food on a world scale, associated with various forms of hegemony in the world economy: British, American, and corporate/neoliberal’ (2009: 281). ‘The current (post-1980s) regime [is] a “corporate food regime”, insofar as the organizing principle is the market, not the empire or the state, as in previous food regimes’ (ibid.: 285).

As we have suggested earlier, however, there is a clear divergence between European and North American involvement in African agriculture and Asian and Gulf states’ activities. Asian and Gulf states’ investments have not been driven by their own financial crises, large agro-industrial firms, or the drive to meet and impose neoliberal policies—as has been the case for Western states and international financial institutions. While Asian and Gulf states have, of course, been impacted by the financial crisis and rising commodity prices, they have not been subject to the debt or austerity regimes that have driven so much activity in the rich North and the poorer regions of the South alike. It is even harder to make the case that Asian and Gulf states were behind the demand for biofuels, the most central factor driving for many behind the 2007–08 commodity boom. Where biofuels have lacked such state financial and regulatory support, as in India or the Philippines, they have failed (Cordon 2013; Editorial 2013). The collapse of interest in jatropha in particular, widely hailed as the impetus for many large African land deals, continues (Johnson 2009). And the endurance of long-term price increases on the basis of Western demands for biofuels is itself being undermined by the implementation of new technologies such as hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, which can tap huge hydrocarbon resources that were previously unrecoverable. The International Energy Agency now estimates that the United States will become largely energy independent by 2030 (Chazan and Crooks 2012; Yergin 2012).⁹

Actual agricultural activity on the ground by Chinese and Indian enterprises in Africa also fails to match the basic, historic features of the US and the EU corporate model, defined by highly mechanized agriculture, heavy inputs of chemicals, subsidies to large farmers and the flooding of world markets with cheap grain. Producing largely for local markets as we have seen, Indian and Chinese investments to date lack any coherent combination of these characteristics. Of course, Chinese and Indian investments in agriculture in Africa may eventually lead to imports from Africa, as their production of food grains is not keeping pace with their population growth (Patnaik 2012: 242–43). But this is a very long, uncertain and contentious project.

The future in this respect depends on two relatively unknown factors that need much more attention and research. First, very much depends, in our view, on the outcome of the collapse of the US world order and its associated food regime, and the role which several major states from the global South, especially China, India and Brazil, will play in the construction of a new world division of labour. As we have repeatedly suggested earlier, the working out of this transition cannot be predicted by extending past models of US and European hegemonies, stylized food regimes or the resolution of crises in the North through new waves of primitive accumulation in the South. What we confront is rather a far more volatile and radical situation: the collapse of the world agricultural order of the last two centuries and the struggle over a new agricultural order to come—which may be more or less capitalist, more or less non—or anti-capitalist.

This raises a critical second factor: the critical role of the half of the world’s peoples who remain tillers of the land. There has been considerable attention in the last decade to land movements, ranging from land sovereignty movements and Via Campesina (Edelman and Carwil 2011; Wiebe et al. 2010), to indigenous land movements, most notably in Latin America (Stahler-Sholk et al. 2007), to ‘back to the land’ movements (the so-called re-peasantization phenomena (Moyo 2011, Page 2010; Vergara-Camus 2009). Local and regional meetings in Africa are growing as well. To counter foreign investments in land, more than 250 displaced farmers from 30 different countries met in November 2011, in Mali, to protest ‘land grabs’, for example, while a similar meeting of an Indo-Ethiopian Civil Society Summit on Land Investments took place in February 2013, in New Delhi (Mittal 2013; Via Campesina News 2011). More recently, on 2 June 2013, a peoples’ assembly of grassroots land movements that met in Cape Town denounced the complete failure of state land redistribution and issued a common call to roll out large-scale, radical land reform and roll back state actions against land occupiers. Lurking in the background remains the now undeniable success for small farmers and many landless of fast-track land reform in Zimbabwe. In very different ways, such actions express a very broad search, often at a very local level, for self-governing, self-reproducing communities outside the dominant corporate ontologies of capitalist agriculture.

In the past, these searches for alternative social economies were often ignored by students of capitalist development, under the assumption that peasants and the agrarian question would be resolved by ever-higher levels of industrialization, urbanization and capitalist development, which would naturally spread from the North to South. Over-reliance upon core-centric conceptions, whether they be ‘accumulation by dispossession’ or abstract ‘food regimes’, reinforces this tendency to empower core states and capital and ignore popular resistance to the further commodification of rural land and labour. A resolution of the paradox presented in this paper by accelerating ‘land grabbing’ and an equally accelerating number of failed ‘land grabs’ is, however, approachable if we pay more attention to popular resistance against the intensification of capitalist forms of agriculture in Africa. As studies at the local level are now unearthing, in almost every purported area of major land grabbing, considerable resistance has stalled or stopped many of the easy agreements reached between African states, elites and foreign states and firms.

The most signal case of popular resistance to historic land dispossession, Zimbabwe, has only recently received wide scholarly attention—despite early work by the African Institute for Agrarian Studies (Hanlon et al. 2013; Moyo and Yeros 2005; Moyo 2011; Moyo et al. 2009; Scoones 2010). Yet, Zimbabwe is hardly alone. In Madagascar, as noted, a wave of popular resistance put paid to the state’s agreement to lease half of the island for foreign investors. In highly authoritarian Ethiopia, where both urban and rural land has been possessed and disposed by the state, popular and often very local forms of resistance have succeeded in stalling key projects (Rahmato 2011; Sethi 2013). In Mozambique, foreign investment and inflated claims of foreigners coming to seize land has generated similar public protest, leading to the cancellation of large projects; the same can be said of Kenya (FIAN 2010). Few surveys or workshops have charted the extent of these actions (for example, Greco 2013; Martiniello 2013); we need much more work along these lines.

What such conflicts reveal is the instability and chaos accompanying the demise of past world food regimes, and the increasing and uncertain role of Asian states in shaping the future agricultural order. In this interregnum, there exists a significant opportunity for the tillers of the world to shape the future. Land struggles and peasant wars shaped, as we know, the post-war world and, in particular, the very different organization of land and labour in Asia and the rest of the global South. As we live in a global interregnum, this offers considerable hope for a more equitable and ecologically future—if we make it so.

Footnotes

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