Hazel Healy Reports on a Land Rush in Full Swing
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The smallholders’ last stand A visit to Mozambique dispels any notion that big business is going to ‘feed Africa’. HAZEL HEALY reports on a land rush in full swing. By 7am work parties are already fanning a headdress as small plots of maize appear in out along the road’s edge. The people of Chiure among the brush and waist-high grasses. district in rural Mozambique are setting out The farmlands of small-scale farmers like before the heat kicks in. Gangs of children these are characterized as ‘under-used’. Since stride along with hoes over their shoulders; the state – which legally owns all the land here women make slower progress with babies tied – declared it had seven million hectares going to their backs, balancing large bundles on their spare, investors have snapped up 2.5 million. head, trailing toddlers with the free hand. Mozambique has stayed in the ‘top 10 most It’s hard to see where this stream of people targeted’ countries for land deals ever since. is headed at first. Then, looking closer you The age-old tussle over resources is nothing Hazel Healy Hazel see the rise and fall of dull metal, the flash of new. But the speed at which large tracts of land 12 ● NEW INTERNATIONALIST ● MAY 2013 The Big Story land grabs most powerful ‘empty land myth’ centres on Africa. In Mozambique, where the global grab collides with explosive economic growth, the land rush is accelerating. Green grabbing In Chuire district, in the northern province of Cabo Delgado (see map on page 15), investors are seeking agricultural land for everything from bananas to biofuels. Sandrina Muaco, one of the six per cent of Mozambicans who live past 50, is smoking with her maize-husk roll-up turned lit side in – something of a trend in Maurunga village. She is one of 171 households displaced by a bevy of companies – both foreign and domestic – who have moved in on the fertile fields near the Lurio River. Muaco’s six hectares of cashew trees were cleared to make way for Eco-Energia de Moçambique’s Ouroverde (Greengold) sugar processing plant. ‘We used to spend a week picking nuts every harvest,’ she recalls. ‘I would sell the cashews and make alcohol from the fruits. The land produced a lot.’ Villagers here, like 80 per cent of Mozambicans, rely on agriculture to survive. But Muaco wasn’t a subsistence farmer. Her plot was four times the average land holding. Eco-Energia – described by a land expert as ‘one of the better companies’ – paid $664 in compensation for Muaco’s trees and house, which was cleared to make way for the sugar cane plantation. But two years on, the money is long spent – on a new home, a sarong and the rental of an exhausted plot of land nearby where ‘They'll have to kill us first’. Muaco scratches out a living growing cassava The land of villagers in Kitica, and maize. She concludes: ‘I lost everything.’ Cabo Delgado province, is under The chair of Eco-Energia’s parent company threat from a local landgrabber. is entrepreneurial Swede Per Carstedt, former They pose with machete, CEO of Europe’s leading bioethanol importer hoe and a coil of homegrown SEKAB.4 He hopes to clean-up the polluting tobacco, the trappings of home transport systems of the industrialized world – and self defence. via African fields in both Tanzania and Mozambique. Ouroverde has absorbed at least $1.3 million in investments (50 per cent from The smallholders’ last stand the Dutch government’s private investment in the global South are being transferred into arm) and has rights to 1,000 hectares for the private hands has not been seen since colonial next 25 years.5 In the long term, Eco-Energia times. hopes to scale up to 30,000 hectares across the The cast has changed. Modern day province, export organic sugar to Europe and ‘They will send landgrabbers are a varied bunch: the Saudis distil bioethanol. It’s a prime example of what us to places want to raise poultry and grow grains in Sudan; the Journal of Peasant Studies has defined as forests in the Philippines are disappearing under ‘green-grabbing – or ‘the appropriation of land with poor soil. Asia’s insatiable appetite for palm oil; the finance and resources for environmental ends’. hubs of London and New York, have bought Then how will into El Tejar, which farms 800,000 hectares in In the dark we live?’ South America.1,2,3 Companies from rapidly ‘We were taken by surprise,’ says one widow, growing India and South Africa are at the fore, whose land has to sustain nine grandchildren. alongside Western firms. She blames the chef de aldea (lowest ranking While land grabs are happening all over the government official) for signing away her world from South Asia to Latin America, the cashew, banana and mango trees. She now NEW INTERNATIONALIST ● MAY 2013 ● 13 The Big Story LAND GRABS rents a plot half a day’s walk from her house. Meanwhile, the intense investor interest Aching muscles mean she can only farm on has sparked a speculative land rush by local alternate days. Other villagers claim that the élites. In nearby Kitica (pictured on page 12), compensation process lacked transparency and villagers are under threat from a cattle rancher, was haphazard. who has tried to evict them by force, without Eco-Energia responds that the compensation the niceties of compensation. ‘We depend on process is unfinished, and they have received no our own strength to feed our children,’ says complaints through their grievance procedures. Laurinda Mitilage. ‘They will send us to places It also maintains that the principles of free, with poor soil. Then how will we live?’ No research prior and informed consent were followed The stories from Chiure are repeated in large- during an extensive consultation. scale deals the world over. The land acquired has given the But despite the company’s efforts, the was not ‘empty’, despite Mozambique’s low villagers did not know what they were getting population density. Investors compete for land green-light into. Traditional leader, Martiño Silva thought with local farming communities, who are pushed to large-scale the lease was for four years. into marginal areas – women in particular, are ‘After independence we occupied the losing out. Consultations, when they happen, agriculture in land. We farmed there. Then Monika came,’ are fraught with power imbalance and unequal he recalls, in reference to Monika Branks, access to information. The work generated on Africa Executive Director of Eco-Energia. ‘She said, plantations is not sufficient – either in salary “I want some land.” We agreed. We thought it or security – to replace lost livelihoods; nor would be a small area by the river. Then they is compensation. Land activist Diamantino said they needed more...’ Nhampossa puts it bluntly: ‘The people are The plantation has created jobs, but villagers being cheated.’ (See page 18 for an interview say these are only ‘good for young men’. with him.) Whether investors are motivated ‘It’s too risky for someone with children,’ by the ‘will to improve’, the environment, or says the widow. ‘Three days here, 25 days there. profit – or a mix of all three – the outcome can And it doesn’t leave you time to sow your own be equally catastrophic for the people forced off fields.’ their land.6 Forest lost White elephants Elsewhere in Chiure, villagers have lost access The free-market logic dictates that the eviction to valuable common resources. A German of farming communities is an unfortunate mining firm Graphite Kropfmühl, has cordoned necessity – we need more productive farms to off forests around scores of exploration sites. meet the world’s food requirements. Yet even From one day to the next, farmers were cut off the World Bank – an avid backer of large land from lean season staples such as wild tubers deals – acknowledges that no research has given and beans, game like hares, guinea fowl and the green-light to large-scale agriculture in small deer, as well as firewood, bamboo and Africa. medicinal plants. In fact, there’s a pretty low success rate across the board. A land expert tells me that bar sugar, he is unaware of a single successful large-scale Africa’s biggest land grab? farm over 1,000 hectares in Mozambique – they ProSavana is an ambitious project, inspired by the transformation of have all gone bust. Brazil’s biodiverse cerrado grassland into what writer Fred Pearce has But the poor track record has not stopped described as ‘the most unremitting commercialized monoculture on ever-bigger players from entering the earth’. The Mozambican government initially offered a whopping 14 ‘development’ fray. Last May, the group of million hectares of tropical savannah, cutting through the middle of the G8 nations launched the ‘new alliance for Northern regions (see map page 15). It’s framed as win-win-win. Brazilian food security and nutrition’, which proposes agribusiness will grow commodity crops for export to Japan. Mozambique using giant agribusiness corporations such as gets some low-wage jobs and foreign currency. Monsanto, to end hunger in Mozambique and But the land being targeted is also home to hundreds of thousands of five other countries. Writer Joe Hanlon notes the farming families. Civil society has raised the alarm. The National Peasants G8’s first act of charity was to subsidize grain Union (UNAC) predicts landlessness, social upheaval and environmental giant Cargill to take over 40,000 hectares of destruction; it is doing some tripartite mobilizing of its own, with social Mozambican soil (they got 10,000).