The New Scramble for Africa

In George Orwell's 1984 three great totalitarian empires rule their respective parts of the world. They reserve Africa as the site of their interminable wars against one another, part of a psychological strategy to keep their publics unquestioningly obedient by agitating them into a perpetual state of patriotic war hysteria.

Africa has long been one of the world's chief whipping boys. For four hundred years it served as the source of the New World's slave labor. For centuries before that it filled the same role in the Islamic world. Once they had achieved unrivaled technological primacy, the nations of Europe met in 1878 at the Congress of Berlin to draw up the ground rules for the coming partition of Africa. This first "Scramble for Africa" colonialized the continent for the better part of 80 years.

Direct empire and colonial rule are a bit out of fashion these days, but informal empire for resource and commodity exploitation most decidedly are not. So it is that once again, outside powers are moving in to gain title to the continent's material goods while denying them to Africa's resident population. As the French like to say, "The more things change the more they stay the same." This time the target is farmland--millions of acres of it.

The Fall 2009 edition of "On Earth," the Journal of the Natural Resources Defense Council, the article "Africa on the Auction Block" by Bruce Stutz provides a glimpse into what has been happening lately. Motivated by the doubling of world grain prices between 2007 and 2008, "wealthy nations with growing populations dependent on agricultural imports stepped up their search for alternatives to secure their own food supplies." Chief among the buyers of some 50 million acres, "equal to all the farmland in France" have been such nations as, "the Gulf states, India and South Korea. "

The land has been bought in desperately poor and hungry countries such as Madagascar, Mozambique, Sudan and Ethiopia. Often it has taken place with little or no oversight, or with collusion and dubious motives on the part of African officials. Stutz frames the issue well: "Will the quest for food security or profit bring much-needed investments in these poor host nations? Will it bring jobs, schools, roads, hospitals, irrigation, technology, port facilities and revenue from export duties? Or will these vast 'land grabs' as some have called them mark the beginning of a new era of agricultural colonialism, in which local farmers and herders are forced off their land and left to labor on foreign-owed plantations producing food for export?"

Uganda's parliament stepped in to halt a deal when it found out it envisioned leasing 2 million acres to an Egyptian consortium. Madagascar's president had "unilaterally agreed to grant the South Korean company Daewoo Logistics a 99-year lease on 3.2 million acres--nearly half the country's arable land--to raise corn for export." Public protests and the president's ouster in a military coup followed. But more deals are in the works, including Saudi Arabia's lease of 1.2 million acres in Tanzania and South Africa's interest in 25 million acres in the Republic of Congo. It is not hard to envision a future where hunger gets even worse for Africans as foreigners buy up the region's land and ship the produce overseas.

As the article concludes, it must not be forgotten that this prospect raises "not only a land rights issue. It's also a human rights issue."