It’s the Lease We Can Do

We take lots of little things for granted… like deeds of trust and recording real estate transfers. Imagine how chaotic post-Soviet Russia was when folks living in dachas or large apartments decided it was time to sell to take advantage of the new capitalist marketplace. So, like you had to plop down a pile of cash – no mortgages – and take your chances, since the closest you could get to a chain of title was the fact that the dude selling you the abode was living in it when he took your money. That’s kind of the way it went for a while, and eventually people began to record transfers and note who owned what.

But now comes a land grab of epic proportions. Picture generation after generation of illiterate subsistence farmers, villages who have passed their land down to their sons and their sons’ families based on tribal rules and practices. Little African parcels of land that no one ever gave a second thought to. But there were no deeds, no transfer documents, no wills evidencing of who owned what. So when the government tells you that all such unregistered land belongs to them… like the government is a different body than the people who have inhabited and cultivates these farms for as long as oral history can remember… what exactly do you say?

What if they decide that they can raise a whole pile of money – for “government things” – by leasing your precious farmland to foreigners anxious to harness agricultural resources outside their own agriculture-impaired or agriculturally-insufficient homeland? Or just because they can make money in a rapidly rising commodities marketplace? And what if these avaricious foreigners tell you that you have to leave the land that has “belonged” to your family for as long as anyone can determine? Where do you go; what do you do? Welcome to the legal nightmare we call Africa. It is well-known that China, using her swollen currency reserves to buy commodities and lease land in the Great Rift Valley to grow crops to feed her massive population. But Libya? France? Canada? South Korea? Netherlands? Saudi Arabia? India? Even South Africa? Yup!

“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… Organizations like the United Nations 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.” New York Times, December 21^st. “People have been pushed off land in countries like Ethiopia, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia and Zambia.” Add Mali, Mozambique and the Sudan… and note that in Madagascar, a government that was hell-bent on leasing almost half the arable land to a South Korean conglomerate was toppled by angry citizens in 2009.

The changes in such African land use are massive: “A World Bank study released in September 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 percent 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.” NY Times. Occasionally, the government agrees to pay compensation to such farmers, but it seldom is it sufficient, and most of these people really don’t know how to move and start life in another place.

In Mali, the Libyan deal isn’t going down particularly well: “[A]nger 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 coordinating committee for farmer organizations in Mali. ‘If people do not stand up for their rights, they will lose everything!’ … ‘Ante!’ members of the crowd shouted in Bamanankan, the local language. ‘We refuse!’

“Kassoum Denon, the regional [government] head for the Office du Niger, accused the Malian opponents of being paid by Western groups that are ideologically opposed to large-scale farming… ‘We are responsible for developing Mali,’ he said. ‘If the civil society does not agree with the way we are doing it, they can go jump in a lake.’” NY Times. Cue the lake, and get those warm and cuddly soldiers ready to pound the crap out of people who really don’t understand what’s going on. Hell, I don’t really understand what’s going on or how any government on earth can justify such horrific treatment of their citizens. I guess “money talks, and #$%^& walks!”

I’m Peter Dekom, and I suspect that I really shouldn’t be surprised at mankind’s inhumanity to man… but I sure as hell am going to write about it!