Foreign Investors Buy up African Farmland

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When Erastas tried to harvest his corn last year, it was under water. "They are playing with the water level to get rid of us," he says. And when that doesn't work, says Erastas, Dominion sends in bulldozers, thugs and sometimes even the police.

Under its contract, Dominion has agreed to renovate "at least one school and one medical facility" in each of the two local districts. "They drove out 400 families instead," says Gondi Olima of the organization Friends of the Yala Swamp. According to Olima, at first the Dominion venture created new jobs, as day laborers were hired to clear the site with machetes, but then the company brought in more and more equipment. "Now they have so many machines that workers are no longer needed," says Olima.

Dominion Farms denies the farmers' accusations and points out that it has already built eight classrooms, donated gateposts and awarded educational scholarships to 16 children, as well as providing beds and electricity for a hospital ward.

Perhaps Erastas and his family will be forced to make way for the development soon, as is already happening in many other places. The World Bank estimates that only 2 to 10 percent of the land in Africa is formally owned or leased, and most of that is in cities. A family may have lived on or occupied a piece of land for decades, but it often has no proof of ownership.

Hunt for Land Continues

Nevertheless, the land is almost never left unused. The poor, in particular, live off the land, where they collect fruits, herbs or firewood and graze their livestock. According to a joint study by several UN organizations, land grabs are often justified by defining the land as "fallow." As a result, according to the report, land grabs have the potential to dispossess farmers on a large scale. In many countries, there may be enough arable land available for everyone, but the quality is not uniform—and the investors want the best land. That, as it happens, is the land where farmers usually live.

Because more than 50 percent of Africans are small farmers, large-scale land acquisition could be disastrous for the population. Those who lose their fields lose everything. The fact that the large investors can substantially improve harvests with their modern agricultural technology is of little use to Africans who, once they have lost their land and livelihoods, cannot afford to buy the new farms' products.

The World Bank and others are now developing a code of conduct for investors. A declaration of intent had been planned for the July G-8 summit in L'Aquila, Italy, but the heads of state in attendance could not agree on binding standards.

And so the hunt for land continues. Dominion has secured another 3,200 hectares, and Philippe Heilberg is in the process of leasing an additional 600,000 hectares in South Sudan. Back in New York, in the Stuyvesant Room, one of the speakers is reciting numbers to illustrate how fast the global population is growing: By 154 people per minute, 9,240 per hour or 221,760 per day. And each one of them wants to eat.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

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