One of the top­ics that came up dur­ing this past week’s World Food Sum­mit was the “land grabs” tak­ing place in Africa. Lybia’s Muam­mar Gaddafi accused rich nations of buy­ing up large tracts of farm land for use to feed their own countries.

From IPS, writer Paul Virgo looks into the debate that started last week.

The U.N.‘s Food and Agri­cul­ture Organ­i­sa­tion (FAO), the summit’s host, said it is esti­mated that up to 20 mil­lion hectares of African land have been acquired by for­eign inter­ests in the last three years.

States such as Saudi Ara­bia and China started to look for farm­land abroad after a spike in the price of sta­ples such as wheat and rice in 2007-08, prompt­ing fears that small­holder farm­ers may be dis­placed from their ter­ri­to­ries, wors­en­ing the sit­u­a­tion in coun­tries already suf­fer­ing grave food insecurity.

The rise in food prices and the finan­cial cri­sis have dri­ven more than 100 mil­lion peo­ple into the ranks of the hun­gry this year, to take their num­ber beyond the one-billion mark for the first time, the FAO says. So it is per­haps under­stand­able that hos­til­ity to for­eign land pur­chases in Africa remains high.

“Our lead­ers (in Africa) are sell­ing all our land,” Huguette Akplo­gan Dossa, coor­di­na­tor of the African Net­work on the Right to Food, told IPS. “Sell­ing national land is not a good thing. They have to think about what is good for the peo­ple. If they come to buy our lands for pro­duc­tion, take it to their coun­tries, trans­form it and sell it back to us very expen­sively, it is another form of colo­nial­ism. We have to ban it.”

How­ever, the FAO and the Inter­na­tional Fund for Agri­cul­tural Devel­op­ment (IFAD) are reluc­tant to stig­ma­tise a pos­si­ble source of cap­i­tal, given that a long-running decline in agri­cul­tural invest­ment is per­haps the main rea­son why so many peo­ple in rural areas of devel­op­ing coun­tries strug­gle to feed themselves.

“It is the wrong lan­guage to call them land grabs. They are invest­ments in farm­land like invest­ments in oil explo­ration,” Kanayo Nwanze, head of IFAD, told a news con­fer­ence. “The fact there are dis­tor­tions does not sug­gest this should be banned.”

FAO and IFAD admit that the acqui­si­tions, which con­tin­ued to be called ‘land grabs’ in sum­mit papers despite Nwanze’s objec­tions, have had neg­a­tive impacts in some cases. But they insist for­eign invest­ment can also help small­hold­ers gain access to the resources they need to haul them­selves out of poverty. So they are hold­ing con­sul­ta­tions on an inter­na­tional code of con­duct to encour­age pos­i­tive forms of for­eign agri­cul­tural invest­ment and dis­cour­age bad practices.

“What strikes me is the het­ero­gene­ity of these sit­u­a­tions. It appears super­fi­cially that all of these so-called land grabs are sim­i­lar; it’s big for­eign com­pa­nies push­ing small­hold­ers off the land, and indeed some of them do look like that,” IFAD Assis­tant Pres­i­dent Kevin Cleaver told IPS.

“But oth­ers are much more sim­i­lar to old pri­vate invest­ments in sugar, rub­ber and tea that actu­ally put money into a coun­try, devel­oped an area that was under­de­vel­oped, and helped small­hold­ers,” Cleaver said. “My point is not to give a mes­sage about whether it is good or bad. I know for cer­tain that the sit­u­a­tion is highly het­ero­ge­neous. My sus­pi­cion is that there are hor­ri­ble cases of grotesque exploita­tion and there are other cases of use­ful pri­vate investment.”

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