![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
Abstract
‘Green economy’ is a broad concept open to different interpretations, definitions and practices ranging from the greening of current neoliberal economies to radical transformations of these economies. In Africa, one emerging and powerful idea in the implementation of the green economy seems to be to use a green agenda to further strengthen development as modernization through capital-intensive land investments. This has again reinvigorated old debates about large-scale versus smallholder agriculture. Influential actors justify large-scale ‘green’ investments by the urgency for economic development as well as to offset carbon emissions and other environmental impacts. In this contribution, we discuss the case of the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT) to give examples of how the green economy may materialize in Africa. SAGCOT is presented by the Tanzanian government as well as investors and donors as a leading African example of an ‘investment blueprint’ and as a laboratory to test green growth combining profitable farming with the safeguard of ecosystem services. In particular, we discuss three Scandinavian investments within SAGCOT, their social implications and their discursive representations through the public debates that these investments have generated in Scandinavia.
Acknowledgements
Bergius sends thanks to the Nordic Africa Institute for the financial support that enabled fieldwork in Tanzania in 2013, and to the Oakland Institute for facilitating a field trip in 2014. Finally, we are grateful for very useful comments from the journal’s two anonymous reviewers.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 The Norwegian state owns 36 percent of Yara.
2 Outgrower schemes usually imply smallholders contracted to a centralized estate whereby the estate normally extends a production loan (including key agricultural inputs) and buys the crops from surrounding smallholders.
3 However, cases have been heard of where this process has not necessarily been adhered to. Moreover, under the Kilimo Kwanza and SAGCOT strategies there have been proposals to amend the legislation to facilitate easier access to land for investors by increasing the share of General Land (Boudreaux Citation2012; German, Schoneveld, and Mwangi Citation2011).
4 According to a presentation by the Minister of Land, Housing & Human Settlements Development, the distribution of land within the SAGCOT area is: Village Land – 60 percent, Reserved Land – 32 percent and General Land – 2 percent (SAGCOT Citation2012).
5 According to FAO (as cited in Kröger Citation2014, 241), a forest plantation has ‘few species, even spacing and/or even-aged stands’.
6 A loan of NOK 146.2 mill (USD 17.9 million) is mentioned on Norfund’s website (Citationn.d.)
7 Keynote presentation at World Forestry Congress in Durban, 9 September 2015.
8 GR had first an intentional agreement with the Norwegian Ministry of Finance that would buy the carbon credits from the plantations in Tanzania. The Ministry, however, withdrew when GR did not succeed in obtaining CDM certification for these plantations.
9 They were paid TZS 2500 per day, which was the minimum wage for agricultural work. The local union, however, claimed that such plantation work should be classified as industrial work, which had a minimum wage of TZS 3000 per day.
10 While the total aid budget has increased, a large share of this includes funding to asylum seekers in Norway.
11 SRI is based on transplanting single, widely spaced, very young seedlings, reducing irrigation rates (alternate wet-and-dry practices), frequent weeding with a rotary hoe, and the use of fertilizers. While originally an organic farming method, KPL advances SRI in combination with agro-chemicals to outgrowers.
12 Interview with villagers, 9 December 2015.
13 This includes performance standard #5 for Land Acquisition and Involuntary Resettlement.
14 Similar concerns have also been expressed by West (Citation2014). See also video footage made by villagers in the resettlement site (Oakland Institute Citation2015b).
15 One cause for this is, according to Greco (Citation2015), spiralling land prices locally upon KPL’s arrival.
16 Greco (Citation2015) explains that the Kilombero Districts Administration is currently endeavoring to undertake Village Land Use Plans and issue land titles.
17 See also website of the Norwegian NGO Framtiden i våre hender (The future in our hands) that critically follows Norwegian investments in the Global South (FIVH Citationn.d).
18 This may be seen as an example of commodity fetishism as described by Marx ([Citation1995] Citation1867, 47), which in this case not only includes concealed social relations of production, but also ecological relations that are not visible to consumers of carbon credits.
19 This statement was also provided in an interview with CEO Mads Asprem in Dagens Næringsliv, 31 January 2014 (Lindgren Citation2014).
20 On multiple occasions, Norfund has cited the lack of complaints filed by smallholders with the grievance committee set up by the company as ‘proof’ that dissatisfaction with the project is not widespread.
21 See Oakland Institute (Citation2015c) for more information.
22 See also comment by Benjaminsen (Citation2015).
23 See Sveriges Television (SVT Citation2014) for more information.
24 Sweden and Norway have, however, a history of ‘internal’ colonization of the indigenous Sámi population in the north.
25 As Amland (Citation1993) wrote about the Norwegian situation in the early 1990s: ‘Unemployment and recession have led to companies looking with new interest on foreign aid. There is an enormous market, which may also give a strategic foothold in future export areas’.
26 In 2002, Statkraft (60 percent) and Norfund (40 percent) established a new company, SN Power, which invests in energy generation projects across the Global South, including India, Nepal, Vietnam, Philippines, Chile, Peru, Brazil, Panama, Zambia and Mozambique.
27 An evaluation report claims that this project has been ‘very successful’, although the impact ‘on poverty is not as great as it might have been, but this is because of the nature of industrial fisheries and distributional aspects’ (Norad Citation2005).
28 As Kröger (Citation2015, Citation5) shows in his study on the Finnish mining boom, the current round of ‘material expansion’ is not limited to the Global South, but also takes place in other ‘peripheries of cores’.
29 As shown above, in the case of the G8’s New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, Scandinavian capital is taking the lead via the investments provided by Yara. For Yara, initiatives such as the New Alliance (and SAGCOT) contribute to overcoming one of its main growth inhibitors: the weak purchasing power of the poor as compared to large agriculturalists (Cartridge Citation2007).
30 See recent opinion piece (in Norwegian) by Norwegian minister of Foreign Affairs (Brende and Fjeldstad Citation2016).
31 Based on (Deininger et al. Citation2011), Li (Citation2011) shows how returns to labor gained by smallholders working their own land are significantly higher as compared to plantation wage work. See also the study by Twomey, Schiavoni, and Mongula (Citation2015).
32 We recognize that ‘accumulation by dispossession’ is not the only ‘power of exclusion’ in rural settings (Hall, Hirsch, and Li Citation2011).
33 Although this might not always be captured when development institutions measure the development impacts of their investment by counting the number of new jobs created (Bjergene and Piene Citation2013).
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Mikael Bergius
Mikael Bergius is a PhD fellow in food and agricultural development at the Department of International Environment and Development Studies (Noragric), Norwegian University of Life Sciences. Using a food regime perspective, his PhD research is focusing on contemporary agrarian change in Tanzania. He has a background in development studies at the University of Agder and international environmental studies at Noragric. Bergius is also a fellow at the US-based think tank The Oakland Institute.
Tor A. Benjaminsen
Tor A. Benjaminsen is professor of development studies at the Department of International Environment and Development Studies, Norwegian University of Life Sciences. As a human geographer, his research focuses on political ecology, land tenure, land-use conflicts, pastoralism, and environmental conservation and justice. He is also Associate Editor of Political Geography. Email: [email protected]
Mats Widgren
Mats Widgren is professor emeritus of geography, especially human geography, at Stockholm University. He is a historical geographer and his research focuses on present and past land use in Sweden, Africa and the world. He now leads a project mapping global agricultural history during the last millennium. He is co-editor of Landesque capital: the historical ecology of enduring land modifications (Routledge 2014, with N. Thomas Håkansson). Email: [email protected]