The Land Rush and Classic Agrarian Questions of Capital and Labour: a systematic scoping review of the socioeconomic impact of land grabs in Africa

Abstract

This paper has two main objectives. First, to address the problematic of the socioeconomic impact of land deals in sub-Saharan Africa by looking at what we know from the available literature so far, namely what has been claimed and how much research has been done, as well as why we do not know very much despite the quantity of material published. This is done via a systematic scoping review, which aims to avoid some of the biases inherent in conventional literature reviews and to provide evidence for some basic features of the emerging research on land grabs in Africa, with specific reference to their contribution to the understanding of livelihood impacts. Second, the article links empirical questions about the impact and implications of land grabs with a discussion of alternative (neglected) research questions, notably the implications of the current land rush phenomenon for the classic agrarian questions of capital and labour, as understood in agrarian political economy. Thus the paper proposes a re-engagement with debates on the classic agrarian questions in a Marxist political economy tradition in order to move the land grab research agenda towards more conceptually and empirically challenging research questions.

The author is particularly grateful for the excellent research assistance provided by Thomas Muddimer for the systematic scoping review of the literature. An earlier version of this material was presented at the Centre of African Studies, University of Copenhagen, and received valuable feedback from an engaging audience, particularly from Christian Lund and Amanda Hammar. The article has also benefited from very useful comments and suggestions by Borras Saturnino Jr, Marc Edelman, Terence J Byres and an anonymous reviewer. I am, however, solely responsible for the analysis, and any errors, in the final paper.

Notes

1 For the sake of simplicity ‘land rush’ and ‘land grabs’ will be used interchangeably to characterise the key topic of discussion, even if their respective meanings are quite different. Indeed, the use of these two terms also reflects the variety of approaches to the phenomenon of recent large-scale land acquisitions in developing countries. For a discussion of these definitions, see SM Borras Jr, C Kay, S Gómez, & J Wilkinson, ‘Land grabbing and global capitalist accumulation: key features in Latin America’, Canadian Journal of Development Studies, 33(4), 2012, pp 402–416.

2 C Oya, ‘Methodological reflections on “land grab” databases and the “land grab” literature “rush”’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 40(3), 2013, pp 503–520.

3 K Deininger, D Byerlee, J Lindsay, A Norton, H Selod & M Stickler, Rising Global Interest in Farmland: Can it Yield Sustainable and Equitable Benefits?, Washington, DC: World Bank, 2011.

4 The ‘Global Land Grabbing Conference I’ at the Institute of Development Studies (ids), September 2011, and the ‘Global Land Grabbing Conference II’ at Cornell University, October 2012.

5 Note, particularly, special issues in the Journal of Peasant Studies, 40(3), 39(3–4), 39(2), 38(2), 37(4); Development and Change, 44(2); Globalisations, 10(1); and the Canadian Journal of Development Studies, 33(4). Within these issues see, in particular, introductory essays by B White, S Borras Jr, R Hall, I Scoones & W Wolford, ‘The new enclosures: critical perspectives on corporate land deals’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 39(3-4), 2012, pp 619–647, on the political economy of land grabbing; W Wolford, S Borras Jr, R Hall, I Scoones & B White, ‘Governing global land deals: the role of the state in the rush for land’, Development and Change, 44(2), 2013, pp 189–210, on the role of the state in land grabbing; J Fairhead, M Leach & I Scoones, ‘Green grabbing: a new appropriation of nature?’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 39(2), 2012, pp 237–261, on ‘green grabbing’, ME Margulis, N McKeon & S Borras Jr, ‘Land grabbing and global governance: critical perspectives’, Globalisations, 10 (1), 2013, pp 1-23, on global governance and land grabbing; and Borras et al, ‘Land grabbing and global capitalist accumulation’, on land grabbing in Latin America.

6 However, thus far progress has not been so impressive on methodological grounds. See Oya, ‘Methodological reflections on “land grab” databases and the “land grab” literature “rush”’; and M Edelman, ‘Messy hectares: questions about the epistemology of land grabbing data’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 40(3), 2013, pp 485–501, a point to which I will return in the next section.

7 For some explanations of the classic ‘agrarian questions’, see TJ Byres, ‘The agrarian question and the peasantry’, in B Fine & A Saad-Filho (eds), The Elgar Companion to Marxist Economics, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2012, pp 10–15; H Bernstein, ‘Agrarian questions from transition to globalisation’, in H Akram-Lodhi & C Kay (eds), Peasants and Globalisation, London: Routledge, 2009, pp 239–261; Bernstein, Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change, Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2010; and H Akram-Lodhi & C Kay, ‘Surveying the agrarian question (Part 2): current debates and beyond’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 37(2), 2010, pp 255–284.

8 See L Cotula, The Great African Land Grab? Agricultural Investments and the Global Food System, London: Zed Books, 2013, pp 35–81; and the debate in the Journal of Peasant Studies’ ‘Forum on Global Land Grabbing Part 2’, 2013. See also media reports on land deal data revisions at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22839149.

9 See, for example, Oxfam GB, Land and Power: The Growing Scandal Surrounding the New Wave of Investments in Land, Briefing Paper 151, Oxford: Oxfam, 2011, at http://policy-practice.oxfam.org.uk/publications/download?Id=428754&dl=http://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/oxfam/bitstream/10546/142858/32/bp151-land-power-rights-acquisitions-220911-en.pdf ; and ‘The surge in land deals: when others are grabbing their land’, The Economist, 5 May 2011, at http://www.economist.com/node/18648855.

10 The special issue of Globalisations is particularly focused on the governance of land deals, with an analysis and proposals that go beyond what has essentially emerged from interventions by international organisations like the Food and Agriculture Organization (fao) and the World Bank. See Margulis et al, ‘Land grabbing and global governance’.

11 See, for example, S Borras Jr, JC Franco & C Wang, ‘The challenge of global governance of land grabbing: changing international agricultural context and competing political views and strategies’, Globalisations, 10(1), 2013, pp 161–179; and P McMichael, ‘The land grab and corporate food regime restructuring’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 39(3–4), 2012, pp 681–701.

12 In particular, see Borras et al, ‘Land grabbing and global capitalist accumulation’; and Wolford et al, ‘Governing global land deals’.

13 For example, some win-win scenarios are presented in fao, Trends and Impacts of Foreign Investment in Developing Country Agriculture: Evidence from Case Studies, Rome: fao, 2013. They can also be seen in some of the descriptions of investment projects to be found in company websites, for example http://www.agrisoltanzania.com; and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBtJmGXTGnU.

14 RL Miller & JD Brewer, The A–Z of Social Research, London: Sage, 2003.

15 For examples of this, see Cotula, The Great African Land Grab?; and T Lavers, ‘“Land grab” as development strategy? The political economy of agricultural investment in Ethiopia’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 39(1), 2012, pp 105–132; and, particularly, work focused on non-African contexts, such as M Levien, ‘The land question: special economic zones and the political economy of dispossession in India’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 39(3–4), 2012, pp 933–969; and TM Li, ‘Centering labor in the land grab debate’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 38(2), 2011, pp 281–298. See also some of the more recent special issues in the Canadian Journal of Development Studies, 33(4), on Latin America; Development and Change, 44(2), on the role of the state; and Globalisations, 10(1), on the governance of land deals.

16 See Scoones et al ‘The politics of evidence: methodologies for understanding the global land rush’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 40(3), 2013, pp 469–483; Oya ‘Methodological reflections on “land grab” databases and the “land grab” literature “rush”’; and Edelman, ‘Messy hectares’ for an extensive discussion of this challenge. These articles pay particular attention to the problems of addressing the question of ‘how much’ and ‘where’, particularly in the case of international land deal databases. In the emerging academic literature published in this period there are of course several examples of solid research that deal with the ‘who’, ‘where’ and ‘how much’ questions, such as SM Borras Jr & JC Franco, ‘Global land grabbing and trajectories of agrarian change: a preliminary analysis’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 12(1), 2012, pp 34–59; Levien, ‘The land question’; and Cotula, The Great African Land Grab?

17 C Cramer, Civil War is Not a Stupid Thing: Accounting for Violence in Developing Countries, London: Hurst & Company, 2006.

18 See Oya, ‘Methodological reflections on “land grab” databases and the “land grab” literature “rush”’; and Borras & Franco, this issue. Consider, for example, peasants who use ‘modern’ technology in traditional cultivation systems, investors who are domestic but widely reported as foreign (like Sheikh Al-Amoudi in Ethiopia), or alliances between domestic and foreign capital. Thanks to Marc Edelman for raising this important point.

19 See the Journal of Peasant Studies’ ‘Forum on Global Land Grabbing Part 2’, 2013.

20 It is important to point out that, while the first wave of ‘salvo’ research did not focus on research questions on impact but rather on questions of process, magnitude of deals and their main actors, claims have been made about impacts, often conflating actual and potential effects, a point that will be discussed later in the paper.

21 See H Waddington, H White, B Snilstveit, J Garcia Hombrados, Ma Vojtkova, P Davies, A Bhavsar et al, ‘How to do a good systematic review of effects in international development: a tool kit’, Journal of Development Effectiveness, 4(3), 2012, pp 359–387.

22 V Terstappen, L Hanson & D McLaughlin, ‘Gender, health, labor, and inequities: a review of the fair and alternative trade literature’, Agriculture and Human Values, 30(1), 2013, p 2. For an extended discussion of the challenges for systematic reviews in international development research, see also R Mallett, J Hagen-Zanker, R Slater & Maren Duvendack, ‘The benefits and challenges of using systematic reviews in international development research’, Journal of Development Effectiveness, 4(3), 2012, pp 445–455.

23 D Gogh, S Oliver & J Thomas, An Introduction to Systematic Reviews, London: Sage, 2012, p 5; and Waddington et al, ‘How to do a good systematic review’.

24 Mallet et al, ‘The benefits and challenges of using systematic reviews in international development studies’, pp 448–450.

25 Cotula, The Great African Land Grab?, p 145.

26 Li, ‘Centering labor in the land grab debate’.

27 See Waddington et al, ‘How to do a good systematic review’, p 366.

28 For an extended discussion of potential positive and negative outcomes, see Cotula, The Great African Land Grab?, pp 125–172.

29 Mallett et al, ‘The benefits and challenges of using systematic reviews in international development research’, also strongly recommend this practice for systematic reviews in development studies.

30 See ibid; and Terstappen et al, ‘Gender, health, labor and inequities’, p 6.

31 Cotula, The Great African Land Grab?, p 145.

32 Ibid, pp 142–144.

33 Ibid, pp 135–138. For non-African contexts, see also Li ‘Centering labor in the land grab debate’; and JF McCarthy, ‘Processes of inclusion and adverse incorporation: oil palm and agrarian change in Sumatra, Indonesia’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 37(4), 2010, pp 821–850.

34 On the agrarian question of labour, see H Bernstein, ‘“Changing before our very eyes”: agrarian questions and the politics of land in capitalism today’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 4(1–2), 2004, pp 190–225. This question has been partly addressed by some contributions to land rush research, particularly by studies on Asia, such as Li, ‘Centering labor in the land grab debate’; and McCarthy, ‘Processes of inclusion and adverse incorporation’.

35 Byres, ‘The agrarian question and the peasantry’, p 13.

36 Bernstein, ‘Agrarian questions from transition to globalisation’, p 241.

37 See Akram-Lodhi & Kay, ‘Surveying the agrarian question (Part 2)’ for a clear explanation of Bernstein’s idea of the ‘decoupled question’, which essentially means that the emergence of agrarian capital is no longer relevant to global capital accumulation. See also Bernstein, ‘Agrarian questions from transition to globalisation’, for the author’s own explanation.

38 Akram Lodhi & Kay, ‘Surveying the agrarian question (Part 2)’, pp 264, 267.

39 For examples of such instances and documented evidence, see C Oya ‘Stories of rural accumulation in Africa: trajectories and transitions among rural capitalists in Senegal’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 7(4), 2007, pp 453–493.

40 TJ Byres, ‘Structural change, the agrarian question and the possible impact of globalisation’, in J Ghosh & JH Chandrasekhar (eds), Work and Well-being in the Age of Finance, 2003, p 207.

41 Ibid, p 207.

42 Ibid, p 209.

43 See Oya, ‘Stories of rural accumulation in Africa’, for a discussion of this neglect.

44 See, for example, McMichael, ‘The land grab and corporate food regime restructuring’.

45 Journal of Peasant Studies’ ‘Forum on Global Land Grabbing Part 2’, 2013.

46 Cotula, The Great African Land Grab?, p 142.

47 See, for example, T Lavers, ‘Patterns of agrarian transformation in Ethiopia: state-mediated commercialisation and the “land grab”’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 39(3–4), 2012, pp 795–822; and R Lefort, ‘Free market economy, “developmental state” and party–state hegemony in Ethiopia: the case of the “model farmers”’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 50(4), 2012, pp 681–706. The recent revisions of the Land Matrix data on land deals also confirm the substantial role of national investors.

48 See also Cotula, The Great African Land Grab?, pp 53–54, for more examples of domestic capital playing a major role in large-scale land acquisitions.

49 Ibid, p 144.

50 See Oya, ‘Stories of rural accumulation in Africa’, for examples in Senegal and in the wider literature on agrarian capital in Africa.

51 See also Baglioni & Gibbon, this issue, on the relative ‘constancy’ of large-scale and plantation farming in Africa, with a growing role of national capital since independence in most countries.

52 See the classic work by TJ Byres, Capitalism from Above and Capitalism from Below: An Essay in Comparative Political Economy, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996; and discussion of such trajectories in Oya ‘Stories of rural accumulation in Africa’.

53 See, for example, L Shaw‐Taylor, ‘The rise of agrarian capitalism and the decline of family farming in England’, Economic History Review, 65(1), 2012, pp 26–60; and the classic contribution by R Brenner, ‘Agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial Europe’, in TH Aston & CHE Philpin (eds), The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-industrial Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, pp 10–63. See also Byres, Capitalism from Above and Capitalism from Below; and, more recently, J Banaji, Theory and History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation, Leiden: Brill, 2010.

54 See C Oya, ‘Rural wage employment in Africa: methodological issues and emerging evidence’, Review of African Political Economy, 40(136), 2013, pp 251–273, for an extended discussion.

55 See Shaw-Taylor, ‘The rise of agrarian capitalism and the decline of family farming’.

56 All these examples are taken from the author’s own fieldwork experiences in Senegal, Uganda and Ethiopia and are used for illustrative purposes.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Carlos Oya

Carlos Oya is in the Department of Development Studies, Soas, University of London, London WC1H 0XG, UK.