Land appropriation, surplus people and a battle over visions of agrarian futures in Africa

Abstract

The debate about ‘land grabs’ by foreign agents should not obscure the role of national governments or the accelerating process of appropriation of land by national agents. Much of the appropriated land is under forms of ‘customary’ tenure. In arguing that a fundamental problem is the denial of property in land to Africans, I lay out the colonial and post-colonial reproduction of ‘customary’ tenure as not equivalent to property rights, the documentation of mounting competition and conflict centring on land, and the more recent threats by national and international agents. Against this background, I question acceptance of an inevitable agro-industrial future which makes millions of Africans ‘surplus’ to the needs of capitalist investment.

Keywords:

• customary tenure
• land appropriation
• small- to medium-scale farming
• Africa

Acknowledgments

I have also benefitted from discussions with Ben Cousins, Bridget O'Laughlin and Henry Bernstein during a fellowship at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, South Africa, in 2011.

Notes

Thanks go to the Land Deals Politics Initiative team for the October 2012 conference on ‘land grabs’ held at Cornell University where the paper was first presented, to Jun Borras for encouragement, and to two anonymous reviewers for useful comments.

¹A phrase used by Borras et al. (2010, 583) in a discussion about biofuels, but here I mean it more widely.

²It is well known that Locke used the Native Americans as his examples for unproductively used resources that were therefore not to be considered as their property. And see Alden Wily (2012, 754) for basically the same argument being made by Chief Justice Marshall of the US Supreme Court in 1823 to deny ownership to North American ‘Indians’.

³Cf. Macpherson (1987).

⁴Information and quotations from file NS 1/15/4 in the Malawi National Archives, Zomba, Malawi.

⁵H.M. Stationery Office 1956 Report of the Conference on Land Tenure in East and Central Africa, held at Arusha, Tanganyika, February 1956. London: H.M. Stationery Office.

⁶Also seen in other governments: ‘[T]he government [in Cambodia] argued that titling hampered development schemes that required evictions’ (Hall 2011, 2).

⁷On pastoralism see Galaty et al. (1981), Horowitz (1986), Baxter and Hogg (1990), Behnke et al. (1993), P.E. Peters (1994).

⁸I include myself in this.

⁹See critiques by von Benda-Beckmann (2003), Kingwill et al. (2006) and Musembi (2007), among others.

¹⁰A key analytical problem here is to assume one can talk of ‘women’ rather than gendered statuses or types of women (wives, widows, daughters, sisters, etc.). Thus, where the pattern of patrilineal inheritance through men holds, those who oppose the extension of land rights to the widows of lineage men include female lineal members, that is, the mothers and sisters of the lineal men.

¹¹‘Large-scale land deals … imply large-scale use of water resources’ (Woodhouse 2012, 789).

¹²Cf. von Braun (2007), McMichael (2010). Also see Kalb and Halmai (2012) on the globalization and financialization of capital.

¹³Compare capital inflows to Africa rising by 16% in 2008 while falling 20% worldwide and Africa considered as ‘best for investment’ a few years earlier (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012, 15, 195).

¹⁴Although other countries are also targeted in South and Central America, the former USSR, and Southeast Asia.

¹⁵See Alden Wily (2012, 769) for examples of low prices.

¹⁶Also see below for the point about competing for mobile global capital.

¹⁷See Alden Wily on encroachments on and excisions from ‘common’ land (2011, 2012).

¹⁸‘400 villagers fight former Minister, T/A, DC over land’, Deogratias Mmana, The Nation, 16 July 2010. A report in the same paper for October 2012 describes fishing villagers taking up pangas to defend their land on Lake Malawi from the apparent ‘sale’ by local chiefs of the customarily held area to someone who intends building a hotel.

¹⁹The case also suggests that such appropriations may be one reason why the government is taking so long to pass the law policy into law – if passed, the proposed decentralization of authority over land to committees might provide an obstacle to such appropriations. It remains to be seen what difference the new government (mid-2012) makes in these matters.

²⁰This is not a new phenomenon – see Goldman (2001) for blatant cases from Laos involving the World Bank and international environmental agencies.

²¹Though the importance of ‘off-farm’ labour for many rural producers means some members of a family are likely also to be attracted to any expansion in opportunities for wage labour, especially if it is in their vicinity.

²²‘African countries’ barter terms of trade declined by roughly 30 to 50% between 1980 and the early 1990s with wide variations across countries’ (cf. Cooper 2002, Ch. 5).

²³This has been particularly documented for Nigeria (see Guyer and Lambin 1993, Guyer 1997) but is also the case for other countries, such as rice-growing areas in the Chilwa Basin in southern Malawi (author's research).

²⁴Note that the term ‘richest’ is highly relative since even this ‘top’ quartile is poor by any standards. See Jayne et al. 2012 for other countries in Africa.

²⁵See, for example, Sender and Johnston (2004), and the special issue of Journal of Agrarian Change (JAC), 2004, 4(1&2) and responses in JAC, 2004, 4(3).

²⁶Note that I do not mean full self-sufficiency – that is not a goal, nor is it possible except for a tiny minority.

²⁷Experts point to the considerable conventional plant breeding still possible for African farmers even before recourse is had to genetically modified crops, and insist both should be based on close working relations between scientists and farmers (which has not been the norm). See Kloppenburg (2010) and Richards (2010).

²⁸Oya (2012) points to the parallels between the past system of marketing boards and associated channels of regulation and some forms of contract farming. A challenge will be to avoid the rigidity and corruption of that old system.

²⁹See Weis (2010). More criticism of conventional agriculture is also being raised even in its heartland in the USA – see Hertsgaard (2012) for a recent piece in public media.

³⁰Cf. Pratt (2009) on small to medium farmers in Italy and California also see debates in the 2004 issues of the Journal of Agrarian Change.

Additional information

Pauline E. Peters is a social anthropologist, retired from the teaching faculty, but still affiliated as Faculty Fellow and Senior Research Fellow with the Centre for International Development, Harvard University. She has conducted research in southern Africa, particularly Malawi, on issues of land, political economy of farming, gender, family and poverty. Email: [email protected]