Challenges and methodological flaws in reporting the global land rush: observations from Tanzania

Abstract

Since international awareness of a global rush for land has grown from 2008 onward, various databases and reports have attempted to provide an overview of the situation by compiling information on individual land deals. While providing such an overview is challenging owing to the dynamic and untransparent nature of the investments, flawed methods of using and citing data are aggravating that challenge and allowing dissemination of inaccurate information. The consequences are an unnecessarily blurred picture of the land deal situation and thus an inadequate basis for related political decisions or social actions and a misleading starting point for new research projects. In this article we demonstrate some of the flaws in the use of data and their consequences, with examples from fieldwork and literature on Tanzania. The paper illustrates and contributes to the evolving debate on appropriate research methodologies for studying the global land rush.

Keywords:

• land deals
• land grab
• databases
• aggregated data
• methodological flaws
• Tanzania

We are grateful to our interview partners in Tanzania for sharing their information and time with us during this study. We would like to thank Rebecca Smalley, Ruth Hall, Norman Backhaus, Theo Rauch and two anonymous reviewers for helpful feedback on this paper. This article is partially based on work conducted within the framework of the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research North-South (NCCR North-South): Research Partnerships for Mitigating Syndromes of Global Change, and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) and the University of Zurich.

Notes

¹See for example a collection of articles in the Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS Forum on Global Land Grabbing Part 1, Borras et al. 2011) and numerous special issues in the JPS and other journals; the Global Commercial Pressures on Land Research Project (Anseeuw et al. 2012a); several reports by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) (Cotula et al. 2009, Cotula and Vermeulen 2009, Cotula 2011), by the Oakland Institute (Daniel and Mittal 2009) and by the NGO GRAIN (GRAIN 2008, 2010) and conference papers of two international conferences, namely the LDPI (Land Deal Politics Initiative) Global Land Grabbing Conference I at University of Sussex in 2011 and the LDPI Global Land Grabbing Conference II at Cornell University in 2012.

²In-depth case studies include e.g. Schoneveld et al. 2011; thematic analyses are provided, amongst others, by Margulis et al. 2013 and Wolford et al. 2013 on governance, Fairhead et al. 2012 on ‘green grabs’, Behrman et al. 2012 on gender and Locher et al. 2012 on initiatives to regulate the phenomenon.

³The motivation for this article and particularly for the data compilation in the underlying LDPI Working Paper 31 came during a workshop where Locher met other scholars starting a research project in Tanzania. Locher realised that these scholars had spent considerable time and resources – like she had done before – to gain an understanding of the status of certain land investment projects in Tanzania in order to choose their case studies.

⁴While we are aware that land deals for mineral extraction, conservation, tourism and other purposes are also relevant and deserve scientific attention, our research in the last few years (and hence our collected data) has focused on the recent wave of land deals triggered by ‘“the triple-F crisis”: food, fuel and finance’ (Hall 2011b). Forestry investments were included due to their growing relevance in Tanzania in the same period.

⁵A draft report by the Department of Economics, University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, titled ‘Consultancy services to conduct an assessment and evaluation of ownership of farms above 50 acres in Tanzania Mainland 2013’ was made available to the authors, but is not publicly accessible. Although the results of this study were expected to be discussed in the parliamentary meeting of April 2013 (Luhwago 2012b), no report has been published yet. However, the Member of Parliament Halima Mdee referred to this study in her blog entry in May 2013 (Mdee 2013).

⁶‘Unsurveyed land’ means that the government has not conducted a proper legal designation of borders and has not registered the use and category of ownership for this plot. However, unsurveyed land managed under customary law can still be owned and considered legal property by Tanzanian citizens (Village Land Act, see URT 1999). Unsurveyed land cannot be allocated to foreign investors directly, but to domestic ones.

⁷Görgen et al. (2009) do not explicitly refer to Sulle and Nelson (2009), but to Cotula et al. (2009), whose data for Tanzania are based on the data published in Sulle and Nelson (2009).

⁸In the Oakland Institute report (2011a), the KRC is named ‘Korean Rural Development Cooperation’, deviating from other sources that name it ‘Korean Rural Community Cooperation’. The publication provides some detailed and more precise information about the investor's plans in a separate box on page 21; however, the information in the table suggests that said land is already acquired.

⁹RUBADA is a statutory organ, established in 1975, that manages several plots of land in the Rufiji Basin (Mwami and Kamata 2011, 18).

¹⁰As we stated above, it is very difficult to get detailed information about the formal status of an individual land deal. Hence, our figures here are rather estimates, based on the indications we have. The actual number of legally concluded land deals might be even smaller, as according to our experience land deals are often reported as concluded before they actually are.

¹¹30 Degree East has reportedly bought major shares of Sun Biofuels to develop biodiesel from jatropha (Locher and Sulle 2013). To date, communities in Kisarawe still call the investor Sun Biofuels.

¹²Our own figures (Locher and Sulle 2013) date from the end of 2012; for better comparison with the Land Matrix figures, one may consider the following: when we accessed Land Matrix data on 4 July 2013, the re-launched database listed 23 deals amounting to 285,000 ha. Figures in the earlier Land Matrix beta version were even higher.

¹³Projects of the same company in different districts are counted as one; if every (projected) land deal in every district is counted separately, the total figure of ceased or aborted deals amounts to 17 projects.

¹⁴See footnote 5.

¹⁵The description of the Land Matrix’ reliability code 1 (out of a spectrum of 0–3) reads as follows: ‘Land transactions reported in sources that we judge reliable including for example: research papers [ … ], company websites [ … ], government records’ (Anseeuw et al. 2012b, 48).

¹⁶McCarthy et al. (2012, 523) define ‘virtual land grabbing’ as ‘situations where, behind a façade of land acquisition for a stated purpose, there lies an agenda to appropriate subsidies, obtain bank loans using land permits as collateral or speculate on future increases in land values’. They further state that ‘[i]n the case of “virtual grabbing” only a few initial stages of land acquisition or enclosure processes occur; just sufficient to enable specific actors to pursue their own interests, which may or may not depend upon land use changes actually taking place’ (McCarthy et al. 2012, 523).

¹⁷The compilation on land deals in Tanzania by Exner (2011, 131ff), though based on secondary information, is a good example regarding the exact provision of sources for detailed entries in a table.

Additional information

Martina Locher is a PhD candidate and teaching associate at the Department of Geography, University of Zurich. Her research interests include rural development, participatory nature conservation and gender. Her current research aims at contributing to a more detailed understanding of transnational land acquisition procedures in Tanzania.

Emmanuel Sulle is a researcher and PhD student at the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), University of the Western Cape. His research interests include agricultural business models, land tenure and rural livelihoods in sub-Saharan Africa. Email: [email protected]