The Divide

by Jason Hickel

  Many of these purchases were land grabs. A land purchase qualifies as a grab when it entails a transfer of at least 500 acres to be converted from smallholder production, collective use or ecosystem services to commercial activity. Land grabs may provide abstract economic benefit – increasing GDP, for instance – but they often cause environmental damage and human harm: vulnerable people end up displaced from their land and stripped of their access to food and independent livelihoods.

  Number of land grabs since 2000. Source: Land Matrix

  It is difficult to know exactly how much land has been grabbed in this way, because many of the transactions are conducted in secret, behind closed doors. Early estimates from the World Bank put the figure at 120 million acres during the decade since 2000, while Oxfam claimed land grabs amounted to as much as 560 million acres over the same period, roughly the size of Western Europe. These numbers are difficult to verify, but the latest data from the Land Matrix, which tabulates only confirmed transnational transactions since 2000, reports 162 million acres grabbed in some 1,500 deals that have either already been concluded or are still under negotiation.

  While the majority of the land-grabbers are investors from rich countries, and the majority of the target land is in poor countries, the story of land grabs is not a straightforward tale of the North looting the South. Britain is the biggest land-grabber in terms of the number of deals it has executed, and the United States is the biggest in terms of the sheer size of its grabs, but China and India are not too far behind. And about a third of all land grabs involve regional investors. The story is much clearer if we look at it in class terms. The land-grabbers are always rich, regardless of where they are from (after all, the 1 per cent is now a global class), while the people who are displaced from the land are always poor. Indeed, land-grabbers tend to target regions where people do not have formal legal title to their land, and where residents are too poor to mount a serious challenge in the courts. They also tend to favour countries that have poor governance scores, and where local corruption means the deals can be concluded quickly and quietly – a trend that, incidentally, inverts the conventional assumption that good governance attracts foreign investment. South Sudan, for instance, attracted some of the biggest, murkiest land heists shortly after it acquired independence, before it had a government to speak of, and even before proper maps of the new country had been drawn up.

  This explains why 66 per cent of the land that was grabbed between 2000 and 2010 was in Africa, accounting for up to 4 per cent of the continent’s total land mass. Africa is an ideal target because most communities tend to hold land collectively, without formal titles. Control over specific plots is often reckoned according to customary norms or oral tradition. And much of this land is technically owned by the state – a holdover from the colonial era, when European governments simply appropriated vast swathes of land for themselves through legal writ. This control makes it easy for politicians and bureaucrats in Africa to sell or lease land to foreign investors for a song in return for whatever kickbacks the buyer is willing to extend. In many land-grab cases both sides are party to obvious corruption. As for the actual inhabitants of the land – they end up having to bear the real cost: they lose their homes, their resources, their livelihoods and their communities.

  In many ways, this scenario is redolent of the enclosures in England or the clearances immortalised in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. And more often than not, the countries that are giving away land already suffer from serious hunger problems. In Liberia, 75 per cent of the country’s land was in the hands of large investors in 2012, while 24 per cent of Liberian children were malnourished.

  Not all land grabs are aimed at improving food security for the grabbers. Astonishingly, sometimes the grabbing is done in the name of improving the plight of the grabbed. As hunger increased in the wake of the food-price crisis, in 2012 the G8 and more than 200 of the world’s biggest agribusiness corporations (including Monsanto, Syngenta, Cargill, and later Coca-Cola) launched the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition. Their stated goal is to ‘lift 50 million people out of poverty over the next 10 years through inclusive and sustained agricultural growth’. But this sugary humanitarian rhetoric is being used to justify the consolidation of land into corporate hands. The project promises agricultural aid and private investment to African countries that agree to change their laws in order to ‘facilitate’ access to land for foreign firms. Ten countries have signed up, agreeing to cut corporate tax rates, ease export regulations, extend the length of leases and set aside huge chunks of prime agricultural land for agribusinesses. In Côte d’Ivoire, these deals are set to transfer some 1.5 million acres to foreign companies, which, according to a 2013 report by the watchdog group Grain, ‘will displace tens of thousands of peasant rice farmers and destroy the livelihoods of thousands of small traders – the very people that the G8 claims will be the “primary beneficiaries” of its New Alliance’.

  Land is not the only commons that the Alliance seeks to enclose. Seeds are on the agenda too. An agreement with Mozambique requires that it ‘systematically cease distribution of free and unimproved seeds’. Tanzania has been made to pass a new Seed Act that protects corporate patents on biological material. Similar ‘reforms’ have been foisted on the eight other participating countries.

  Food production and biofuel may be the biggest drivers of land grabbing, but there are many other sectors involved as well. In Papua New Guinea, more than a tenth of the country’s land was grabbed in a single decade and handed over to foreign logging companies eager to get their saws into the region’s famous rainforests. In Cambodia, 5 million acres – or half of the country’s total agricultural land – has been handed out to private companies, mostly for sugar production. So many Cambodian peasants have been illegally evicted from the land that the new sugar exports have become known as ‘blood sugar’. Across South East Asia, around 1 million acres have been converted from peasant holdings to rubber plantations operated by Chinese companies ready to supply the ravenous market for car tyres in China. And the Land Matrix database shows that dozens of land grabs have been conducted for the sake of tourism. A royal company from Abu Dhabi recently acquired 5.5 million acres of South Sudan’s grasslands, which it plans to convert into an upmarket game reserve peppered with five-star hotels.

  But perhaps the most disturbing recent trend is that land grabbing is now also being conducted in the name of the most progressive cause of this century: climate change mitigation. In 2005, the United Nations and the World Bank began developing a new strategy for reducing greenhouse gas emissions known as REDD, or by its rather clumsy full name, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation. REDD allows companies in rich countries to buy carbon credits to get around their emissions limits, and then uses that money to protect forests in developing countries from being chopped down for commercial purposes. REDD’s basic innovation is to recognise that our present economic model assigns value to forests only when the trees are chopped down and turned into commodities; it fails to account for the devastating – and incredibly expensive – costs that deforestation produces in the form of climate change. Normally forests serve as important carbon sinks, but when they are destroyed they release vast amounts of carbon into the air; deforestation contributes 20 per cent of total global greenhouse gas emissions. REDD seeks to redress this pricing failure by allowing forest owners to profit from not chopping down the trees, recognising that the forest provides an important ‘environmental service’ to all of humanity and should therefore be assigned an economic value.

  This seems like a good step, in theory. But in practice it has had devastating consequences. In many cases, REDD pilot projects have led to the forced eviction of indigenous communities from forests on the basis that their farming practices contribute to deforestation. In Kenya, for instance, the government has cooperated with a World Bank-led REDD scheme by evicting and destroying the homes of the 15,000 indigenous Sengwer pe
ople who live in the Embobut Forest. REDD is also incentivising a new wave of land grabs: corporations and states are rushing to buy up forests in developing countries in order to cash in on the payouts, a practice now known as ‘carbon colonialism’. Some are taking advantage of loopholes in REDD that actually permit deforestation of original forests so long as new forests are planted elsewhere – even if those new forests happen to be plantations. In other words, some of the very companies that are driving deforestation through land grabs are now grabbing yet more land under the guise of offsetting the environmental damage they have caused. Instead of protecting forests from destructive market forces, REDD is rapidly bringing forests into the market. And in the end it will lead to zero reduction of carbon emissions at source; after all, the whole idea behind carbon credits is to allow polluters to avoid reducing their emissions by buying their way around the rules.

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  While local elites might make handsome profits, the environmental losses that developing countries suffer at the hands of land-grabbers are immense. But there is also a substantial financial loss at stake. In many of these deals, land is sold at fire-sale prices – far below its actual value. Examples from Ethiopia and Peru show that investors end up paying around $0.50 per acre per year, or even as little as $0.30 per acre. Even at conservative estimates, the real value of land on the international market is probably closer to about $600 per acre per year; that’s how much global South countries should be earning on their land transactions. At this rate, the real value of the land that has been grabbed in the global South since 2000 amounts to about $97 billion. That’s just the one-year lease value; the total value would be a year-on-year multiple of this. And of course this figure tells us nothing about the profits that stand to be made off the land in an era of high food prices, soaring demand and dwindling supply.

  Some of these deals might be justified by policymakers in target countries on the basis that they will provide tax revenue on corporate income. But given the fact that most of the investors involved are capable of avoiding the tax system altogether, it’s unlikely that significant benefits will ever materialise.

  The Climate Changers

  When Typhoon Haiyan made landfall in South East Asia in November 2013, it was the strongest tropical cyclone ever recorded, clocking wind speeds of up to 200 miles per hour. While much of the region suffered serious damage, the Philippines was the worst hit by far. Even the most calloused, news-hardened observers could not have been left unmoved by the images that circulated around the world that month, depicting destruction on an overwhelming scale. Whole cities and towns were laid to waste; in some not a single structure was left standing. It was the deadliest typhoon to hit the Philippines in modern history, killing at least 6,300 people and leaving another 30,000 injured. As late as 2015, some bodies were still being retrieved from the wreckage, and more than 1,000 remained missing. But the body count is only the tip of the iceberg. A vast humanitarian disaster unfolded in the wake of the typhoon: more than 6 million people were displaced in the Philippines alone, and 1.9 million left homeless, triggering an internal refugee crisis. Aid agencies warned of disease epidemics in the region due to the lack of food, water and medication.

  According to the latest report, the total cost of the damage has reached $2.05 billion, making Haiyan the costliest typhoon in the history of the Philippines – more than double the second-costliest storm, Typhoon Bopha, which made landfall only one year prior. This has become a disturbing trend. In fact, the eight costliest typhoons in Philippines history have all occurred since 2008, exacting a total toll of nearly $6 billion.

  As it happens, the UN Climate Change Conference was being held in Poland at exactly the same time as Haiyan struck. Yeb Sano, the gentle, soft-spoken delegate from the Philippines, gave an emotional speech that quickly went viral on social media. ‘Super Typhoon Haiyan made landfall in my family’s home town and the devastation is staggering,’ he said. ‘I struggle to find words even for the images that we see from the news coverage. I struggle to find words to describe how I feel about the losses and damages we have suffered from this cataclysm. Up to this hour, I agonise while waiting for word as to the fate of my very own relatives.’ In a voice choked by tears but bolstered by rage, he continued: ‘What my country is going through as a result of this extreme climate event is madness. The climate crisis is madness. I speak for my delegation. But more than that, I speak for the countless people who will no longer be able to speak for themselves after perishing from this storm. We must stop calling events like these natural disasters. [The disaster] is a result of inequity, and the poorest people of the world are at greatest risk because of their vulnerability and decades of maldevelopment, which I must assert is connected to the pursuit of so-called economic growth that dominates the world.’

  Sano announced that he would begin a hunger strike until a meaningful climate deal was in sight. He was joined by a number of other delegates and sixty people from the Climate Action Network.

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  Sano’s speech illustrated a powerful fact that the rich world has found very difficult to swallow. While the West has been historically responsible for the vast majority of the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change, and has benefited tremendously from the industrial use of fossil fuels, the costs of climate change fall disproportionately on poor countries.

  From the start of the Industrial Revolution until today, humans have released a total of 588 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. Rich industrial economies are responsible for about 70 per cent of this, although measurements vary slightly: the number is much higher if you count only industrial emissions, but slightly lower if you include non-industrial emissions, such as from deforestation. Yet, according to data from the Climate Vulnerability Monitor, developed nations bear only 12 per cent of the total costs of climate change. Developing countries, by contrast, have to bear 82 per cent of the total costs, which in 2010 meant $571 billion in losses due to drought, floods, landslides, storms and wildfires. The Monitor predicts that as these costs continue to increase, the share of losses borne by developing countries will increase as well – to 92 per cent by 2030. By then, developing countries will suffer losses amounting to $954 billion per year.

  The distribution of climate-change-related deaths is also geographically uneven. Typhoon Haiyan killed 6,300 people – an astonishing number. But this is only a small fraction of the total number of people killed by climate change each year. In 2010 there were 400,000 such deaths, many due to extreme weather events but most due to climate-change-induced hunger and communicable disease. Of these, 98 per cent occurred in developing countries. And, ironically, the vast majority – 83 per cent – occurred in the countries that have the lowest carbon emissions in the world. And it’s getting worse. The Climate Vulnerability Monitor predicts that by 2030 climate-related deaths in the developing world will have increased to more than 530,000 per year. Rich countries, by contrast, will witness only 1 per cent of those deaths within their borders.

  Multi-dimensional vulnerability to climate change. Source: Climate Vulnerability Monitor, 2012

  Emissions patterns are changing, of course. In 2005, developing countries as a group caught up with their richer counterparts in terms of CO2 emissions – a change for which China is almost exclusively responsible, given its heavy reliance on coal. Indeed, China recently surpassed the USA to become the world’s biggest polluter. And Brazil, Indonesia and India have now surpassed Germany and the United Kingdom. Much of this has to do with the fact that globalisation has shifted production to developing countries, and especially to China, effectively outsourcing responsibility for pollution. Still, once corrected for population size the picture looks significantly different. The United States remains the biggest polluter, emitting three times more CO2 than China on a per capita basis. Germany emits almost double what China does, per capita. And India, for its part, emits just a fraction of the world average: each Indian is responsible for only 1.4 tons of CO2,
while the world average is upward of 4.5 tons per person. Africans emit only 0.9 tons per person. And yet the costs of climate change will hit Africa and India the hardest, amounting to 4 per cent and 5 per cent of their GDP, respectively.

  Why are the consequences of climate change so unevenly distributed? For one, climate change is causing patterns of rainfall gradually to shift north. As a result, many drought-prone areas of the global South will have even less water than they do now. In developing countries, where agriculture is already precarious and generally conducted on a small, non-industrial scale, even slight changes in precipitation can cause devastating damage. Ironically, the high-yield seeds that have been in use since the Green Revolution in the 1960s are much less resistant to a variable climate than the older heirloom varieties. According to The Economist, by 2040 Indian crop yields will decline by up to 9 per cent. In Africa, the growing period could be reduced by 20 per cent. By 2080, agricultural production could fall by as much as 21 per cent across the developing world – all while the demand for food continues to rise. Oxfam predicts that, as a result, world hunger will worsen significantly. The number of people at risk of hunger could increase 20 per cent by 2050 as the availability of calories diminishes across the world.

  Disease is another important consideration. In Africa, many cities and towns are built intentionally just above the ‘malaria line’ – just high enough to escape the reach of malaria-bearing mosquitoes. As the weather warms, mosquitoes are able to move into altitudes that were previously uninhabitable for them. Present estimates suggest that by 2030 an additional 90 million Africans could be exposed to malaria. Similarly, meningitis outbreaks are expected to increase in Africa, as the disease is highly correlated with drought. The recent upsurge in dengue fever and the Zika virus – the latter of which plagued Brazil during the 2016 Olympic Games – are also associated with the changing climate.