The Land Grabbers: The New Fight over Who Owns the Earth

by Fred Pearce

  The Land Grabbers

  The New Fight over Who Owns the Earth

  Fred Pearce

  Beacon Press

  Boston

  Contents

  Introduction

  Part 1: Land Wars

  Chapter 1. Gambella, Ethiopia: Tragedy in the Commons

  Chapter 2. Chicago, U.S.A.: The Price of Food

  Chapter 3. Saudi Arabia: Plowing in the Petrodollars

  Chapter 4. South Sudan: Up the Nile with the Capitalists of Chaos

  Part 2: White Men in Africa

  Chapter 5. Yala Swamp, Kenya: One Man’s Dominion

  Chapter 6. Liberia: The Resource Curse

  Chapter 7. Palm Bay, Liberia: Return of the Oil Palm

  Chapter 8. London, England: Pinstripes and Pitchforks

  Part 3: Across the Globe

  Chapter 9. Ukraine: Lebensraum

  Chapter 10. Western Bahia, Brazil: Soylandia

  Chapter 11. Chaco, Paraguay: Chaco Apocalyptico

  Chapter 12. Latin America: The New Conquistadors

  Chapter 13. Patagonia: The Last Place on Earth

  Chapter 14. Australia: Under the Shade of a Coolibah Tree

  Part 4: China’s Backyard

  Chapter 15. Sumatra, Indonesia: Pulping the Jungle

  Chapter 16. Papua New Guinea: “A Truly Wild Island”

  Chapter 17. Cambodia: Sweet and Sour

  Chapter 18. Southeast Asia: Rubber Hits the Road to China

  Part 5: African Dreams

  Chapter 19. Maasailand, Tanzania: The White People’s Place

  Chapter 20. South Africa: Green Grab

  Chapter 21. Africa: The Second Great Trek

  Chapter 22. Mozambique: The Biofuels Bubble

  Chapter 23. Zimbabwe: On the Fast Track

  Part 6: The Last Enclosure

  Chapter 24. Central Africa: Laws of the Jungle

  Chapter 25. Inner Niger Delta, Mali: West African Water Grab

  Chapter 26. Badia, Jordan: On the Commons

  Chapter 27. London, England: Feeding the World

  Notes on Sources

  Index

  Introduction

  “Buy land. They’re not making it any more.”

  —Mark Twain

  Soaring grain prices and fears about future food supplies are triggering a global land grab. Gulf sheikhs, Chinese state corporations, Wall Street speculators, Russian oligarchs, Indian microchip billionaires, doomsday fatalists, Midwestern missionaries, and City of London hedge-fund slickers are scouring the globe for cheap land to feed their people, their bottom lines, or their consciences. Chunks of land the size of small countries are exchanging hands for a song. So who precisely are the buyers—and whose land is being taken over?

  I spent a year circling the globe to find out, interviewing the grabbers and the grabbed on every continent, from Jeddah, London, and Chicago to Sumatra, Paraguay, and Liberia. Almost everyone seems to be a land grabber today. My cast of characters includes super-financier George Soros and super-industrialist Richard Branson; Colombian narco-terrorists and Italian heiresses; an Irish dairy farmer in the Saudi desert and the recent commander of British land forces, now tilling soil in Guinea; gun runners and the couple who sold the world high fashion with the Patagonia brand before buying the wild lands of the same name.

  I discovered how logging concessions in central Africa may have helped elect Nicolas Sarkozy as president of France; what Lord Rothschild and a legendary 1970s asset stripper are doing in the backwoods of Brazil; who is buying Laos and Liberia, and who already owns Swaziland; how Goldman Sachs added tens of millions to the world’s starving; the dramatic contrast between Kenya’s Happy Valley and Zimbabwe’s Hippo Valley; who grabbed a tenth of the new state of South Sudan even before it raised its flag; why Qatar is everywhere; and what links a black-skinned Saudi billionaire to Bill Clinton, Ethiopia’s ex-freedom-fighting prime minister, and rich cattle pastures at the head of the Nile.

  I found an evangelical American ex–prison boss draining bogs on the shores of Lake Victoria; a dapper English banker plowing up the Brazilian cerrado grasslands; Saudi sheikhs in Sudan, extending the world’s largest sugar farm; the Moonies seeking “heavenly life” by grabbing Paraguayan jungles; and Gaddafi’s doomed henchmen annexing black earth in Ukraine and yellow sands in Mali. The Kidmans and Windsors and Gettys and Khashoggis and Oppenheimers are in there too—and most likely you, or at least your pension fund, have a slice of the action.

  Some regard the term land grabbers as pejorative. But it is widely used, and the subject of academic conferences. I use it here to describe any contentious acquisition of large-scale land rights by a foreigner or other “outsider,” whatever the legal status of the transaction. It’s not all bad, but it all merits attention. And that is the purpose of this book.

  I have been in awe at the grabbers’ sheer ambition, and sometimes at their open-hearted altruism too. Some want to save their nations from a coming “perfect storm” of rising population, changing diets, and climate change. Others look forward to making a killing as the storm hits. Many believe they will do good along the way. But I have been appalled at the damage that often results from their actions.

  Their hosts share much of the blame for what goes wrong. After years of neglecting their agriculture, African governments are suddenly keen to invest. Their desire for a quick fix to deep-seated problems makes foreign investors, with their big promises, attractive. Many governments ask few questions when investors come calling. They clear the land of existing inhabitants, and often don’t even ask for rent. There is often an unspoken cultural cringe, in which foreign is always considered best. The investment, ministers believe, will inevitably bring food and jobs to their people. But such easy assurances rarely work out, for reasons that are social, environmental, economic, geopolitical—and sometimes a toxic mix of all four.

  There is much uncertainty about how much land has been “grabbed,” and how firm the grasp of the grabbers is. In 2010, the World Bank came up with a figure of 120 million acres. The Global Land Project, an international research network, hazarded 150 million acres. The Land Deal Politics Initiative, another network of researchers that helped organize a conference in Britain on land grabbing in mid-2011, totted up 200 million acres. Within weeks, Oxfam, an aid agency, published its own estimate of 560 million acres. The truth is nobody knows. There is no central register; there is little national transparency. Some of the largest deals were done in secret and unknown even to the most diligent NGOs, while other deals have attracted headlines but have never come to fruition. I have tried to disentangle the truth about individual projects, but I have not attempted any global figure.

  I hope I have reported fairly. I did find new mega-farms with thoughtful managers who make sure to offer secure jobs, food, and basic social services to their workers and their families. I found others with vibrant “out-grower” schemes that supported nearby peasant farmers and bought their produce. I found investors with a long-term view. But I also found poor farmers and cattle herders who woke up to find themselves evicted from their ancestral lands; corporate potentates running enclave fiefdoms oblivious to the country beyond their fences; warlords selling land they don’t own to financiers they have never met; hungry nations forced to export their food to the wealthy; and speculators who buy land and then disappear without trace. I was reminded repeatedly of scenes from books like John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrat
h and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

  This is not about ideology. It is about what works. What will feed the world and what will feed the world’s poorest. But what works has to do with human rights and access to natural resources, as well as maximizing tons per acre. As one agribusiness proponent, James Siggs of Toronto-based Feronia, admitted at an investment conference in 2011, “exclusively industrial-scale farming displaces and alienates peoples, creates few jobs and causes social disruption.”

  Yet industrial-scale farming is what most land grabbers have in mind. According to Graham Davies, consultant to the British private equity company Altima Partners, the “vast majority” of investors in Africa are only interested in commercial Western-style agriculture, “largely ignoring” the continent’s 60 million small farms that produce 80 percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s farm produce.

  It is important to know what agribusiness can and cannot deliver. But it is equally important to be angered by the appalling injustice of people having their ancestral land pulled from beneath their feet. And to question the arrogance and ignorance surrounding claims, by home governments and Western investors alike, that huge areas of Africa are “empty” lands only awaiting the magic of foreign hands and foreign capital. And to balk at the patina of virtue that often surrounds environmentalists eagerly taking other people’s land in the interests of protecting wildlife. What right do “green grabbers” have to take peasant fields and pastures to grow biofuels, cordon off rich pastures for nature conservation, shut up forests as carbon stores, and fence in wilderness as playpens and hunting grounds for rich sponsors? They are cooking up a “tragedy of the commons” in reverse.

  Over the next few decades I believe land grabbing will matter more, to more of the planet’s people, even than climate change. The new land rush looks increasingly like a final enclosure of the planet’s wild places, a last roundup on the global commons. Is this the inevitable cost of feeding the world and protecting its surviving wildlife? Must the world’s billion or so peasants and pastoralists give up their hinterlands in order to nourish the rest of us? Or is this a new colonialism that should be confronted—the moment when localism and communalism fight back?

  I began and ended my journey round the world in the cockpit of the greatest land grab in history—the unfenced plains of Africa, where governments, corporations, and peasants seem set to fight for the soil of their continent. I started with a man called Omot.

  Part 1: Land Wars

  Chapter 1. Gambella, Ethiopia: Tragedy in the Commons

  Omot Ochan was sitting in a remnant of forest on an old waterbuck skin and eating corn from a calabash gourd. He was lean and tall, wearing only a pair of combat pants. Behind him was a straw hut, where bare-breasted women and barefooted children were busy cooking fish on an open fire. A little way off were other huts, the remains of what was once a sizable village. Omot said he and his family were from the Anuak tribe. They had lived in the forest for ten generations. “This land belonged to our father. All round here is ours. For two days’ walk.” He described the distant tree that marked the boundary with the next village. “When my father died, he said don’t leave the land. We made a promise. We can’t give it to the foreigners.”

  Our conversation was punctuated by the rumble of trucks passing on a dirt road just 20 yards away. The dust clouds they created wafted into the clearing and rained down on the leaves on the trees. Beyond the road huge backhoes were excavating a canal. Omot watched them: “Two years ago, the company began chopping down the forest and the bees went away. They need thick forest. We used to sell honey. We used to hunt with dogs too. But after the farm came, the animals here disappeared. Now we only have fish to sell.” And with the company draining the wetland, they will probably be gone soon, too.

  Gambella is the poorest province in one of the world’s poorest nations—a lowland appendix in the far southwestern corner of Ethiopia. Geographically and ethnically, the hot, swampy province feels like part of the new neighboring state of South Sudan, rather than the cool highlands of the rest of Ethiopia. Indeed, Gambella was effectively in Sudan when it was ruled by the British from Khartoum, until they left in 1956. For the half century since, the government in Addis Ababa has ruled here, but it has invested little and cared even less for its Nilotic tribal inhabitants, whose jet black skin and tall elegant physique mark them out from the lighter-skinned and shorter highlanders. The livestock-herding Nuer, who frequently cross the border into South Sudan, and the Anuak, who are farmers and fishers, are peripheral to highland Ethiopia in every sense.

  Only three flights a week go to the small provincial capital, also called Gambella. When you get there, there are no taxis, because there is no demand. The road from the airport is a dirt track through an empty landscape. Gambella town is a shambles. Its population of thirty thousand has no waste collection system, so garbage piles up. The drains don’t work, public water supplies are sporadic, and electricity is occasional. There are few public latrines. The couple of paved roads are heavily potholed and give out before the town limits. My billet, the Norwegian-built guesthouse at the Bethel Synod church, was probably the dirtiest, bleakest, and most ill-kempt building in which I have ever rested my head. The only vehicle in town for hire was a forty-year-old Toyota minibus of dubious road-worthiness, with a crew of three. I took it.

  Of late, the central government in Addis Ababa has stopped pretending that the province of Gambella doesn’t exist. It now seems intent on taming a populace that might prefer rule from Juba, the capital of South Sudan. In practice, that means bringing in foreign agribusiness and collecting the province’s dispersed population in state-designated villages, while their forests, fields, and hunting grounds are handed over to outsiders. In the service of capitalism, the Gambella “villagization” program will relocate a domestic population much in the manner of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot.

  I set out along the only road south from Gambella town to find the land grabbers. On the outskirts, as we hit the dirt, my driver decided to pick up a dozen hitchhikers. From then on, we were the local bus service. To an outsider, much of the province looks deserted. Its expanses of lowland forests and bush, grassland and marsh, are wide open to wildlife migrations, passing cattle herders, and occasional shifting cultivators. For miles, the only obvious sign of human activity was the odd cell phone tower, usually with a generator to power it and a resident native guard. But there were hidden villages in the bush. Their members would sit by the roadside trying to sell mangoes and other fruit to any vehicles that passed. Mangoes cost less than three cents each, and the price had halved by late afternoon.

  Soon after the small town of Abobo, the road passed through a landscape of ash, smoke, and charred trees. This was land newly acquired by my first land grabber—Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Ali Al Amoudi, a Saudi oil billionaire with large holdings in Ethiopian plantations, mines, and real estate. In 2011, Fortune magazine put his personal wealth at more than $12 billion. Ethiopian born, he is often described as the world’s richest black man. He is a million-dollar donor to the Clinton Foundation, and also a close confidant of Ethiopia’s prime minister Meles Zenawi and his ruling party, which had granted a sixty-year concession on 25,000 acres of Gambella to Al Amoudi’s company, Saudi Star.

  Al Amoudi has been eyeing agriculture since the world food price spike in 2008 sent Saudi Arabia into a panic about its future food supplies. He is intent on shipping most of his intended produce, including in excess of a million tons of rice a year, to Saudi Arabia. There he has been feted by the king for making investments abroad to keep the kingdom fed. To smooth the wheels of commerce, Al Amoudi has recruited one of Zenawi’s former ministers, Haile Assegdie, as chief executive of Saudi Star.

  Saudi Star’s concession is based around the Alwero dam built in the 1980s to irrigate a state cotton farm that never happened. The dam’s rusting sign still advertises the consulting services of Soviet engineers Selkhozpromexport. Al A
moudi is digging a 20-mile canal from the dam to irrigate rice paddies. Once the old state farm is watered, he wants to expand to at least 620,000 acres, to grow sunflowers and corn.

  At the gate of the Saudi Star compound, I watched soldiers usher in giant Volvo trucks and Massey Ferguson tractors, and workmen starting to replace the temporary buildings with new permanent structures. Close by, they were laying an airstrip in a recently made clearing in the forest. Nobody at the company here or in Gambella town would talk to me. Perhaps they thought there was nothing to add to their boss’s recent media statement that “land grabbing poses no harm on the environment or on the local community.”

  Our next hitchhikers, outside the company gate, were a couple of schoolgirls who wanted a lift back to their home a couple of kilometers away. It was there, in a small clearing in a forest by the road, where we found Omot Ochan in his combat pants on his waterbuck skin, describing how Al Amoudi and his company were destroying his world. Hearing his testimony of ancestral connection with this patch of forest, and his determination to keep it, I was struck by how most Westerners have lost any sense of place and attachment to the land. I move around all the time, and buy and sell houses without feeling ties to the soil. But here in Gambella, their land is like their blood. It is everything. And to lose it would be to lose their identity.

  Omot insisted Saudi Star had no right to be in his forest. The company had not even told the villagers that it was going to dig a canal across their land. “Nobody came to tell us what was happening.” He did remember officials from the “villagization” program dropping by to say the families should go to the new village at Pokedi, across the River Alwedo from Saudi Star’s compound. But that was all. Omot had no doubt that the purpose of the new village was to clear them and others off land taken from them to give to Saudi Star. So far, his family and their neighbors had refused to go, even though their children walked to the school at Pokedi on a Monday morning and didn’t return until Friday evening.