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

by Fred Pearce

  What a tragedy. With the ink still wet on its registration as the 193rd member of the United Nations, South Sudan is handing over its most vital resources to neighbors and silver-tongued “investors.” The fertile soils of the green belt, the precious waters of the Nile, and the rich heritage of wildlife in Boma National Park and the incomparable Sudd wetland—all are in danger of slipping into foreign hands. Handing over a tenth of your country on day one does not look like an auspicious start for a new nation.

  Part 2: White Men in Africa

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

  On top of a small green hill, in the midst of what was once Kenya’s largest papyrus swamp, stands a large white cross. Ten yards high, it is visible for miles in every direction. Calvin Burgess, the American agricultural entrepreneur who erected it, is a Christian evangelist. He has come to Africa to save souls and to grow rice in the swamp.

  The local people watch through a fence in bemusement as his fleet of green John Deere equipment rips up the papyrus, digs drains to dry out waterlogged soils, and dikes the river. They scratch their heads and dodge the dust as trucks ship out thousands of tons of Burgess’s rice. And, brooding over that cross, erected on a hill where they once performed animist rituals, they talk darkly of living beneath a crucifixion scene. Is this a land grab for God?

  Burgess made his millions running private prisons for state governments in the United States. He came to East Africa to drain the swamp, purge its people of pagan rituals, and transform a place where “desperation, hunger and corruption reigned and life was hopeless,” as he puts it in the Kenya Monitor, a local magazine. “I had been blessed and now it was my turn to bless. But did I have it in me? I really had no idea of what was in store as I made the decision to take on Africa.”

  Speaking from his base in Guthrie, Oklahoma, Burgess told me he wanted “to make a drastic improvement to the worst place in Kenya, with the poorest of the poor. By the time we’re done, I want to take a million people out of poverty.” He writes heartfelt blogs describing his passion for his work and the love that the locals express for him and his farm. On the final morning of a trip to Africa in late 2010, he wrote: “I walked through the village with all the children running along behind. Their hope is in Dominion Farms, for a future without hunger.”

  Burgess named his farm Dominion. It gave the sense of a Christian taming nature and creating order in the world. Some have called him an advocate of dominionism, the belief that Christian values should be made central to all public activity. It is not a term he uses about either himself or his farm. But like many missionaries before him, Burgess has found that the subjects of his philanthropy don’t always seem too keen on his Dominion. Many locals I spoke to said they found the name Dominion to be domineering. They don’t like his drains or his bulldozers or his fences. They don’t like the reservoir that floods their pastures. Most of all, they don’t like losing their swamp. For Burgess the swamp is useless, empty boggy land; for them it is a valuable resource. The differing views about the swamp are a powerful metaphor for what goes wrong when people like Burgess head for Africa.

  Burgess arranged for me to tour the farm with his two deputies: Chris Abir, who runs community relations, and Ronald Boone, a farm manager from the American south. They made quite a contrast. Abir is young, dapper in a business suit, and soft-spoken. He is a member of the Luo tribe that dominates the area round Lake Victoria, a former missionary and teacher from the country’s big Luo city, Kisumu. On his desk sat a book of psalms and a DVD of The Cross—The Story of Arthur Blessitt, a biopic about a man who spent twelve years walking around the planet with a four-yard-long cross on his back. Behind him was a sack of Prime Harvest Rice, the main product of Dominion Farms.

  Boone was louder and less dapper, one of life’s buccaneers. He wore cowboy boots rather than soft shoes. “I grew up in Louisiana, draining swamps and growing rice, and that’s what I am doing here in Africa,” he said as we piled into his Jeep and headed out across the farm. “I hooked up with Calvin in 2004 when I was broke and needed a job. I left and then he invited me back, and that’s why I’m here now.”

  My first impression was that the farm was a slightly chaotic operation. The Jeep ran out of gas and we had to radio for someone to come out and fill the tank. But around the farm, Boone was constantly waving at his laborers, checking out the work, giving lifts, and collecting news about their families. It was a routine, but he was good at it. We were stopped by a farm worker who wanted “Mr. Ronald” to loan him 200 Kenyan shillings (a couple of dollars, or about a day’s pay). Just for a week; till he got his wages. Boone happily handed over the cash and wrote a note of the transaction in a little black book.

  Evidently this happened a lot, and the loans and bonhomie made him popular. But the day after my visit, Boone was gone. Back to Louisiana. Burgess said he left of his own accord. The workers said he was fired. I had no sense of an impending crisis as we toured the farm, even when discussing his future and that of the farm. Maybe there was just a sudden disagreement with the boss. It was evident the two didn’t always see eye to eye. At any event, the next day 150 women workers demonstrated outside the offices demanding his return. It made the local paper.

  The Yala swamp is, or rather was, a huge mass of dense papyrus standing about 12 feet high and covering 42,000 acres of soggy ground where the Yala River empties into Lake Victoria, Africa’s largest lake. Impenetrable except by boat down its narrow meandering water channels, the swamp is, or rather was, rich in wildlife. It had hippos, crocodiles, leopards, hyenas, several species of buck, and rare birds such as the papyrus yellow warbler. It still hides a number of islands and a small lake, Lake Kanyaboli. Conservationists call the lake a “living museum,” because its reedy waters are a last refuge for fish species that have disappeared from the giant Lake Victoria. Workers on the farm say they occasionally see a critically endangered Sitatonga antelope in the swamp. Out there somewhere too is a village of about a thousand people, on an island covering several dozen acres. But Burgess’s drainage engineers are advancing through the swamp. According to local activists, the reclusive inhabitants say they will fight to the death, should the invaders get that far.

  A lot of nonsense has been talked about the swamp since Burgess arrived. One NGO claims it has “a population of about half a million.” That is untrue. Burgess, on the other hand, says nobody lived there before or made use of its resources. “Whatever the locals say, they didn’t use the swamp. They couldn’t get in. Now they want to go there of course, because we are drying it out. But they didn’t before.” Likewise, nonsense. There are 700,000 people living within 10 miles of the swamp, and until recently many of them did harvest its fish, wild game, and papyrus, and used its drier spots for grazing and growing vegetables.

  Engineers and agriculturalists have had their eyes on the swamp for years. Three times, they tried to drain its waters and clear the papyrus for cultivation. Some 5,700 acres were cleared and drained in the 1970s. A weir was installed on the river. Dutch engineers drew up plans to drain a further 23,000 acres. But the fields flooded after a dike failed, and the plans were shelved.

  Enter Burgess. A driven businessman, he was looking for a new and godly cause after selling his prisons business. At the suggestion of a missionary pastor back home, he turned up on the shores of Lake Victoria. Several local businessmen and religious folk pleaded with him to take on the failed farm project. He says he made up his mind on Christmas Day 1999 and signed a twenty-five-year deal with two local councils, since extended to forty-five years, to lease not just the failed project area but a much wider section of the swamp. Burgess says he has permission to drain much of the swamp and take 70 percent of the water flowing down the River Yala for irrigating rice.

  He has always thought big. His intention is “the conversion of 17,050 acres of swampland into a modern irrigated farm capable of producing rice, rotation crops, tilapia fish a
nd a number of byproducts in a vertically-integrated, independent operation.” He also wants to plant bananas and soybeans, and even establish training centers and a radio station.

  Locals say they were happy for him to take on the existing failed project, but not to wade ever deeper into the swamp. But he was impatient. Without always waiting to go through bureaucratic hoops, he raised the weir 6 feet, dug more dikes and canals, leveled the land, and divided Lake Kanyaboli in two with a causeway. When conservationists from the Kenya Wetlands Forum visited in 2005, they said the company should be “compelled to stop immediately all activities . . . as they are in clear breach of the law.” Dominion finally obtained an environment license for its plans in June 2006 and plowed on.

  Boone took me out to the swamp frontier, where the cleared rice fields meet the papyrus. “We cut up the papyrus and then burn it,” he said. “We clear a thousand acres a year,” which should mean 4,000 acres being cultivated by the end of 2011. But that wasn’t enough. “Calvin has to get to nine thousand acres for this to be an effective rice enterprise,” he said. But, besides the economic and environmental issues, it is the social challenges that look the greatest. The Wetlands Forum’s inspectors reported a “strong feeling of betrayal . . . the company is implementing its activities without the interests of the community being considered.” Ignoring, that is, the interests of the very people Burgess says he has as his first concern.

  After touring the farm, I went to see the neighbors outside the company fence. Close to Gendro, a shabby village of mud huts and tin-roofed shacks, I talked to two women doing their washing. A hand-powered pump brought water 10 feet from the dirty canal inside the fence to their stone slab just outside. Jennifer Acheng, a strong woman who wore a torn pink T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Mighty Mom,” remembered: “Calvin came to see us when they started. We were so happy. We sang for him then. We called him ‘rain: the father of food.’ But in the end he brought us hunger.”

  The women looked through the fence at a sign saying “No Trespassing” in English, Swahili, and Luo. Beyond it were Dominion’s rice-processing plant and the rice fields. “That land was grazing pasture for our cattle,” Acheng said. “Even the poorest families had at least twenty cattle, for meat and milk. We used to go right across that land to the swamp. We cut the papyrus to make mats and baskets and thatch for our huts.” She pointed to a mango tree on the other side of the fence. “That used to be ours, too. The farm took our land. Most people have no cattle now. And the water is dirty. The company said it would give us clean water, but the pumps only deliver dirty canal water.” She went back to her washing.

  Sitting under a tree in the village, wearing a yellow shirt and peaked baseball cap, seventy-four-year-old Dalmas told me: “We used to live right in the swamp. My seventeen brothers and sisters and I were born there. My grandfather died there. We had a hundred cattle then.” Most of the village’s adults said they were born inside the swamp. Now, 1,500 of them are huddled together like squatters around the edge of the farm.

  Dalmas also remembered Burgess visiting them at the beginning. He came with his fellow American director Barbara Waterson and a young local pastor, Ken Nyagudi, who encouraged Dominion to set up here and later became a member of parliament in Kisumu. “They told us God would bring an answer to our problems,” he said. “We would get four acres each and we would all have jobs. But there are no jobs. They are laying people off now.”

  At the start, the farm employed many people. Gangs of local men did the backbreaking work of clearing the land and digging the dikes. But Boone told me that when he arrived, he advised Burgess to change course. “There were more than seven hundred workers here, not properly controlled. There was virtually no equipment. I told him to cut the staff and get in equipment to clear, drain, and level the land properly.” As a result, the workforce is now down to 150 full-timers and varying numbers of women working seasonally, mostly standing in the fields to scare birds, and doing weeding.

  Burgess insists the women are delighted to be working for him. His December 2010 blog said: “450 women grace our fields daily . . . they are thankful for the work and the pay check. They start each morning early with prayer and singing, then attack the fields. They toil away bent over for nine hours a day and then walk home full of smiles . . . Some walk two hours a day just to get to work and then do it again to get home.” When Waterson joined the women in the fields, they were “hugging and holding on to her, expressing their love and appreciation for their changed lives.” A German film crew in attendance was “touched so much that composure was all but lost.”

  But outside the fence, I heard a different story. I heard anger that the women, many of them single parents, had to accept such hard labor. As I saw for myself, conditions for the women were rudimentary. There were no buses to get them to work; no shelters from the rain; no canteens; no toilets. At lunchtime, come rain or shine, they gathered on the dikes to eat food that they had brought themselves.

  Burgess paid his workers two dollars a day—less than the average rate for prisoners in his old U.S. penitentiaries. Boone defended this. “We employ the women to weed the fields because it is cheaper than spraying herbicides. If we had to pay them more, it would not be cheaper. They need to remember that.”

  Soon we were joined in Gendro by a group of men headed by a bald narrow-shouldered man in a white raincoat with a small purse round his neck advertising Manchester United. John Akieno Ongwek was chairman of the liaison committee that met monthly with Dominion’s Chris Abir. He looked angrily over the fence. “They only want women,” he said. “I want them to employ our boys as well, to avoid their idleness. They said no.” He pointed to a youngster in the group. “The farm terminated his work. This guy has a wife and three children, but they just sacked him for no reason.” Ongwek picked out another man, who had a mutilated thumb. “It was chopped off while he was cutting papyrus for the company. But they said it was an accident and he got no compensation.” John suddenly looked shrunken and bewildered. “We want them to be friendly to us, not treat us like this.”

  On the other side of the farm, beyond a large reservoir created by Burgess, they were seething at the loss of hundreds of acres of fields and pastures. When it raised the weir on the river to create the reservoir, Dominion had offered compensation and rehousing to around ninety families. Those in a village that disappeared beneath the waters took the cash. But farmers further up the slope refused. They prefer to plant crops and graze animals as and when they can, taking their chances with the abrupt rise and fall of the reservoir water level.

  In 2007, there was a flood and all the grazing land was inundated. Some homes were swept away. It was a traumatic time. The locals blame Dominion. Dominion blames heavy rains and insists the farm was “in no way responsible.” But the truth is that its weir and sluice gates can only handle river flows of up to 420 million acre-feet a second, which was exceeded during the heavy rains. Prevented from escaping into the swamp, the water backed up and flooded the fields.

  “Before they built the weir, we had plenty of grazing land and we also used the swamp for making charcoal and for cutting papyrus to make mats,” Jackson Oware told me as we stood outside his hut. He still had a scrap of land to plant corn and beans, though he never knew when the floods might come. He kept goats in a shed and grazed a much reduced herd of thirty-two cattle inside the swamp when he could.

  But the presence of the farm now meant that the waters brought hippos and crocodiles almost to his front door. “Because of the weir, they can’t get to the lake. They stay in the bush right here,” he told me. “A friend of mine was attacked by a crocodile while he was fishing.” His wife, his aged mother, and the young daughter clinging to his hand all stayed indoors at night now. “I’m not against Dominion, and if they had stuck to their initial plan we wouldn’t have all these problems. We tried to negotiate, but instead they started saying NGOs were inciting us to object.
They are not developing the land; they are making us poor. Nothing good is coming, and we’ve lost so much livestock.” Even so, he told me: “I don’t want compensation; I want my land. I won’t move.”

  Up the hill, safe from the floods, I met Erasto Odindo, who has lived here for many years. He is comparatively well off, with a satellite TV, a generator, a shed full of dairy goats, and his own well. But he was no less angry. “When Dominion took over we thought it would be good. But in 2005 they started to encroach on people’s private land, demanding our common grazing land, and taking over the river. They told us we had to change; to stop raising cattle. Their tractors ran over our crops. We went to court. But the farm told us they didn’t need to consult with us because we didn’t have title deeds.” I remembered something Boone said on the farm the previous day: “I told Calvin we don’t need to negotiate with them if they haven’t got title. We should just get on.”

  Another bone of contention is farm chemicals. Burgess has repeatedly and flatly denied that his company uses dangerous pesticides of any sort. But he admits that the Kenyan government’s crop-spraying planes do take off from his airstrip when they blitz the quelea bird, a voracious crop eater. And Burgess himself does spray some herbicides. He noted in his blog in 2009, after introducing his new pilot: “We must be careful where we spray, especially near the perimeter of the farm and around our gardens, fish farm, and aquatic ponds.” Indeed so. The locals told me they blamed wind-blown spray for killing 150 acres of kale, and said several people had died after their stomachs swelled after spraying, something that had never happened here before. The deaths may have nothing to do with Dominion, of course, but the locals believe they do. And Odindo said: “If you get sick and rush to Dominion, they’ll pay you a thousand shillings to shut up.”