by Fred Pearce
China does need some imports of foodstuffs. It imports a lot of sugar, for instance. And Chinese companies are grabbing land to grow more, partly to make ethanol. Complant International Sugar—which already grows sugar in Benin, Sierra Leone, and Madagascar through its Cayman Islands–based subsidiary Hua Lien—in 2011 leased Jamaica’s last three sugar estates, covering 75,000 acres, from the ailing state-owned Sugar Company of Jamaica. A Chinese sugar project in Mali will cover 60,000 acres (see chapter 25); another of similar size is planned in the Philippines.
But China’s main need is for soy, which it gets mostly from Latin America, to feed its livestock. China wants to cut out the soy middlemen. It clearly does not trust the large American-owned commodity traders like Cargill and Bunge. Leading the way is Beidahuang Land Cultivation Group, a giant state-owned farming business based in the northeast of the country that grows more soy than anyone else in China. In 2011, it secured a deal with the governor of Rio Negro in Argentina to lease some 570,000 acres. It also tied up a long-term agreement with domestic Argentine land giant Credus, which controls more than 2 million acres of farms. Beidahuang said it would also build a new port to export the soy.
China’s demand for soy is also taking it to Brazil. And, as I saw during my visit to the cerrado, Chongqing Grain Group has sealed a $2.4 billion deal there to set up western Bahia’s biggest soy processing plant and ship 1.5 billion tons of soy back to China every year.
While China’s demands are large, they are not insatiable. The fruits of its one-child policy are already seeing its population stabilizing, and its head count could soon be falling. Yes, as the Chinese grow richer, they will demand more stuff—requiring imports of land-dependent commodities like rubber, cotton, timber, and biofuels. But the truth may be that China’s food consumption explosion has already happened. If Chinese agricultural corporations continue to take over the world, as they may, it will often be to supply other markets. Like you and me.
China is integrating into the global economy. This integration means that, besides large Chinese corporations traveling the world looking to make profits growing food on foreign soils, we may also find more land grabbers moving into China. It is already happening on a small scale. Take chickens. In 2008, Goldman Sachs, the American private equity bank, spent $300 million buying ten giant poultry farms in China’s Hunan and Fujian provinces. Sadly the masters of the universe won’t be putting on their wellies. They are outsourcing management. But it is not a one-off. Goldman Sachs, along with Deutsche Bank and others, has also bought into Chinese pig farms. And it has a stake in the Yurun Food Group, the country’s second-largest meat processor.
Singapore is developing a high-tech Super Farm, known as the China Jilin Modern Agricultural Food Zone, near Changchun in the fertile black soils of the far northeast of China. The farm, at 370,000 acres, is more than twice the size of Singapore. The aim is to grow rice and corn, raise cattle and pigs, and even establish vineyards—to supply both Singapore and China. Meanwhile, New Zealand’s dairy giant Fonterra has a number of Chinese farms. It owns 43 percent of the dairy company responsible for the scandal of milk powder poisoned with melamine that killed six Chinese children and made a quarter-million sick in 2008.
What about Africa? The continent has been the prime focus for Chinese companies searching for metals to sustain their country’s fast-growing industrial economy. Beijing promises to build roads, bridges, ports, and other infrastructure in return for being allowed to mine Africa. By one assessment there are 1.5 million Chinese in Africa today. Chinese contractors have been digging water canals and pursuing irrigation schemes in Mali. Chinese scientists are manning seed labs in South Africa. Chinese smallholder farmers who have lost their land to domestic land grabs are busy tilling soil from Senegal to Mozambique. But how much farmland are the Chinese grabbing? The answer is much less than sometimes appears.
As we saw in chapter 7, reports that the Zhongxing Telecommunications Equipment company has 7 million acres of the Democratic Republic of the Congo to grow oil palm are off by an order of magnitude. A much-discussed scheme in Zimbabwe, in which the state-owned China International Water and Electric Company would get corn in return for building a 250,000-acre irrigation scheme near Bulawayo, seems stillborn. “Much of what we hear is misinformation and rumor, about large-scale land grabs and sinister Chinese plots,” says Lila Buckley, a China expert at the International Institute for Environment and Development in London.
There is some activity. But it is not the Chinese way to act in haste. The China State Farms Agribusiness Corporation has been farming in Africa since 1994 and operates seven projects across the continent, including farms in Zambia, Tanzania, South Africa, and Guinea Bissau. But according to China Daily, in 2010 those farms totaled just 20,000 acres, mostly in a sisal plantation in Tanzania. “Agricultural investment requires more patience and long-term view than other industries,” said the company’s deputy general manager Xu Jun. “The fragile political situation is still the biggest challenge for Chinese companies investing in Africa.” Chinese companies also often bring in their own workers, rather than employing locals. That happened on Sino Cam Iko’s 25,000 acres of rice fields in Cameroon, where Chinese managers say locals don’t work hard and steal the rice.
Put simply, the Chinese and Africans often don’t get on too well, says Buckley, who researched their mutual incomprehension in Senegal. A Chinese manager told her: “The biggest problem with agriculture in Senegal is people’s mentality. They are very easily satisfied. If they have enough to eat, they won’t work anymore. There is a lot of arable land that they don’t use.” The locals, meanwhile, complained that “the Chinese want the workers to come and work for eight hours. But we have a different approach. We work for a few hours, then rest by the side of the field, chat with our friends, drink some tea, share our stories.” Such cultural clashes can flare up into something worse. A plan from China’s Ex-im Bank to fund Chinese cattle ranches in Mozambique’s Zambezia and Tete provinces was abandoned in 2007 after a public outcry.
East Asians, it has to be said, sometimes have big trouble in Africa. The other major example is the fate of South Korea. The country is one of the world’s biggest food importers. It imports almost 90 percent of its wheat and corn. And it is growing uncomfortable about that. In 2008, Korean food companies suddenly found that key foreign suppliers were banning exports in order to feed their own people. In Seoul, the government established a National Food Strategy to subsidize national corporations willing to annex foreign land to secure key supplies.
There are visceral fears here. Koreans starved to death in large numbers during the Korean War little more than half a century ago. They still do in Communist North Korea. Despite this, modern South Korea has neglected agriculture, concentrating instead on a breakneck industrialization. Its farmers are old and its farms dilapidated. Now it looks with dread at the prospect that, as a major report by the Samsung Economic Research Institute put it in 2011, countries may in the future “weaponize food” and cut off its breadline.
So, by 2030, South Korea wants to grow a quarter of its food on foreign soil owned or leased by Korean companies. The executives of Daewoo and the other industrial corporations that made South Korea rich are now on a new mission—to scour the world for land to feed their nation.
But not all has gone well. Not everybody welcomes Koreans, even Koreans with money. In 2008, Richard Shin, head of Daewoo Logistics’ foreign land purchases, did a deal with the Madagascan president Marc Ravalomanana to take over 3.2 million acres of that country to grow half of South Korea’s corn. The proposed land grab represented not much more than 2 percent of Madagascar, but was the equivalent of a quarter of its current arable land. Daewoo promised in return to build roads and hospitals, and provide thousands of jobs. But the deal collapsed when anger in the African country over the deal unseated the president.
In response to the failure of the deal, Shin
said phlegmatically, “If not this Madagascar project, we will go for another. It’s pure business, not colonialism of any form, old or new.” Three years on, the Korea Times reported that seventy-three South Korean companies were growing grain on 57,000 acres in eighteen countries. And many more and bigger deals would follow.
Korea has leased 75,000 acres in the Khalkhgol region in the far east of Mongolia. Hyundai, the world’s biggest shipbuilder, bought a two-thirds share in a Russian company farming 125,000 acres in the Russian Far East near Vladivostock and has its eye on a similar-sized piece of the Brazilian cerrado. The Korean International Cooperation Agency said in 2011 that it was shopping for 250,000 acres of government-designated “idle land” in the Philippines. Daewoo planned a 50,000-acre corn farm in Indonesia. The Korean food giant Daesang had hooked up with a Korean ex-pat farmer in Cambodia’s Kampong Speu province, Lee Woo-chang, to grow corn on 32,000 acres for shipping back to South Korea. Like the Chinese, it looks like, for now at least, the Koreans may have better luck in Asia.
Part 5: African Dreams
Chapter 19. Maasailand, Tanzania: The White People’s Place
Fancy your own private cottage in the Serengeti, with a grandstand view of arguably the most precious wildlife region on Earth, a home of lions, elephants, rhinos, buffalo, cheetahs, and the greatest spectacle of them all, the wildebeest migration? The one I have in mind will cost you $1,875 a night for your own room, or $1,675 if you are prepared to bunk up with a friend. For that you get the sound of wildlife at night and the daytime run of the 336,000-acre Grumeti game reserve. As the South African eco-safari group that manages the place promises—after mentioning the “imported chandeliers and hand-crafted furniture,” the spa, the lawn croquet, and the archery—“you’ll have this wild stretch of Africa all to yourself.”
Everyone agrees that the Serengeti is special. In his 1909 book African Game Trails, describing his yearlong orgy of hunting through East Africa, former U.S. president Teddy Roosevelt dubbed the Serengeti a “Pleistocene” landscape, a “great fragment out of the long-buried past of our race.” But what Roosevelt mentioned only in passing was the human population—the brightly adorned, aristocratic Maasai people—through whose land he rampaged.
Conservationists have often used similar language to Roosevelt. But for me, the most remarkable thing about the Serengeti is not its sense of a land without humans but rather the opposite. For the truth is that this most extraordinary collection of big game has shared this land with native tribes such as the Maasai people and their cattle for hundreds, probably thousands of years. There is a symbiosis entirely at odds with our modern ideas about humans being in inevitable conflict with nature. And because we cannot, or do not want to, see that symbiosis, we have deemed the local herders too dangerous to stay. The longtime custodians of the Serengeti and its wildlife are being systematically expelled from their land.
Bizarre as it may seem, our vision of virgin nature—on the hoof, and red in tooth and claw—has encouraged the takeover of the land by a new breed of superrich conservationists and safari operators. The Serengeti, these days, is not so much a Pleistocene landscape as the world’s biggest zoo, in which the Maasai warriors, with their bright red clothing, elaborate beads, and lethal spears, are reduced to decorative walk-on parts.
For an extra $500 per person during your stay, the people at the Grumeti game reserve will let you take a balloon safari across a place where, as they put it, “the land stretches forever.” This phrase, by the way, is the Maasai meaning of the word Serengeti. Now, however, it stretches forever for you, but not for them. While you receive “seclusion and exclusivity,” they and their cattle aren’t allowed into the reserve. The concession holders told me they were “legally bound” to keep “unscrupulous locals” from bringing cattle onto their traditional lands. But even a travel correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, visiting in 2007, felt a pang of unease. With English furniture in the lodge and white South African guides in the Land Rovers, “the fact that this was Tanzania, with its own culture and ecosystem, seemed almost incidental,” he said.
The Grumeti reserve is roughly the size of Long Island. Overlooking the Grumeti River on the western side of the Serengeti plain, it runs down toward the shores of Lake Victoria. It is a national game reserve under the control of Wall Street hotshot Paul Tudor Jones. A welterweight boxing champion from Memphis, Tennessee, he joined up with his cotton-trading relatives from the Dunavant dynasty before going into hedge funds. He became a billionaire after successfully predicting Black Monday, the stock market crash in 1987. In 1990, after being convicted of filling in a protected wetland on his Maryland estate, he took up conservation philanthropy. He bought the Grumeti concession in 2002 from the Tanzanian government. In mid-2011, the influential U.S. travel magazine Travel and Leisure named his spread the world’s best hotel.
Jones is not the only high roller attracted to the Serengeti plains. The landscape may not be as picturesque as Patagonia, but the big game sure beats llamas. Travel east from Grumeti, to the other side of the Serengeti National Park, and you may stumble on Gulf sheikhs and their friends out to bag a slice of wild Africa. This is a hunting reserve, just for them, thanks to a deal done in 1992 between the then Tanzanian president Ali Hassan Mwinyi and Brigadier Mohamed Abdul Rahim Al Ali—“the brigadier,” as he has been widely known locally ever since, though at home in the United Arab Emirates he has since been promoted to major general.
The brigadier’s safari company, the Ortello Business Corporation, has exclusive hunting rights to a large area of the million-acre Loliondo Game Controlled Area. The area is a crossroads for wildlife between the Serengeti National Park to the west, the Ngorongoro conservation area to the south, and the Maasai Mara reserve in Kenya to the north. The brigadier does not own the land, which is traditional Maasai territory and contains several villages. But the Maasai are required to keep out of his way, and the government deploys its elite paramilitary Field Force Unit to ensure they do. The area is so exclusive, so apart from Tanzania, so Arab that if you drive anywhere near it your mobile phone beeps with a text welcoming you to the United Arab Emirates.
The brigadier and his Loliondo land grab were controversial from the start. In 1993, the New York Times asked whether, in the light of stories about the brigadier’s past Rambo-style hunting excursions on the Serengeti, Tanzania had “declared open season on its own protected wildlife.” The answer seemed to be yes. Allegations soon surfaced of hunting by the brigadier’s guests outside the six-month season, of bush burning to drive the animals toward the hunters, of marksmen going out at night with spotlights to shoot leopards from vehicles using AK-47s, and even of lions being captured and taken from a private airstrip to a zoo in the United Arab Emirates.
The Maasai say their grazing rights have been curtailed to meet the whims of the hunters. The brigadier, who is now a prominent real estate developer in Dubai, has done little to assuage their concerns. Rather the opposite. In July 2009, the Field Force Unit and Ortello’s own security staff entered several Maasai villages, evicted the residents, and threw their cattle off grazing land. The government’s tourism minister, Shamsa Mwangunga, defended the action, saying the Maasai were building houses in the hunting zone and grazing their cattle during the hunting season. But there was a news clampdown. Several European diplomats and journalists were refused permission to visit the area to see for themselves.
The first independent assessment came the following year from James Anaya, a law professor from the University of Arizona and the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights and indigenous people. More than two hundred homesteads were burned down, he said. Their cornfields and food stores were destroyed. Three thousand people were left without shelter, food, or water, and fifty thousand cattle without grazing land. Tear gas was used. One woman was raped, some men chained, and three children had disappeared.
Anaya went on to accuse the Tanzania government of failing
to investigate the affair. But he didn’t sound too surprised. He said that the evictions followed years of “ever-increasing restrictions of the rights [of the Maasai villagers] to graze and water their livestock within the game control area.” This arose because of “a larger government policy favoring the interests of private enterprises engaged in conservation tourism and wildlife hunting, principally the Ortello Business Corporation, over the rights of indigenous peoples.” The Tanzanian government did not respond to Anaya’s report.
Safari tourism, whether with cameras or automatic weapons, is a huge industry in Tanzania. It is responsible for a quarter of export earnings. Hunting is banned across the border in Kenya, but hunters in Tanzania spend big for the privilege of cruising the Serengeti to bag the “big five”—elephants, lions, leopards, buffalo, and rhino.
Jack Brittingham’s Tanzania Adventures is state of the art. Brittingham, a Mexican American, has turned a business making hunting videos into a pan-African safari organization that, he promises in a clear nod to Roosevelt’s exploits, will provide Americans with experiences that “rival even the early years of traditional trophy hunting in Africa.” He has a base camp at the foot of Mount Kitumbeine at the heart of the Serengeti ecosystem, which provides “a truly unique opportunity to hunt its dense old-growth forest preserve for mountain buffalo and exceptionally large leopard.”
Brittingham’s hunting is more traditional than the brigadier’s. His marksmen often go on foot in rugged terrain. But they need deep pockets before stepping onto the Serengeti. In 2011, a fourteen-day buffalo hunt started at $53,000, with an extra $2,000-plus payable for any buffalo actually hit. A twenty-eight-day lion hunt cost upwards of $100,000. The trophy fee for an elephant was $22,500, 90 percent of which goes to the Tanzanian government and 10 percent to the Tembo Foundation, an NGO that fights poaching. (Note: poaching is illegal hunting by poor natives.) Brittingham promises “to pamper you and your family after a day of hunting.” But those wanting a taste of the real East Africa may feel disappointed. Five of his seven professional hunters are South African whites (Mzungu, in Swahili). None is a Maasai.