by Fred Pearce
But greens are impatient. As David Kaimovitz, a forest specialist at the Ford Foundation, puts it: “Some conservationists feel that time is too short to negotiate every intervention. While they doubtless regret the hardships local people experience, their main concern is to save species.” Twenty years after the Earth Summit, Kaimovitz detects a move back to “pure” conservation—back to the “fortress conservation” philosophy of Rupert and Prince Bernhard, and before them, of Huxley and Grzimek. In truth, the big money in conservation has always been directed toward schemes that exclude locals in the name of conservation and seek out the top dollars that can be earned from selling environmental spectacle. Hence the dozens of huge, privately owned parks and conservancies around the world, from Patagonia to Tanzania.
Buying your own slice of Eden is certainly a growing trend around the world. The American Prairies Foundation, a spinoff from WWF, is on a shopping spree for the bison ranges of the American West, with a huge slab of Montana already on its books. Swedish-born businessman Johan Eliasch, head of sports goods manufacturer Head and a forest adviser to former British prime minister Gordon Brown, bought 400,000 acres of the Amazon rain forest. Virgin boss Richard Branson has turned one of the islands he owns in the tax haven of the British Virgin Islands into a zoo for ring-tailed lemurs that he has imported from Madagascar.
And nowhere is this trend toward the privatization of nature seen more than in Rupert’s old stomping ground of South Africa. Across the country, many large, mostly white-owned ranches are giving up livestock in favor of wildlife ranching. According to a study by Dhoya Snijders of the VU University of Amsterdam, a staggering 17 percent of South Africa has been given over to private wildlife reserves.
Big-ticket billionaires have moved in. The 57,000-acre Phinda game reserve in KwaZulu Natal, north of Durban, is owned by Tara and Jessica Getty, heirs to the Getty legacy. Virgin boss Branson—yes, him again—owns the 25,000-acre Sabi Sands, one of nine private game reserves that circle the 5-million-acre Kruger National Park, sharing its wildlife. Nicky Oppenheimer, chairman of the de Beers diamond empire founded by Cecil Rhodes, who once dreamed of an African land grab from the Cape to Cairo, has spent some of his $3 billion fortune on the 250,000-acre Tswalu Kalahari game reserve, South Africa’s largest, in the north of the country. And, in case you thought we could get through a chapter without mentioning a Gulf investor, the 60,000-acre Shamwari game reserve in the south, near Port Elizabeth, is owned by Dubai World, a real-estate-grabbing arm of the government of Dubai, which also has luxury beach resorts in Djibouti, Zanzibar, and the tiny Indian Ocean island nation of Comoros. The sheikhs bought it from Adrian Gardiner, whose Mantis Group created the reserve from former farmland, and has an empire of forty game reserves and luxury boutique hotels across Africa. That’s green grab.
Chapter 21. Africa: The Second Great Trek
They are calling it the second great trek. Almost two centuries ago, the descendents of Dutch settlers in the British-run Cape of Good Hope hitched their wagons to oxen and headed inland to establish new republics in the Transvaal and Orange Free State that eventually became the heartland of South Africa. Now they are on the move again. This time the destination of the “white tribe” is the whole of the African continent. Boer farmers are now being courted by black nations to the north.
As I traveled across the continent for this book, I constantly met white South Africans managing new plantations, as well as running mines and tourism ventures. They are often the technicians and foot soldiers of the African land grab. But they are also buying on their own behalf. Since the end of white rule in South Africa, there have been sporadic moves north by Boer farmers. Some felt unwanted at home. Others felt the tug of new adventures. Most went to near-neighbors like Mozambique, Botswana, and Zambia. But there is now an organized migration further afield, with approval and assistance from governments at both ends.
The men in khaki shorts and Springbok rugby caps are being offered millions of acres, some of it “virgin” bush and some of it already cultivated by smallholders and state farms, or grazed by herders. The hope is that their undoubted agricultural know-how can kick-start an agrarian revolution across the continent. Whatever else, it is a dramatic reversal of the ostracism the Boers suffered in the days of apartheid.
The travel agent for these Boers with itchy feet is Agri South Africa, the post-apartheid successor to the old South African Agricultural Union, which was formed in 1904 to represent white farmers. Agri-SA has some seventy thousand members today, including many black farmers. Its deputy president, Theo de Jaeger, says he has received offers of land for his members from twenty-two countries in all parts of Africa. By mid-2011, formal government-backed deals to cement the relationships were in place for Congo-Brazzaville and Mozambique, with more to follow.
The incentives from would-be hosts are considerable. Along with free land come tax holidays, promises of new roads and power lines, and freedom to export produce and profits. Such sugar-coating often angers local peasant farmers who have never enjoyed such benefits. In the South African capital, Pretoria, assisting the farmers to move is also government policy. In 2010, ministers set aside $450 million to support South African farmers outside the country’s borders in recognition of the fact that some 30 percent of South Africa’s white-owned farmland is due to be transferred to black owners by 2014.
Agriculture minister Tina Joemat-Pettersson told the annual congress of Agri-SA in 2009: “If we can’t find opportunities for white South African farmers in this country, we must do it elsewhere in the continent.” But she also sees the second great trek in a strategic context, pointing out that the Chinese, Brazilians, and others are moving in on African farmland. In 2011, she said: “Africa has almost 60 percent of the global arable land that is under-utilized. It is imperative that the South African government works together with the private sector and civil society to champion South African foreign policy agenda in the continent.” If there is a land grab going on, then South Africa should not be left out.
The biggest offer so far is from Congo-Brazzaville. This is the smaller and more northerly of the two adjoining Congo states. Plagued by internal conflict for decades, the oil- and timber-rich but probity-poor former French colony has languished on the international sidelines. Its longtime leader, Denis Sassou Nguesso, who was born in a remote village in the north of his country, is no stranger to international land deals. He has his own lucrative real estate on the French Riviera. And he is keen for South Africans to take some of his homeland—up to 25 million acres, an area the size of Kentucky.
Sassou Nguesso’s government says the Boers are being offered “vacant land.” The first arrivals are taking over a huge former state farm in the fertile Niari Valley, which is in the heavily populated southwest, along the railway that connects the capital, Brazzaville, and the coastal second city, Point-Noire, with neighboring Gabon. According to de Jaeger, the farm has been abandoned for more than a decade. “The bulk of the property remains in good condition. The farmers will move into the houses on the property.” They hope. For since the state gave up the farm a decade ago, the former occupiers of the land have returned, and now grow manioc and peanuts there. They may not want to leave.
Ruth Hall and Gaynor Paradza of the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, paid a visit to the proposed “vacant land” in late 2011, just ahead of the arrival of the first convoy of South African farmers. “There are people living there,” Paradza told me on her return. “At least five settlements will be affected by the land transfer. In one of the villages, Malolo 2, there was something that passed for consultation, culminating in an elder symbolically spitting palm-wine on the ground, which the ministry official took as indicating community consent.”
In another village, Dehese, the local chief told her he had not been consulted at all. But he feared the worst. South African farmers had been to
the village, putting pegs into the ground in the school yard and around village water sources. Hall said there was no published map of the land allocated to the South Africans. “I met the ministers of land affairs and agriculture personally, but they had different stories. Nobody even knew how long the leases would be.”
In March 2011, the land affairs minister, Pierre Mabiala, said that his people expected “abundant food” from the colonists. Agri-SA promised its hosts that the newcomers will first plant staples like corn. And they “will do skill transfer to the people of Congo to educate them to become successful farmers themselves.”
But back home, de Jaeger has been selling prospective pioneers the idea of growing more profitable tropical fruit like avocados and bananas, and even biofuels for export to Europe. Whatever the promises to local ministers, he believes the contracts give the farmers the right to grow what they want, to take a five-year tax holiday, not to pay any rent, and to repatriate all their profits.
Next up is Mozambique. There is some inauspicious history here. In 1996, an agreement between South African president Nelson Mandela and his Mozambique counterpart Joaquim Chissano gave South African farmers the chance to take up fifty-year leases to farm up to 500,000 acres of old Portuguese cotton farms. The land was in the Lugenda river valley in the country’s least populated, most forested, and most northerly province of Niassa, bordering Tanzania. The land was along one of the few roads through the province, close to the large Niassa National Park, one of Africa’s best lion sanctuaries.
The scheme was dubbed the “promised land,” but the plans drawn up in South Africa were also widely criticized for re-creating an apartheid-style society. Absentee white landlords would employ what the South African high commissioner in Maputo termed “tame Kaffirs” from back home, to supervise local laborers living in “rural townships.” In any event, the plan failed. The South African Chamber for Agricultural Development, an agency set up by Mandela to manage the migration, couldn’t find the promised funding for the promised land. By 1999, only thirteen South African farmers of the anticipated five hundred had actually moved in. At last count, only five remained.
Undeterred, the Mozambique government has now offered an additional 2 million acres. This time, the deal looks more enticing. The farms are in the southern province of Gaza, less than 300 miles by road from Pretoria. The new intergovernment arrangement was set up by white farmer Charl Senekal, a close associate of the new South African president, Jacob Zuma. Senekal was declared South Africa’s “farmer of the year” in 2003 for building a 110-acre enterprise into a highly profitable 45,000-acre sugar and game estate.
The deal was sealed in May 2011, at a ceremony at Agri-SA’s office in Centurion, near Pretoria, where the farmers’ union called it “a platform to consolidate South African commercial farming interests in Mozambique.” Rich soils, combined with water from the Limpopo River, are expected to make Gaza the future granary of Mozambique. Hundreds of South African farmers will most likely move into the area.
Other countries are enticing itinerant Boer sons of the soil. Zambia wants them to grow corn on two new farm blocks totaling 740,000 acres. Sudan offers land and irrigation water to grow sugarcane along the Nile. The vast arid nation of Namibia, which only got rid of South African occupiers in 1988, now wants them back to irrigate fields on the banks of the Orange and Kunene rivers. Angola has offered two farms totaling 345,000 acres, and Uganda hints at 420,000 acres. Another deal, on hold at the time of writing, may yet see them growing grapes and olives on 86,000 acres of Libya.
Despite the success of Agri-SA in opening up Africa to Boer farmers, a new travel agent has emerged with a different trek in mind. The ultra-conservative Transvaal Agricultural Union refused to embrace the post-apartheid South Africa, and still represents almost exclusively white farmers. So it is spurning offers from African governments in favor of a proposal from the post-Soviet—and eminently white—state of Georgia. It wants to take Caucasians to the Caucasus.
In early 2011, prospective Boer settlers made a tour of inspection. They were dined by the first lady of Georgia, who was born in the Netherlands and reportedly chatted to her guests in their ancestral Dutch. The Transvaal Agricultural Union has set up a Georgia website, www.boers.ge, full of images of the mountain idyll and links to farms up for purchase. The largest on offer when I checked was 890 acres of mountain pasture in Dedoplistskaro, amid the vineyards of the far east of the country. It was tiny by South African standards, and in comparison with the free land on offer in Africa, rather expensive at $150 an acre.
While governments are keen to help South African farmers relocate, so are banks and investment funds. The new trek is attracting support from, among others, the Johannesburg-based Standard Bank, which now describes itself as a “pan-African bank”; the homegrown Phatisa Group investment fund; and Emergent Asset Management, the joint UK-South Africa fund run by former Goldman Sachs high flyer Susan Payne (see chapter 8).
Not everyone is happy, however. The “exodus” has provoked scary headlines in South Africa. “The last of the white farmers are about to depart for greener pastures,” said one. Nonsense, of course. But there is a political subtext here. The alarm is being whipped up to inflame opposition from rural Boer heartlands to the country’s land reforms, which are intended to end a land apartheid that has persisted after political apartheid ended.
Ruth Hall says the trek really just represents a recognition of the market value of South African farmers in an era of land grab. The most telling fact is that most farmers are not fleeing South Africa at all. The great majority are keeping their farms at home. They are hedging their bets rather than cutting their ties. “This is not racial flight or South African imperialism,” says Hall. “They are going not to feed either South Africa or their hosts. They are finding cheap land, water and labor. This is global capitalism.”
If global capitalism has been hot for South African farmers on the move, it has been doubly hot for farming corporations that specialize in growing sugar. Booming demand for our favorite sweetener, plus rising biofuels production, pushed sugar prices to record levels in 2011. Big sugar-processing companies were buying land to keep up with orders.
One of the buyers is Associated British Foods. There are few blander corporate names. But behind the anonymous face, ABF is, among other things, the world’s second-biggest sugar producer, through its ownership of British Sugar. British Sugar has long been a fixture at home, consuming the entire output of Britain’s four thousand sugar beet farmers. Its brand, Silver Spoon, is part of British life. But recently it has carved out a whole new sugar empire in Africa through the purchase of a controlling interest in the rapidly expanding South African sugar juggernaut, Illovo.
And that makes British Sugar and ABF’s owners—the secretive Weston family from Canada, headed by the company’s current chief executive, George Weston—major African land grabbers. Oh, and water grabbers, too. Sugarcane requires prodigious amounts of water to grow. It requires fields to be flooded to a depth of more than 6 feet during a typical year. That is twice as much as required by other water-guzzling crops like rice or cotton. Across the world, sugarcane empties rivers and wrecks underground water reserves.
Illovo emerged from some restructuring of old South African apartheid companies in the 1990s. It has escaped from its homeland to buy up farms in Malawi, Mauritius, Zambia, Tanzania, and Mozambique. It owns some 295,000 acres, and counting. African commodities buccaneer Tiny Rowland was once big in sugar, and several of his plantations have ended up in Illovo’s hands. Now Illovo’s purchase by British Sugar gives it improved access to markets in the European Union, where it supplies a third of all imports.
Africa is a great place for people with large chunks of land and access to water to grow sugarcane. Sugar yields in Africa, unlike those for many other crops, are at least as good as those in the world’s top producers like India, Brazil, Thailand, and Australia.
So Illovo is heading north, grabbing land as fast as it can.
An early Illovo acquisition was Zambia Sugar. Its main plantation, the Nakambala estate, covers 45,000 acres of the Kafue Flats, a huge area of drained wetland beside the River Kafue, a major tributary of the mighty River Zambezi. White settlers annexed the estate from local farmers and herders long ago. Its fences stopped cattle from reaching their old grazing grounds on the Kafue Flats, reputedly once the best in Zambia. Meanwhile, dams built to generate hydroelectricity and irrigate Nakambala sugar have flooded out thousands of people and destroyed wildlife habitat for millions of birds and antelope, including the rare Kafue lechwe.
The Nakambala estate was nationalized after independence but then privatized, ending up in Illovo’s hands in 2001—in effect a reversion to settler colonialism. The company has bought a neighboring 25,000-acre cattle ranch. South African president Jacob Zuma came personally to open the new sugar fields. The combined estates are now the biggest farm in Zambia, and the second-biggest sugar farm in Africa. Illovo provides a tenth of all the “formal” jobs in Zambia, many of them for cane-cutting migrants. But the gradual annexing of the Kafue Flats over decades, and the estates’ demand for water, have damaged ecosystems and wrecked the farming and herding livelihoods of thousands of people. There have been protests and arrests, and cane fields have been burned.
Illovo’s great trek is taking it next to Mali, in order to irrigate 35,000 acres of cane fields. Some 1,600 people will be cleared off the land by the Mali government to make way. But, as we shall see in chapter 25, the biggest threat to the locals may come from its water take. It will suck as much as half a cubic kilometer of water a year from the River Niger, the region’s lifeblood.
Illovo has rivals for its status as Africa’s sugar daddy. Two contenders are shaping up for a tussle in Senegal, in West Africa on the banks of the River Senegal. The current sugar monopolist there is a Swiss-domiciled French banker named Jean-Claude Mimran. His father got rich logging Cote d’Ivoire and Madagascar. But Jean-Claude is the longtime owner of the Compagnie Sucrière Sénégalaise, which cultivates some 20,000 acres of sugar, and is expanding into biofuels production for sale to Europe.