Ramp Hollow

by Steven Stoll

  They organized everything just perfectly except for one thing. Thousands of people planted millet, beans, corn, rice, and peanuts on those 17,000 hectares. The agencies started planning and the capital started flowing, the government drew up papers and the corporation spun off Sosumar, all before anyone informed the peasants. But unlike British lords, Sosumar did not (or could not) evict the farmers and destroy their villages. The project took place within an international context much more transparent, including advocates for the rights of peasants. The African Development Bank, for one, demanded that the villagers be treated with respect. In response, Sosumar offered to give each household a slice of irrigated land. Smallholders would produce 40 percent of the company’s cane by contract. Everyone involved seems to have known that specialization is dispossession in slow motion. The company agreed to establish “a floor price” that would protect growers from market adversity. Smallholders would also cultivate their own food between the rows of cane, further securing them against the vagaries of events and institutions beyond their control.57

  Sosumar needed someone to front the project by mediating among the parties. Mima Nedelcovych arrived in 2010. Nedelcovych advocates for private investment as the most effective means of generating economic development. Once in Mali, he moved fluidly between government ministries, meetings with bankers, construction sites, and village councils. When Nedelcovych talks about dispossession as social progress, he sounds more like Bill Clinton than James Steuart. The “straight land grab,” he said, “will not last.” Nedelcovych believed that Sosumar would save the villagers from themselves. They grew food and commodities just as they did three centuries ago. “There is no change … bringing the small farmer[s] into the value chain is giving them a reason to produce more than what they eat.” Take their land, goes this thinking, but make them into commercial farmers. Usher them into history itself by making their labor take the form of commodities and Mali’s GDP would increase, the company would make billions of dollars, and everyone would win.

  Two filmmakers, Hugo Berkeley and Osvalde Lewat, interviewed Nedelcovych along with the residents of two villages for Land Rush (2012). The people of one village, Tain, expressed interest in Sosumar. A farmer named Massa spoke: “Our harvests have not improved in eighteen years. That’s why we agreed to stop growing millet and do something new. We want to change.” Representatives of Tain knew that the government had already leased their land to the corporation. Some argued that change might be good for them. One man said, “No one here eats three meals a day.” Anything that promised more money would give them a higher standard of living. “When I learned about Sosumar,” said a woman, “I saw that women have a lot to gain. Any woman who wants work will be able to work all year round.”

  The residents of the other village, Soungo, were opposed. A farmer named Kassoum spoke of his farm as a legacy. “Everyone in my family works together on the same farm. We have about thirty hectares of land … We considered the sugarcane project, and we have no interest in it.” Then he added, “Even if they give us lots of money, it will run out. But the land never runs out.” Others at a subsequent meeting acknowledged that they sometimes went hungry, sometimes had to “make do.” But they preferred a known unknown to an unknown unknown. “Destroying a village is like destroying a whole country,” said another. Kassoum added that no one in the company or the government had presented the members of the village with a choice, but rather a thinly disguised ultimatum.

  The village debates replayed the kinds of unrecorded discussions that must have taken place among English peasants of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries calculating how they might survive enclosure. Households and kin in the southern mountains must have had the same conversations, with some anticipating schools and roads and others worried about giving up woods and hunting. All of them must have talked about the benefits of money from outside their means and methods of exchange and whether money would take care of them or run out and leave them with nothing. One skein of the Sosumar debate addressed land grabbing in general. An activist involved with the villages, Ibrahim Coulibaly, told those assembled at another meeting not to be swayed by money. “Don’t pick up guns or knives, but do something, or else you’ll disappear, 1,000 square kilometers at a time.”58

  No peasants ended up taking the deal and none lost their land because Sosumar never planted a hectare of cane or sold a pound of sugar. In 2012, Islamist Tuareg fighters attempted to cleave away Mali’s northern region for an independent state. The ensuing political storm and escalating violence shattered the relative stability that followed a prodemocracy movement in 1992. Foreign direct investment pulled out, and Sosumar might never go forward.

  Like the story at the center of this book, the meaning of Sosumar depends on whose interests we think with. We can trace the land rush in West Africa and other “undervalued” regions to the food crisis of 2008. Prices spiked, not because of a scarcity of rice, but because speculation in commodities markets drove them up. This led corporations to view agriculture as profitable, prompting them to invest in so-called idle lands. The governments of host countries welcomed the foreign money. They could increase national income by leasing the only abundant resource they controlled. And though these interests did not fit hand in glove then or now, they allowed “transactions to be concluded.”59 What do the peasants of West Africa want? By their own standards, the farmers of Markala are not thriving. Mali lands 179th out of 188 countries in the United Nations Human Development Index. Average life expectancy is fifty-eight years. Should they have gone along with Sosumar? Should they have trusted an enormous amalgamation of capital and political power, assuming that they had been given a meaningful choice?60

  The villages of Markala are around one thousand years old. They have endured drought, colonization, and war. Sosumar, however, wanted more from them than even French colonizers demanded. The company wanted them to give up their only hold and stake in the world for a set of promises. Its managers proposed they become full-time commodity producers and cast their fate upon a market that includes state-supported competitors in Brazil, India, Mexico, Thailand, and Pakistan, as well as Hawaii and Texas. Sosumar offered to maintain contract farmers in the event of low prices, but no one knows if they would have. No government agency or international court exists that could have compelled the company to follow through. But even with assurances, the risks of planting an inedible commodity on a small plot of land with no control over the conditions of production, trade policy, or final sale would have been substantial.

  Nedelcovych sought the agreement of the villagers in what looked like an open process of deliberation. Was it? The financial power he represented preceded him. One elder quoted a local official connected to Sosumar who reportedly said, “Whether you like it or not, we’re taking your land. This land belongs to the state so we can take it.” A number of those interviewed mentioned a radio campaign funded by Sosumar. Those opposed did not have the same access to make their arguments known. Kassoum threw up his hands at the thought of Sosumar. “We want them to leave our land to us. We pray to God that they do.” How sincere was the process Nedelcovych pursued? Would Sosumar have disbanded and returned $600 million to investors had a few hundred peasants decided not to cooperate? Perhaps. But when Kassoum placed his faith and fate with God, he might have been thinking of the village of Kolongo.

  Muammar Gaddafi came to the government of Mali asking for land in 2008. The government leased 100,000 hectares to a corporation Gaddafi controlled, including the water rights, without asking for anything in return. Gaddafi only needed to extend the irrigation infrastructure. It took two years and tens of millions of dollars for Libya to reach an agreement with a Chinese construction company. Unknown to the residents of Kolongo, however, the Chinese company designed the main canal to run right through the middle of their village. We do not know what the residents were told in advance. We do know that bulldozers destroyed their houses while armed thugs held them off. “They fired tear
gas at us,” said one woman. “Afterwards, they came with their electric batons. They hit me and pushed me over. Then they took us away.” The woman told of arriving at another location, where she was ordered to lie facedown on the ground. “After that, they hit us.” The construction company even gutted the cemetery. A visitor from an international aid organization reported seeing human remains strewn all over the construction site. An outraged man pointed to the exhumed graves of his ancestors, shaking with anger at the violation, “As if we’re not citizens of Mali.”61

  Should we consider the dispossession of Kolongo an example of economic development? To call it that would be unfair to all the agricultural specialists and well-intentioned administrators in organizations like the United Nations and the World Bank who are dedicated to improving the lives of the global poor. It would be an insult to representatives of the African Development Bank who pursue a peaceful transition from subsistence economy to commercial relations for African peasants. Clearly, no legitimate agency would endorse the violent removal of people from their land. And yet, in their ends, if not their means, Sosumar’s plans for Markala and Gaddafi’s destruction of Kolongo share certain qualities.

  In both cases, corporations cut a deal with the government without first securing the consent of the people who would be forced out. In both cases, the intention was to turn fields of millet into spaces that generate global commodities and billions of dollars in profit, not food for the people. According to Oxfam, “More than 60 percent of crops grown on land bought by foreign investors in developing countries are intended for export.” As reported in The New York Times, an economist with the United Nations Development Programme in Mali spoke broadly of the effects of corporate enclosure. “The land is a natural resource that 70 percent of the population uses to survive … You cannot just push 70 percent of the population off the land, nor can you say they can just become agriculture workers.” Yet this is the logical conclusion of land grabbing in Africa regardless of who is doing it, though it might not be possible for decades.62

  The difference, of course, is that Gaddafi made no pretense to improving anyone’s life but his own. But while Sosumar insisted that it would do right by the people, it had no obligation to any group other than its shareholders. This is a problem with corporate-financed economic development. The product’s only purpose is to return a profit. The chief information officer for a private equity firm that acquires land in Africa rejected any suggestion of humanitarianism: “We are not investing money to grow food or help people in Africa—we are investing to return capital to our clients. But a consequence of our investment is the production of food and increased food security.” The equity firm’s policy would be a fair parallel to Sosumar’s except for one thing: Sosumar would not have improved Mali’s food security at all.63

  It is important to keep something else in mind. Development often means transformation, by which is meant village to city, mutuality to individuality, subsistence to wage. The World Bank has recently offered an updated description of its role. Apparently, development does not consist merely of “the quantitative accumulation of national capital” and crude economic growth. “Development is also the qualitative transformation of a whole society, a shift to new ways of thinking, and, correspondingly, to new relations and new methods of production.” Transformation qualifies as social progress, “only if it benefits most people—improves their quality of life and gives them more control over their destinies.” The World Bank wants universal education, the reduction of child mortality, and the elimination of AIDS and malaria. These are all admirable ends. But why does meeting a people’s basic human needs require that they shift to new ways of thinking? Two economists also insist on transformation as salvation: “For economic development to succeed in Africa in the next 50 years, African agriculture will have to change beyond recognition. Production will have to have increased massively, but also labour productivity, requiring a vast reduction in the proportion of the population engaged in agriculture and a large move out of rural areas.” Why do people need to leave everything they know for new social relations in order to have food and education?64

  The Sosumar project inadvertently highlighted an indigenous method of making money from the ecological base. But rather than encourage it, the plan was to destroy it. Under the company’s vision for Markala, irrigated cane fields would have replaced thousands of shea trees on the savannah of the Office du Niger. Women harvest the fruits and remove the nuts, roast them in pots, and then grind them. From this they make a creamy butter. The butter is used as cooking oil and made into soap in Africa. Europeans and Americans like it as a skin moisturizer. Shea brings in cash in much the same way as rubber tapping does for the rice planters of Kalimantan and whiskey did for the settlers of western Pennsylvania. It connects the villages of Markala to the distant realm of exchange, where money and opportunity are abundant. More than that, it offers a social ritual exclusively for women and girls. “Shea is our livelihood,” said one woman to the filmmakers. “We don’t want our trees cut down.”65

  Shea is not some obscure West African product. The United Nations Development Programme estimates that 3 million women produce it, including fifteen thousand who sell it to the cosmetics company L’Occitane. The Global Shea Alliance works with women’s groups, manufacturing companies, and nongovernmental organizations to create demand for shea butter. So if the government of Mali and international lenders wanted the people of Markala to make more money, they could have helped them to sell more shea butter instead of asking them to hand over their land to Sosumar. Sosumar would have excised women and men from socially embedded ways of creating commodities, generational patterns of work, and beloved landscapes. For people around the world who lack government protection, who are subject to capital, with no social welfare system to see them through unemployment, an income detached from a subsistence livelihood does not provide economic security.66

  An essential critique of land grabbing comes from Olivier De Schutter, a Belgian professor of human rights law who served as United Nations special rapporteur on food security. De Schutter reveals the contradictions and false premises involved in leasing peasant land to corporations. If we view these deals without the history of the people involved, we will fail to see them for what they are. Like the smallholders of the southern mountains circa 1890, African farmers face challenges to their occupancy, having already endured a narrowing of their subsistence stability by previous acts of coercion that “relegated [them] to soils that are arid, hilly, or without irrigation.” They work for wages on plantations to replace food and cash incomes they once created for themselves. Employment brings a better life only when no other better life is possible. The hardships that flow from prior events allowed Nedelcovych to evoke an ideology of progress identical to capitalist premises. He could argue that poor farmers had nothing to lose. But step out of that ideology, and this is what it looks like: For mere speculation in commodities, for the sake of profit, the basis of life for millions of people is recast as an alienable asset. We should not be fooled when a benevolent purpose is read backward into these motives.67

  Capitalism generates a blanket of protective assumptions that ties it to nature or the order of things. Compounding interest became the material proof of progress, a value easily projected onto society, so that what is good for capital must be good for the world. As Karl Polanyi observed decades ago, the capitalist sees utopia just ahead or else continually undermined by timid constitutionalists or delusional socialists, regardless of the actual consequences of actual policies. The ideology filters out data that contradict it. If corporations pursuing their objectives through free trade over the last one hundred years really spread wealth wherever they went, there would be no Global Slum of 1 billion people and growing—no Dharavi in Mumbai, no Neza-Chalco-Itza in Mexico City. The truth is that the spatial manifestation of capital in the twenty-first century is not a functioning city with a sanitation infrastructure and a responsible civil service,
but an archipelago of misery that is the mirror image of the wealth created by dispossession.

  Writes De Schutter, “If it is to be truly responsible, agricultural investment must be investment that benefits the poor in the South, rather than leading to a transfer of resources to the rich in the North. It must be investment that truly reduces hunger and malnutrition, rather than aggravating them.” He offers his own set of principles intended to limit and govern land grabbing. They include accepting existing rights to land and natural resources, transparency and mutuality in all transactions, estimating environmental impacts, and—most of all—deploying money in order to enhance food security and social stability. De Schutter calls these minimum requirements, meaning that even if a corporate scheme satisfies them, the project in question might still be objectionable. One reason Sosumar or another corporation might fail the humanitarian test has to do with the economic vulnerability that lies behind minimum requirements. African governments have only limited capacities to compensate for downturns and unemployment. If villagers become wageworkers or contract farmers, what happens when the bottom falls out of the international market or a company pivots its interests and closes down?68

  Something like Sosumar will come to fruition (if it hasn’t already). Peasants will leave their villages. Some of the profit will go to education and infrastructure. Workers will move into houses with electric lights and send their daughters to school. When that happens, we should not look away. Any recession in the importing countries, any financial bubble in New York or London or Beijing, can cause tenuous incomes and fragile institutions to evaporate. A commonly asked question about the spectacular ascent of Chinese production and urban migration is whether China can handle its own Great Depression. Yet China has a series of social welfare policies, including unemployment insurance, universal healthcare, and pension funds. It also has enormous stockpiles of foreign currency. African governments have none of these things. When a crisis leaves sugar mills to rust, workers who traded their ecological base for wages will be hungrier than they ever were before.