Land grab fears in Africa "legitimate"

A new report by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) has found that recent large-scale land deals in Africa are likely to provide scant benefit to some of the world's poorest and most famine-prone nations and will probably create new social and environmental problems. Analysing 12 recent land leasing contracts investigators found a number of concerns, including contracts that are only a few pages long, exclusion of local people, and in one case actually give land away for free.

Many of the contracts last for 100 years, threatening to separate local communities from the land they live on.
"Most contracts for large-scale land deals in Africa are negotiated in secret," explains report author Lorenzo Cotula in a press release. "Only rarely do local landholders have a say in those negotiations and few contracts are publicly available after they have been signed."

The land-lease trend in Africa is recent. As prognosticators warn that food and water shortages, exacerbated by climate change and growing populations, will become the norm, rising nation such as China and South Korea have begun to purchase massive tracts of land from the world's most destitute. In Africa this covers over 50 million hectares in countries like Sudan, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Madagascar, Cameroon, Mozambique, Senegal, and Mali.

In many cases the land is sold for a pittance: in Sudan land is being leased for $0.07 per hectare annually, while Mali has signed a contract that gives land away for free. Some of the contracts even include handing over water rights without fees. Ironically, such contracts have been drafted in already-arid nations threatened by desertification like Senegal and Sudan. (read more)