Large-Scale Land Acquisition as Commons Grabbing: A Comparative Analysis of Six African Case Studies (original) (raw)
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Diminished access, diverted exclusion: Women and land tenure in sub-Saharan Africa
African Studies Review, 1999
Increasing commercialization, population growth and concurrent increases in land value have affected women's land rights in Africa. Most of the literature concentrates on how these changes have led to an erosion of women's rights. This paper examines some of the processes by which women's rights to land are diminishing. First, we examine cases where rights previously utilized have become less important; that is, the incidence of exercising rights has decreased. Second, we investigate how women's rights to land decrease as the public meanings underlying the social interpretation and enforcement of rights are manipulated. Third, we examine women's diminishing access to land when the actual rules of access change.
Large-scale land acquisitions are widespread in Africa. In the 2000s, Africa became a 'grabbers’ hotspot', following global concerns over food security and fuel supplies. Land, with its available water potential, was acquired by a wide range of private and public actors, including sovereign governments, on African soil. Ineffective legal, political and institutional processes have permitted large-scale land acquisition to the detriment of local communities. There are increasing tensions with local communities who suffer from dispossession of land and natural resources and lack power, made worse where there are no mechanisms for relocation or compensation. Rural populations do, however, mobilize grass-roots agency to contest ‘dispossession’. In Cameroon, corporate accumulation of land is supported for its national-level benefits, but this pits government against local communities with women often being the biggest losers from loss of farmland. 'Green grabbing', justified on environmental grounds, also affects local livelihoods. Communities are not necessarily adverse to commercial agriculture if they are able to exercise more control over it.
Journal of Agrarian Change, 2003
This article examines some contemporary policy discourses on land tenure reform in sub-Saharan Africa and their implications for women's interests in land. It demonstrates an emerging consensus among a range of influential policy institutions, lawyers and academics about the potential of so-called customary systems of land tenure to meet the needs of all land users and claimants. This consensus, which has arisen out of critiques of past attempts at land titling and registration, particularly in Kenya, is rooted in modernizing discourses and/or evolutionary theories of land tenure and embraces particular and contested understandings of customary law and legal pluralism. It has also fed into a wide-ranging critique of the failures of the post-colonial state in Africa which has been important in the current retreat of the state under structural adjustment programmes. African women lawyers, a minority dissenting voice, are much more equivocal about trusting the customary, preferring instead to look to the State for laws to protect women's interests. We agree that there are considerable problems with so-called customary systems of land tenure and administration for achieving gender justice with respect to women's land claims. Insufficient attention is being paid to power relations in the countryside and their implications for social groups, such as women, who are not well positioned and represented in local level power structures. But considerable changes to political and legal practices and cultures will be needed before African states can begin to deliver gender justice with respect to land.
This contribution is concerned with the challenges of securing women's rights to land in Africa in the context of contemporary land deals through a discussion of three distinct but interrelated problems in the framing of women's land rights discourses. First, this study discusses the interface between rights and "custom" to highlight the inherent distortions of African customary law. Second, it argues that liberal formulations of the law are limited by a set of assumptions regarding women's position in the political economy. And third, this discussion discursively assesses the debates in the literature regarding the efficacy of law in protecting women's rights to land. The discussion proceeds from a critique of two approaches to promoting gender equity in land tenure systems: the institutional approach, which deals with women's formal land rights; and the political economy approach, which deals with the structural nature of women's traditional relations to land.
Land grabbing and the implications for the right to development in Africa
African Human Rights Law Journal of , 2022
The indispensability of land for agriculture and the extraction of the natural resources thereon to sustain industrialisation and economic growth processes across the world have orchestrated a significant change in patterns of land ownership and use in Africa where evictions and displacement of local communities from their ancestral lands have become legion as a result of persistent land grabbing. This situation has had a concomitant negative implication for the potential of local communities in Africa to develop socio-economically and culturally, with a corresponding negative impact on their right to development. It is not clear whether the right to development enshrined in the African Charter could be relied upon to achieve Africa’s development prospects, particularly with the prevalence of land grabbing across the continent. Taking land as a major contributing factor to socio-economic and cultural development, we argue that land grabbing not only contravenes but also bars prospects of making the right to development a reality for the peoples of Africa. Based on the doctrinal research methodology, we critically review the normative contents of the right to development in conjunction with other relevant provisions under the African Charter. We question whether the right to development affords prospects for socio-economic and cultural advancement in the face of land grabbing in Africa. Concerning the adverse impact of land grabbing, the article concludes that it is crucial for African states to re-think their right to development obligations and the land ownership and land use policy prerogatives relevant to protecting the livelihood sustainability interests of their peoples.
Primitive Accumulation by Dispossession: Land Grabbing in Southern Africa post-2008
In 2009, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to food Olivier De Schutter, warned of the increasing trend of “land grabbing” that violates the human rights of indigenous people for the benefit of private investors (De Schutter, 2009). While there are many contested definitions of the term land grabbing, I define land grabbing as the large- scale investment or acquisition of land located primarily in the Global South by private or national investors located primarily in the Global North (Martiniello, 2015: 1; Nkansah- Dwamena, 2017: 82). The majority of global land grabbing since the 2007/2008 food crisis has occurred in Southern Africa, which will, therefore, be the focus of this essay (Moyo, 2011: 258; Clements & Fernandes, 2013: 42). Land grabbing in Southern Africa has three main purposes: extraction/mining, tourism, and agribusiness (Moyo, 2000: 151; Hall, 2011: 198). For the purpose of this essay, I will focus on land grabbing by agribusinesses, which I define as agriculture for commercial purposes (Hall, 2011: 198). Arguments in favour of land grabbing, which use the term “responsible agricultural investment” (RAI) focus on food security, job creation and poverty reduction as being positive outcomes (La Via Campesina, 2018; McMichael, 2012: 694; Nkansah-Dwamena, 2017: 3). The empirical evidence provided in this essay will counter much of these purported benefits by demonstrating that, in many cases, RAI actually worsens food security, increases poverty and causes unemployment (Chambati, Mazwi & Mberi, 2019: 1; Li, 2009: 74; McMichael, 2012: 694). Furthermore, the fact that the majority of the land involved in large- scale deals in African countries is used to grow crops for biofuel which is exported rather than for domestic food consumption puts the argument of food security further into question (International Land Coalition, 2011). One school of land grabbing critics operate in the agrarian political economy framework (Borras Jr, McMichael & Scoones, 2013). They argue that the current era of land grabbing is occurring withint the so-called corporate food regime that has been operating since the late 1980s (McMichael, 2013: 47). Thus, they fail to analyse the distinct wave of land grabbing that has been occurring since the global food crisis of 2007/2008, which has very innovative characteristics. Furthermore, in their analysis they overemphasise the role of “sub-imperial” actors like China, Brazil and post-Apartheid South Africa in perpetuating the land grabbing wave (Richardson, 2013: 351). This is countered by evidence showing that sub-imperial corporations are often subsidiaries of companies emanating from the Global North (Chambati, Mazwi & Mberi, 2019: 15). Therefore, I establish the need to continue emphasising the centrality of North-South power relations (as opposed to sub-imperial power relations) whilst viewing the current wave of land grabbing as distinct in form, thus potentially representing the emergence of a new “food regime”. In order to demonstrate these two points, I will use the framework of primitive accumulation by dispossession (PABD) (Moyo, 2011: 258). PABD builds on David Harvey’s (2003) accumulation by dispossession (ABD) thesis, which holds that the dispossession of peasants from their land for it to be used for capital accumulation purposes has been an integral part of the capitalist system from its onset. The PABD thesis builds on this framework by emphasising the importance of taking into consideration power relations between the Global North and the Global South, suggesting that the process of ABD is disproportionately carried out by actors from the Global North dispossessing peasants from the Global South.
Oxford Development Studies, 2002
The debate over land reform in Africa is embedded in evolutionary models, in which it is assumed landholding systems are evolving into individualized systems of ownership with greater market integration. This process is seen to be occurring even without state protection of private land rights through titling. Gender as an analytical category is excluded in evolutionary models. Women are accommodated only in their dependent position as the wives of landholders in idealized 'households'. This paper argues that gender relations are central to the organization and transformation of landholding systems. Women have faced different forms of tenure insecurity, both as wives and in their relations with wider kin, as landholding systems have been integrated into wider markets. These cannot be addressed while evolutionary models dominate the policy debate. The paper draws out these arguments from experience of tenure reform in Tanzania and asks how policy-makers might address these issues differently.
2021
Despite their key role in agriculture, in many African regions, women do not have equal access to or control and ownership over land and natural resources as men. As a consequence, international organizations, national governments and non-governmental organizations have joined forces to develop progressive policies and legal frameworks to secure equal land rights for women and men at individual and collective levels in customary tenure systems. However, women and men at the local level may not be aware of women's rights to land, and social and cultural relations may prevent women from claiming their rights. In this context, there are many initiatives and programs that aim to empower women in securing their rights. But still very little is known about the existing strategies and practices women employ to secure their equal rights and control over land and other natural resources. In particular, the lived experiences of women themselves are somewhat overlooked in current debates a...
Securing Customary Land Rights in Sub-Saharan Africa
2015
Africa live in rural areas and make a livelihood from agriculture and other land-based production activities. Secure tenure to land is thus of fundamental importance for these people. Yet even today very few of them have title to their land but get access to it through various informal customary tenure arrangements. 2 While research has since long shown that landholdings under such systems are not necessarily insecure (Bruce and Migot-Adholla 1994), with increased population pressure and commercialization of production there is a tendency for these customary tenure systems to disintegrate or to become manipulated by local elites (Peters 2004). Another factor relevant in this context is the escalating global demand for land for large-scale production of biofuels, food export crops, forest plantations, etc., which is particularly prevalent in Sub-Saharan Africa (Cotula 2012). In those countries where customary tenure is not recognized in statutory law, there is a clear risk that land held under this system is not respected when land concessions for such investment projects are being granted. And even when customary tenure rights are recognized in the national legislation, it may still be difficult for local people to defend their land rights against such outside claims simply because their holdings are not demarcated and registered, and therefore not identifiable on maps and in official cadastres. There is today a growing awareness of the importance of providing local people with more secure rights to land as illustrated, for example, by the overall land policy guidelines adopted by African Heads of State in the context of the African Union (AU-ECA-AfDB Consortium 2010). Similarly, though at a global level, there are the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure adopted by the Committee on World Food Security in 2012, which also draw attention to the importance of providing especially poor rural women and men with more secure tenure to land and other natural resources (FAO 2012). Yet, one thing is to express the need for more secure tenure in principle, another is finding ways for how this could be realized in practice given the particular social, cultural, economic and political conditions that prevail in Sub-Saharan Africa. The conventional approach for securing property rights to land is by establishing a system of private ownership through individual titling. This approach has been tried in several African countries over the years but with mixed results. Such individual privatization of land