Mozambique: 100,000 People Likely To Be Displaced

Mozambique is mulling a plan to lease 240,000 hectares of prime farmland to investors to grow crops for export, threatening to displace more than 100,000 local residents, activists and academics said, citing a leaked document. The Lurio River Valley Development Project in the country's northeast aims to produce cotton, corn, sugar, ethanol and livestock, said Clemente Ntauazi, a researcher with advocacy group Academic Action for the Development of Rural Communities. An estimated 500,000 people will be affected by the plan, with 100,000 forced from their homes, Ntauazi said, citing a leaked presentation to would-be investors and satellite images of communities that would be impacted. 

The leaked plan is the latest in a series of major foreign-based agricultural project proposed in Mozambique and other African countries that supporters say will bring jobs and boost land productivity but critics fear will displace local people and rob small-scale farmers of their livelihoods. "The area holds some of Mozambique's best land and local farmers have been living there for more than 30 years," Ntauazi told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. 

The proposal follows another major ongoing agricultural project in Mozambique with the government planning to approve the Brazilian-and-Japanese backed ProSavana Project covering several million hectares to grow soybeans by the end of the year. 

The proposed Lurio River project, involving two hydro electric dams along with agriculture plans, is currently waiting approval from the Council of Ministers, a government body, researchers said. It's unclear when a decision will be made. "This is a secret (plan), no consultation, (and) no published information from the government," Tim Wise, director of Tufts University's Global Development Institute, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Officials at the country's agriculture ministry did not make a spokesperson available to comment on the proposed project. 

The initiative is expected to cost $4.2 billion, a sum Mozambique's cash-strapped government would not be able to finance without outside support, Ntauazi said. Mozambique is one of the world's poorest countries, ranking 178 out of 187 nations on the U.N.'s Human Development Index. 

To increase food production, the government should invest in local farmers, many of whom still use the most basic hoes to till their fields and lack access to the best seeds, Wise said. Residents living and working on the land in question had no idea they could be displaced, he said, after visiting some of the areas in Nampula province earlier this year. Under Mozambique's land laws, the government is obliged to consult local communities, even if they don't have formal ownership of the land they farm, Ntauazi said. 

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This Land Is Whose Land? Reclaim The Commons

There was a time when 'land' used to refer to those parts of our habitat that were cultivated for food, grazed by animals for hide, wool, meat, milk and fertilisation, forests from which timber, firewood and food were collected and where communities lived sharing the common wealth. Now, as with everything else one can imagine, land is just another commodity to be bought and sold at the best possible price, to be acquired whatever the consequences for long-term incumbents. As land is a commodity so too is everything it can offer – food, fuel, minerals and water – with the added bonus of investment and speculation.

The phenomenon of 'land-grab', well known now, was originally seen as a way for food insecure and rich countries such as Saudi Arabia and China to gain access to foreign farmland in order to meet the food needs of their own populations. Then came the big push for biofuels following targets agreed by governments at a succession of meetings on climate change. In a recent report from Worldwatch Institute rural populations have been pushed off prime land in 25 sub-Saharan countries for the production of biofuel crops for foreign nations. In other examples food is grown on an industrial scale solely for export, disenfranchising local populations and turning them into wage labourers if they are lucky and forcing them into urban areas and likely penury if they are not.

The most exciting opportunity now for big money seeking even bigger money is that of investment and speculation in both food and land. Pension schemes, universities, bankers and large investors are jostling to invest in land for speculation. According to one spokesperson for a large company fund it doesn't matter if nothing is grown for ten years, you'll still 'turn a good profit.' Pension funds globally run to around $23 trillion. Their investment in land and agriculture is relatively recent but growing fast and admitted by some investment bankers and civil society organisations to be a major cause of rising food prices globally.

At the World Social Forum in Dakar, Senegal an appeal against land-grabbing was launched. By the following September over 650 organisations had endorsed it. Estimates of land the size of western Europe (227 million hectares) have been sold, leased or licensed in the last decade. One Oxfam case study found at least 22,500 people lost both homes and land in Uganda when they were evicted in favour of a British company, the New Forest Company. There were conflicting versions from the company and the evicted but a high court order to restrain evictions was sidestepped and the company put the responsibility onto the Ugandan National Forest Authority. There are numerous accounts of promised benefits to displaced persons and communities not materialising even after several years of waiting. Efforts to draw up and implement regulations for the protection of local populations, even voluntary ones, have been less than robust.

The countries of Africa have been a major target for land-grab with agriculture on an industrial scale reaping substantial profits for investors. Corporate agriculture, however, is not about food production or satisfying the needs of the undernourished or downright starving but about producing profit. How long can it be at this rate before its limits are reached – disenfranchised millions starved to death in favour of a tidy accumulation for the few? A lengthy study by the Oakland Institute in Tanzania, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Mali, Mozambique, Zambia and South Sudan looked at the viability of industrial scale farming compared with small family farms. What they found was that where 100,000 hectares of plantations would employ 1,000 workers traditional agriculture of the same area would sustain 50,000 families, that is between 200-250,000 people. In addition a 2009 UN report concluded that industrial agriculture is responsible in large part for climate change, species extinction, poisoning of the environment, water shortage, disease and poverty.

This land is our land. Reclaiming the commons for the peoples of the world is a necessary step in the pursuit of socialism. Join us for a revolution.

JS