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AfricaFocus Bulletin
“Enabling the Business of Agriculture,” promoted by the World Bank,
and now enhanced with a new sub-indicator on land policy, is
presented as a way to advance agricultural development,
particularly in Africa. In reality, notes a new report from the
Oakland Institute, it gives an additional push to a “land rush” by
mostly foreign corporate interests. This trend, notes Harvard land
tenure scholar Pauline Peters, “marks the most radical shift in the
distribution and tenure status of land since colonial times.”
Peters reviews the literature on “the politics of the
land rush across Africa” in a November 2018 article in the Oxford
Research Encyclopedia of Politics. Both Peters and the Oakland
Institute highlight the fact that land appropriation, although not
new, has accelerated rapidly in the decade since the financial
crisis of 2008.
The Oakland Institute, which has conducted a wide range of case
studies on the topic in recent years, focuses in its latest report
on the impact of World Bank indicators that in effect privilege
large corporate interests and well-connected political elites,
while disregarding the interests of small farmers and other land users
whose title to land is under customary rules. In particular, the World Bank is
pushing the titling of land, followed by a free-market frenzy, as
the path to agricultural development. In this, it is allied with
other key donors, particularly USAID, DFID, and the Gates
Foundation, who share this vision of corporate-dominated
agriculture.
The World Bank´s annual land and poverty conference
(http://tinyurl.com/y69sxy6n), which most recently gathered some
1,500 participants in March 2019, provided little or no space for
dissent or debate on this dominant model. The conference agenda was
filled with sessions on big data and drone mapping of land tenure.
But farmers´ organizations, advocacy groups, or critical scholars
were conspicuously absent, and the issue of displacement of small
farmers entirely missing or very well-hidden.
This AfricaFocus Bulletin contains six short talking points
extracted from the summary of the article by Dr. Peters. This is
followed by excerpts from the Oakland Institute report: “The
Highest Bidder Takes It All”.
For an archive of 56 previous AfricaFocus Bulletins on agriculture
and related issues, beginning in 2003, visit
http://www.africafocus.org/intro-ag.php
++++++++++++++++++++++end editor's note+++++++++++++++++
by Pauline Peters
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, November 2018.
[The summary from which these talking points is taken is openly
available at the link above, with a link to the full report, which
is available only to subscribers of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Politics.
To contact the author, write to
pauline.peters1@gmail.com.]
The Oakland Institute
http://www.oaklandinstitute.org – direct URL:
http://tinyurl.com/y32agllx
This report was authored by Frédéric Mousseau with research
assistance provided by Flora Sonkin and editorial support by
Anuradha Mittal and Elizabeth Fraser.
In 2013, the World Bank launched the Enabling the Business of
Agriculture (EBA) project, aimed at guiding pro-business reforms in
the agriculture sector. It was initially commissioned to support
the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, an initiative
launched by the G8 to promote private sector-led agricultural
development in Africa. The EBA scores countries on the ease of
doing business in agriculture. It measures the “legal barriers” for
agribusinesses and prescribes reforms across 12 topic areas, such
as seeds, fertilizers, trade, and machinery. It then promotes
policy reforms to remove these barriers and support agribusiness.
Under the World Bank’s guidance, governments should, for instance,
loosen regulations on seeds and phytosanitary products (fertilizers
and pesticides). The latest EBA report, published in 2017,
introduced a new indicator: land.
This new indicator comes as large-scale land acquisitions in the
developing world have intensified over the past ten years. In most
instances, they have involved forced evictions, widespread human
rights violations, environmental degradation, increased food
insecurity, and the destruction of livelihoods.
But these land grabs have also been met with massive resistance by
millions of farmers, pastoralists, and Indigenous Peoples who
oppose the takeover of their ancestral land. Many have been
successful in delaying, disrupting, or stopping the establishment
of plantations. The land targeted by so-called investors is often
used by local people who might not have property titles. Legally,
it is typically either public or state land and/or land on which
local communities claim customary rights. This issue is recognized
by the World Bank, which has reached the conclusion that
“undocumented [land] rights pose challenges and risks to
investors.”
This may explain why the Bank, supported by the US and UK
governments and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – all strong
proponents of the corporatization of agriculture – has used the EBA
to embark upon a new, unprecedented effort to tackle the land issue
in the developing world, particularly Africa.
By examining the reforms and measures that this new land indicator
advocates for, this report raises serious concerns about their
potential impact, if implemented by governments.
Whereas the Bank claims its intention is to protect land rights and
bring more freedom and equity in access to land, the so-called
“good practices” prescribed by the EBA point to a drastically
different agenda centered on promoting large-scale industrial
agriculture at the expense of family farmers, pastoralists, and
Indigenous Peoples. To regulate countries’ land tenure arrangements
and “enhance productivity of land use,” the Bank’s prescribes
formalizing private property rights, easing the sale and lease of
land for commercial use, systematizing the sale of public land by
auction to the highest bidder, and improving procedures for
expropriation.
Most public land in the developing world is actually used by people
as a common good, under customary laws. Communally managed natural
resources such as water, forests, savannas, and grazing lands are
essential for the livelihoods of millions of rural poor. In
customary laws, land is also valued as an ancestral asset with deep
social and cultural significance. Ignoring these facts, the Bank is
driving governments towards the privatization and commodification
of land to enable the expansion of more capital-intensive
agricultural production.
Suggesting that low-income countries do not manage public land in
an effective manner, the Bank prescribes the privatization of
public land as the way forward: Governments should become land
brokers and transfer public lands with “potential economic value”
to commercial use and private ownership, so that the land can be
put to its “best use.”
The World Bank also pushes for the formalization of private land
ownership as a way to spur agribusiness investments in capitalintensive
agriculture and increase productivity. Part of the
process is to make land a “transferable asset” and encourage its
use as a collateral for credit. The Bank’s premise overlooks the
high vulnerability of family farmers around the world, which is
further increased when the land that they rely on for their
livelihoods becomes an asset that can be traded and speculated
upon. In Western economies, with “formal” land tenure systems,
stories of farmers losing their land to banks and creditors abound.
Expanding this model to the developing world will provide a legal
avenue for increased land dispossession, land concentration, and
land grabbing.
By scoring countries according to the ease of accessing land for
agribusiness, the new land indicator represents an aggressive push
to privatize land in developing countries and facilitate private
interests’ access to land. By making land a marketable commodity
that must be offered to the highest bidder, the land indicator will
inevitably encourage increased concentration of land in the hands
of a few, along with the dispossession of the rural poor who rely
on it for their food security and livelihoods. This will shift land
from being an essential source of livelihoods and the basis of
resilient farming and ecological balance, to an increasingly
speculated upon financial asset that will expand corporate
agriculture.
Governments have to be urged and helped to design food and
agricultural policies that put family farmers, pastoralists, and
Indigenous Peoples at the center to address the major challenges of
hunger, environmental degradation, and climate change. Instead,
with its new land indicator, the World Bank is launching an
unprecedented attack on their land rights and their future.
Introduced as a pilot on 38 countries in 2017, the land indicator
is expected to be expanded to more countries in the EBA 2019
report. Whereas the EBA was already much biased towards industrial
agriculture and agribusiness corporations, the threats that come
with this new indicator make it even more important to end this
harmful initiative permanently.
Some 3.1 billion people worldwide rely on land for their
livelihoods, mostly as farmers. Eighty percent of the food consumed
in the world is produced by family farmers. Despite the essential
role they play, farmers and pastoralists have come increasingly
under threat over the past ten years with mounting pressures over
their land and natural resources by corporate interests. Around the
Global South, land grabs have led to dispossession and forced
displacements, while posing threats to local and national food
security. This trend intensified with the food and financial crises
of 2008, when the high volatility of food prices led to a surge of
interest in large-scale agriculture and land acquisitions. In 2009,
less than a year after the food price spike, 56 million hectares
worth of large-scale farmland deals had been announced, more than
70 percent of which were in Africa. By 2016, an estimated 42.4
million hectares of land had come under contract, one third of
which involved land formerly used by smallholder farmers.
The World Bank has played a pivotal role in promoting these largescale
land deals. For years, through different mechanisms including
technical assistance and advisory services to governments, aid
conditionality, and business rankings, the Bank has encouraged
regulatory reforms aimed at attracting foreign private investment
for economic growth and development. By 2014, the International
Finance Corporation (IFC) – the World Bank’s private-sector arm –
was managing 156 projects worth US$260 million for advisory
services to promote private-sector development in 34 African
countries.
Around the world, the expansion of large-scale farming has been the
cause of dispossession and loss of livelihoods for millions, while
failing to bring promised economic development and food security.
It has led to massive environmental degradation and loss of
biodiversity while worsening climate change through deforestation
and industrial agriculture, as seen for instance with palm oil in
Indonesia. But the past ten years have also seen countless stories
of resistance by farmers, pastoralists, and Indigenous Peoples
opposing the takeover of their land and the destruction of their
environment. Often mislabeled as “land disputes,” many of these
struggles challenge the takeover of land by foreign firms that is
either legally public or state land and/or land on which local
communities have customary rights. While some of these struggles
have resulted in violent repression and forced displacement, many
have been successful in delaying, disrupting, or stopping the
establishment of plantations.
A farmer in Tanzania, where land and water grabs are frequent.
Credit: World Bank/Scott Wallace
This is recognized by the World Bank, which has reached the
conclusion that “undocumented [land] rights pose challenges and
risks to investors,” and that, in the case of Africa, the continent
is “held back by land ownership confusion.” …
The EBA was commissioned by the G8 in 2012, as one of the so-called
“enabling actions” for the then newly formed New Alliance for Food
Security and Nutrition. Initially bankrolled by five Western donors
including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the US, UK,
Danish, and Dutch governments, the project was officially launched
by the World Bank in 2013.
The EBA’s goal is to help create “policies that facilitate doing
business in agriculture and increase the investment attractiveness
and competitiveness of countries.” To achieve this, it benchmarks
areas including seeds, fertilizers, markets, transport, machinery,
finance, and now land, to determine whether countries’ laws do or
do not facilitate doing business in agriculture. The Bank
recommends pro- business reforms and scores countries on their
performance in applying these recommendations. The scores obtained
then condition the provision of international aid and are intended
to influence foreign investment in these countries. The EBA
exemplifies a growing trend in international aid programs, which
have become instruments to enforce market-based and pro-private
sector industrial agriculture.
In 2014, a multi-continental campaign, Our Land Our Business, was
launched with over 280 organizations, including farmers groups,
trade unions, and civil society organizations joining hands to
denounce the top-down imposition of policies detrimental to farmers
and food security by the EBA and the Doing Business projects.
Pressured by the campaign, the Dutch and Danish governments
terminated their funding of the EBA in 2016.
Officially, the “EBA land indicators measure laws and regulations
that impact access to land markets for producers and
agribusinesses.” The EBA identifies and evaluates the “regulatory
burdens” impacting private access to land. The 2017 pilot scored 38
countries according to three main sub- indicator groups:
1. Coverage, relevance, and currency of records for private land;
2. Public land management; and 3. Equity and fairness.
The first group of sub-indicators assesses the documentation and
coverage of private land, for instance the presence and extent of
systems for mapping private property and the existence of online
records for land-related legal procedures, such as land transfers,
mortgages, and land disputes. According to the World Bank, a key
purpose of land records is to increase investments in agriculture
and allow land owners to transfer their property to others “if they
decide to take up non-agricultural opportunities.”
The second set of sub-indicators deals with public land management.
It scores countries in terms of existing mechanisms such as state
land mapping, monitoring, and the use of public tenders to transfer
public land to private owners. Though the stated goal of these subindicators
is to prevent encroachment, all of the nine questions
that guide the scoring relate to processes for easing the transfer
of state lands such as parks, natural reserves, forests, and other
public spaces to commercial use. The Bank emphasizes the “potential
economic value” of public land and claims that privatizing it via
public auction will “ensure that state land is put to its best
uses.” For low-income countries to improve their poor ratings in
public land management (see Figure 1), they must establish adequate
tender mechanisms to transfer public land to the private sector and
ensure a good price for the land sold. In other words, public land
must be sold to the highest bidder.
Forest in Uganda appropriated for palm-oil plantation. Credit:
FoEI.
The third set of sub-indicators concerns equity and fairness in
land markets. It recommends gender-differentiated land records as
well as the lifting of “restrictions on land leasing.” For the
Bank, encouraging the long-term leasing of land would allow
“farmers with higher skills to expand and invest in more capitalintensive
production methods,” while “less efficient” farmers would
exit agriculture. Most of the questions related to equity and
fairness (7 out of 12) concern procedures for expropriation, so
that “land rights are protected against expropriation without fair
compensation.”
The pilot EBA land indicator ranks OECD countries highest, whereas
countries in Sub-Saharan Africa are ranked lowest (see Figure 1).
Throughout the EBA report, the establishment of land markets for
selling and leasing land to investors is encouraged for
“efficiency-enhancing” land transfers and “effective land use,”
which, for the Bank, consists of allocating farmland to capitalintensive
agriculture.
The EBA’s land indicator and associated World Bank documents raise
important questions about the Bank’s policy prescriptions to
governments. An initial concern has to do with the assumption that
formalizing “private ownership” over land will secure land tenure
and spur development.
While the EBA prescribes the formalization of private property as a
way to increase land tenure security, it also encourages land
registration in order to turn land into a transferrable asset.
According to its logic, once land tenure is formalized – i.e. the
rights and conditions of access of a now bounded piece of land are
officially registered – landowners will be able to access credit,
using their new title as collateral for loans. As a result, they
will be able to invest in more “capital-intensive agriculture” or
sell their land to others if they “choose” to exit agriculture.
This approach raises a number of questions. First, the Bank’s
premise that people would freely choose to exit agriculture
overlooks the high vulnerability of family farmers around the
world. Their vulnerability is further increased when the land on
which they rely for their livelihoods becomes an economic asset
that can be traded and speculated upon. In Western economies, with
“formal” land tenure systems, stories of farmers losing their land
to banks and creditors abound. …
The consequences of formalizing land as a “transferable asset” are
likely to be even more dire in developing countries, where farmers
are highly vulnerable to environmental shocks, receive limited
public support, lack crop insurance, and where agricultural prices
are generally deregulated and volatile. Where tenure systems allow
such sales, farmers may then be forced to sell their land in years
of bad harvests or low commodity prices. This happened on a largescale
following the 2005 food crisis in Niger, when in just one
season, hunger forced 8 to 14 percent of the farmers to sell or
mortgage their land in order to survive.
The Bank’s approach thus provides a legal avenue for increased land
dispossession, land concentration, and land grabbing. ...
Moreover, the Bank’s assertion that private titles constitute a
necessary building block for eradicating poverty and achieving
development is challenged by its own Independent Evaluation Group
(IEG). A 2016 IEG review of the Bank’s land projects from 1998 to
2014 found that most projects failed to deliver on development
promises and did not even target the poor and marginalized groups
in the first place. Furthermore, the same review found weak
evidence of enhanced credit access as a result of titling and
registration.
…
The World Bank claims that the primary objective of governments
regarding the management of public land should be to “prevent
encroachment.” But the majority of so-called “encroachment” in the
developing world is actually the use of public lands by
pastoralists, smallholder farmers, and Indigenous Peoples for their
livelihoods.
It is estimated that as much as 65 percent of the world’s land area
is stewarded by communities under customary systems. Throughout
history, large expanses of these lands have been claimed by
colonial and later independent states under statutory laws. After
their independence, a number of formerly colonized countries
adopted legal systems establishing that all land was owned by the
state. Communities were allowed to maintain customary tenure
systems and could still access and use public land and natural
resources, while the state reserved the right to transfer or lease
land for “public interest” purposes. …
Public land is therefore often land that is used under customary
arrangements. Communally managed natural resources such as
farmland, water, forests, and savannas are essential to the
livelihoods of millions of pastoralists, fisherfolk, and family
farmers, and generally also valued as ancestral assets with deep
social and cultural significance. …
The Bank’s policy recommendations and its stated goal to “prevent
encroachment” thus transform customary land users into “squatters,”
“encroachers”, or “trespassers” on their own lands that they have
protected and used for generations. This is exactly how local
communities have been labeled in a number of cases of forced
evictions documented by the Oakland Institute in recent years.
“This land belongs to the state” is a recurring argument used by
governments to grab the land from their own citizens for the
benefit of foreign business ventures as documented in the case of
Indigenous communities in Ethiopia, the Maasai in Loliondo,
Tanzania, and the villagers who lost their land to the Bukanga
Lonzo agro-industrial park in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
…
The Bank emphasizes the “potential economic value” of public land,
as if this land is universally idle and available. In a rather
cynical posture, oblivious of centuries of colonial and neocolonial
exploitation, the Bank claims that poverty in Africa is largely due
to its poor land governance: “Despite its abundant agricultural
land and natural resources, Sub- Saharan Africa is still mostly
poor and has been unable to translate its recent robust growth into
rapid poverty reduction.” The continent is “held back by land
ownership confusion,” the Bank claims.
For the World Bank, in order to improve low EBA ratings, developing
country governments should enforce transparent public tender
mechanisms to offer land to private investors at the highest market
prices. The Bank considers that fairness would be ensured by such
transparent sales of land to the highest bidder, while ignoring
that in a world rampant with inequality, this is likely to drive
further land concentration. The highest bidders are likely to be
the most powerful economic interests, such as corporations and rich
individuals.
The use of public auction to sell public land is posited as the way
to “ensure that state land is put to its best uses.” Once public
land is transferred to commercial use, investors will ensure
“economically valuable” land is used with “efficiency.” The Bank
fails to provide a definition for “economically valuable land” nor
what it means by its “best use,” or “efficient use.”
This is highly problematic. Who gets to assess and decide what the
“best use” of the land will be? Using what criteria? Will
communities living on that land have a say? And who will benefit
eventually?
Given the massive threats to land rights around the globe, it would
be commendable if the World Bank prescribed measures that actually
increased equity and fairness in access to land. However, what the
Bank recommends to governments falls short of what is required to
achieve these goals. Instead, its measures could contribute to
increased concentration of farmland in the hands of a few.
…
[For example] The second EBA recommendation for fairness and equity
focuses on the “freedom of leasing” land, i.e. removing regulations
and restrictions on leasing. According to the Bank, “leasing is
critical for structural transformation” and “restrictions on its
use” should be removed to allow “efficiency-enhancing land
transactions” and “more effective land use.” The positive sounding
“freedom of leasing” recommendation is promoted as a way to allow
land transfers for “farmers wishing to grow into the commercial
sector, but also for those wanting to exit agriculture.” Yet, as
discussed earlier, many farmers don’t exit agriculture by choice
but are forced to do so because of social marginalization, poverty,
conflict, climate, lack of institutional support, and more. In this
context, promoting the “freedom of leasing” is geared towards
easing large-scale land acquisitions and land concentration in the
hands of corporations, influential individuals, and those with more
resources.
…
In terms of productivity and food security, as early as 2009, the
International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and
Technology for Development (IAASTD), a multidisciplinary study
involving over 400 scientists and co- sponsored by the FAO, UNDP,
UNEP, and the World Bank itself, widely discredited the supposed
benefits of capital- intensive, industrial agriculture. The report
urged all actors involved in agricultural development to shift
their support toward agroecological practices that are less
dependent on capital and external inputs. The IAASTD also called
attention to the negative environmental impacts of intensive
agriculture, which are hardly taken into consideration by the
Bank’s current policy advice.
Another comprehensive study, carried out by the World Bank’s own
research staff in 2009, deconstructed the fallacy of the economic
efficiency argument that is used to favor the privatization of land
and expansion of land markets. According to the Bank’s experts, the
creation of land markets ultimately leads to land concentration for
industrialized agriculture and monocultures in large mechanized
land holdings, which are less productive than family farms.
In addition, large industrial farms often lead to much higher
economic burdens for farmers (e.g. debt) and health and
environmental damage (e.g. loss of biodiversity, soil depletion,
contamination of water sources by chemical fertilizers, food
insecurity/lower nutrition intake). Overall, the World Bank’s own
experts assert that land markets not only fail to distribute land
to the poor, but also do not make economic sense in terms of
enhancing productivity.
…
AfricaFocus Bulletin is an independent electronic publication
providing reposted commentary and analysis on African issues, with
a particular focus on U.S. and international policies. AfricaFocus
Bulletin is edited by William Minter.
AfricaFocus Bulletin can be reached at africafocus@igc.org. Please
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information about reposted material, please contact directly the
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