land appropriation, surplus people and a battle over visions of agrarian futures in africa

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Land appropriation, surplus people anda battle over visions of agrarian futuresin AfricaPauline E. PetersPublished online: 28 Jun 2013.

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Forum on Global Land Grabbing Part 2

Land appropriation, surplus people and a battle over visions ofagrarian futures in Africa

Pauline E. Peters

The debate about ‘land grabs’ by foreign agents should not obscure the role of nationalgovernments or the accelerating process of appropriation of land by national agents.Much of the appropriated land is under forms of ‘customary’ tenure. In arguing that afundamental problem is the denial of property in land to Africans, I lay out thecolonial and post-colonial reproduction of ‘customary’ tenure as not equivalent toproperty rights, the documentation of mounting competition and conflict centring onland, and the more recent threats by national and international agents. Against thisbackground, I question acceptance of an inevitable agro-industrial future whichmakes millions of Africans ‘surplus’ to the needs of capitalist investment.

Keywords: customary tenure; land appropriation; small- to medium-scale farming;Africa

Introduction

The recent documentation (from mass media reports to in-depth research) reveals both newand old characteristics in current ‘land grabs’. B. White et al. (2012, 624) stress ‘the enor-mous scale and speed of expansion of the current deals’ with ‘correspondingly greaterimpacts in radically restructuring agrarian economies … and rural social relations’(cf. Hall et al. 2011, Peluso and Lund 2011, Fairhead et al. 2012, 239). Yet these charac-teristics build on longer-term processes, variously seen as due to ‘the logic of agribusinessaccumulation’ (Amanor 2012, 732) or ‘the latest stage in [the] competition for control ofland and other natural resources’ across Africa (Woodhouse 2012, 777), or, morebroadly still, as part of ‘class-creating social transformation’ (Alden Wily 2012, 751).The accumulating information suggests all these are involved in different combinationsin different circumstances. In this paper, however, I want first to focus on one element,but a fundamental one, in the process of land appropriation across Africa: the constructionand reproduction of ‘customary tenure’ as not equivalent to full property. Then, as a secondand related focus, I wish to examine the intersection of an accelerating appropriation of landwith the current and future role of small- to medium-scale farming in an effort to perceivealternative agrarian futures for African countries.

© 2013 Taylor & Francis

Thanks go to the Land Deals Politics Initiative team for the October 2012 conference on ‘land grabs’held at Cornell University where the paper was first presented, to Jun Borras for encouragement, andto two anonymous reviewers for useful comments.

The Journal of Peasant Studies, 2013Vol. 40, No. 3, 537–562, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2013.803070

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The loud debate about recent ‘land grabs’ by foreign agents is in danger of obscuring notonly the involvement of national governments but also an older but accelerating process ofappropriation of land by national agents. In both cases,much of the appropriated land is under‘customary’ tenure legally or by convention, so threateningmillions of rural producers. If thecurrently influential view that large-scale agriculture is the only and proper way to producefoods and other agricultural products maintains its dominance, the fate of people who live onand from that land is to be rendered ‘surplus’ to perceived development needs. At best, theagro-industrial vision of the future marginalizes small-medium scale farming into enclavesor as appendages to large-scale, industrial agriculture; at worst, it is erased. But the furor gen-erated by the ‘land grabs’, in combinationwith ongoing processes of competition and conflictover land, objections to the effects of powerful agri-business corporations on access to agri-cultural inputs and markets, and deepening inequalities associated with globalization, havereinvigorated a debate about alternative agrarian futures. There is no consensus about the pos-sibilities, let alone the preferences, for particular futures. In what follows, I concentrate onAfrica, but I draw on literature from other regions and consider that much of the argumentabout ‘a battle over visions of the future’1 can be applied elsewhere.

I propose that one of the fundamental problems underlying ‘the land question’ in Africaover the past century is the denial of property in land to most Africans through the construc-tion and reproduction of ‘customary’ tenure. This has infused theways inwhich different cat-egories of Africans have sought to attain and maintain rightful access to land. In turn, it hasinfluenced the responses by governments, donors and researchers seeking to understand,document and/or change the social relations around land. The paper begins by emphasizingthe restricted definition of ‘property’ in the colonial construction – and the postcolonial repro-duction – of ‘customary’ tenure, which continues to shape contemporary processes anddebates. It then lays out the current ‘state of play’ in scholarly, activist and policy positionsvis à vis land in Africa, including: the current wave of land ‘reform’ policies and their con-tinuance of old approaches despite the inclusion of newer rationales; the intensification ofcontestation over claims to landwhich are intertwinedwith competition over legitimate auth-ority, specifications of citizenship and outbreaks of violence; the fears of ‘an African enclo-sure’ in light of documented privatization and appropriation of land held in common; and themost recent documentation of land ‘grabs’ by foreign agents, albeit with the help of nationals.Against this background, the final section considers the description of millions of Africanswho are under threat of dislocation and displacement by the internal and external ‘grabbers’of land as ‘surplus’ to the needs of a currently volatile but expansionary phase of capitalistinvestment. I then ask whether the drive for large-scale agricultural production and otherlarge-scale activities (in forestry, mining and so forth) must necessarily erase small- andmedium-scale livelihoods on African lands, and propose an answer of ‘no’.

Customary tenure, land reform and the denial of property in land

While the information about ‘grabs’ of land in some of the poorest countries of the world byagents representing some of the richest countries is rightly causing an uproar in manycircles, past history in Africa reveals that land (as territory and as basis of production)has been at the centre of political competition since the beginning of colonial rule andfor much longer in many places. Despite the well-known historical importance of

1A phrase used by Borras et al. (2010, 583) in a discussion about biofuels, but here I mean it morewidely.

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‘wealth-in-people’ for African social, political and economic modes of organization(Bledsoe 1980, Guyer and Belinga 1995), it is now recognized that Africa has been trans-formed from being ‘a continent of land abundance in the first half of the twentieth century toone of increasing land scarcity at its end’ (Berry 2002, 639). However, even before colonialrule, the most fertile and best-watered land was frequently the subject of competition amonggroups. Nevertheless, a critical difference introduced by the coming of Europeans, first asmissionaries and explorers and then as colonial rulers, was that struggles over land turnedon the concept of property. This is a point important to stress since it remains at the centre oftoday’s contestations over land.

Colonial thought and practice regarding property in land were based on the concept of auniversal evolution from barbarism to civilization:

When the tribal stage is reached, the control passes [from the ‘head of the family’ in the pre-vious stage] to the chief, who allots unoccupied land at will but is not justified in dispossessingany family or person who is using the land. Later still, especially when the pressure of popu-lation has given to the land an exchange value, the conception of proprietary rights in itemerges, and sale, mortgage and lease of the land, apart from its user, is recognized. …These processes of natural evolution, leading up to individual ownership, may … be tracedin every civilization … (F.J.M. Lugard 1922 in Chanock 1991b, 69)

Two critical features in this conception, which help explain not only the colonial constructionof ‘customary’ tenure but also the persistent definition of what constitutes ‘property’, standout. First is the insistence that ‘tribal’ peoples hold land in common and under the ‘trust’ ofchiefs, and second, that property emerges when land gains ‘an exchange value’.

Despite the initial disdain among colonialists for African ‘communal’ landholding andthe conviction that conversion to private property was the necessary next stage of the civi-lizing process, the imperatives of colonial control in the form of ‘indirect rule’ throughchiefs proved more politically pressing. It was feared that a property regime allowing indi-viduals to separate themselves from the ‘tribe’ would ‘disturb social relations’ (Hailey1938), and ‘disrupt the native polity’ (Meek 1946 in Lund 2008, 27). Moreover, asChanock shows, by deeming African landholding not to be property, the colonial regimesought to prevent a legal challenge to its claims on ‘conquered’ territory. Thus, when theBritish Privy Council ruled in 1906 that ‘individual ownership of land is quite foreign tonative ideas. Land belongs to the community, the village and the family, never to the indi-vidual’, it essentially was ruling that, since these ‘lesser rights’ were not ‘the kind of indi-vidual rights of ownership recognized in English law’, they would ‘not be affected by achange in sovereignty’, and ownership of land through conquest could be claimed by theconquerors according to international law then in place (Chanock 1991a, 65).

But it is also important to recognize that the conceptualization of property was notpeculiar to this set of colonial interests but typified European understanding and practicemore generally. Ellen Meiksin Woods emphasizes that when Locke, one of the earliestand most influential theorists of property in the English language, spoke of mixinglabour with land to create property, it was not labour alone he referred to but ‘adding to[land’s] commercial value by rendering it more productive’.2 In short, ‘the production of

2It is well known that Locke used the Native Americans as his examples for unproductively usedresources that were therefore not to be considered as their property. And see Alden Wily (2012,754) for basically the same argument being made by Chief Justice Marshall of the US SupremeCourt in 1823 to deny ownership to North American ‘Indians’.

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exchange value becomes effectively the basis of property both domestically and abroad’(Woods 2011, 33).3 The particular conceptual form this took in the processes that constitutewhat came to be called ‘enclosure’ was that of ‘improvement’ or increasing the productivityof labour and land (Woods 2011, 33). Histories of the process of enclosure of the Englishcommons have shown how, from the very early seventeenth century, the concept of‘improvement’ was used as a rationale for dividing up the commons into individually-owned blocks where experiments in more intensive and profitable agriculture could beimplemented (Thompson 1993, 130).

Precisely the same concept of ‘improvement’ was used by British colonial agriculturalofficers in their many attempts to force Africans to ‘adopt modern’ farming. The 1930s–1940s’ efforts at controlling what was considered to be disastrous ‘soil erosion’ as wellas the stepped-up programmes of agricultural modernization and resettlement of the1950s focused on two main elements: a package of ‘improved’ techniques (deep ploughing,mono-cropping and rotation based on a northern European model), and forms of titlingintended to increase ‘security of tenure’. For example, in the Protectorate of Nyasaland(now Malawi), the chief agricultural officer, Kettlewell, explicitly invoked the enclosuresin England and the associated improvements in agricultural methods when he hopedthat, from the settlement programmes of modernized farming to be set up in the early1950s, ‘something akin to the Yeoman Farmer might be evolved out of the few progressivenative agriculturalists’.4 The governor of the Protectorate accepted the need for increasedcompulsion in promoting proper agricultural methods but declared the ‘partial ruraldepopulation’ advocated by the agriculture officers to be ‘impracticable’ in light of theexisting shortage of land and pressure of population. In the event, by mid-1960 (andwith the onset of political independence), all the programmes had ‘collapsed’ withfarmers reverting to their prior methods of cultivation (McLoughlin 1967). This wasbecause the patterns of settlement, organization of landholding and agricultural productionwere so at odds with the prevailing practices, as well as due to the political ‘emergency’generated by popular rejection of the federation with the Rhodesias and the rising strengthof the pro-independence movement (P.E. Peters 1997).

In what was to be the last decade of colonial rule in most African countries, many colo-nial officers, especially those in agriculture, were convinced that individual freehold titlewas needed to wrest African farming – and life more generally – out of its backwardstate.5 Nevertheless, arguments about the political dangers of such a move once againproved more powerful. Officials feared social unrest caused by what many consideredthe inevitable indebtedness and inequality in landholding consequent on privatization ofownership. Most significant, however, was the realization that individualization of landrights would ‘tie the hand of government in all schemes of agricultural advance’ (Meek[1946] 1968, 6–8, cited in Chanock 1991a, 79). The position that land rights ‘should becontingent upon the priorities of development’, the new concept embracing ‘improvement’,was taken up by the newly independent African governments (Meek [1946] 1968, 6–8,cited in Chanock 1991a, 79).6 As Chanock wryly points out, ‘The usefulness of the… cus-tomary law of land tenure [in preventing full ownership rights over land] was not lost on the

3Cf. Macpherson (1987).4Information and quotations from file NS 1/15/4 in the Malawi National Archives, Zomba, Malawi.5H.M. Stationery Office 1956 Report of the Conference on Land Tenure in East and Central Africa,held at Arusha, Tanganyika, February 1956. London: H.M. Stationery Office.6Also seen in other governments: ‘[T]he government [in Cambodia] argued that titling hampereddevelopment schemes that required evictions’ (Hall 2011, 2).


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rulers of the postcolonial states’ (1991a, 80). Land was either declared ‘national’ or, evenwhere customary tenure was continued, most new states claimed overall sovereignty; onemain exception was Kenya where private titling of land took place in the crowded areas ofthe former ‘White Highlands’ as well as in some grazing areas (see references below).

The proliferation of land policy reforms during the 1960s and 1970s, and into the early1980s, formed part of the strenuous efforts by and for the state to promote ‘development’ inthe new African countries. The policies were heavily promoted and funded by multilateralagencies, especially the World Bank, as well as bilateral donors, and justified in terms thatresembled those of the agricultural officers of the late colonial years – the institution of‘clear and certain’ ownership rights, usually through registration and titling, was considerednecessary to ensure ‘security of tenure’, thereby the ‘incentive to invest’, with resultingimprovements in productivity.

A critical research literature quickly developed that raised serious reservations aboutboth the premises and the outcomes of the land policies. Once implemented, the land pol-icies failed to achieve the projected increase in agricultural investment and productivity, didnot facilitate the use of land as collateral for small farmers, and often encouraged specu-lation in land by outsiders, thus displacing the very people – the local users of the land –

who were supposed to acquire increased security through titling, which exacerbated con-flicts by ignoring overlapping and multiple rights and uses of land, so reinforcing patternsof unequal access to land based on gender, age, ethnicity and class (Okoth-Ogendo 1976,Coldham 1978, Pala 1980, Davison 1988, Shipton 1988, Haugerud 1989, Attwood 1990,Shipton and Goheen 1992, Mackenzie 1993, Shipton 1994, Lastarria-Cornhiel 1997, Beste-man 1999, Lund 2000, Alden Wily 2012).7

In addition, the widespread instances of cash cropping by small farmers, such as cocoaproduction on customary land in West Africa, were used to reject premises that customarytenure inhibited investment and agricultural commercialization, and to demonstrate theflexibility allowed by customary tenure to farmers adapting to changing conditions. Agri-cultural intensification and commercial production were not inhibited by customary land-holding as much as by broader social and political-economic conditions at local, regionaland international levels (Linares 1992, Netting 1993, Place and Hazell 1993, Guyer1997). Moreover, customary systems did not exclude individual rights, a point that hadbeen made since at least since the 1940s (e.g. by Max Gluckman), and entailed varioustypes of transfer of rights to land, such as tenancy (Hill 1963, Berry 1975, Okali 1983,Lawry 1993, Gyasi 1994), and other types of transfers including rentals and sales (C.M.N. White 1963, Allott 1969, Bruce 1988, Ng’ong’ola 1996, Besteman 1999).

Several results from this now extensive body of research may be remarked. First, itappeared to have had some influence on a shift in thinking among the promoters anddonors of land reform policies (Toulmin and Quan 2000). Land researchers at theWorld Bank conceded the advantages of customary tenure over formal individual titleswith respect to cost effectiveness and equity, emphasized that titling needs a range ofother conditions (such as access to capital and credit) to be effective, and urged cautionabout state-led intervention in land tenure systems, suggesting the possibility of buildingon existing systems (Bruce and Mighot-Adholla 1994, Deininger and Binswanger 1999).In practice, however, the purportedly ‘new’ policies differed far less substantively from theconventional World Bank emphasis on ‘a framework of secure, transparent and

7On pastoralism see Galaty et al. (1981), Horowitz (1986), Baxter and Hogg (1990), Behnke et al.(1993), P.E. Peters (1994).


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enforceable property rights as the critical precondition for investment and economicgrowth’ (Quan 2000, 38; also see Bryceson and Bank 2001, James 2001, Whiteheadand Tsikata 2003). The new ‘evolutionary’ theory of land rights actually resembled the‘old’ evolutionary theory posited by Lugard and his contemporaries in positing a universalmove towards private rights in land (F.J.M. Lugard 1922 in Chanock 1991b, 69), though itwas also shaped by the growing prominence of neoliberal preference for market asopposed to state ‘solutions’ in relying on decentralization, market forces and ‘civilsociety’ to achieve the transition.

A second result is that the sometimes self-congratulatory tone of the research critical ofthe older land policies was punctured by critiques of premises that ‘local’ is always betterand that the ‘customary’ systems would ‘evolve’ in productive and equitable ways. On thecontrary, insisted Jean-Philippe Platteau (1996, 2000) among others, many existing custom-ary or local forms of land tenure embody considerable inequality, intra- and inter-groupconflict, illegal sales by traditional leaders, and appropriation for private use by represen-tatives of the state. This has proved to be a significant line of argument, with a burgeoningbody of research over the past couple of decades documenting pervasive competition andconflict over land across the continent that is inextricably caught up in politics at multiplelevels.

A third point is that the critical literature has ambiguous outcomes. Documentation ofthe overlapping and multiple social claims on land, mediated by differences of gender, ageand status, was certainly fruitful in showing how disruption and displacement were causedby policies and programmes based on simplistic notions about single-purpose use or com-munal, undivided holdings. Yet, with hindsight, one can now see that the research con-clusions reinforced the idea that African landholding systems were not the equivalent of‘Western property’. The research had in many ways replayed the defence mounted byanthropologists, historians and others in the 1940s–1950s: both then and in the critiquesduring the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, land was shown to be ‘socially embedded’, not ‘com-munal’ but socially defined and channeled, not a commodity but nevertheless allowing forindividual ‘investment’ in the form of cash cropping, improvements in agricultural pro-duction and multiple forms of transfer of land. Martin Chanock had pointed to the wayin which anthropologists, concerned to protect the Africans (whose lives they wereresearching) against colonial interventions based on mistaken premises, reinforced theideas of chiefly trusteeship (for example, through Gluckman’s ‘hierarchy’ of embeddedland rights) and lack of ‘property’ (see Chanock 1991a, 67, 75). It is uncomfortable torecognize that the many valuable critiques of the ‘development-oriented’ land policieshave also, willy-nilly, reiterated the colonial position denying the status of ‘property’ toAfrican modes of landholding.8

The state of play on the land question in Africa

Here, I briefly lay out the ‘state of play’ in discussion and debate about land in Africa, justbefore attention turned to two types of land appropriation – that by foreign agents, labeled‘land grabs’ by critics and ‘land investment’ by promoters, and that by national agents, par-ticularly of common and customary land resources. I do so first with reference to land policyreforms instituted by states and donors, and second to discussions by researchers and acti-vists critical of the former.

8I include myself in this.


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Plus ça change… Land policy reforms

In a recent paper, Borras and Franco (2010, 1) concluded that ‘Land policy is back on theagendas of international development institutions and many nation-states’. These ‘main-stream policy’ approaches purport to link land policies with improved ‘governance’and, hence, poverty alleviation. However, the focus in such approaches is heavily ‘techni-cal and administrative … rather than a matter of democratizing access to and control overwealth and power’ (2). The declared intention of land policies being ‘pro-poor’, then,remains mainly rhetorical while the land policy process continues to be based on ‘the pro-motion of (usually individual) private property rights in land through mechanisms deemedto be financially and administratively efficient’ (3). This old idea has marked land policiesin Africa since colonial times (as argued in the previous section). But it has taken see-mingly new and seductive forms with the rise of neoliberalism and theories of ‘propertyrights’. The popular claim of Hernando de Soto (2000) that private property rightsaccorded to poor people’s few assets will convert ‘dead’ capital into active wealth byproviding the collateral to access credit has been roundly criticized for ignoring politi-cal-economic realities.9

Similarly, the outcomes of the ‘market-led’, ‘willing buyer-willing seller’model in pro-grammes of land distribution have been poor and its premises and assumptions are flawed,especially by ignoring the political context where highly unequal social relations, such asthose between rural poor and landowners, structure the supposedly neutral ‘market’relations of prospective ‘buyers and sellers’. In this, the ‘market-led’ approach shareswith conventional land policies the tendency to assume a social tabula rasa, ‘underminingwell-established practices and holds on land by poor communities and individuals’ (Borrasand Franco 2010, 15), and increasing competition and conflict among land users and clai-mants (see previous section). Even when there is an apparently progressive land policy, thefailure to conduct an in-depth analysis of variation within a country produces problems. Anexample is that of the new, but still pending, land policy in Malawi where the aim to protect‘women’s rights’ led to a call for ensuring equal inheritance by male and female offspring.But since a large area of the country combines matrilineal inheritance with matrilocal(uxorilocal) residence, where only daughters inherit lineage land, the policy would actuallydisinherit millions of women (P.E. Peters 2010).10

Critical research by scholars and activists

Central themes in critical research on land at the beginning of the new millennium are:various attempts to typify African modes of landholding as part of the challenges to themainstream policy approach, and as part of the efforts to protect customary uses, claimsand rights; documentation and analysis of pervasive and increasing competition and conflictover land and over who has legitimate authority over land, some of which takes the form ofindigenous or autochthonous claimants versus outsiders; documentation and analysis ofcommodification of land seen in an increasing rate in transfers of land and increasing

9See critiques by von Benda-Beckmann (2003), Kingwill et al. (2006) and Musembi (2007), amongothers.10A key analytical problem here is to assume one can talk of ‘women’ rather than gendered statuses ortypes of women (wives, widows, daughters, sisters, etc.). Thus, where the pattern of patrilineal inheri-tance through men holds, those who oppose the extension of land rights to the widows of lineage meninclude female lineal members, that is, the mothers and sisters of the lineal men.


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formalization of such transfers, and attempts to theorize these as ‘vernacular markets’ or‘embedded’ transfers.

There is no neat packaging of these different themes into a single account of ‘the landquestion’ in Africa because there is not full agreement about how best to typify current con-ditions on land across countries. Different writers focus on different issues, differentcountries and regions present different combinations of conditions, and different writerscome to different, sometimes opposing, conclusions. Some writers discuss the dynamicsof the social management of land where, even if not harmonious and equitable, thesocial relations around land promote a broader sense of social identity, belonging andengagement (Berry 1993, Shipton 2009). Other studies point to division and inequality(Amanor 1999, 2010, P.E. Peters 2004, Chauveau and Richards 2008, Colin and Wood-house 2010). Inevitably, there are contradictory situations and processes. For instance,many studies describe many users of ‘customary’ land holding to the notion that land is‘never sold’ whereas research shows many sale-like transfers in earlier centuries in somecountries (Amanor 2010) and increasing instances in many places today, thereby question-ing the notion that sale is ‘foreign’ to African modes of landholding. Most writers argueagainst the imposition of narrow versions of western models of property which privilegeprivate, individual rights onto African modes of landholding that demonstrate flexibility,thus facilitating people’s management of volatile economic processes, and a degree ofinclusion. But increasing threats to customary rights lead some to call for legal recognitionto such rights, though there is no consensus on what form this might take.

Some writers discuss what might be done to prevent both imposition of inappropriatemodels ‘from above’ and the reproduction of inequalities ‘from below’. Ben Cousins, forexample, notes that, in light of the often negative results of land policies based on titling,the issue is ‘how to recognize and secure land rights that are clearly distinct from“Western-legal” forms of private property but cannot be characterized as “traditional” or“pre-colonial”’ and recommends, for South Africa, making ‘socially legitimate occupationand use rights, as they are currently held and practised, the point of departure for their rec-ognition in law’ (2007a, 282). Yet studies in various countries point to the often severeinequalities in ‘currently held and practised’ uses and claims, as well as the sheer difficultiesof identifying priorities in face of pervasive contestation over whose claims are legitimateand whose not (Lentz 2006, Lund 2008). Moreover, there are many cases where thoseclaiming authority over land, whether local chiefs or representatives of government, appro-priate land for their own benefit. As Woodhouse concluded, ‘customary tenure acts neitheras an obstacle to investment … nor as an inalienable safety net for the poor’ (2003, 1717).

A large literature reveals the interaction of competition over land with competition overlegitimate political authority over land. In turn, competition over land among different auth-orities (family and clan heads, various ‘traditional’ authorities, local and national stateorgans and representatives, etc.) gets caught up in national party politics and conflict thatoften takes the form of ethnic and indigenous struggles. Studies describe how the notionof trusteeship has been manipulated by some ‘customary’ or ‘traditional’ leaders to theirown advantage in allowing them, for example, to use land to recruit paying tenants and pol-itical followers or to sell plots for compensation they keep for themselves (P.E. Peters andKambewa 2007; cf. Daley 2005).

Another theme is that the effects of increasing value of land and water amid growingpopulations, increasing commercial uses of land, and intensifying social differentiationand class formation have fuelled the increase in transfers, including ‘sales’. Detailedstudies have shown that such transfers have qualities resembling market transfersyet also other qualities such as multiple and overlapping claims and uses, and rights


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based on social status. To describe such contrary evidence, commentators have hadrecourse to terms such as ‘vernacular markets’ (Chimhowu and Woodhouse 2006),‘socially embedded markets’ (Colin and Woodhouse 2010), or ‘recombinant property’(Berry 2013, employing the term introduced by Stark 1996, on post-socialist Europe).Embeddedness, then, can produce exclusion, inequality and serious conflict as well asforms of incorporation and inclusion. By the beginning of this new century, Woodhousearticulated what many studies have been finding: that rising land values resulting fromthe intensification of water and land use by many small farmers were part of ‘processesof commodification and individualization of access to land –‘enclosures’ – which reduceaccess to land for the poor (2003, 1717).

It is at this point, then, that fears of an even wider enclosure by foreign agents in partner-ship with national agents have been introduced into the literature on land in Africa throughthe land grabs debate.

Land appropriation, surplus people, and the fate of small-scale producers

Current assessment of the recent surge in acquiring extensive lands for agriculture, as wellas for other land-based resources such as timber, minerals and so on, identifies the followingas causes. The sharp rise in world food crop prices of 2007–2008 intensified concern aboutlonger-term food supply in some countries, especially those with water and land shortages.Rising prices and declining sources for fossil fuels have also produced a search for alterna-tive sources of energy in biofuels, as well as large subsidies by rich countries for such pro-duction (Borras et al. 2010, 577). As a result, large areas of land, always with access towater,11 are being acquired in countries in Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia,usually as concessions or leases of variable time periods rather than sales, by countriessuch as China, India, South Korea, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States (Borras andFranco 2010, 2012, Palmer 2010). Much, too, is targeted for mining and logging as wellas for types of preservation in ways now considered ‘green grabbing’ (Fairhead et al. 2012).

In addition, ‘cheap’ land in developing or middle countries is attracting speculation.Private investors, some from Europe and the US, are involved in many land deals, oftenseeking alternatives to volatile international financial markets (Hall 2011, 2).12 Oneexample is the Emvest Agricultural Corporation, a ‘vehicle for South African, UK andother investors to diversify their investments into African agriculture’, whose websitedeclares that ‘Agriculture is an excellent defensive investment in the long term withexpected real price appreciation of soft commodities and land in Africa’ (B. White et al.2012, 630).13

That claim highlights why ‘Sub-Saharan Africa is the site of the most speculative majorland deals’14 (Borras, Hall et al. 2011, 209). In the words of the Chief Executive Officer ofan investment company, ‘African farmland prices are the lowest in the world’ and ‘it isreally the last frontier’ (Palmer 2010, 5, citing a report in The Straits Times). This, ofcourse, is because ‘customary’ tenure is regarded as not full ‘property’, or what a World

11‘Large-scale land deals … imply large-scale use of water resources’ (Woodhouse 2012, 789).

12Cf. von Braun (2007), McMichael (2010). Also see Kalb and Halmai (2012) on the globalizationand financialization of capital.13Compare capital inflows to Africa rising by 16% in 2008 while falling 20% worldwide and Africaconsidered as ‘best for investment’ a few years earlier (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012, 15, 195).14Although other countries are also targeted in South and Central America, the former USSR, andSoutheast Asia.


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Bank land expert refers to as the ‘weak recognition of land rights at the country level’ (Dei-ninger 2011, 218). Such rights are being set aside by governments for ‘the public benefit’ orfor various forms of ‘development’, and so allowing existing land-users to be displacedmore easily and the ‘price’ of land charged to investors to be very low or non-existent.15

A second aspect of the African deals is the role of national actors. Thus, despite the litera-ture’s overwhelming focus on foreign investors, data on ‘a limited number of countries’suggests that ‘domestic investors were more important than foreign ones’ according toone writer (Deininger 2011, 218). Two prolific commentators on land issues acrossAfrica have also emphasized the role of African governments in facilitating and encoura-ging land deals (Alden Wily 2012, Palmer 2010). Incentives for governmental authoritiesand persons acting in the name of government (often difficult to distinguish) include thegenerous loan and aid packages that often accompany land leasing, as well as personalgains either directly (in the form of fees or other payments) or indirectly (through benefitingfrom foreign investments in particular places), and political pay-off for various levels ofauthorities claiming the right to allocate land.16

National actors in land deals and appropriation

The accumulating information about the ‘new enclosures’ points both to the importance ofnot allowing the focus on foreign agents to obscure the role of nationals in the currentwave of land acquisition, and to the danger for the millions of small-scale farmersliving on customary land. The former is less new than intensified in a context that facili-tates and even encourages expropriation. As noted above, most post-colonial, newly inde-pendent African countries tended to continue the premises and practices of the colonialgovernments with regard to customary tenure, regarding it more as mere possessionthan ownership or property. Land considered to be customarily theirs by the users wastaken for plantations, agricultural development or settlement projects, irrigation, forestry,parks and reserves. While grazing lands proved to be most vulnerable (as they were undercolonial regimes), agricultural lands were also appropriated. In addition to state expropria-tion for the ‘public interest’ or ‘development’, well-placed individuals also appropriatedland for their own benefit, and some chiefs claimed more land as one of their perquisitesof office and/or sold some to strangers for their own benefit. Alden Wily comments, ‘thefacts of willful dispossession and irregular allocations of untitled or state lands in the1970s–1980s [have been] most systematically documented in Kenya’ (2012, 765; cf.Klopp 2000), although cases from many other countries can also be found in the literatureon land.

In recent years, the appropriations across the continent by agencies, corporations andindividuals have increased. Part of this is due to how states become locked into a globalregime setting them up as competitive with other states for mobile capital by offeringtheir populations and territories up as profitably exploitable factors for global capital(Kalb and Halmai 2012, 3). Woodhouse pointedly states that most African governmentsfind it impossible to provide the necessary ‘complementary investment’ (such as infrastruc-ture) in agriculture ‘without recourse to foreign funding’, an imperative that is ‘an inescap-able part of the context for land deals’ (2012, 781). Part, too, is an intensifying classformation that, with politically unaccountable regimes, facilitates those with the necessary

15See Alden Wily (2012, 769) for examples of low prices.16Also see below for the point about competing for mobile global capital.


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power to accumulate at the expense of the poorer and vulnerable.17 A recent case amongseveral fromMalawi is instructive. A newspaper report described how a former governmentminister had purchased 286 hectares of land in Chikwawa in the far south of the country.18

Despite opposition by the local village chief (a woman) and some of the inhabitants dis-placed by the purchase, senior chiefs and the District Commissioner (DC) authorized thepurchase. Some, but not all, of the displaced people received compensation, thoughmany apparently complained that the amount of Malawi Kwacha K3500 (c. $23) eachreceived was very low. The new owner intends to start a cattle ranch and is quoted assaying, ‘It is a very good development that will benefit the people’, while the DCblamed some ‘disgruntled’ people for disrupting the ‘transparent … process’ of acquiringthe land, and claimed that, ‘We must make sacrifices if we are to develop this country’. It isobvious who is making the sacrifice! Most significant and worrying is the statement madeby the news reporter, though unattributed to anyone interviewed, that ‘Malawi NationalLand Policy of 2002 states that under section 25 of the Land Act, original title in customaryland was removed from chiefs and community owners and vested in the President in trustfor all citizens of Malawi’. This presumably refers to the Land Act of 1965 that enabled theMinister for land affairs to appropriate customary land if it is ‘expedient for better agricul-tural development’. The context suggests this is for ‘public’ or ‘national’ development,whereas in this case the obvious beneficiary is the private citizen – the former Minister.The 2002 Land Policy has not yet been passed into law, but this case and the justifyingrationales are in direct contradiction to one of the original claims of the Policy to strengthencustomary land rights.19

In short, much of the land under customary tenure (or treated as ‘commons’) in Africahas been vulnerable to appropriation because of ‘legal manipulations which deny that localindigenous (customary) tenures deliver property rights, thereby legalizing the theft of thelands of the poor or subject peoples’ (Alden Wily 2012, 751).

What, then, of the effects of this most recent wave of land acquisition? The informationis sparse mainly because the land deals are so recent that many are still ‘on paper’ with littleor no action on the ground, but also partly because it is difficult to obtain details about thedeals from the groups and individuals managing them. Nevertheless, some conclusions canalready be drawn and questions posed.

As in the past, governments offer the option of leasing land to foreign governments orcorporations in terms of benefits to ‘the public interest’ or for ‘development’, but today theyusually claim they are targeting ‘unused’, ‘marginal’ or ‘idle, waste’ lands. But land that isdescribed as ‘marginal’, ‘unused’ or ‘under-utilized’ leaves worrying space for discountingexisting use and different categories of users. This is particularly so given the World Bank’sgenerous estimates of between 445 million and 1.7 billion hectares worldwide of potentially‘suitable’ lands assumed to be ‘marginal’, ‘underutilized’, ‘empty’ and ‘available’, most ofthese classified as public lands and most in Africa (Deininger 2011). Even the World Bank

17See Alden Wily on encroachments on and excisions from ‘common’ land (2011, 2012).18‘400 villagers fight former Minister, T/A, DC over land’, Deogratias Mmana, The Nation, 16 July

2010. A report in the same paper for October 2012 describes fishing villagers taking up pangas todefend their land on Lake Malawi from the apparent ‘sale’ by local chiefs of the customarily heldarea to someone who intends building a hotel.19The case also suggests that such appropriations may be one reason why the government is taking solong to pass the law policy into law – if passed, the proposed decentralization of authority over land tocommittees might provide an obstacle to such appropriations. It remains to be seen what difference thenew government (mid-2012) makes in these matters.


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report on Rising global interest in farmland: can it yield sustainable and equitable benefits?noted that in Mozambique, ‘the total area over which land use titles given to investors over-lapped areas previously delimited in the name of communities amounted to 1.4 million hec-tares in 418 cases, raising concerns about potential future conflicts’ (World Bank 2010, 42).This echoes earlier reports from the 1990s on the same phenomenon of multiple allocationsof customary land by government officials (Myers 1994, West and Myers 1996; and see, forother countries, Amanor 1999, 2001, Hardin 2002).

Where there is official recognition of existing use there is supposed to be ‘consultation’with users, but reports abound of neglect of such consultation, let alone a real possibility fordecision-making by current users. Research in Ghana, Mozambique, Tanzania, Ethiopia,Madagascar and Mali showed that if consultation did take place, it was dominated by afew elders or chiefs and provided little to no ability to shape key decisions (Vermeulenand Cotula 2010). The response by agencies like the World Bank to earlier reports of dis-placement and dispossession of land users has been a ‘Code of Conduct’ to discipline bigland deals and the ‘Principles of Responsible Agricultural Investments’ or ‘RAI Principles’(World Bank 2010, Deininger 2011). Unfortunately, as with similar ‘finger in the dike’attempts to moderate highly unequal transactions (such as programmes under ‘socialdimensions of adjustment’ or ‘corporate social responsibility’), these RAI Principlesprove weak in the face of powerful economic and political interests. This is particularlythe case when, as explained, existing ‘customary’ (and similar) rights are not officiallyrecognized as property, so that holders are not recognized as ‘owners’ to be consulted.Instead, representatives of a ruling government act as owners, legal authorities anddecision-makers.

Even where legal recognition has been accorded customary rights, it is rarely sufficientto provide ‘effective mechanisms for land users to either reject or shape deals’, according toVermeulen and Cotula. The same authors conclude that ‘current procedures lock affectedpeople into unfavourable negotiation and development pathways’ (Vermuelen andCotula 2010, 913; cf. Borras et al. 2011 on ProCana in Mozambique). These may blatantlyfail to carry out any consultation or may more subtly close down avenues for real discus-sion. As one well-documented example among many, Krijn Peters and Paul Richards(2011, 393) witnessed a ‘community consultation’ in Sierra Leone that was required forconceding land to a large internationally funded biofuel project. They found that themeeting was ‘skillfully managed by attentive chiefs. The facilitator’s suggestion to breakout interest groups of elders, women and young men for separate consultations was immedi-ately opposed by the chiefs present, on the grounds that people would feel uncomfortableunless they met village-by-village in a circle of people they knew and trusted’. In this way,the fundamental tensions and conflict over land they had found in the course of their field-work were never allowed to come into the open.20

Implications for small to medium farming

The paucity of detailed, long-term information on the large-scale land deals is due to thenewness of the deals, slow implementation of production projects and difficulties of acquir-ing relevant information, but there is some early indication of existing outcomes and specu-lation on likely outcomes based on experience from other regions. The most dire conclusion

20This is not a new phenomenon – see Goldman (2001) for blatant cases from Laos involving theWorld Bank and international environmental agencies.


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is that the labour of millions of farmers and other rural residents in the targeted areas is‘surplus’ to the new forms of land use. As explained by B. White et al., ‘Contemporaryforms of agrarian transition … expel people from agriculture without absorbing theirlabour in manufactures or elsewhere in the economy’, thus making them surplus ‘to capi-tal’s requirements for labour’ (2012, 624–625; cf. Bernstein 2004, Li 2009, 2010, Tanner2010, O’Laughlin et al. 2013). As Tania Li pungently puts it, people are made surplus‘when their land is needed, but their labour is not’ (2011, 286). In short, large-scale landdeals not only tend to displace current users of the landed resources but also fail to trans-form them into workers (income earners) of various sorts. One example out of many is thatof sugar plantations in Zambia where there has been considerable ‘casualisation ofunskilled workers and limited uptake of smallholder outgrowers’ (Richardson 2010,quoted by Borras et al. 2010, 582). The very fact that the deals are taking place mainlyin countries where there is already a large and growing gap between the availability ofjobs and those seeking them makes the potential of overall loss for existing populationsmore likely. Inevitably, there are counter examples, such as the successful small-scale,farmer-led biofuel experiments in Brazil (Fernandes et al. 2010), and some of the oilpalm projects in Indonesia where ‘outcomes depend very much on the terms underwhich incorporation into the oil palm economy occurs’ (McCarthy 2010, original emphasis;both cited in Borras et al. 2010, 582).

A recent exhaustive review of the literature on contract farming, with particular refer-ence to sub-Saharan Africa (Oya 2012), highlights the ‘substantial diversity of contractfarming’, its relatively small role quantitatively, and considerable heterogeneity in boththe ‘drivers’ pushing contract farming and in its outcomes for efficiency and equity. Oyaalso notes that the literature on ‘global land grabs’ has intersected with that on contractfarming to the degree that the latter is seen as a way to make large-scale use of land as‘pro-poor’ and ‘politically correct’ in finding ways to ‘incorporate’ smallholders (2012,7–9). He concludes that ‘it is not clear whether … “land grabbing”… will provide anadditional boost to the expansion of contract farming or a return to plantation-type capital-ism and incorporation of poor rural people as direct wage workers…’ (27). My own take onthis complex question is that ‘poor rural people’ who are landless (an increasing proportionin many countries) are more likely to be so ‘incorporated’ than those with land.21 As I arguebelow, those with land should receive the kinds of support to enable them to make moreproductive use of their own land, water and labour.

Past, present and future for small- to medium-scale agriculture and rurallivelihoods

The vast majority of people living on, and partially from, the land across Africa work onsmall to medium landholdings and use (variously defined) ‘family’ labour, complementedwith limited numbers of hired workers. The conventional word used to refer to this largepopulation – ‘smallholders’ – has been justifiably criticized because the single term‘tends to obscure inequalities and class-based differences within the large population ofhouseholds engaged in agricultural production on a relatively small scale’ (Cousins2007b, 2). Rather than smallholders constituting a homogeneous group, they have been

21Though the importance of ‘off-farm’ labour for many rural producers means some members of afamily are likely also to be attracted to any expansion in opportunities for wage labour, especiallyif it is in their vicinity.


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shown by many studies in many African sites to vary in the degree to which agriculturalproduction on ‘own account’ contributes to their livelihoods and, consequently, to bedivided by considerable socio-economic differentiation (P.E. Peters 2006, Oya 2007,2012, Jayne et al. 2010, Woodhouse 2012).

Even more problematic than the terminology has been the distorting analytical lensapplied to small- to medium-scale farming families by governments, donors and manyother commentators since the colonial era through to today. This is based on a simple evol-utionary model that relegates the kind of labour-intensive farming seen across Africa(mostly dependent on hand labour though in some places using animal traction, onfamily labour complemented with limited hired workers, on complex cropping systems,and often on bush/fallow cultivation [fast disappearing in light of population density]and the use of multiple fields with different soils and light/moisture conditions ratherthan a single consolidated ‘farm’) as an early and backward stage in the trajectory of ‘devel-opment’ towards industrialized society, in which any remaining agriculture is in the modeof capital- and chemical-intensive agro-industrial production. Populations called ‘small-holders’ or, especially in Latin America, Asia and parts of Europe, ‘peasants’, are seenas doomed to disappear in the face of, for economists, scale economies or, for Marxists,‘marginality to a revolutionary class politics’ (McMichael 2008, 205). From the point ofview of modernizers, peasants and smallholders have been seen as essentially backward,static and resistant to change. Most colonial officers felt the need to force these populationsinto the modern world of ‘progressive’ farming (and into what was called ‘civilization’early in the colonial era or ‘development’ in the later and post-colonial years) throughthe imposition of various ‘improvements’ in land and water management, cropping andanimal husbandry, and land tenure.

Much the same set of rationales about modernization and development as well as policydirections were continued by most post-independence African governments (Cooper 1997).Misunderstandings and misrepresentations included failure to appreciate the diverse formsof agricultures devised by small farmers for the diverse ecologies and climates they inhab-ited, and the consequent labeling of such farmers as ‘conservative’ or ‘backward’when theyresisted the imposition of inappropriate methods. Most of the coercive resettlement cummodernization schemes failed, though some techniques and many new crops wereadopted over time. In Malawi, for example, 1950s schemes based on a farming model suit-able to English ‘yeomen’ quickly collapsed, although methods such as ridging have beenadapted for certain types of soil and for certain crops and continue to be used today.Most spectacularly, many of the crops introduced across Africa were taken up with enthu-siasm and led to the various booms (cotton, cocoa, coffee, tobacco, etc.). Over and over,research has shown that resistances and failures in respect of imposed agriculturalmethods or crops have been due not to an inherent conservatism among farmers but tothe ‘interventions’ being inappropriate or incompatible, and/or to political-economic con-ditions affecting input and output markets, including neglect or appropriation bygovernments.

A persistent failure has been to misunderstand the relation between producing food forown consumption and producing for sale. Ever since colonial days, ‘subsistence’ farmershave been assumed to be in a kind of ‘original state’ needing to be transformed into ‘commer-cial’ farmers. But archival, historical and other research has shown that even in the 1920s and1930s rural farming groups were dependent on the market for many products, even, especiallyin densely populated places, for staple foods. Today, there are no fully ‘subsistence farmers’anywhere on the continent. Rather than subsistence and production for sale being opposedstates, they are strategies. Most small-scale and often medium-scale farmers have been


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shown to deploy both strategies. A goal, achieved by some to few depending on the countryand region, is to produce as much of the family food as possible for the good ‘rational’reasons of avoiding what is almost always a spike in food prices in the food deficit, pre-harvest periods, as well as the better-off using food to hire temporary labourers. But also,most sell some of their crops, including food crops, again to a lesser or greater scale depend-ing mainly on level of assets, proximity to markets, and annual fluctuations, in order to raisethe necessary cash for many items needed by families. Most research shows that the degree of‘subsistence’, understood as the proportion of own needed staple food produced, is positivelycorrelated with sale of crops. It is precisely the better off with most land and income who aremore able to produce much to all of their needed staples, and it is the poorest in land and cashwho are most dependent on the market for their own staples.

Unfortunately, the simplistic formulation of ‘subsistence’ farmers versus ‘commercialfarmers’ continues to hold currency among ministries of agriculture, national governments,donors and others. A recent news report in a leading US newspaper shows this fundamentalmisrepresentation to be still with us today. An article by Lydia Polgreen in the New YorkTimes for 10 November 2012 describes how coal production in Mozambique is displacingrural residents. An attempt to ameliorate the lot of the latter has been to bring in ‘an experton farming who has been working on American-financed agribusiness projects in Mozam-bique for the past seven years’. The ‘expert’ is quoted as saying, ‘Farmers are used toburning land, throwing down seeds and praying for rain. The length of time to takesomeone from subsistence to commercial farming can take up to a generation’. If thiscomment were to be transferred to the colonial 1920s it would not seem out of place.But in light of the massive research on the strategies of small-scale farmers, most ofwhom carefully select specific seeds (including a huge number of new introductions) forspecific types of soil and purposes, make judicious use of long-proved techniques, and‘read’ their local climates through experience, it is horrifying to read this absurd anddangerously wrong portrayal of Mozambican farmers!

The imposition of structural adjustment and market liberalization policies from the early1980s proved disastrous for smallholder-peasant populations. The donor-imposed removalof most government services, subsidies and protections in the form of trade tariffs and pricecontrols were imagined by donors to herald the dawn of a new ‘liberalized’ time where the‘private sector’, freed from the tentacles of ‘rent-seeking’ states, would drive the economyto ever greater growth, allowing ‘all boats to rise’ in classic trickle-down rhetoric. Thereality was quite different. The structural adjustment programmes prevented ‘Third-world national governments providing producer subsidies and other buffer measures toprotect peasant producers from the adverse effects of commodity price decline’ (Bryceson2000a, 27; cf. Mkandawire and Soludo 1999).22. The effects of World Trade Organization(WTO) policies, ‘the erosion of preferential trade agreements, such as the Lomé Agreementbetween the EU [European Union] and the African, Caribbean and Pacific region’, and theunequal contest between African (and other regional) efforts to develop ‘non-traditionalexports’ in competition with the highly subsidized American and European industrial agri-culture (Bryceson 2000, cf. Raikes and Gibbon 2000) included a precipitous drop in percapita incomes, a widespread inability of rural producers to maintain earlier levels offarming, increasingly diversified income strategies, and declines in measures of healthand education. Moreover, massive retrenchment of civil servants and other employees of

22‘African countries’ barter terms of trade declined by roughly 30 to 50% between 1980 and the early

1990s with wide variations across countries’ (cf. Cooper 2002, Ch. 5).


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government and parastatal organizations not only removed a source of cash income frommany families, including branches in the rural areas, but led many of the new unemployedto look to family and customary land as a source of food and cash.

The high proportion of non-farm income for many, combined with the loss of access tokey inputs for agricultural production, is what Deborah Bryceson sees as contributing todepeasantization, and what others see as an ‘enforced extension of peasant survival strat-egies under pressure of impoverishment’ (Raikes 2000, 68). Amanor sees diversificationof income sources as part of a structural transformation in which commodification ofland and labour relations produce ‘fragmentation’ of family and wider kin-based groupsas well as conflict between generations and genders (2001, 114). Moreover, preciselybecause many unable to find gainful employment in the urban areas look to rural land asone of their options for livelihood, and because existing rural families endeavour toproduce as much food and crops for sale as they can, despite the difficulties with inputs,the pressure on already constrained land has been increasing over the past two decades.In addition, such pressure is intensified by the small proportion of richer rural producers(richer in land and cash) who have been able to take up the diminished and privatized ser-vices available for cash cropping, and the small number of the pensioned-off salariat whohave been able to use their pensions and influence to embark on or extend commercialfarming.23 The overall results have been deepening stress on the poorest for both foodand cash income, and increasing inequality (thus, in Malawi between 1986 and 1997 theratio of incomes of the richest quartile among small-scale farming families comparedwith those of the poorest quartile increased from three to eleven times; P.E. Peters 2006).24

Reinvigoration of debate about futures for small- to medium-scale farming families

The conventional view on agrarian society – on the right and the left, among developmentand agricultural economists, the World Bank and other donors on the one hand, and, on theother, among radical critics – has been the inevitability of an agribusiness future centred onlarge farms, albeit with outgrower schemes absorbing (some of) the current rural popu-lations (Sender and Johnston 2004, Collier 2008, Oya 2009, B. White et al. 2012). Overthe past few years, however, the posited disappearance of the smallholder population inAfrica has come under reassessment, due to several factors. One is the new literature onthe environmental and ecological costs of agro-industrial agriculture which provides anew type of critique of the posited inevitability of such a future. A second is the formidablerise of agrarian social movements, particularly in Latin America and Asia, which, alongwith the surprising links between these and similar movements in Europe, have helpedfuel a challenge to seeing ‘peasantries’ as necessarily doomed, and provide a positiveassessment of the economic, ecological and social benefits of rural-based livelihoods. Athird is the fast-growing documentation of intensifying land appropriation (‘grabs’) byboth foreign and domestic agents from peasant and smallholder populations, discussedabove, a trend that has occasioned not only deep concern but a re-evaluation of convention-al trajectories of ‘development’.

23This has been particularly documented for Nigeria (see Guyer and Lambin 1993, Guyer 1997) but isalso the case for other countries, such as rice-growing areas in the Chilwa Basin in southern Malawi(author’s research).24Note that the term ‘richest’ is highly relative since even this ‘top’ quartile is poor by any standards.See Jayne et al. 2012 for other countries in Africa.


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One debate is among Marxist and other critical political economic writers about ‘theagrarian question’. Henry Bernstein, for example, states that, ‘With contemporary globali-zation and the massive development of the productive forces in advanced capitalist agricul-ture, the centrality of any agrarian question to industrialization is no longer significant forinternational capital. Instead, he claims, the ‘new’ agrarian question is that of labour and its‘crisis of reproduction’ (2009, 250). But others disagree, arguing that neoliberal globaliza-tion has produced ‘the most significant reassertion of the primacy of struggles over theglobal politics of land since the early 1950s’, indicating that transnational capital doesseek access to agricultural and other resources by obtaining (watered) land. Hence, thereis a ‘renewed relevance of the agrarian question’ (Akram-Lodhi et al. 2009, 220, 25).Moreover, the tight links between resources of land and water and people’s use of them(‘labour’) mean both continue to be central to the ‘agrarian question’.

Another debate is one dating back several decades25 on the relative efficiency of large-scale versus small-scale agricultural production (the so-called ‘inverse relationship’),which has re-entered discussion. But, as Philip Woodhouse concluded recently after areview of available evidence for Africa, a contrast between small and large farms ‘willnot suffice to predict impacts of land deals on labour productivity or employment[which] are likely to be highly context-specific’ (2012, 787). The focus should be noton land/farm size but on the ‘scale of production’ or ‘levels of investment’. He goes onto emphasize the unrecognized but critical role of water management in any attempts toincrease levels of investment in land. He warns particularly against the failure to under-stand (or even investigate) existing forms of water management by small- to medium-scale farming, fishing and livestock-raising populations. This, in turn, suggests the criticalimportance of taking account of widely different scales of resource use in areas of planned‘investment’. Woodhouse cites one example from a planned large-scale irrigation schemein Mali which would have definite effects, mostly negative, for the many existing users.One conclusion is a necessary ‘role for the state in defining and enforcing a public interestas part of land deal contracts’ (2012, 790), a point made for different forms of contractfarming (Li 2012, Oya 2012).

More generally, such discussions point towards consideration not of a simple dichot-omy, large vs small, but of possibilities for the most effective combinations of venturesof differing scale where investment in land and water would produce the ‘best possible’ out-comes. It is essential to stress that these outcomes should be defined not only in terms ofagricultural output, land and labour productivity, and profit but also in terms of decent live-lihoods for a wide range of people.

Given the past treatment of small to medium producers or ‘peasants’ by colonial andpost-colonial regimes and by development agencies, and the ongoing mistaken represen-tation of them as backward (see earlier), I am most concerned about the tendency toassume ‘the’ future for Africa is through large-scale, input- and capital-intensive ‘industrial’agriculture as embodied in conventional ‘modernization’ and ‘neoliberal’ views, in muchagricultural policy, and in currently prominent African Green Revolution programmes sup-ported by the Gates Foundation and the United Nations (UN) among others, as well as in theinfluence of companies like Monsanto and Cargill.

At the heart of current debates about farming futures are very different time scales aswell as a questionable quality of available data. Too much of the polemical debate over

25See, for example, Sender and Johnston (2004), and the special issue of Journal of Agrarian Change(JAC), 2004, 4(1&2) and responses in JAC, 2004, 4(3).


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agricultural futures and agrarian process assumes a (usually unspecified) very long timescale. Let us take a shorter time frame – the next 50 or so years, perhaps. Over the pasthalf century, many people across Africa have found a land base to be essential to theirability to withstand the volatility of climatic, economic and political ups and downs andto make a living for their family, while a substantial proportion have also been successfulwith production of cash crops like cocoa, coffee, cotton, tobacco and the all-important foodcrops that have been essential to regional and national food security as well as havingfuelled the growth in towns and cities (Guyer 1997). Even today, with the rigoursimposed by deeply misguided policies of structural adjustment and market liberalization,rising populations, the pressures of the globalized agricultural and food markets and theincreasing competition over land described earlier, there remain literally millions of ruralresidents for whom a land base is an essential part of their strategies of livelihood, socialreproduction and social value.

Doubt has been thrown on the most gloomy assessments about farming (most on asmall- to medium-scale basis) across Africa, for reasons of doubtful data within countrieslet alone across different countries, particularly in light of the complexity of multiple crop-ping, inter-cropping and crop sequencing in small fields (Berry 1984, Wiggins 2002). Morerecently, Oya (2010) has argued against ‘Agro-Afro-pessimism’ and emphasizes ‘the sub-stantial evidence of success [despite] the marked unevenness in agrarian/rural developmenttrajectories between and within countries’ (2010, 2). Oya goes on to cite a Food and Agri-culture Organization (FAO) assessment that ‘over the last 40 year period and especiallysince the mid 1990s both domestic production and imports increased on aggregate’ and‘food imports … did not compete or displace domestic production (with exceptions likerice in Senegal and meat in Côte d’Ivoire)’ (Oya 2010, 4). He concludes that ‘African per-formance in agriculture has not been bad but could have been very much better given thefavourable international demand conditions’ (6). Oya is quick to emphasize, as do otherwriters, the socio-economic differentiation among ‘smallholders’ already mentioned. Theobvious concomitant of this recognition is that not all producers are going to benefitequally from all the required interventions to support small- to medium-scale production.The landless and near-landless are more likely to provide the labour for large farms andother large-scale production, as well as for manufacturing and industry. Some richer gov-ernments are also providing or considering such income supports as child and old-agegrants (South Africa, Botswana, Namibia). The responses will have to be as varied asthe variations across the countries of Africa.

None of this positive positioning for small- to medium-scale land-based living seeks todeny the challenges – how to enable small farmers to produce crops for own consumption26

and for sale and how to link them to the currently expanding ‘global food regime’. Nor isthis concern meant to imply the complete exclusion of large-scale farming: as noted above,the more appropriate aim is a combination of scales and modes of production without thesystematic marginalization of ‘smallholders’. I propose that the first and most significantneed is to secure the rights of the millions of small to medium farming groups to their land.

In addition, what is needed are:

bold… and longer-term approaches… substantial increases in public investments in infrastruc-ture (particularly in irrigation and land improvement), making use of labour intensive public

26Note that I do not mean full self-sufficiency – that is not a goal, nor is it possible except for a tinyminority.


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works also designed to tighten rural labour markets; a revamp of agricultural research and inno-vation to fulfill the obvious potential to improve crop yields on a large scale;27 careful attractionof agribusiness investments to transform productivity in segments of the agricultural sector andopen access to high-value markets on conditions of monitorable employment and net foreignexchange generation; development of national food markets and systems of provision in a waythat benefit both a class of dynamic market-oriented farmers and the mass of poorer net buyersof food for whom low and stable food prices are key for survival; all complemented by sustain-able forms of universal protection… (Oya 2010, 13)

These are Carlos Oya’s words but very similar recommendations are made by researchersspeaking from different theoretical and policy positions (Dorward and Kydd 2004, Cousinsand Scoones 2010, Jayne et al. 2010). Also, in recognizing that the majority of rural land-owners will continue to depend on ‘diversified’ income sources, initiatives are needed toencourage the development of employment in manufacturing and industry which so farhas been totally insufficient in most countries of Africa.

Writers arguing for a future for small- to medium-scale use of landed resources ofteninvoke past efforts, some successful, that have provided institutional supports (subsidizedinputs, buying and selling, technical services and so on) for small producers.28 The devas-tations wrought by the removal of such supports through the neoliberal policies under struc-tural adjustment and market liberalization are clear and recognized, as is the hypocrisy ofthe rich countries imposing such bans in the name of ‘market liberalization’when they havethe highest subsidies and levels of protection. There are also the new challenges of an evermore unequal world market situation for most African countries.

On the other hand, there is, as mentioned above, the relatively new research showing thehigh ecological and environmental costs of conventional ‘industrial’ large-scale agriculturewith its high dependence on chemical fertilizers and pesticides, vast monocropping, coststhat have not been included in the comparisons of small-scale and large-scale agriculturecum land use.29 Such analyses may help shift the balance towards the many ecologicaland cost benefits of small- to medium-scale use of landed resources. The challenges areenormous, but why would they be considered impossible if, as is the historical case,some of the approaches now considered appropriate were in place in the past?

As a final point but by no means the least important, I want to stress the significantsocial and cultural valence of land ownership. In their comprehensive introductory articleon ‘the new enclosures’, B. White et al. (2012) point to the need to discuss labour processesand accumulation from a critical political economy approach. They draw on discussions ofthe structure of capitalist production, including labour regimes, but note the tendency ofstructural approaches to ‘omit the essential aspects of agency and power’ (623), while else-where they note the frequent omission of ‘politics’ from overly structural political economyapproaches. Similarly, Borras et al. (2010, 575–576) cite the exact same ‘four questions’ ofHenry Bernstein about agrarian change (Who owns what? Who does what? Who gets what?

27Experts point to the considerable conventional plant breeding still possible for African farmers evenbefore recourse is had to genetically modified crops, and insist both should be based on close workingrelations between scientists and farmers (which has not been the norm). See Kloppenburg (2010) andRichards (2010).28Oya (2012) points to the parallels between the past system of marketing boards and associated chan-nels of regulation and some forms of contract farming. A challenge will be to avoid the rigidity andcorruption of that old system.29SeeWeis (2010). More criticism of conventional agriculture is also being raised even in its heartlandin the USA – see Hertsgaard (2012) for a recent piece in public media.


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What do they do with the surplus wealth?) as do B. White et al. (2012), but they too want toadd the need to assess ‘emergent social and political relations [and] interactions’ as well as‘the politics of representation’ (cf. Fairhead et al. 2012).

The challenge of accounting for ‘agency and power’, ‘politics’ and ‘representations’ isto document the ways in which different actors see, think, judge and value, how they assesswhat they do, what they want, what they object to and so forth. This entails careful socio-cultural analysis in order to ‘capture the irreducible sociality of human existence’ and todocument ‘how the world is affectively and cognitively experienced, acted upon, [and]inhabited by sentient human subjects’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012, 42, 49).30 Manystudies in different parts of Africa show how people identify with certain areas – not justas sources of livelihood but as home, as a place where they belong, where their ancestorsare buried, or where they have historical memories of having arrived and settled, or ofhaving struggled mightily to obtain and keep. Many people also express liking, evenlove, of certain rural places and rural practices. The villagers in southern Malawi whereI’ve lived and researched for many years express satisfaction if they are near enough kinor neighbours or friends to get help when they need it, but at a sufficient distance thatthey enjoy a certain privacy and sense of independence. This is almost impossible formost to obtain in urban areas. They express satisfaction in work well done on the land –

a fine field of maize or pigeon peas, a good tobacco harvest for sale, fat goats and layingchickens, a healthy stand of trees for fruit and timber, well-brewed sorghum beer – theseare appreciated not only as material goods but as aesthetic and cultural values to be cher-ished. For many, the kind of life they live may well be difficult and short on what manyconsider to be the comforts of life, but they would not accept that it is a life to be consideredirrelevant and unviable or themselves to be considered ‘surplus’ to other people’s visions ofwealth. Why not work to protect and sustain such valued lives and refuse to accept theerasure from futures on African lands that still seem possible, even if for only the nextfew generations? If one is to answer yes to this, as clearly I want to, then the next task isto identify what research, writing and action are needed to support such a fight.

In this paper, I have suggested two conclusions relevant for further research and action.One is to combat the denial of ‘property’ to the many forms of customary tenure underwhich millions of resource users in Africa hold land, thus providing one basis for prevent-ing further misappropriation by more powerful agents, domestic and foreign. The other is tocounter a single-minded view of an ‘agro-industrial’ future for Africa by demonstrating theeconomic and social viability of small- to medium-scale production across the continent’slands, albeit in combination with larger scales of production.

AcknowledgmentsI have also benefitted from discussions with Ben Cousins, Bridget O'Laughlin and Henry Bernsteinduring a fellowship at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, South Africa, in 2011.

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Pauline E. Peters is a social anthropologist, retired from the teaching faculty, but still affiliated asFaculty Fellow and Senior Research Fellow with the Centre for International Development,Harvard University. She has conducted research in southern Africa, particularly Malawi, on issuesof land, political economy of farming, gender, family and poverty. Email: [email protected]


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land appropriation, surplus people and a battle over visions of agrarian futures in africa

Documents

appropriated land

current land grabs

global land grabbing

surplus people anda

foreign agents

international agents

articletaylor francis

forms of customary tenure