Institute For The Future

Neo Colonialism?

Some of my colleagues and I have been conducting research on the growing, or perhaps dying trend, of land grabbing to secure future food sources. I recently found a great resource for anyone interested in following this disturbing trend.

According to Nick Wadhams, from The National, Qatar has recently caused some controversy within Kenya. In 2008 Mwai Kabaki (Kenya’s President) met with Qatar’s emir at Doha regarding a $2.5 billion loan to build a second deep-water port in Kenya. As part of the deal, Qatar asked Kenya for 40,000 hectares of the 200,000 hectare landmass in the Tana River Delta.

The Tana River Delta is a large mass of undeveloped lush land. Although it legally belongs to the Kenyan government, locals who have lived on the land since before Kenya came into existence as a country, claim it as theirs through customary law. The deal is particularly appealing for Qatar as the fertile land is a quick skip and a hop away from the proposed port, which would then be used to ship the food directly to Qatar.

www.birdlife.org/images/raw/tana_river_delta_herdsmen.jpg

Kenya is pushing it’s own development plan called Vision 2030 (This is the only link I can find that provides actual content, but I hope this isn’t the full report, it is pathetically empty. In fact, I was planning on blogging about it earlier, and decided not as it was too depressing. If you’ll notice, the second to last slide says, “What next? Get down to work.” What kind of a plan is that? It shows that the people in power in Kenya, don’t really care about the general population, they can’t even be bothered to create an actual plan? But I digress . . .) geared to promote investment in and development of Kenya. The new port would open up Northeast of Kenya (a very underdeveloped region) to development.

Why might Kenya, and other countries in the Global South be looking to other governments for assistance as opposed the tradition method of seeking help from the WB or the IMF? “It is not a matter of free money,” Wycliffe Oparanya, Kenya’s Planning Minister, told Reuters. “But if we go to the World Bank, it takes four years to negotiate and then you are told: ‘Do this, do that’. The Kenyan people cannot wait that long for this urgent development project.”

However, Qatar may not have realized exactly how controversial the Tana River Delta is when they made this scandalous deal. Land deals tend to be easier to accomplish in Ethiopia or Sudan where the average person is much poorer and more easily exploited. Locals in the Delta have been killing each other over the land for decades in small spurts of violence. In addition to local infighting, the Kenyan government and the inhabitants of the land don’t agree on who the land belongs to. Locals are saying they will not let this land be given away, and are ready to fight to the death.

A third layer of difficulty in Qatar is Kenya’s very large conservationist movement which his actively worked to keep the Delta undeveloped. According to Wadhams, “That the Tana River Delta is undeveloped is, in some ways, testament to that tenacity. The government has long tried a host of schemes – from sugarcane, to shrimp farming, to rice fields and agro-fuels – in the delta, all of which failed, sunk by local opposition, poor planning or conservation groups, who cherish the delta’s extraordinary ecological diversity.”

The Kenyan government insists that locals are incorrect about which land is being given away and that nothing has been written in stone with Qatar. Qatar has kept quite. Kenya and Qatar will supposedly meet next month to work out the loan.

As David Hallam, head of the Trade Policy Service at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization put it, “It does seem rather anomalous that you’ve got countries which are food insecure and in receipt of food aid shipments and at the same time handing over control of land to third countries.”

Analysts suggest it might be better to form relationships with already existing local farms than grabbing land. According to Wadhams, South Korea failed to recently snatch a third of the arable land in Madagascar, and in the mean time may have played a hand in their recent coup. The current controversy in Kenya, combined with what happened in South Korea, and the general difficulty of purchasing or leasing farm land in Africa, may in the long run turn countries away from this method of securing food for the future.

O B Sisay, a deputy African analyst with Exclusive Analysis in London said, “You’re going to find it difficult to produce food for export in countries that have perennial food and farming shortages.”

All I can say is, I can’t believe someone like Sisay actually has to say that. It should be so obvious to Qatar, South Korea and the plethora of other Asian and Middle Eastern countries who are involved in similar schemes that this can only have a bad ending. What happens when Kenya enters a famine (which it will) and the people in the Tana River Delta area starve? Will Qatar pay for soldiers to go down and guard the land while locals look on starving? Farmland grabbing is not a sustainable solution to food shortages anywhere. May I also mention how ridiculous it is that Qatar should get 40,000 hectares of land for free? I am sure they will be charing a high interest rate on the money they are lending Kenya for the port. Is it not shameful to be so unabashedly concerned with ones own needs with no thought of others?