Man, drink, deck, summer night, cigar.

"He sat back and watched the lights and sipped his beer and watched the late Northwest flight out of Minneapolis line up on the airport across the valley, miles away. The runway lit up as the plane approached, twinkling in the night air. He lit his cigar and sat back in his lawn chair to watch. Man, drink, deck, summer night, cigar."

- Kevin Canty, Everything, p. 42

Seized!

Back in the fall of 2008, Daewoo Logistics, a South Korean natural resource development company, struck a deal with the government of Madagascar. In exchange for a 99-year lease on 3.2 million acres of land - almost half of the farmed land in the country - for growing corn and palm trees (for the oil to be used for biofuel) and building the requisite roads and other infrastructure, Daewoo would "pay nothing for the land."* Well, not nothing exactly. According to a report appearing in Time Magazine at the time, "Daewoo says the Madagascar land will be leased for about $12 an acre, which is a fraction of the cost of farmland in the corporation's home country," a country with an incredibly dense population and extremely little farmland.**

Fast forward to March of 2009, a tumultuous year for the island country, when Madagascar's then-president Marc Ravalomanana was forced from office and into hiding when a rival, supported by a group within the country's armed forces, Andry Rajoelina, took office, suspended parliament, and canceled the deal, saying to reporters, "In the constitution, it is stipulated that Madagascar's land is neither for sale nor for rent, so the agreement with Daewoo is cancelled...We are not against the idea of working with investors, but if we want to sell or rent out land, we have to change the constitution, you have to consult the people. So at this hour the deal is cancelled."***

Fast forward, again, to today and a new article/slideshow/video in the New York Times about farmer displacement in Mali: "African Farmers Displaced as Investors Move In."

The article begins with the story of a 73 year old farmer and community leader, Mama Keira, from Soumouni, Mali, recalling how a group of strangers entered his village of "hand-to-mouth farmers" in order to inform the community members that their land was now controlled by Muammar el-Qaddafi, Libya's leader. And the story of the article is that Keira's story is rapidly becoming more common.**** "Across Africa and the developing world, a new global land rush is gobbling up large expanses of arable land," reporter Neil MacFarquhar writes.

In an October 2010 speech given in Iowa at the World Food Prize symposium, Kofi Annan, former United Nations Secretary General and current Chair of the Board of Directors of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, said, "Africa is the only continent which does not grow enough food to feed itself. It alone has failed, in recent decades, to see agricultural productivity keep pace with its growing population." At the same time, he continued, “Never before has there been such a collective drive for change. This encompasses civil society organizations, philanthropic foundations and multinational corporations. Food and nutrition security now sits firmly and rightly at the top of the development agenda."*****

But do food and nutrition security sit at the top of the agendas of all African state governments, domestic business interests, foreign governments, and multinational land development concerns?

If farmers were being displaced and reimbursed so that African countries could introduce commercial farming in order to feed their citizens that would be one (very complicated) thing - and some argue that large-scale commercial farming could be a boon for the local populations - but, as Neil MacFarquhar reports for the Times, "others condemn the deals as neocolonial land grabs that destroy villages, uproot tens of thousands of farmers and create a volatile mass of landless poor. Making matters worse, they contend, much of the food is bound for wealthier nations."****** Annan, echoing those concerns that food security in the countries in question must be "first and foremost", is quoted as saying, "Otherwise it is straightforward exploitation and it won’t work. We have seen a scramble for Africa before. I don’t think we want to see a second scramble of that kind."

Grain, a self described "small international non-profit organisation that works to support small farmers and social movements in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems,"******* released a report in 2008 called Seized! The 2008 Land Grab for Food and Financial Security, in which it was argued, "If left unchecked, this global land grab could spell the end of small-scale farming, and rural livelihoods, in numerous places around the world."********

In some instances, local farmers have worked hard to check some of those very changes that they see transforming their lives in unwanted, unwelcome ways. MacFarquhar writes, "In a rally last month, hundreds of farmers demanded that the government halt such deals until they get a voice. Several said that they had been beaten and jailed by soldiers, but that they were ready to die to keep their land."

This is a complicated equation here, to be sure, but there's also something glaringly and maddeningly clear: the words of people like Sekou Traore, a 69 year old man from Soumouni, who told MacFarquhar, "We are all so afraid...We will be victims of the situation, of that we are sure."



**** "A World Bank study released in September tallied farmland deals covering at least 110 million acres — the size of California and West Virginia combined — announced during the first 11 months of 2009 alone. More than 70 percent of those deals were for land in Africa, with Sudan, Mozambique and Ethiopia among those nations transferring millions of acres to investors."

******** The blog farmlandgrab.org, a project begun by the folks at Grain, is following this story closely.

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