04:00 GMT 27th September 2011
The truth is that most of Africa's wounds are self-inflicted. How else, can one explain the present time bomb the continent's leaders are building up with the lease of land to foreign firms for cultivation of crops for biofuel. This is coming against the background of the struggle by many African countries, especially in southern Africa, to deal with the problem of land grab executed during the colonial era.
Before going into the issue, the straight economics of the lease of land to foreign firms does not make sense. In Brazil, the lands are leased at a minimum rate of $5,000 per hectare. In Africa, they are leased for as little as $6.75 per hectare. It begs the question why African land should be more than 400 times cheaper than land in other parts of the world, especially when they are to be used for commercial agriculture. The word from the leaders of these African countries is that the investment will create jobs and better economic opportunities for the local population.
However, given that the companies are under no obligation to engage locals or pay minimum wages, those benefits fail to materialise. The countries are not even gaining in any way because the companies are also getting tax exemption. Some of the deals also allow them to repatriate 100 per cent of profit and keep foreign exchange earnings offshore if they so desire. It becomes a win-win situation for the companies with a very high social and economic cost for the continent.
The first cost is the social dislocation it causes. Africa is a very poor continent and the only resource available to the rural poor is their land, which they farm for subsistence. When the land is taken away from them, they simply become dispossessed with no means of sustainable survival. Most of the leased land are in the fertile areas of the affected countries. Local communities are impoverished. It sounds so much like a script from the colonial land grab in southern Africa of the past.
The Africans were pushed off the fertile lands into less productive areas. The land were then given to colonial farmers so much that in Zimbabwe, whites who benefitted from the colonial exercise owned 60 per cent of the land although they accounted for one per cent of the population.
There is also the environmental degradation associated with large scale farming which depend so much on fertilizers and insecticides. If and when these lands eventually revert to local communities, they will be so severely degraded that the organic farming methods for which the communities are known will no longer be feasible.
Also, Africans have a psychological and spiritual attachment to their land. Relocation from one place to another breaks a psychological bond, which will create mental problems among the population. The level of mental trauma faced by displaced Kalahari bushmen illustrates this.
Before Africa ends up with degraded landcapes like Ogoni land in Nigeria or social tension as happened between whites and blacks in southern Africa, it is time to call the time on this backdoor plot to slavery.
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