We must stay vigil against the rush for our land by multinational corporations

This Day (Tanzania) | 19.01.2009

FINNIGAN WA SIMBEYE
DAR ES SALAAM

WHILE attending an investigative journalism power reporting workshop at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa last October, I had the opportunity to rub shoulders with some of the world’s award winning investigative journalists from Britain, the United States, India and South Africa.

One of the sessions I attended was lectured by Indian award winning rural investigative journalist who is also rural editor for The Hindustan newspaper, Sainath Pelagummi. Mr Pelagummi accused Western financial institutions, corporations and governments of plotting a green revolution for Africa which will actually colonize food production on the continent.

He named the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and corporations such as Monsanto as being behind the plan to revolutionize the continent’s food and water supply production and management.

Last week, a leading Kenyan daily newspaper, Daily Nation, had a detailed report quoting Food and Agriculture Organization’s Director General Jacques Diouf, warning against rich countries’ and corporations’ scramble for prime arable land in Africa.

The paper quoted Diouf as saying rising global food prices are driving countries and corporations to buy rights for large tracts of arable land in countries such as Kenya and Madagascar, where Qatar and South Korean Daewoo Logistics have bought thousands of hectares of land for food cultivation.

Diouf said Daewoo plans to buy a 99 year lease of a million hectares of prime land in Madagascar for corn and palm oil cultivation while Qatar is finalizing plans to lease 40,000 hectares in Kenya. Arable land is increasingly becoming a hot cake in the world and increasingly multinational corporations and rich Western governments are behind the move.

Tanzania has not been spared from the multinational corporations’ scramble for land, but here they have come with a different objective, cultivate biofuels. More than eight multinational biofuel companies are reportedly finalizing colonial style agreements with villages and to acquire thousands of hectares of land to cultivate biofuel crops.

Swedish biofuels company, Sekab, is seeking to acquire two million hectares of land for the cultivation of biofuel plants and production of bio-energy in the next two decades. Sekab Tanzania is due to start production of biofuel from sugarcane by 2012 with an investment of between $400-500m.

British Sun Biofuels Plc has almost acquired over 8,000 hectares of land in Mkuranga District where several villagers are due to be compensated less than $1m to give up their arable land used to cultivate food for the biofuel project.

Mkuranga District authorities are very happy about the investment and the peanut compensation payment which has become common to impoverished rural Tanzanians who have been condemned to live in abject poverty for good.

Some members of parliament and activists have already warned against the invasion of our arable land by multinationals seeking to cultivate biofuels whose priority market is not Tanzania but rich economies of the West. Unlike Daewoo and Qatar which have plans to cultivate food, multinational corporations coming to Tanzania want to cultivate biofuels and as usual our corrupt lazy thinking bureaucrats and politicians are already applauding the investors.

Very soon, this country may find itself on similar a pathway like Zimbabwe where 4,500 commercial farmers own over 90 per cent of arable land including some so-called absent landlords living luxurious lives in London.

Land is the basis of any agrarian revolution which has a direct bearing in an industrial revolution if we take the European example. It is therefore important that our policy-makers stay the course by ensuring that we don’t just know how to fob off an aggressive Kenyan campaign to include land as an item of sharing under the foreign pushed regional integration agenda.

In Tanzania, just like a bigger part of Africa, policy makers think over a five-year period when elections are due; it also spills over to the business community much of it is dominated by same personalities who double as politicians.

Our partners in the rich north think into the next generation, so Sekab are talking about two decades, Daewoo 99 years and Qatar 25 years. We need to change and think big over decades and generations.

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