Yesterday on our way back to Bissau from the south, we were stopped at a military checkpoint and forced to empty our rucksacks. Well, empty them until the soldier got bored halfway through and told us to stop – he didn’t look at the other half.
The reason for this sudden rigour (at the same checkpoint a few days previously mentioning Manchester United was sufficient to avoid a bag check) is the return to Guinea-Bissau of General Bubu, the former head of the navy. Bubu had to flee the country 18 months ago when he was discovered plotting a coup d’etat against the then president, Nino Vieira. He took sanctuary in Gambia.
Last Monday, weary of exile, the general returned secretly to Guinea-Bissau in a dugout canoe, entering via one of the country’s many rivers. Eluding checkpoints such as the one we passed through, he arrived in Bissau, walked into the United Nations building and claimed refugee status. There he remains today.
The government wants the UN to give him up so they can try him for his crime – although Nino Vieira is now dead and Bubu claims he has come in peace, you can’t trust anyone around here, especially someone with his popularity. But the UN constitution makes handing him over impossible, so there is deadlock. All that can be done is for soldiers at checkpoints to make sure people like Bubu don’t get through in future (although checking only half of one’s bag and not asking for ID may not be failsafe). After us, the regional governor passed through the same checkpoint. His bag was searched too, and he angrily asked the soldiers why they were shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted. The soldiers, chastened, shrugged.
January 4, 2010 at 11:02 am | More on Africa, Conflict and security | 1 Comment
The arrest of a Nigerian national suspected of plotting to blow up a transatlantic plane is another worrying piece in the jigsaw of West African Islamic terrorism. Until a year or two ago, Al Qaeda’s presence in the region was more a rumour than a serious concern to Western governments. The group was thought to be involved in diamond smuggling during the Sierra Leonean civil war in the 1990s, and some observers believe it has profited from the heroin trade through the Gulf of Guinea.
But as recently as February this year, when I gave a talk to the UK’s Office of Security and Counter-Terrorism, the British government did not believe Islamic extremism in West Africa would coalesce into a serious threat, especially outside the region itself. Although the FCO has placed half of Mali and Niger and all of Mauritania on its list of travel blackspots, their people still seemed unruffled when I talked to them about their West Africa strategy a couple of months back.
They may be sleeping less easily now. Although Al Qaeda’s infiltration of the region remains at a fledgling stage, the arrest of the Nigerian and the kidnappings of four Spaniards and two Italians – all in the past six weeks – are an indication of the potential dangers both within and without West Africa’s borders. And the pressure that is encouraging young Africans towards extremism – the great collision between demography and poverty that is taking place against a background of inept and venal governance – is intensifying by the day.
The authorities are doing what they can. Nigeria’s police cracked down violently on the Islamist Boko Haram movement back in August, and Mauritania’s police take copies of taxi drivers’ ID cards so that they can haul in their families if passengers disappear.
But without economic development the region’s governments will be fighting an impossible war. Al Qaeda’s wealth will buy off police and army as well as luring in new recruits. It is development that people need – relevant education and infrastructure investment provided by their own governments that are responsive to them and not to donors or other vested interests, and that provide a fair enabling environment for businesses large and small; assistance from the West by means of getting out of the way of trade and migration and forcing Western businesses to behave honestly; and they also need a large dose of luck: they need leaders to emerge who have the will and courage to stop the cycle of selfishness and corruption at all levels of government and to shed the burden of aid in favour of self-reliance; and they need their neighbours to remain stable and peaceful. Only West Africa itself has the power to stop extremist violence in the long-term. As many people I have spoken to in Senegal and Guinea-Bissau realise, the rest of us can help most by clearing their path.
December 30, 2009 at 12:23 pm | More on Africa, Conflict and security | Comments Off
This morning I went to an orphanage in Bissau (see @markweston71 on twitter for more photos). Can there be a less promising start to life than being orphaned in Guiinea-Bissau? Actually, yes. Some of the orphans were disabled, physically and mentally. Others had been raped and were infected with HIV (unfortunately the southern African myth that you can rid yourself of HIV/AIDS by having sex with a child has reached West Africa, and orphans are an easy target).
Some of the children wanted to play and have their photos taken, and to touch your white skin and long hair. Most, though, just wanted a hug, and to rest their little head on your shoulder for a while.
December 17, 2009 at 5:14 pm | More on Africa, Economics and development | Comments Off
A dispute broke out in our neighbourhood in Bissau when a woman bought a plot of land and began to build a small shop on it. A neighbour objected, claiming the territory was his. The man who had sold the land to the woman remembered that a palm tree used to mark the border of the neighbour’s plot. “Where’s the palm tree?” he asked the neighbour. “It died many years ago,” came the reply.
Undeterred, the landlord asked the neighbour to get out his spade and dig in the place where he thought the palm tree once stood. This the man did, and he eventually found the roots of the old palm tree between his own land and the woman’s new shop. Realising his error, he apologised to the woman, who promptly got on with building her shop. Property rights, Guinea-Bissau style…
(For more on my travels in West Africa, see @markweston71 on twitter.com).
December 17, 2009 at 5:05 pm | More on Africa, Economics and development | Comments Off
The UN is pessimistic about the situation in Guinea. In Tambacounda last night, in the south-eastern wastes of Senegal, I met a World Food Programme employee from Dakar. Like everyone else in this one-horse town, he was on his way somewhere else, in this case to Kedougou, near the border with Guinea. He is going to investigate whether there are sufficient telecoms and internet facilities there, in case war breaks out in Guinea and a flood of refugees pours into Senegal. Similar preparations are taking place in Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Sierra Leone and Liberia.
The UN’s caution may be well-founded. Guinea’s increasingly-unhinged leader, Dadis Camara, has recruited South African mercenaries to train his supporters in the art of war, in case the majority Peul population decides it has had enough of him and moves to unseat him from power. I asked the WFP man what the Senegalese government’s position is. He said that the president, Abdoulaye Wade, supported Camara when he took over last December, and has maintained a discreet silence since. “Guinea is rich in resources,” he explained. “It doesn’t pay to antagonise those who control them.”
November 30, 2009 at 11:12 am | More on Africa, Conflict and security | Comments Off
Last December I wrote about a Somali pirate’s justification for his choice of career. A former fisherman, like many of his countrymen, his main gripe was with foreign fishing vessels which overfished Somali waters and bulldozed local boats out of their way.
Well it turns out that now, thanks to the pirates, fish stocks off the Somali coast have recovered. The greedy foreign piscatorial plunderers have been scared off, leaving locals to haul in bumper catches. Now that his justification for piracy has been removed, I wonder if our pirate friend will go back to his fishing rod.
Update: On the other side of Africa, Guinea-Bissau is clamping down on foreign fishing vessels too, but so far in a less swashbuckling way than the Somalis. The tiny West African country’s government has had a trawlerful of Spanish fishermen in custody for the last two weeks (which given the flimsy state of Guinea-Bissau’s navy and its complete absence of prisons is no mean feat). Apparently, the Spaniards are “losing patience.” Should have kept to your quotas then, shouldn’t you?
October 26, 2009 at 3:48 pm | More on Africa, Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security | Comments Off
It beggars belief that a decade after Thabo Mbeki and other AIDS denialists were completely discredited by a mountain of evidence (see a good summary here if you must), respectable media outlets still question whether the virus is caused by HIV. The latest in this shameful line is The Spectator, which at least has the (probably false) humility to ask whether it should be questioning the link (the answer is no, because it puts people’s lives at risk if they believe this garbage).
According to the Spectator, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist has said that you can shrug off HIV infections if you have a healthy immune system. This is the argument put forward by South Africa’s disgraced former health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang (who reckoned eating raw garlic would sort you out if you got infected). In all my time working in the HIV/AIDS field in Africa and the West (intermittent but over quite a long period), I’ve met one person who contracted HIV but didn’t end up needing antiretroviral drugs. The Spectator would have it that this person (a scientist himself, as it happens) is one of multitudes. Surprising, then, that he describes himself as a “human pincushion,” as so many researchers have tested him to find out what stops HIV turning into AIDS. If people like him were so numerous, you’d think the scientists wouldn’t have to subject him to painful jabs so often.
October 23, 2009 at 5:43 pm | More on Influence and networks | Comments Off
While researching my upcoming book on the world’s poorest countries last week, I came across David Keen’s ‘Conflict and Collusion in Sierra Leone,’ an analysis of the causes of the world’s poorest country’s vicious 1990s civil war. What struck me most was the similarity between what I read of the conditions in Sierra Leone before war erupted and what I heard on a recent trip to Nigeria of the conditions prevailing there.
The parallels are remarkable. Burgeoning youth population? Check. Intense competition for services and economic opportunities? Check. Collapsed education system that fails the young? Check. Dependence on a single valuable natural resource? Check (diamonds in Sierra Leone, oil in Nigeria). Neglect of other economic activities like agriculture? Check. Catastrophic lack of jobs? Check.
The result of all these fundamental problems in Nigeria, as in Sierra Leone, is a youth population that cannot establish itself. Denied employment, young people cannot leave their parents’ homes, marry, or start families. Their reliance on the older generation deprives them of the latter’s respect. Their resentment of their elders, who benefited from a better education, faced weaker competition for jobs, and have control over the country’s economy, is acute. The corruption and decadence of those in power and their lack of interest in young people’s demands further fan the flames (both David Keen writing on Sierra Leone and several Nigerians I spoke to said that wealth, no matter how dishonestly acquired, had become society’s’ overriding goal – as a young woman in Lagos lamented, “nobody asks how you got rich”).
In Sierra Leone, young people eventually took out their frustrations with extreme violence. Among their main targets were village chiefs and other figures of authority. When the Revolutionary United Front invaded Freetown in January 1999, its young rebel soldiers sought out and dealt out horrific punishments to journalists and writers who had criticised them and shown them disrespect. Many young Nigerians also bemoan the lack of respect they receive from the older generation, who dominate the country’s institutions.
Of course, there are differences between Sierra Leone and Nigeria which might make the devastation wreaked on the former less likely in West Africa’s most populous nation. Nigeria doesn’t have a Liberia next door with a leader like Charles Taylor who is determined to spread his domestic campaign of terror to his diamond-rich neighbour. Its army is stronger than Sierra Leone’s was, although as Pakistan has shown, a large army is no guarantee against a mass insurgency. And its very size makes a coordinated rebellion more difficult – rebels in the Niger Delta currently have little in common with northern Islamists like the Boko Haram group that caused serious unrest in Kano and Bauchi this summer.
But the longer Nigeria’s leaders remain complacent, the more the risk of revolution grows. University students around the country are frustrated and increasingly restive. Primary and secondary school teachers are full of pessimism. I didn’t visit the Delta, but many young people in the north seemed on the point of snapping, clinging to sharia law to save them from the venality of their secular leaders. One northern university professor I met said “you can see and feel the anger of youth,” while one of his peers in Lagos warned that “what is happening in the Niger Delta could happen all over – it’s already happening in the east, where there are regular kidnappings, while in the west and north there are some signs of increasing unrest.”
History in West Africa tends to repeat itself – for Sierra Leone, you could probably substitute Liberia, the Ivory Coast and now Guinea and find many of the same roots behind their conflicts. If Nigeria plunged into war, the whole region could implode. Any friends of President Yar Adua who are looking for a Christmas present for him could do worse than a copy of David Keen’s book.
October 12, 2009 at 2:10 pm | More on Africa, Conflict and security, Economics and development | 5 Comments
More depressing news from West Africa – surely the world’s most unstable region – as Gambia’s Big Man president Yahya Jammeh declares he wants to kill human rights workers in the country. This is what he said:
I will kill anyone, who wants to destabilise this country. If you think that you can collaborate with so-called human rights defenders, and get away with it, you must be living in a dream world. I will kill you, and nothing will come out of it. We are not going to condone people posing as human rights defenders to the detriment of the country. If you are affiliated with any human rights group, be rest assured that your security and personal safety would not be guaranteed by my government. We are ready to kill saboteurs.
And this in the country that is host to the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights (sic), which was set up by the African Union. The AU is traditionally lily-livered when it comes to dealing with Africa’s many nefarious leaders, and it will be interesting to see how it responds to this open threat to its staffers.
October 1, 2009 at 4:52 pm | More on Africa, Conflict and security | 1 Comment
When the story broke on Monday that a young British schoolgirl, Natalie Morton, had died after receiving the HPV vaccine for cervical cancer, I wondered why it had made the news. After all, she also died after eating her breakfast that morning, and presumably after attending a couple of lessons. Why did the news stories not provide this information, I wondered. Why did they only mention the vaccination – which after all, was just another event in the girl’s schedule that day. And why didn’t they mention any of the other British children who’d also died that day, in road accidents, for example?
The reason, I soon worked out, was that newsmen like to start controversies. Controversies, however unfounded, sell newspapers or help broadcasters sell advertising space. However, this still didn’t tell me why the BBC – a “public service broadcaster” which has no need to sell ads and which is supposed to be a responsible counterweight to the tabloids and the Murdoch TV channels – published the story on its website under the banner, “Schoolgirl dies after cancer jab.” As with the tabloid press, the tone of the article, and of the BBC’s report on the episode in the 10 o’clock news, strongly suggested, without any evidence, that Natalie Morton’s death was caused by the vaccine. Anyone who did not see the follow-up story, published today, would have reasonably thought that the HPV vaccine was dangerous and may well have decided it was unsafe for their daughters to be immunised. Given that the vaccine is expected to reduce cervical cancer cases by 70%, such a decision would have left thousands of girls at risk of contracting a frequently fatal disease.
Hopefully, the follow-up story, which reports that Ms Morton died of a massive tumour in her chest that affected her heart and lungs, and not because of the vaccine (nor because she ate breakfast or attended lessons that day, for that matter), will receive as much coverage as the initial report and the scare will abate, though I’m not holding my breath. You only have to look at the mountain of coverage received by the MMR scandal (where duff science linked the vaccine to autism) to see that vaccination is not a topic that attracts responsible journalism.
Sadly, it doesn’t attract responsible politics either.
Andrew Lansley, the Tory shadow health secretary, used Morton’s tragic death in an attempt to score political points. In a bizarre non sequitur, he told the BBC that “this again raises the question we have asked for some time, as to why the government won’t publish the assessments it made of the relative merits of the two HPV vaccines and why we therefore use a different vaccine to most comparable countries.” Lansley has a point about vaccine decisions not always being transparent (as I discussed in detail in my recent report on UK vaccination policy), but to use this girl’s death to demonstrate this point is both cynical and ignorant. The decision to use Cervarix was based on cost-effectiveness, not safety, considerations – both Cervarix and Gardasil were found to be safe and effective in clinical trials.
It would be worrying if the man who is likely to become Britain’s next Minister of Health did not know this, but if we give him the benefit of the doubt, that leaves point-scoring as the only alternative explanation for his outburst. And this begs the question of whether public health is a suitable arena for politicking, or whether, when the health of thousands of young women is under discussion, it would not be naive to expect a more responsible, less partisan approach from our elected representatives.
Now that it has become clear that the death had nothing to do with the jab, Andrew Lansley’s comments look rather hasty. Will he retract his criticisms? Will he admit that he should have been more measured, and that fanning the flames of the story might have imperilled the public’s health? Will he f***.
October 1, 2009 at 12:41 pm | More on Influence and networks, UK | 2 Comments
Back in December, when Moussa “Dadis” Camara seized power in Guinea in a bloodless coup, he promised to hold elections and return his country to democracy after decades of hardline dictatorship. His people welcomed this approach and hailed the young and previously unknown army officer as a breath of fresh air. When he pledged not to stand in the elections, his popularity grew still stronger.
Sadly, those who were taken in hadn’t been studying their post-colonial African history. Like many before him, far from bringing change and cleaning out a corrupt system, Camara has turned out to be yet another brutal, power-hungry Big Man. Not long ago, he banned public demonstrations. Then he did an about-turn on his election promise (although he says he hasn’t decided whether or not to take part in the upcoming poll in January, a new party has sprung up saying he will represent it and few doubt he will stand). And yesterday, he demonstrated the lengths he will go to to cling onto power by violently quashing a protest against his candidature in the capital, Conakry.
157 people died as troops opened fire on demonstrators. Many were bayoneted to death. And in a scary echo of neighbouring Sierra Leone’s vicious civil war, soldiers used sexual violence to make their point too. An eyewitness from a local human rights group “saw soldiers strip women naked, spread their legs and stamp on their privates with their boots.”
France, the colonial power, has suspended military aid to the country (why were they giving arms to an unelected dictator in the first place, you might wonder). It is reconsidering its development aid. Whether this will have any effect is uncertain, however. As Camara recently pointed out, there was widespread international criticism when Mohammed Ould Abdel Aziz took power by ejecting an elected president in a coup in Mauritania last year, but when Aziz won a subsequent ballot, the complaints rapidly subsided. Camara is counting on the same thing happening with him.
September 29, 2009 at 9:03 pm | More on Africa, Conflict and security | Comments Off
The BBC reports that the weekend’s violence in the city of Bauchi has spread to other parts of northern Nigeria, including the sleepy northeastern town of Maiduguri and Wudil, a town near Kano. A BBC reporter counted over 100 bodies in Bauchi.
Blame has been placed on a militant Islamist group called Boko Haram, an organisation made up mostly of former university students who are opposed to the westernisation of education. Apparently (although nothing is clear), some of the group’s leaders were arrested, so their cadets took to the streets with guns to secure their release.
Most of northern Nigeria is under sharia law. On a trip there earlier this month for the Next Generation Nigeria project, I met sharia leaders in Kano, the north’s biggest city. They told me that resistance to western education had historic roots, as it was seen as an attempt by southern Christians, who had been educated by the British colonisers, to spread their religion to the Muslim north.
Only in recent years has this resistance weakened, and many parents are now very keen for their children to attend western schools. Trouble is, there aren’t enough places for the burgeoning numbers of children, so in many areas Islamic schools remain the only option. State governments are encouraging these schools to teach secular subjects like English and maths as well as Kuranic studies and Arabic.
The religious leaders I spoke to were generally fine with this, but it seems not all their peers are of the same opinion. Mohammed Yusuf, the leader of Boko Haram, has said western education is forbidden, and recruited students to advance his arguments. Given how bad Nigeria’s schools and universities are, and how slim graduates’ prospects of getting a decent job when they leave, the recruitment drive probably isn’t difficult.
If Yusuf’s campaign is successful, it will be a blow to northern Nigeria’s development prospects. Although Islamic schools may do a good job of inculcating values and morality, for the vast majority of their alumni what they teach is of no value at all to their careers. I asked a sharia leader how Arabic and Kuranic studies help students find jobs, and he replied that they could work as teachers in such schools or as imams. This would be fine if everybody could become an imam or a teacher, I said, but then there wouldn’t be any congregation or students. He smiled patiently, and said that the rest would work in the fields or hawking in the street. In the north, as in the country as a whole, too many leaders benefit from the status quo to concern themselves with progress.
July 27, 2009 at 1:37 pm | More on Africa, Conflict and security | Comments Off
Cross-border wars in Sub-Saharan Africa have been few and far between since the end of the colonial period. Instead, the continent’s disaffected have fought numerous battles with their own countrymen. Last weekend, however, Guinea’s new leader, Dadis Camara, who took power in a coup last Christmas, claimed that neighbouring Guinea-Bissau was amassing troops at the border in preparation for an invasion of his country.
This would be a remarkable move by Guinea-Bissau, which doesn’t currently have a leader (the second round of presidential elections is due on 26 July) and whose army is a disaffected ragbag of poorly paid, badly trained young men who have enough trouble keeping the peace at home (their chief of staff was assassinated in March) without contemplating an invasion of a much bigger neighbour.
Camara reckons the planned invasion is a plot by the region’s drug lords, from Guinea, Guinea-Bissau and Latin America, to remove him. Camara has been surprisingly thorough in his purging of those Guineans involved in the cocaine trade which has plagued the countries of the Mano River basin in recent years, and he believes those high up in the industry want him out so that they can maintain their freedom to operate.
A war between the two countries would be disastrous for both and for their region. Both are extremely fragile politically, dirt poor and surrounded by other historically unstable states (Liberia, Sierra Leone, Senegal’s Casamance region). Guinea’s opposition parties are less worried, however. They see Camara’s warning as a ploy to entrench his power ahead of promised elections in October. Given that he has also banned all political and union activities in his country, it seems that a false alarm of an invasion would indeed be in keeping with a strategy to stay in power, despite his promise to step down once elections are held.
July 14, 2009 at 8:59 am | More on Africa, Conflict and security | Comments Off
Edwin Dyer
Back in February, I gave a talk on security in West Africa at a Demos leadership masterclass on International Security and Counter-Terrorism. Yesterday came news that Al Qaeda’s African arm had killed a British hostage, Edwin Dyer, whom they captured in Niger in January (they killed him in neighbouring Mali). In my talk, I predicted that the security threat from West Africa might be more of a long-term problem for Europe, but that it was one that was worth monitoring in the short-term too. It seems the threat might be more immediate than I feared. The talk is available here.
June 4, 2009 at 8:46 am | More on Africa, Conflict and security | Comments Off
Further to recent Global Dashboard posts on the attempts by rich countries to buy up African agricultural land (here and here for example), an article I wrote for this month’s EMEA Finance magazine explores the subject in more detail.
The main problem with the deals, I argue, is the difficulty of valuing them in a rapidly-changing global food market. For African countries which lack expertise in such matters, there is a huge danger that they will be ripped off. But the risks are also great for investor countries, as the recent collapse of South Korea’s bid to buy up land in Madagascar has shown. For the deals to work, they will need to be radically different to those made so far – more transparent, properly regulated, beneficial to local people and shorter. More important still, however, is for Africa to realise its own potential for food production, which would in the long-term negate the need for these deals.
For the full article, see after the jump.
The New Scramble for Africa
Mark Weston
EMEA Finance, May 2009
Imagine if China, following a brief negotiation with a UK government desperate for foreign cash after the collapse of the British economy, bought up the whole of Wales, replaced most of its inhabitants with Chinese workers, turned the entire country into an enormous rice field, and sent all the rice produced there for the next 99 years back to China. Imagine that neither the evicted Welsh nor the rest of the British public knew what they were getting in return for this, having to content themselves with vague promises that the new landlords would upgrade a few ports and roads and create jobs for local people (it is not clear how many, as most of those working in the rice fields will be imported).
Then imagine that after a few years – and bearing in mind that recession and the plummeting pound have already made it difficult for the UK to buy food from abroad – an oil price spike or an environmental disaster in one of the world’s big grain producing nations drives global food prices sharply upwards, and beyond the reach of many Britons. While the Chinese next door in Wales continue sending rice back to China, the starving British look helplessly on, ruing the day that their government sold off half their arable land. Some of them plot the violent recapture of the Welsh valleys.
Such a scenario may appear far-fetched, but its early stages are already being played out on the fields of Africa. Wealthy countries with cash surpluses but a shortage of cultivable farmland have been buying up large tracts of land-rich but cash-poor Africa. Qatar is negotiating to lease 40,000 hectares in Kenya; the United Arab Emirates has acquired 30,000 hectares in Sudan; Saudi Arabia has leased land in Ethiopia and Sudan; and in the biggest deal so far, South Korea’s Daewoo Logistics reached agreement with the government of Madagascar to lease 1.3 million hectares – half of Madagascar’s arable land – for the next 99 years. Encouraged by its own government, which paved the way for the deal, Daewoo plans to use most of the land for growing corn for export back to Korea.
The details of most of these arrangements are sketchy. Qatar has pledged to build a $3.5 billion port in Kenya as its part of the deal, while the United Arab Emirates appears to have been given its Sudanese lease for nothing. The UK’s Financial Times reported that despite promises to invest in infrastructure to support its investment, the direct costs of the Daewoo Logistics deal in Madagascar would be zero. Some observers believe the deal was partly responsible for the recent coup d’état in Madagascar.
The scramble for food security
Although the deals themselves are opaque, the reasons behind them are clear. Governments like those of Korea and Qatar believe the acquisitions will guarantee their countries’ food security in an uncertain future. The world’s population continues to mushroom – by 2050 the United Nations expects it to be almost 50% larger than it is now – and growing the food to feed nine billion people will place enormous pressure on the earth, eroding soils and draining rivers and lakes. Climate change is likely to ramp up the threats to agriculture, triggering more frequent extreme weather events and further disrupting water supplies.
It is far from certain that technological improvements will be sufficient to help global food production keep pace with the population explosion. According to Alex Evans of New York University’s Centre on International Cooperation, there is a real risk that population growth, climate change, rising oil prices and water scarcity will combine to spark a global “food price crunch.” “The potential impact of long-term scarcity trends,” he says, “will represent a major challenge for global food security. This is likely to fall primarily on import-dependent countries and on poor people.”
In 2008, the world was given a foretaste of what a crunch might look like when food prices shot up in response to a spike in the oil price (oil is used in fertilisers, farm machinery and transport, and its price is therefore closely linked to the cost of food). Food-producers like Argentina and India responded, and exacerbated the crisis, by escalating export tariffs to protect their own supplies. Russia and Ukraine imposed export bans on wheat. The World Bank estimated that the crisis added 100 million to the number of undernourished people worldwide.
The Gulf States and parts of East Asia are particularly vulnerable to food price increases and protectionist measures. Only 1% of Qatar’s land is cultivable, for example, and the emirate is one of many Arab countries that rely heavily on food imports. Hedging against future price inflation is therefore an attractive option. The Harvard economist David Bloom explains: “In a globalised world you should be able to rely on the market for your food supplies, but these moves are an indication that countries are worried that globalisation will be pushed back. If protectionism increases and markets shrink, buying arable land abroad is a rational way around that.”
The strategy has other advantages for investors. By investing in land, wealthy countries can guard against future inflation eroding the value of their cash reserves. As David Bloom observes, “as well as being an investment in your food security, the land is also an asset that you can sell later.”
Africans, too, could benefit from land deals. Most of the continent suffers from a desperate lack of jobs. If foreign investors employ local labour to cultivate their crops, African farmers who have previously been at the mercy of the weather and fluctuating global commodity prices will instead receive a steady income. If the investors build or upgrade the infrastructure that supports their farms, more jobs will be created and the benefits could spill over to other local industries. The knowledge and technology wealthy countries bring in could also help their hosts, while the direct cash proceeds of the deals, if used wisely, could give African governments much-needed funds to invest in developing their countries.
What price the future?
The risks for Africans, however, are manifold. Most of the deals struck so far require people to leave their homes. Daewoo Logistics intended to bring in farmers from South Africa to oversee its program in Madagascar; families will have to be moved to make way for the new arrivals and to clear space for farming. Protesters in Kenya have focused on a similar threat from the Qatar deal. Formal consultation and compensation mechanisms in most African countries are underdeveloped where they exist at all, and there is a high risk that local people will lose out from the land deals.
The acquisitions may also bring political risks for Africa. If a foreign partner owns half your arable land, it will have a strong interest in your trade, labour, environmental and possibly even foreign policies. If Kenya goes to war, for example, Qatar’s agricultural programme may be interrupted – what role will Qatar have, or wish to have, in formulating Kenya’s policies, and how will Kenya maintain its sovereignty in the face of pressure from its powerful and wealthy investor?
But the fundamental problem with the land deals is the difficulty of valuing them. African governments are not heavily endowed with the technical capabilities for such calculations, and more resourceful investor governments may outmanoeuvre them. Valuing half a country’s arable land for the next 99 years, however, would tax even the most sophisticated analyst. While it was negotiating with Qatar, Kenya’s government announced a state of emergency over food shortages. In Madagascar, Mark Jacobs of the NGO Azafady reports that his organisation, which had been working on education programmes in the south-east of the country about nutrition, has had to refocus its work towards distributing food, as food price rises and prolonged drought have left thousands at risk of starvation. There is not enough food to go around now, and population growth, the increased demand for food in China and India, and other factors linked to resource scarcity mean Africa could face much more severe food shortages in the years to come.
The extent of these shortages is impossible to predict, however. Who knew that the cost to the Gulf States of food imports would more than double in the last five years, or that the oil price would collapse so suddenly in 2008? Long-term forecasting of food supplies and prices – and therefore the worth of a country’s arable land – is more difficult still. Even countries with plentiful supplies at present cannot be sure that these will be sufficient 70 or 80 years hence, and a scenario where starving Africans watch on as foreigners export food from under their noses would be dangerous for all parties. Putting a fair value on the land in the face of all these unknowns is an enormously complex task. The uncertainty is such that in any long-term deal one of the parties is highly likely to lose out, with potentially devastating consequences for communities’ survival.
Buyer beware
The perils of agreements such as those in Madagascar, Sudan and Kenya are not limited to Africans. Investors, too, face multiple risks. Infrastructure in Africa is generally so weak that foreign companies will have to spend heavily to get their investment up and running. Daewoo Logistics planned to spend $6 billion on irrigation and transport infrastructure, for example. But the chronic instability that plagues the continent means there is no guarantee that firms will be around long enough to reap a return on this outlay.
It did not take long for Daewoo Logistics to learn this lesson. The Madagascan government that signed the deal has since been ejected in a coup d’état. The new government cancelled the contract with Daewoo, saying that selling off land would require changing the country’s constitution, so the public would have to be consulted first.
Elizabeth Stephens of the risk management adviser Jardine Lloyd Thompson Ltd warns that investors looking to tie up land for many years should be prepared for many such hiccups: “To invest in agricultural production you have to have a long-term contract, but in any emerging market – in terms of the probability for dramatic change in the political and economic environment – long-term means three to five years. Companies need to understand the risks of these deals.”
Even where governments are stable, there is no guarantee that they will honour contracts. If food becomes scarcer and Africans hungrier, it will be hard for their governments to resist pressure to reclaim the land. “The time you really need to export this food is going to be when there are food shortages or high prices,” says Elizabeth Stephens, “and that’s going to be just the time when the government decides you can’t export it for domestic reasons. Does the government renege on the contract to keep its people happy, or does it honour the contract but risk being overthrown?”
If a deal were to fall through, investor nations would be left without a vital source of food imports. Saudi Arabia is planning to stop producing wheat by 2016, while South Korea hopes imports from Madagascar will supply half of its corn needs. Depending on crops produced in poor, unstable countries could weaken rather than shore up wealthy nations’ long-term food security.
Where next?
Following the collapse of the Korea-Madagascar deal, and controversy over similar acquisitions in Africa, a new approach to outsourcing land is clearly needed. First, negotiations and contracts must become more transparent. In none of the agreements so far has it been clear what the host country would receive. According to the director of a Madagascan environmental consultancy, “misinformation was the biggest mistake the government made over the Daewoo deal. They should have clearly explained to the public and the press the steps that would be taken. They never did that, and now the country’s reputation with investors has suffered.” Clarifying what is being paid to whom, and ideally what the money will be spent on, is essential for the long-term success of a deal.
Second, consultation with the public should be formalised. Rushing deals through without proper dialogue and fair compensation will, as in Madagascar, end in failure. Many donor-country governments have expertise in consulting the public, and all parties to land deals will benefit if they pass on some of that knowledge to their African peers.
Third, companies investing in overseas farmland should ensure their involvement benefits local people. Providing services such as schools and hospitals will protect firms’ reputations and thereby make projects more likely to last. Making sure that those living in surrounding areas are well fed is also important. Direct support for communities may be more effective than indirect assistance. Elizabeth Stephens explains: “Giving money to the government to do this is not always the best idea as it often doesn’t reach local people. Companies should do the projects themselves, so they’re seen to be contributing.”
Fourth, regulation is needed. Neither host governments nor investors can always be trusted to ensure that local people gain from the deals. If land outsourcing becomes more widespread, an international overseer may be required to enforce contracts, ensure consultation and compensation, and assess the likely environmental impacts of the agreements, including the impacts on host countries’ water supplies.
Fifth, and given the near impossibility of valuing land in the long-term, investors and hosts should shift their focus towards shorter deals. A ninety-nine year lease is clearly far too long – that deal lasted only a few months – but fifteen- or twenty-year contracts periodically reviewed by both sides may be feasible. The deals should contain emergency provisions that guarantee that food from the outsourced land will be delivered to local people during shortages.
More important than any of the above, however, are the usual policy prescriptions for Africa and the international community’s dealings with it. Raising the productivity of African farmers so that they can compete internationally and boost global food supplies; encouraging increased production by freeing up the international food market; and stricter World Trade Organisation sanctions on countries that restrict or ban exports are among the most urgent measures. Korea and the Gulf States recognise that Africa has the potential to produce more food. If the continent can at last fulfil that potential and pull its weight as a contributor to global food supplies, there will be less need for worried rich countries to buy up its land.
May 13, 2009 at 3:54 pm | More on Africa, Climate and resource scarcity, Key Posts | Comments Off
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