Land-grabbing: the new colonialism?

It has been labeled a new form of colonialism by its detractors and it's happening more and more. Land-grabbing - when a rich country or corporation buys up vast tracts of land in a poor country, often in Africa, to safeguard its supply of food or energy - has become  increasingly common.

Over the last year, since the riots of April 2008 when Haitians (pictured above), Yemenis, Madagascans, Bangladeshis, Mexicans and many others took to the streets because they couldn't afford to eat, millions of hectares of land have been sold in some of the most deprived parts of the world, often only in return for vague promises to improve the surrounding infrastructure and provide jobs. As Paul Vallely reported in an authoritative and important piece for the Independent on Sunday, South Korean firms now own 690,000 hectares of Sudan; the UAE has 324,000 hectares of Pakistani soil.

With the world's population forecasted to surpass nine billion by 2050, and successful speculators such as George Soros frantically getting their hands on as much land as possible, these countries are acting perfectly logically in attempting to safeguard their future.

Millions of hectares have been sold in the most deprived parts of the world

For a Gulf state like Qatar, where only one per cent of land is fertile enough to be farmed, this sort of arrangement cuts out the middle man and saves as much as 20 per cent on food imports, which are twice as expensive as they were five years ago. If you consider that a hectare of land costs $22,000 in Germany, $7,000 in the US and only between $800 and $1,000 in sub-Saharan Africa, it makes sense to buy where it's cheap.

There are also good reasons for governments to sell. Very little of the aid money sent to developing countries over the last twenty years has been invested in agriculture, so they need outside investment and expertise. Then there are the jobs, infrastructure and development that these deals can bring.

However, the landgrabbing phenomenon throws up myriad uncertainties and potential injustices. The most alarming is the prospect that, while food is shipped back to fill supermarket shelves in the Gulf or elsewhere, there is no guarantee, in places where the poor have to spend the majority of what they earn on food, that local stomachs will be fed. Then there is the potential for social unrest that comes from foreign ownership. In Madagascar, the news that President Marc Ravalomanana was planning to lease, on a 99-year deal, half of the island's arable land, an area half the size of Belgium, so that a company called Daewoo could grow maize and palm oil to send back to South Korea, was met with fury. This was one of the reasons why, earlier this year, protestors marched to the palace, looting and burning, and President Ravalomanana had to flee.

In Kenya, where the government attempted to trade 40,000 hectares of the Tana River delta with Qatar, who agreed to spend $2.4bn building them a deep water port in return, the plan was fiercely opposed by various different groups. The opposition protested that there were hungry Kenyans who needed feeding; the thousands of families who farm and own animals which graze on the delta objected that it was communal land which the government had no right to sell, and environmental campaigners said that a delicate ecosystem of savannah, forests and mangrove swamps would be destroyed. Seduced by the scale of these deals, some governments have allowed foreign firms to take shortcuts on protecting the environment.

Land-grabbing can also lead to exploitation. After a Norwegian biofuels company sought to turn a vast area of forest in northern Ghana, where the locals earn their livings by foraging for shea nuts, into a jatropha plantation, they were accused of deceiving an illiterate chief into signing away 38,000 hectares with his thumbprint.

It seems certain, that where the new landowners don't charm locals by providing an improved quality of life, and where foreign workers, earning what they would back home, retreat into the safety of gated compounds, that this land-grabbing will lead to widespread resentment. If, as in Madagascar, a government is seen to side with the foreigners, it polarizes society on wealth lines and provides populist leaders – whether they be charismatic leftists like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, or right-wing nationalists – with the chance to campaign with the rhetoric of 'us versus them' divisions.

For a worst case scenario, one need only look at the Central American 'banana republics', and the conflicts that pitted the United Fruit Company against the local poor. Or the current violent hostility in the Niger Delta between oil multinationals, supported by the Nigerian government, and an angry, violent guerrilla resistance. Or simply back to last April, when people all around the world took to the streets in unprecedented numbers, because they were starving. ·