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Smith College denwbury@smith.edu Thanks to Peter Limb for alerting us to this article from the Guardian. The massive land grabs going on in many African countries today present truly a terrifying prospect for many African people down the road. These are land grabs not by local elites, but by powerful external financial actors who include many from the oil-rich countries, from China. Now they seem to include many university endowment fund managers from the US. Their effects on local African cultivators is potentially devastating. Such vast acquisitions often consist of some of the most fertile land; often they are heavily settled; often they envisage massive water usage; and they are often not intended for food production (though they could be if the price of food keeps rising) but for bio-energy. These are massive projects: they often displace thousands--sometimes hundreds of thousands--of people, justified of course by the tropes of "productivity" and "employment." (Does anyone recall the slogan of the white settlers in Kenya, after expropriating massive tracts in the highlands: "we taught these people how to work--of course they didn't know the value of labor before . . ." ) Displacing people from their land and then hiring them back at often derisory wages--can anyone point to examples where agrarian wages were not derisory?--does not, except in the most superficial and cynical sense, quality as "providing employment." And the concept that replacing consumption crops (or crops intended for local markets) with export crops, even if at increased levels of productivity per hectare, only counts for "increased productivity" at the most jejune understanding of productivity as budgetary item (as increased exports) rather than any meaningful sense of the term--including Amartya Sen's sense of "entitlements," a frequent factor in postcolonial famine in Africa, as he points out so effectively. And finally, the funds leading us to this brave new world are hedge funds--the very mechanisms that brought this (and the global) economy to the brink a short three years ago. Have we forgotten so quickly the wonders we were submitted to by the new financial tools that run our advanced world? And now we find that all these elements--dispossessing African peasants, obliterating further food entitlements in Africa, potentially turning over increasingly precious water supplies in some of the most marginal lands in Africa (Sudan, western Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia), gambling with hedge funds--are central to the financial strategies of those who oversee university endowments. (It is ironic to see the desperation of those who seek to make up for the endowment dips brought on by the last hedge fund binge, lead them to . . . more of the same lure of the siren song in this era of . . . "recovery" from the last recession.) As Africanists, as academics, and as simple citizens: does this make good sense to us? The Guardian article is short and obviously will need much more detailed research, but the complacent manner in which these "investments in agriculture" are passed off as self-evidently beneficial without any reference to the effects of such policies to people on the ground is truly frightening.
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