Land grabbing: Fuse on a time bomb

Before someone could target me, let it be said, with no apology to limping gods who want to be God, that I am not discussing the Fako land grabbing scam Cameroonians are still expecting the reports by CONAC and the prime minister’s investigators and that’s when the whole truth will be told, over and again until...

For now, even in the face of an array of active public opposition, “land grabbing” is turning out to be an international phenomenon. The World Bank has a more comfortable description for such land cheats. People or nations with “interest in farm land,” although the appetite of those in Fako is for building.

But as a member of the farming community, who make up 70 percent of the working population, I think interest in farm land should deserve screaming headlines too. Several international experts have found out that rich countries that are worried about food security for their citizens are buying land in poor African countries including Cameroon with peanut change to cultivate food for export. In the process, indigenes are left with just starvation crumbs.

The experts visited 25 countries in sub-Saharan Africa talking with more than 350 farmers' groups, non-governmental organizations, government agencies and scientists to write a scathing land grabbing report released by Worldwatch. Their conclusion: the outcome of large-scale land acquisitions “will not be development but a litany of dire possible consequences: xenophobia, riots, coups and more hunger.

"Deals that focus solely on financial profit can leave rural populations more vulnerable and without land, employment opportunities or food security," said the report. The grabbers claim that the land would be developed to help alleviate the world food crisis by tapping into a country's 'unused' agricultural potential. But according to the report “such investments often do more harm than good, disrupting traditional land-use patterns and leaving small-scale farmers vulnerable to exploitation."

The experts say a minimum of 30m hectares is being grabbed from poor countries to grow food for countries like the Gulf countries and China that “cannot produce enough for their populations. The trend is accelerating and could severely impair the ability of poor countries to feed themselves.

“Those targeted include not only fertile countries such as Brazil, Russia and Ukraine, but also poor countries like Cameroon, Ethiopia, Madagascar, and Zambia,” the report pointed out. Taking the cue on an issue that is drawing global worry, an expert at the Forum for Biotechnology and Food Security in India, predicts land grabbing if not checked could lead to civil unrest:"Outsourcing food production will ensure food security for investing countries but would leave behind a trail of hunger, starvation and food scarcities for local populations, The environmental tab of highly intensive farming – devastated soils, dry aquifer, and ruined ecology from chemical infestation – will be left for the host country to pick up".

The London-based International Institute for Environment and Development, comes in soft with its position that land grabbing "create risks and opportunities", while the US-based International Food Policy Research Institute, says nearly $20bn to $30bn a year is being spent by rich countries acquiring land at rock bottom prices in developing countries.

When I read the international reports on “land grabbing” I am reminded by a recent release by Prime Minister Philemon Yang stipulating prices for land throughout the country. Compared with the astronomical demands and even with the propensity of some administrators cum land speculators to grab land, isn’t the prices just chicken feed?

Would that not make the overnight civil service billionaires made rich because of illicit wealth grab the land at the expense of the overwhelming majority of local cutlass-and-hole farmers who depend on such land for a livelihood?...And wouldn’t they just be cultivating violence if the land is all grabbed suspending them in thin air?

Postscript: Morality cannot be legislated, but behaviour can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless - Martin Luther King Jnr