Nothing New Under the Sun or a New Battle Joined? The Political Economy of African Dispossession in the Current Global Land Rush

By Liz Alden Wily

This paper focuses upon local conditions which allow governments of agrarian economies in especially Sub Saharan Africa to lease rural lands at scale to investors without the consent of customary owners. The key enabler examined is persisting failure in many domestic laws to recognize customary interests as amounting to rights of real property. Related enablers include the failure of democratic decentralization to restore meaningful authority over land disposition to rural communities, and insufficient rule of law to curtail the ability of state actors and associated elites to abuse principles of public interest for private gain. As governance concerns, analysis is nested in overview of broader limitations in the modernization of the modern African state, still dogged by neopatrimonial relations and sustaining pursuit of classical strategies of transformation which build significantly on the dispossession of the poor. The current land rush in Africa further entrenches this, and, it is argued, does so both dangerously and unnecessarily at a time when tolerance of abuse of human (land) rights is fraying, and when the opportunity exists to establish a more inclusive route to agrarian transformation by acknowledging the immense land and resource capital customarily possessed by the sub-continent’s rural poor.