By Kojo Sebastian Amanor

In the last few years there has been a growing concern with investment in large-scale estate agriculture, particularly within Africa, and its impact on eroding land rights and livelihoods of smallholders. This tends to regard investment in large-scale agriculture as a perverse aberration, which undermines the equity prevalent in customary tenure systems and recent policy frameworks concerned with the harmonisation of customary and statutory tenure, and strategies concerned with the promoting smallholder agriculture and social participation in agricultural development. However, by presenting these developments as an aberration and in attempting to find a referential moral economy within the precepts of exiting policies, this approach reaffirms the rhetorical claims of neoliberal paradigms on agricultural development, without subjecting them to a critical analysis. Moreover this tends to result in a highly partisan (and patronising) framework in which new investors from the East and the Middle East are depicted as not understanding the refined nuances and morality of the (neoliberal) development policies that have been elaborated in western countries and promoting unequal development.