Would Cecil Rhodes have signed a Code of Conduct? Reflections on global land grabbing and land rights in Africa, past and present

By Robin Palmer

The new phenomenon of global land grabbing and its impact on land rights in Africa bears eerie similarities to some of the activities of imperial concession companies in late 19^th / early 20^th century colonial Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique and Kenya.

New concession hunters are now on the march, seeking control over African land and water to augment food security back home, principally in the Persian Gulf and East Asia.

Like Cecil Rhodes and his contemporaries, they are finding willing local accomplices, eager to lease out vast tracts of land in return for derisory payments and illusory promises. As in colonial times, local people are almost never consulted.

This has attracted a certain amount of research and media attention which I have documented in select bibliographies posted on Oxfam GB’s Land Rights in Africa website: http://www.oxfam.org.uk/resources/learning/landrights/index.html

My paper will review some of this literature and examine the insane geopolitics of biofuels, in which EU countries are permitted to carry on polluting the planet in return for African countries agreeing to convert land currently producing food into biofuel production in order to gain carbon credits.

It will also ask why so much of the literature appears utterly complacent in the light of global land grabbing, and why such an enormous effort is involved, by organizations such as the World Bank, FAO, IFAD, IFPRI etc, in the drawing up of international codes of conduct in an attempt to regulate it.

It will ponder why so many researchers seem so obsessed with the need to find painless ‘win-win’ solutions.

And it will also question why, given that the long term impact of global land grabbing on many African rural communities could well be catastrophic, there appears to exist an almost total conspiracy of silence on the subject.