Land Appropriation, Surplus People and A Battle Over Visions of Agrarian Futures in Africa.

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Land appropriation, surplus people and

a battle over visions of agrarian futures
in Africa
Pauline E. Peters
Published online: 28 Jun 2013.
To cite this article: Pauline E. Peters (2013) Land appropriation, surplus people and a battle
over visions of agrarian futures in Africa, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 40:3, 537-562, DOI:
10.1080/03066150.2013.803070
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The Journal of Peasant Studies, 2013

Vol. 40, No. 3, 537562, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2013.803070
Forum on Global Land Grabbing Part 2

Land appropriation, surplus people and a battle over visions of
agrarian futures in Africa
Downloaded by [66.31.42.148] at 14:28 04 July 2013
Pauline E. Peters
The debate about land grabs by foreign agents should not obscure the role of national
governments or the accelerating process of appropriation of land by national agents.
Much of the appropriated land is under forms of customary tenure. In arguing that a
fundamental problem is the denial of property in land to Africans, I lay out the
colonial and post-colonial reproduction of customary tenure as not equivalent to
property rights, the documentation of mounting competition and conict centring on
land, and the more recent threats by national and international agents. Against this
background, I question acceptance of an inevitable agro-industrial future which
makes millions of Africans surplus to the needs of capitalist investment.
Keywords: customary tenure; land appropriation; small- to medium-scale farming;
Africa
Introduction
The recent documentation (from mass media reports to in-depth research) reveals both new
and old characteristics in current land grabs. B. White et al. (2012, 624) stress the enormous scale and speed of expansion of the current deals with correspondingly greater
impacts in radically restructuring agrarian economies and rural social relations
(cf. Hall et al. 2011, Peluso and Lund 2011, Fairhead et al. 2012, 239). Yet these characteristics build on longer-term processes, variously seen as due to the logic of agribusiness
accumulation (Amanor 2012, 732) or the latest stage in [the] competition for control of
land and other natural resources across Africa (Woodhouse 2012, 777), or, more
broadly still, as part of class-creating social transformation (Alden Wily 2012, 751).
The accumulating information suggests all these are involved in different combinations
in different circumstances. In this paper, however, I want rst to focus on one element,
but a fundamental one, in the process of land appropriation across Africa: the construction
and reproduction of customary tenure as not equivalent to full property. Then, as a second
and related focus, I wish to examine the intersection of an accelerating appropriation of land
with the current and future role of small- to medium-scale farming in an effort to perceive
alternative agrarian futures for African countries.
Thanks go to the Land Deals Politics Initiative team for the October 2012 conference on land grabs
held at Cornell University where the paper was rst presented, to Jun Borras for encouragement, and
to two anonymous reviewers for useful comments.
2013 Taylor & Francis
538
Pauline E. Peters
The loud debate about recent land grabs by foreign agents is in danger of obscuring not
only the involvement of national governments but also an older but accelerating process of
appropriation of land by national agents. In both cases, much of the appropriated land is under
customary tenure legally or by convention, so threatening millions of rural producers. If the
currently inuential view that large-scale agriculture is the only and proper way to produce
foods and other agricultural products maintains its dominance, the fate of people who live on
and from that land is to be rendered surplus to perceived development needs. At best, the
agro-industrial vision of the future marginalizes small-medium scale farming into enclaves
or as appendages to large-scale, industrial agriculture; at worst, it is erased. But the furor generated by the land grabs, in combination with ongoing processes of competition and conict
over land, objections to the effects of powerful agri-business corporations on access to agricultural inputs and markets, and deepening inequalities associated with globalization, have
reinvigorated a debate about alternative agrarian futures. There is no consensus about the possibilities, let alone the preferences, for particular futures. In what follows, I concentrate on
Africa, but I draw on literature from other regions and consider that much of the argument
about a battle over visions of the future1 can be applied elsewhere.
I propose that one of the fundamental problems underlying the land question in Africa
over the past century is the denial of property in land to most Africans through the construction and reproduction of customary tenure. This has infused the ways in which different categories of Africans have sought to attain and maintain rightful access to land. In turn, it has
inuenced the responses by governments, donors and researchers seeking to understand,
document and/or change the social relations around land. The paper begins by emphasizing
the restricted denition of property in the colonial construction and the postcolonial reproduction of customary tenure, which continues to shape contemporary processes and
debates. It then lays out the current state of play in scholarly, activist and policy positions
vis vis land in Africa, including: the current wave of land reform policies and their continuance of old approaches despite the inclusion of newer rationales; the intensication of
contestation over claims to land which are intertwined with competition over legitimate authority, specications of citizenship and outbreaks of violence; the fears of an African enclosure in light of documented privatization and appropriation of land held in common; and the
most recent documentation of land grabs by foreign agents, albeit with the help of nationals.
Against this background, the nal section considers the description of millions of Africans
who are under threat of dislocation and displacement by the internal and external grabbers
of land as surplus to the needs of a currently volatile but expansionary phase of capitalist
investment. I then ask whether the drive for large-scale agricultural production and other
large-scale activities (in forestry, mining and so forth) must necessarily erase small- and
medium-scale livelihoods on African lands, and propose an answer of no.
Customary tenure, land reform and the denial of property in land

While the information about grabs of land in some of the poorest countries of the world by
agents representing some of the richest countries is rightly causing an uproar in many
circles, past history in Africa reveals that land (as territory and as basis of production)
has been at the centre of political competition since the beginning of colonial rule and
for much longer in many places. Despite the well-known historical importance of
1
A phrase used by Borras et al. (2010, 583) in a discussion about biofuels, but here I mean it more
widely.
539
wealth-in-people for African social, political and economic modes of organization

(Bledsoe 1980, Guyer and Belinga 1995), it is now recognized that Africa has been transformed from being a continent of land abundance in the rst half of the twentieth century to
one of increasing land scarcity at its end (Berry 2002, 639). However, even before colonial
rule, the most fertile and best-watered land was frequently the subject of competition among
groups. Nevertheless, a critical difference introduced by the coming of Europeans, rst as
missionaries and explorers and then as colonial rulers, was that struggles over land turned
on the concept of property. This is a point important to stress since it remains at the centre of
todays contestations over land.
Colonial thought and practice regarding property in land were based on the concept of a
universal evolution from barbarism to civilization:
When the tribal stage is reached, the control passes [from the head of the family in the previous stage] to the chief, who allots unoccupied land at will but is not justied in dispossessing
any family or person who is using the land. Later still, especially when the pressure of population has given to the land an exchange value, the conception of proprietary rights in it
emerges, and sale, mortgage and lease of the land, apart from its user, is recognized.
These processes of natural evolution, leading up to individual ownership, may be traced
in every civilization (F.J.M. Lugard 1922 in Chanock 1991b, 69)
Two critical features in this conception, which help explain not only the colonial construction
of customary tenure but also the persistent denition of what constitutes property, stand
out. First is the insistence that tribal peoples hold land in common and under the trust of
chiefs, and second, that property emerges when land gains an exchange value.
Despite the initial disdain among colonialists for African communal landholding and
the conviction that conversion to private property was the necessary next stage of the civilizing process, the imperatives of colonial control in the form of indirect rule through
chiefs proved more politically pressing. It was feared that a property regime allowing individuals to separate themselves from the tribe would disturb social relations (Hailey
1938), and disrupt the native polity (Meek 1946 in Lund 2008, 27). Moreover, as
Chanock shows, by deeming African landholding not to be property, the colonial regime
sought to prevent a legal challenge to its claims on conquered territory. Thus, when the
British Privy Council ruled in 1906 that individual ownership of land is quite foreign to
native ideas. Land belongs to the community, the village and the family, never to the individual, it essentially was ruling that, since these lesser rights were not the kind of individual rights of ownership recognized in English law, they would not be affected by a
change in sovereignty, and ownership of land through conquest could be claimed by the
conquerors according to international law then in place (Chanock 1991a, 65).
But it is also important to recognize that the conceptualization of property was not
peculiar to this set of colonial interests but typied European understanding and practice
more generally. Ellen Meiksin Woods emphasizes that when Locke, one of the earliest
and most inuential theorists of property in the English language, spoke of mixing
labour with land to create property, it was not labour alone he referred to but adding to
[lands] commercial value by rendering it more productive.2 In short, the production of
2
It is well known that Locke used the Native Americans as his examples for unproductively used
resources that were therefore not to be considered as their property. And see Alden Wily (2012,
754) for basically the same argument being made by Chief Justice Marshall of the US Supreme
Court in 1823 to deny ownership to North American Indians.
540
Pauline E. Peters
exchange value becomes effectively the basis of property both domestically and abroad
(Woods 2011, 33).3 The particular conceptual form this took in the processes that constitute
what came to be called enclosure was that of improvement or increasing the productivity
of labour and land (Woods 2011, 33). Histories of the process of enclosure of the English
commons have shown how, from the very early seventeenth century, the concept of
improvement was used as a rationale for dividing up the commons into individuallyowned blocks where experiments in more intensive and protable agriculture could be
implemented (Thompson 1993, 130).
Precisely the same concept of improvement was used by British colonial agricultural
ofcers in their many attempts to force Africans to adopt modern farming. The 1930s
1940s efforts at controlling what was considered to be disastrous soil erosion as well
as the stepped-up programmes of agricultural modernization and resettlement of the
1950s focused on two main elements: a package of improved techniques (deep ploughing,
mono-cropping and rotation based on a northern European model), and forms of titling
intended to increase security of tenure. For example, in the Protectorate of Nyasaland
(now Malawi), the chief agricultural ofcer, Kettlewell, explicitly invoked the enclosures
in England and the associated improvements in agricultural methods when he hoped
that, from the settlement programmes of modernized farming to be set up in the early
1950s, something akin to the Yeoman Farmer might be evolved out of the few progressive
native agriculturalists.4 The governor of the Protectorate accepted the need for increased
compulsion in promoting proper agricultural methods but declared the partial rural
depopulation advocated by the agriculture ofcers to be impracticable in light of the
existing shortage of land and pressure of population. In the event, by mid-1960 (and
with the onset of political independence), all the programmes had collapsed with
farmers reverting to their prior methods of cultivation (McLoughlin 1967). This was
because the patterns of settlement, organization of landholding and agricultural production
were so at odds with the prevailing practices, as well as due to the political emergency
generated by popular rejection of the federation with the Rhodesias and the rising strength
of the pro-independence movement (P.E. Peters 1997).
In what was to be the last decade of colonial rule in most African countries, many colonial ofcers, especially those in agriculture, were convinced that individual freehold title
was needed to wrest African farming and life more generally out of its backward
state.5 Nevertheless, arguments about the political dangers of such a move once again
proved more powerful. Ofcials feared social unrest caused by what many considered
the inevitable indebtedness and inequality in landholding consequent on privatization of
ownership. Most signicant, however, was the realization that individualization of land
rights would tie the hand of government in all schemes of agricultural advance (Meek
[1946] 1968, 68, cited in Chanock 1991a, 79). The position that land rights should be
contingent upon the priorities of development, the new concept embracing improvement,
was taken up by the newly independent African governments (Meek [1946] 1968, 68,
cited in Chanock 1991a, 79).6 As Chanock wryly points out, The usefulness of the customary law of land tenure [in preventing full ownership rights over land] was not lost on the
3
Cf. Macpherson (1987).

Information and quotations from le NS 1/15/4 in the Malawi National Archives, Zomba, Malawi.
5
H.M. Stationery Ofce 1956 Report of the Conference on Land Tenure in East and Central Africa,
held at Arusha, Tanganyika, February 1956. London: H.M. Stationery Ofce.
6
Also seen in other governments: [T]he government [in Cambodia] argued that titling hampered
development schemes that required evictions (Hall 2011, 2).
4
541
rulers of the postcolonial states (1991a, 80). Land was either declared national or, even
where customary tenure was continued, most new states claimed overall sovereignty; one
main exception was Kenya where private titling of land took place in the crowded areas of
the former White Highlands as well as in some grazing areas (see references below).
The proliferation of land policy reforms during the 1960s and 1970s, and into the early
1980s, formed part of the strenuous efforts by and for the state to promote development in
the new African countries. The policies were heavily promoted and funded by multilateral
agencies, especially the World Bank, as well as bilateral donors, and justied in terms that
resembled those of the agricultural ofcers of the late colonial years the institution of
clear and certain ownership rights, usually through registration and titling, was considered
necessary to ensure security of tenure, thereby the incentive to invest, with resulting
improvements in productivity.
A critical research literature quickly developed that raised serious reservations about
both the premises and the outcomes of the land policies. Once implemented, the land policies failed to achieve the projected increase in agricultural investment and productivity, did
not facilitate the use of land as collateral for small farmers, and often encouraged speculation in land by outsiders, thus displacing the very people the local users of the land
who were supposed to acquire increased security through titling, which exacerbated conicts by ignoring overlapping and multiple rights and uses of land, so reinforcing patterns
of unequal access to land based on gender, age, ethnicity and class (Okoth-Ogendo 1976,
Coldham 1978, Pala 1980, Davison 1988, Shipton 1988, Haugerud 1989, Attwood 1990,
Shipton and Goheen 1992, Mackenzie 1993, Shipton 1994, Lastarria-Cornhiel 1997, Besteman 1999, Lund 2000, Alden Wily 2012).7
In addition, the widespread instances of cash cropping by small farmers, such as cocoa
production on customary land in West Africa, were used to reject premises that customary
tenure inhibited investment and agricultural commercialization, and to demonstrate the
exibility allowed by customary tenure to farmers adapting to changing conditions. Agricultural intensication and commercial production were not inhibited by customary landholding as much as by broader social and political-economic conditions at local, regional
and international levels (Linares 1992, Netting 1993, Place and Hazell 1993, Guyer
1997). Moreover, customary systems did not exclude individual rights, a point that had
been made since at least since the 1940s (e.g. by Max Gluckman), and entailed various
types of transfer of rights to land, such as tenancy (Hill 1963, Berry 1975, Okali 1983,
Lawry 1993, Gyasi 1994), and other types of transfers including rentals and sales (C.M.
N. White 1963, Allott 1969, Bruce 1988, Ngongola 1996, Besteman 1999).
Several results from this now extensive body of research may be remarked. First, it
appeared to have had some inuence on a shift in thinking among the promoters and
donors of land reform policies (Toulmin and Quan 2000). Land researchers at the
World Bank conceded the advantages of customary tenure over formal individual titles
with respect to cost effectiveness and equity, emphasized that titling needs a range of
other conditions (such as access to capital and credit) to be effective, and urged caution
about state-led intervention in land tenure systems, suggesting the possibility of building
on existing systems (Bruce and Mighot-Adholla 1994, Deininger and Binswanger 1999).
In practice, however, the purportedly new policies differed far less substantively from the
conventional World Bank emphasis on a framework of secure, transparent and
On pastoralism see Galaty et al. (1981), Horowitz (1986), Baxter and Hogg (1990), Behnke et al.
(1993), P.E. Peters (1994).
542
Pauline E. Peters
enforceable property rights as the critical precondition for investment and economic
growth (Quan 2000, 38; also see Bryceson and Bank 2001, James 2001, Whitehead
and Tsikata 2003). The new evolutionary theory of land rights actually resembled the
old evolutionary theory posited by Lugard and his contemporaries in positing a universal
move towards private rights in land (F.J.M. Lugard 1922 in Chanock 1991b, 69), though it
was also shaped by the growing prominence of neoliberal preference for market as
opposed to state solutions in relying on decentralization, market forces and civil
society to achieve the transition.
A second result is that the sometimes self-congratulatory tone of the research critical of
the older land policies was punctured by critiques of premises that local is always better
and that the customary systems would evolve in productive and equitable ways. On the
contrary, insisted Jean-Philippe Platteau (1996, 2000) among others, many existing customary or local forms of land tenure embody considerable inequality, intra- and inter-group
conict, illegal sales by traditional leaders, and appropriation for private use by representatives of the state. This has proved to be a signicant line of argument, with a burgeoning
body of research over the past couple of decades documenting pervasive competition and
conict over land across the continent that is inextricably caught up in politics at multiple
levels.
A third point is that the critical literature has ambiguous outcomes. Documentation of
the overlapping and multiple social claims on land, mediated by differences of gender, age
and status, was certainly fruitful in showing how disruption and displacement were caused
by policies and programmes based on simplistic notions about single-purpose use or communal, undivided holdings. Yet, with hindsight, one can now see that the research conclusions reinforced the idea that African landholding systems were not the equivalent of
Western property. The research had in many ways replayed the defence mounted by
anthropologists, historians and others in the 1940s1950s: both then and in the critiques
during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, land was shown to be socially embedded, not communal but socially dened and channeled, not a commodity but nevertheless allowing for
individual investment in the form of cash cropping, improvements in agricultural production and multiple forms of transfer of land. Martin Chanock had pointed to the way
in which anthropologists, concerned to protect the Africans (whose lives they were
researching) against colonial interventions based on mistaken premises, reinforced the
ideas of chiey trusteeship (for example, through Gluckmans hierarchy of embedded
land rights) and lack of property (see Chanock 1991a, 67, 75). It is uncomfortable to
recognize that the many valuable critiques of the development-oriented land policies
have also, willy-nilly, reiterated the colonial position denying the status of property to
African modes of landholding.8
The state of play on the land question in Africa

Here, I briey lay out the state of play in discussion and debate about land in Africa, just
before attention turned to two types of land appropriation that by foreign agents, labeled
land grabs by critics and land investment by promoters, and that by national agents, particularly of common and customary land resources. I do so rst with reference to land policy
reforms instituted by states and donors, and second to discussions by researchers and activists critical of the former.
8
I include myself in this.
543
Plus a change Land policy reforms

In a recent paper, Borras and Franco (2010, 1) concluded that Land policy is back on the
agendas of international development institutions and many nation-states. These mainstream policy approaches purport to link land policies with improved governance
and, hence, poverty alleviation. However, the focus in such approaches is heavily technical and administrative rather than a matter of democratizing access to and control over
wealth and power (2). The declared intention of land policies being pro-poor, then,
remains mainly rhetorical while the land policy process continues to be based on the promotion of (usually individual) private property rights in land through mechanisms deemed
to be nancially and administratively efcient (3). This old idea has marked land policies
in Africa since colonial times (as argued in the previous section). But it has taken seemingly new and seductive forms with the rise of neoliberalism and theories of property
rights. The popular claim of Hernando de Soto (2000) that private property rights
accorded to poor peoples few assets will convert dead capital into active wealth by
providing the collateral to access credit has been roundly criticized for ignoring political-economic realities.9
Similarly, the outcomes of the market-led, willing buyer-willing seller model in programmes of land distribution have been poor and its premises and assumptions are awed,
especially by ignoring the political context where highly unequal social relations, such as
those between rural poor and landowners, structure the supposedly neutral market
relations of prospective buyers and sellers. In this, the market-led approach shares
with conventional land policies the tendency to assume a social tabula rasa, undermining
well-established practices and holds on land by poor communities and individuals (Borras
and Franco 2010, 15), and increasing competition and conict among land users and claimants (see previous section). Even when there is an apparently progressive land policy, the
failure to conduct an in-depth analysis of variation within a country produces problems. An
example is that of the new, but still pending, land policy in Malawi where the aim to protect
womens rights led to a call for ensuring equal inheritance by male and female offspring.
But since a large area of the country combines matrilineal inheritance with matrilocal
(uxorilocal) residence, where only daughters inherit lineage land, the policy would actually
disinherit millions of women (P.E. Peters 2010).10
Critical research by scholars and activists

Central themes in critical research on land at the beginning of the new millennium are:
various attempts to typify African modes of landholding as part of the challenges to the
mainstream policy approach, and as part of the efforts to protect customary uses, claims
and rights; documentation and analysis of pervasive and increasing competition and conict
over land and over who has legitimate authority over land, some of which takes the form of
indigenous or autochthonous claimants versus outsiders; documentation and analysis of
commodication of land seen in an increasing rate in transfers of land and increasing
9
See critiques by von Benda-Beckmann (2003), Kingwill et al. (2006) and Musembi (2007), among
others.
10
A key analytical problem here is to assume one can talk of women rather than gendered statuses or
types of women (wives, widows, daughters, sisters, etc.). Thus, where the pattern of patrilineal inheritance through men holds, those who oppose the extension of land rights to the widows of lineage men
include female lineal members, that is, the mothers and sisters of the lineal men.
544
Pauline E. Peters
formalization of such transfers, and attempts to theorize these as vernacular markets or

embedded transfers.
There is no neat packaging of these different themes into a single account of the land
question in Africa because there is not full agreement about how best to typify current conditions on land across countries. Different writers focus on different issues, different
countries and regions present different combinations of conditions, and different writers
come to different, sometimes opposing, conclusions. Some writers discuss the dynamics
of the social management of land where, even if not harmonious and equitable, the
social relations around land promote a broader sense of social identity, belonging and
engagement (Berry 1993, Shipton 2009). Other studies point to division and inequality
(Amanor 1999, 2010, P.E. Peters 2004, Chauveau and Richards 2008, Colin and Woodhouse 2010). Inevitably, there are contradictory situations and processes. For instance,
many studies describe many users of customary land holding to the notion that land is
never sold whereas research shows many sale-like transfers in earlier centuries in some
countries (Amanor 2010) and increasing instances in many places today, thereby questioning the notion that sale is foreign to African modes of landholding. Most writers argue
against the imposition of narrow versions of western models of property which privilege
private, individual rights onto African modes of landholding that demonstrate exibility,
thus facilitating peoples management of volatile economic processes, and a degree of
inclusion. But increasing threats to customary rights lead some to call for legal recognition
to such rights, though there is no consensus on what form this might take.
Some writers discuss what might be done to prevent both imposition of inappropriate
models from above and the reproduction of inequalities from below. Ben Cousins, for
example, notes that, in light of the often negative results of land policies based on titling,
the issue is how to recognize and secure land rights that are clearly distinct from
Western-legal forms of private property but cannot be characterized as traditional or
pre-colonial and recommends, for South Africa, making socially legitimate occupation
and use rights, as they are currently held and practised, the point of departure for their recognition in law (2007a, 282). Yet studies in various countries point to the often severe
inequalities in currently held and practised uses and claims, as well as the sheer difculties
of identifying priorities in face of pervasive contestation over whose claims are legitimate
and whose not (Lentz 2006, Lund 2008). Moreover, there are many cases where those
claiming authority over land, whether local chiefs or representatives of government, appropriate land for their own benet. As Woodhouse concluded, customary tenure acts neither
as an obstacle to investment nor as an inalienable safety net for the poor (2003, 1717).
A large literature reveals the interaction of competition over land with competition over
legitimate political authority over land. In turn, competition over land among different authorities (family and clan heads, various traditional authorities, local and national state
organs and representatives, etc.) gets caught up in national party politics and conict that
often takes the form of ethnic and indigenous struggles. Studies describe how the notion
of trusteeship has been manipulated by some customary or traditional leaders to their
own advantage in allowing them, for example, to use land to recruit paying tenants and political followers or to sell plots for compensation they keep for themselves (P.E. Peters and
Kambewa 2007; cf. Daley 2005).
Another theme is that the effects of increasing value of land and water amid growing
populations, increasing commercial uses of land, and intensifying social differentiation
and class formation have fuelled the increase in transfers, including sales. Detailed
studies have shown that such transfers have qualities resembling market transfers
yet also other qualities such as multiple and overlapping claims and uses, and rights
545
based on social status. To describe such contrary evidence, commentators have had
recourse to terms such as vernacular markets (Chimhowu and Woodhouse 2006),
socially embedded markets (Colin and Woodhouse 2010), or recombinant property
(Berry 2013, employing the term introduced by Stark 1996, on post-socialist Europe).
Embeddedness, then, can produce exclusion, inequality and serious conict as well as
forms of incorporation and inclusion. By the beginning of this new century, Woodhouse
articulated what many studies have been nding: that rising land values resulting from
the intensication of water and land use by many small farmers were part of processes
of commodication and individualization of access to land enclosures which reduce
access to land for the poor (2003, 1717).
It is at this point, then, that fears of an even wider enclosure by foreign agents in partnership with national agents have been introduced into the literature on land in Africa through
the land grabs debate.
Land appropriation, surplus people, and the fate of small-scale producers

Current assessment of the recent surge in acquiring extensive lands for agriculture, as well
as for other land-based resources such as timber, minerals and so on, identies the following
as causes. The sharp rise in world food crop prices of 20072008 intensied concern about
longer-term food supply in some countries, especially those with water and land shortages.
Rising prices and declining sources for fossil fuels have also produced a search for alternative sources of energy in biofuels, as well as large subsidies by rich countries for such production (Borras et al. 2010, 577). As a result, large areas of land, always with access to
water,11 are being acquired in countries in Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia,
usually as concessions or leases of variable time periods rather than sales, by countries
such as China, India, South Korea, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States (Borras and
Franco 2010, 2012, Palmer 2010). Much, too, is targeted for mining and logging as well
as for types of preservation in ways now considered green grabbing (Fairhead et al. 2012).
In addition, cheap land in developing or middle countries is attracting speculation.
Private investors, some from Europe and the US, are involved in many land deals, often
seeking alternatives to volatile international nancial markets (Hall 2011, 2).12 One
example is the Emvest Agricultural Corporation, a vehicle for South African, UK and
other investors to diversify their investments into African agriculture, whose website
declares that Agriculture is an excellent defensive investment in the long term with
expected real price appreciation of soft commodities and land in Africa (B. White et al.
2012, 630).13
That claim highlights why Sub-Saharan Africa is the site of the most speculative major
land deals14 (Borras, Hall et al. 2011, 209). In the words of the Chief Executive Ofcer of
an investment company, African farmland prices are the lowest in the world and it is
really the last frontier (Palmer 2010, 5, citing a report in The Straits Times). This, of
course, is because customary tenure is regarded as not full property, or what a World
Large-scale land deals imply large-scale use of water resources (Woodhouse 2012, 789).
Cf. von Braun (2007), McMichael (2010). Also see Kalb and Halmai (2012) on the globalization
and nancialization of capital.
13
Compare capital inows to Africa rising by 16% in 2008 while falling 20% worldwide and Africa
considered as best for investment a few years earlier (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012, 15, 195).
14
Although other countries are also targeted in South and Central America, the former USSR, and
Southeast Asia.
11
12
546
Pauline E. Peters
Bank land expert refers to as the weak recognition of land rights at the country level (Deininger 2011, 218). Such rights are being set aside by governments for the public benet or
for various forms of development, and so allowing existing land-users to be displaced
more easily and the price of land charged to investors to be very low or non-existent.15
A second aspect of the African deals is the role of national actors. Thus, despite the literatures overwhelming focus on foreign investors, data on a limited number of countries
suggests that domestic investors were more important than foreign ones according to
one writer (Deininger 2011, 218). Two prolic commentators on land issues across
Africa have also emphasized the role of African governments in facilitating and encouraging land deals (Alden Wily 2012, Palmer 2010). Incentives for governmental authorities
and persons acting in the name of government (often difcult to distinguish) include the
generous loan and aid packages that often accompany land leasing, as well as personal
gains either directly (in the form of fees or other payments) or indirectly (through beneting
from foreign investments in particular places), and political pay-off for various levels of
authorities claiming the right to allocate land.16
National actors in land deals and appropriation

The accumulating information about the new enclosures points both to the importance of
not allowing the focus on foreign agents to obscure the role of nationals in the current
wave of land acquisition, and to the danger for the millions of small-scale farmers
living on customary land. The former is less new than intensied in a context that facilitates and even encourages expropriation. As noted above, most post-colonial, newly independent African countries tended to continue the premises and practices of the colonial
governments with regard to customary tenure, regarding it more as mere possession
than ownership or property. Land considered to be customarily theirs by the users was
taken for plantations, agricultural development or settlement projects, irrigation, forestry,
parks and reserves. While grazing lands proved to be most vulnerable (as they were under
colonial regimes), agricultural lands were also appropriated. In addition to state expropriation for the public interest or development, well-placed individuals also appropriated
land for their own benet, and some chiefs claimed more land as one of their perquisites
of ofce and/or sold some to strangers for their own benet. Alden Wily comments, the
facts of willful dispossession and irregular allocations of untitled or state lands in the
1970s1980s [have been] most systematically documented in Kenya (2012, 765; cf.
Klopp 2000), although cases from many other countries can also be found in the literature
on land.
In recent years, the appropriations across the continent by agencies, corporations and
individuals have increased. Part of this is due to how states become locked into a global
regime setting them up as competitive with other states for mobile capital by offering
their populations and territories up as protably exploitable factors for global capital
(Kalb and Halmai 2012, 3). Woodhouse pointedly states that most African governments
nd it impossible to provide the necessary complementary investment (such as infrastructure) in agriculture without recourse to foreign funding, an imperative that is an inescapable part of the context for land deals (2012, 781). Part, too, is an intensifying class
formation that, with politically unaccountable regimes, facilitates those with the necessary
15
See Alden Wily (2012, 769) for examples of low prices.

Also see below for the point about competing for mobile global capital.
16
547
power to accumulate at the expense of the poorer and vulnerable.17 A recent case among
several from Malawi is instructive. A newspaper report described how a former government
minister had purchased 286 hectares of land in Chikwawa in the far south of the country.18
Despite opposition by the local village chief (a woman) and some of the inhabitants displaced by the purchase, senior chiefs and the District Commissioner (DC) authorized the
purchase. Some, but not all, of the displaced people received compensation, though
many apparently complained that the amount of Malawi Kwacha K3500 (c. $23) each
received was very low. The new owner intends to start a cattle ranch and is quoted as
saying, It is a very good development that will benet the people, while the DC
blamed some disgruntled people for disrupting the transparent process of acquiring
the land, and claimed that, We must make sacrices if we are to develop this country. It is
obvious who is making the sacrice! Most signicant and worrying is the statement made
by the news reporter, though unattributed to anyone interviewed, that Malawi National
Land Policy of 2002 states that under section 25 of the Land Act, original title in customary
land was removed from chiefs and community owners and vested in the President in trust
for all citizens of Malawi. This presumably refers to the Land Act of 1965 that enabled the
Minister for land affairs to appropriate customary land if it is expedient for better agricultural development. The context suggests this is for public or national development,
whereas in this case the obvious beneciary is the private citizen the former Minister.
The 2002 Land Policy has not yet been passed into law, but this case and the justifying
rationales are in direct contradiction to one of the original claims of the Policy to strengthen
customary land rights.19
In short, much of the land under customary tenure (or treated as commons) in Africa
has been vulnerable to appropriation because of legal manipulations which deny that local
indigenous (customary) tenures deliver property rights, thereby legalizing the theft of the
lands of the poor or subject peoples (Alden Wily 2012, 751).
What, then, of the effects of this most recent wave of land acquisition? The information
is sparse mainly because the land deals are so recent that many are still on paper with little
or no action on the ground, but also partly because it is difcult to obtain details about the
deals from the groups and individuals managing them. Nevertheless, some conclusions can
already be drawn and questions posed.
As in the past, governments offer the option of leasing land to foreign governments or
corporations in terms of benets to the public interest or for development, but today they
usually claim they are targeting unused, marginal or idle, waste lands. But land that is
described as marginal, unused or under-utilized leaves worrying space for discounting
existing use and different categories of users. This is particularly so given the World Banks
generous estimates of between 445 million and 1.7 billion hectares worldwide of potentially
suitable lands assumed to be marginal, underutilized, empty and available, most of
these classied as public lands and most in Africa (Deininger 2011). Even the World Bank
See Alden Wily on encroachments on and excisions from common land (2011, 2012).
400 villagers ght former Minister, T/A, DC over land, Deogratias Mmana, The Nation, 16 July
2010. A report in the same paper for October 2012 describes shing villagers taking up pangas to
defend their land on Lake Malawi from the apparent sale by local chiefs of the customarily held
area to someone who intends building a hotel.
19
The case also suggests that such appropriations may be one reason why the government is taking so
long to pass the law policy into law if passed, the proposed decentralization of authority over land to
committees might provide an obstacle to such appropriations. It remains to be seen what difference the
new government (mid-2012) makes in these matters.
17
18
548
Pauline E. Peters
report on Rising global interest in farmland: can it yield sustainable and equitable benets?
noted that in Mozambique, the total area over which land use titles given to investors overlapped areas previously delimited in the name of communities amounted to 1.4 million hectares in 418 cases, raising concerns about potential future conicts (World Bank 2010, 42).
This echoes earlier reports from the 1990s on the same phenomenon of multiple allocations
of customary land by government ofcials (Myers 1994, West and Myers 1996; and see, for
other countries, Amanor 1999, 2001, Hardin 2002).
Where there is ofcial recognition of existing use there is supposed to be consultation
with users, but reports abound of neglect of such consultation, let alone a real possibility for
decision-making by current users. Research in Ghana, Mozambique, Tanzania, Ethiopia,
Madagascar and Mali showed that if consultation did take place, it was dominated by a
few elders or chiefs and provided little to no ability to shape key decisions (Vermeulen
and Cotula 2010). The response by agencies like the World Bank to earlier reports of displacement and dispossession of land users has been a Code of Conduct to discipline big
land deals and the Principles of Responsible Agricultural Investments or RAI Principles
(World Bank 2010, Deininger 2011). Unfortunately, as with similar nger in the dike
attempts to moderate highly unequal transactions (such as programmes under social
dimensions of adjustment or corporate social responsibility), these RAI Principles
prove weak in the face of powerful economic and political interests. This is particularly
the case when, as explained, existing customary (and similar) rights are not ofcially
recognized as property, so that holders are not recognized as owners to be consulted.
Instead, representatives of a ruling government act as owners, legal authorities and
decision-makers.
Even where legal recognition has been accorded customary rights, it is rarely sufcient
to provide effective mechanisms for land users to either reject or shape deals, according to
Vermeulen and Cotula. The same authors conclude that current procedures lock affected
people into unfavourable negotiation and development pathways (Vermuelen and
Cotula 2010, 913; cf. Borras et al. 2011 on ProCana in Mozambique). These may blatantly
fail to carry out any consultation or may more subtly close down avenues for real discussion. As one well-documented example among many, Krijn Peters and Paul Richards
(2011, 393) witnessed a community consultation in Sierra Leone that was required for
conceding land to a large internationally funded biofuel project. They found that the
meeting was skillfully managed by attentive chiefs. The facilitators suggestion to break
out interest groups of elders, women and young men for separate consultations was immediately opposed by the chiefs present, on the grounds that people would feel uncomfortable
unless they met village-by-village in a circle of people they knew and trusted. In this way,
the fundamental tensions and conict over land they had found in the course of their eldwork were never allowed to come into the open.20
Implications for small to medium farming

The paucity of detailed, long-term information on the large-scale land deals is due to the
newness of the deals, slow implementation of production projects and difculties of acquiring relevant information, but there is some early indication of existing outcomes and speculation on likely outcomes based on experience from other regions. The most dire conclusion
20
This is not a new phenomenon see Goldman (2001) for blatant cases from Laos involving the
World Bank and international environmental agencies.
549
is that the labour of millions of farmers and other rural residents in the targeted areas is
surplus to the new forms of land use. As explained by B. White et al., Contemporary
forms of agrarian transition expel people from agriculture without absorbing their
labour in manufactures or elsewhere in the economy, thus making them surplus to capitals requirements for labour (2012, 624625; cf. Bernstein 2004, Li 2009, 2010, Tanner
2010, OLaughlin et al. 2013). As Tania Li pungently puts it, people are made surplus
when their land is needed, but their labour is not (2011, 286). In short, large-scale land
deals not only tend to displace current users of the landed resources but also fail to transform them into workers (income earners) of various sorts. One example out of many is that
of sugar plantations in Zambia where there has been considerable casualisation of
unskilled workers and limited uptake of smallholder outgrowers (Richardson 2010,
quoted by Borras et al. 2010, 582). The very fact that the deals are taking place mainly
in countries where there is already a large and growing gap between the availability of
jobs and those seeking them makes the potential of overall loss for existing populations
more likely. Inevitably, there are counter examples, such as the successful small-scale,
farmer-led biofuel experiments in Brazil (Fernandes et al. 2010), and some of the oil
palm projects in Indonesia where outcomes depend very much on the terms under
which incorporation into the oil palm economy occurs (McCarthy 2010, original emphasis;
both cited in Borras et al. 2010, 582).
A recent exhaustive review of the literature on contract farming, with particular reference to sub-Saharan Africa (Oya 2012), highlights the substantial diversity of contract
farming, its relatively small role quantitatively, and considerable heterogeneity in both
the drivers pushing contract farming and in its outcomes for efciency and equity. Oya
also notes that the literature on global land grabs has intersected with that on contract
farming to the degree that the latter is seen as a way to make large-scale use of land as
pro-poor and politically correct in nding ways to incorporate smallholders (2012,
79). He concludes that it is not clear whether land grabbing will provide an
additional boost to the expansion of contract farming or a return to plantation-type capitalism and incorporation of poor rural people as direct wage workers (27). My own take on
this complex question is that poor rural people who are landless (an increasing proportion
in many countries) are more likely to be so incorporated than those with land.21 As I argue
below, those with land should receive the kinds of support to enable them to make more
productive use of their own land, water and labour.
Past, present and future for small- to medium-scale agriculture and rural
livelihoods
The vast majority of people living on, and partially from, the land across Africa work on
small to medium landholdings and use (variously dened) family labour, complemented
with limited numbers of hired workers. The conventional word used to refer to this large
population smallholders has been justiably criticized because the single term
tends to obscure inequalities and class-based differences within the large population of
households engaged in agricultural production on a relatively small scale (Cousins
2007b, 2). Rather than smallholders constituting a homogeneous group, they have been
Though the importance of off-farm labour for many rural producers means some members of a
family are likely also to be attracted to any expansion in opportunities for wage labour, especially
if it is in their vicinity.
21
550
Pauline E. Peters
shown by many studies in many African sites to vary in the degree to which agricultural
production on own account contributes to their livelihoods and, consequently, to be
divided by considerable socio-economic differentiation (P.E. Peters 2006, Oya 2007,
2012, Jayne et al. 2010, Woodhouse 2012).
Even more problematic than the terminology has been the distorting analytical lens
applied to small- to medium-scale farming families by governments, donors and many
other commentators since the colonial era through to today. This is based on a simple evolutionary model that relegates the kind of labour-intensive farming seen across Africa
(mostly dependent on hand labour though in some places using animal traction, on
family labour complemented with limited hired workers, on complex cropping systems,
and often on bush/fallow cultivation [fast disappearing in light of population density]
and the use of multiple elds with different soils and light/moisture conditions rather
than a single consolidated farm) as an early and backward stage in the trajectory of development towards industrialized society, in which any remaining agriculture is in the mode
of capital- and chemical-intensive agro-industrial production. Populations called smallholders or, especially in Latin America, Asia and parts of Europe, peasants, are seen
as doomed to disappear in the face of, for economists, scale economies or, for Marxists,
marginality to a revolutionary class politics (McMichael 2008, 205). From the point of
view of modernizers, peasants and smallholders have been seen as essentially backward,
static and resistant to change. Most colonial ofcers felt the need to force these populations
into the modern world of progressive farming (and into what was called civilization
early in the colonial era or development in the later and post-colonial years) through
the imposition of various improvements in land and water management, cropping and
animal husbandry, and land tenure.
Much the same set of rationales about modernization and development as well as policy
directions were continued by most post-independence African governments (Cooper 1997).
Misunderstandings and misrepresentations included failure to appreciate the diverse forms
of agricultures devised by small farmers for the diverse ecologies and climates they inhabited, and the consequent labeling of such farmers as conservative or backward when they
resisted the imposition of inappropriate methods. Most of the coercive resettlement cum
modernization schemes failed, though some techniques and many new crops were
adopted over time. In Malawi, for example, 1950s schemes based on a farming model suitable to English yeomen quickly collapsed, although methods such as ridging have been
adapted for certain types of soil and for certain crops and continue to be used today.
Most spectacularly, many of the crops introduced across Africa were taken up with enthusiasm and led to the various booms (cotton, cocoa, coffee, tobacco, etc.). Over and over,
research has shown that resistances and failures in respect of imposed agricultural
methods or crops have been due not to an inherent conservatism among farmers but to
the interventions being inappropriate or incompatible, and/or to political-economic conditions affecting input and output markets, including neglect or appropriation by
governments.
A persistent failure has been to misunderstand the relation between producing food for
own consumption and producing for sale. Ever since colonial days, subsistence farmers
have been assumed to be in a kind of original state needing to be transformed into commercial farmers. But archival, historical and other research has shown that even in the 1920s and
1930s rural farming groups were dependent on the market for many products, even, especially
in densely populated places, for staple foods. Today, there are no fully subsistence farmers
anywhere on the continent. Rather than subsistence and production for sale being opposed
states, they are strategies. Most small-scale and often medium-scale farmers have been
551
shown to deploy both strategies. A goal, achieved by some to few depending on the country
and region, is to produce as much of the family food as possible for the good rational
reasons of avoiding what is almost always a spike in food prices in the food decit, preharvest periods, as well as the better-off using food to hire temporary labourers. But also,
most sell some of their crops, including food crops, again to a lesser or greater scale depending mainly on level of assets, proximity to markets, and annual uctuations, in order to raise
the necessary cash for many items needed by families. Most research shows that the degree of
subsistence, understood as the proportion of own needed staple food produced, is positively
correlated with sale of crops. It is precisely the better off with most land and income who are
more able to produce much to all of their needed staples, and it is the poorest in land and cash
who are most dependent on the market for their own staples.
Unfortunately, the simplistic formulation of subsistence farmers versus commercial
farmers continues to hold currency among ministries of agriculture, national governments,
donors and others. A recent news report in a leading US newspaper shows this fundamental
misrepresentation to be still with us today. An article by Lydia Polgreen in the New York
Times for 10 November 2012 describes how coal production in Mozambique is displacing
rural residents. An attempt to ameliorate the lot of the latter has been to bring in an expert
on farming who has been working on American-nanced agribusiness projects in Mozambique for the past seven years. The expert is quoted as saying, Farmers are used to
burning land, throwing down seeds and praying for rain. The length of time to take
someone from subsistence to commercial farming can take up to a generation. If this
comment were to be transferred to the colonial 1920s it would not seem out of place.
But in light of the massive research on the strategies of small-scale farmers, most of
whom carefully select specic seeds (including a huge number of new introductions) for
specic types of soil and purposes, make judicious use of long-proved techniques, and
read their local climates through experience, it is horrifying to read this absurd and
dangerously wrong portrayal of Mozambican farmers!
The imposition of structural adjustment and market liberalization policies from the early
1980s proved disastrous for smallholder-peasant populations. The donor-imposed removal
of most government services, subsidies and protections in the form of trade tariffs and price
controls were imagined by donors to herald the dawn of a new liberalized time where the
private sector, freed from the tentacles of rent-seeking states, would drive the economy
to ever greater growth, allowing all boats to rise in classic trickle-down rhetoric. The
reality was quite different. The structural adjustment programmes prevented Thirdworld national governments providing producer subsidies and other buffer measures to
protect peasant producers from the adverse effects of commodity price decline (Bryceson
2000a, 27; cf. Mkandawire and Soludo 1999).22. The effects of World Trade Organization
(WTO) policies, the erosion of preferential trade agreements, such as the Lom Agreement
between the EU [European Union] and the African, Caribbean and Pacic region, and the
unequal contest between African (and other regional) efforts to develop non-traditional
exports in competition with the highly subsidized American and European industrial agriculture (Bryceson 2000, cf. Raikes and Gibbon 2000) included a precipitous drop in per
capita incomes, a widespread inability of rural producers to maintain earlier levels of
farming, increasingly diversied income strategies, and declines in measures of health
and education. Moreover, massive retrenchment of civil servants and other employees of
African countries barter terms of trade declined by roughly 30 to 50% between 1980 and the early
1990s with wide variations across countries (cf. Cooper 2002, Ch. 5).
22
552
Pauline E. Peters
government and parastatal organizations not only removed a source of cash income from
many families, including branches in the rural areas, but led many of the new unemployed
to look to family and customary land as a source of food and cash.
The high proportion of non-farm income for many, combined with the loss of access to
key inputs for agricultural production, is what Deborah Bryceson sees as contributing to
depeasantization, and what others see as an enforced extension of peasant survival strategies under pressure of impoverishment (Raikes 2000, 68). Amanor sees diversication
of income sources as part of a structural transformation in which commodication of
land and labour relations produce fragmentation of family and wider kin-based groups
as well as conict between generations and genders (2001, 114). Moreover, precisely
because many unable to nd gainful employment in the urban areas look to rural land as
one of their options for livelihood, and because existing rural families endeavour to
produce as much food and crops for sale as they can, despite the difculties with inputs,
the pressure on already constrained land has been increasing over the past two decades.
In addition, such pressure is intensied by the small proportion of richer rural producers
(richer in land and cash) who have been able to take up the diminished and privatized services available for cash cropping, and the small number of the pensioned-off salariat who
have been able to use their pensions and inuence to embark on or extend commercial
farming.23 The overall results have been deepening stress on the poorest for both food
and cash income, and increasing inequality (thus, in Malawi between 1986 and 1997 the
ratio of incomes of the richest quartile among small-scale farming families compared
with those of the poorest quartile increased from three to eleven times; P.E. Peters 2006).24
Reinvigoration of debate about futures for small- to medium-scale farming families

The conventional view on agrarian society on the right and the left, among development
and agricultural economists, the World Bank and other donors on the one hand, and, on the
other, among radical critics has been the inevitability of an agribusiness future centred on
large farms, albeit with outgrower schemes absorbing (some of) the current rural populations (Sender and Johnston 2004, Collier 2008, Oya 2009, B. White et al. 2012). Over
the past few years, however, the posited disappearance of the smallholder population in
Africa has come under reassessment, due to several factors. One is the new literature on
the environmental and ecological costs of agro-industrial agriculture which provides a
new type of critique of the posited inevitability of such a future. A second is the formidable
rise of agrarian social movements, particularly in Latin America and Asia, which, along
with the surprising links between these and similar movements in Europe, have helped
fuel a challenge to seeing peasantries as necessarily doomed, and provide a positive
assessment of the economic, ecological and social benets of rural-based livelihoods. A
third is the fast-growing documentation of intensifying land appropriation (grabs) by
both foreign and domestic agents from peasant and smallholder populations, discussed
above, a trend that has occasioned not only deep concern but a re-evaluation of conventional trajectories of development.
23
This has been particularly documented for Nigeria (see Guyer and Lambin 1993, Guyer 1997) but is
also the case for other countries, such as rice-growing areas in the Chilwa Basin in southern Malawi
(authors research).
24
Note that the term richest is highly relative since even this top quartile is poor by any standards.
See Jayne et al. 2012 for other countries in Africa.
553
One debate is among Marxist and other critical political economic writers about the
agrarian question. Henry Bernstein, for example, states that, With contemporary globalization and the massive development of the productive forces in advanced capitalist agriculture, the centrality of any agrarian question to industrialization is no longer signicant for
international capital. Instead, he claims, the new agrarian question is that of labour and its
crisis of reproduction (2009, 250). But others disagree, arguing that neoliberal globalization has produced the most signicant reassertion of the primacy of struggles over the
global politics of land since the early 1950s, indicating that transnational capital does
seek access to agricultural and other resources by obtaining (watered) land. Hence, there
is a renewed relevance of the agrarian question (Akram-Lodhi et al. 2009, 220, 25).
Moreover, the tight links between resources of land and water and peoples use of them
(labour) mean both continue to be central to the agrarian question.
Another debate is one dating back several decades25 on the relative efciency of largescale versus small-scale agricultural production (the so-called inverse relationship),
which has re-entered discussion. But, as Philip Woodhouse concluded recently after a
review of available evidence for Africa, a contrast between small and large farms will
not sufce to predict impacts of land deals on labour productivity or employment
[which] are likely to be highly context-specic (2012, 787). The focus should be not
on land/farm size but on the scale of production or levels of investment. He goes on
to emphasize the unrecognized but critical role of water management in any attempts to
increase levels of investment in land. He warns particularly against the failure to understand (or even investigate) existing forms of water management by small- to mediumscale farming, shing and livestock-raising populations. This, in turn, suggests the critical
importance of taking account of widely different scales of resource use in areas of planned
investment. Woodhouse cites one example from a planned large-scale irrigation scheme
in Mali which would have denite effects, mostly negative, for the many existing users.
One conclusion is a necessary role for the state in dening and enforcing a public interest
as part of land deal contracts (2012, 790), a point made for different forms of contract
farming (Li 2012, Oya 2012).
More generally, such discussions point towards consideration not of a simple dichotomy, large vs small, but of possibilities for the most effective combinations of ventures
of differing scale where investment in land and water would produce the best possible outcomes. It is essential to stress that these outcomes should be dened not only in terms of
agricultural output, land and labour productivity, and prot but also in terms of decent livelihoods for a wide range of people.
Given the past treatment of small to medium producers or peasants by colonial and
post-colonial regimes and by development agencies, and the ongoing mistaken representation of them as backward (see earlier), I am most concerned about the tendency to
assume the future for Africa is through large-scale, input- and capital-intensive industrial
agriculture as embodied in conventional modernization and neoliberal views, in much
agricultural policy, and in currently prominent African Green Revolution programmes supported by the Gates Foundation and the United Nations (UN) among others, as well as in the
inuence of companies like Monsanto and Cargill.
At the heart of current debates about farming futures are very different time scales as
well as a questionable quality of available data. Too much of the polemical debate over
25
See, for example, Sender and Johnston (2004), and the special issue of Journal of Agrarian Change
(JAC), 2004, 4(1&2) and responses in JAC, 2004, 4(3).
554
Pauline E. Peters
agricultural futures and agrarian process assumes a (usually unspecied) very long time
scale. Let us take a shorter time frame the next 50 or so years, perhaps. Over the past
half century, many people across Africa have found a land base to be essential to their
ability to withstand the volatility of climatic, economic and political ups and downs and
to make a living for their family, while a substantial proportion have also been successful
with production of cash crops like cocoa, coffee, cotton, tobacco and the all-important food
crops that have been essential to regional and national food security as well as having
fuelled the growth in towns and cities (Guyer 1997). Even today, with the rigours
imposed by deeply misguided policies of structural adjustment and market liberalization,
rising populations, the pressures of the globalized agricultural and food markets and the
increasing competition over land described earlier, there remain literally millions of rural
residents for whom a land base is an essential part of their strategies of livelihood, social
reproduction and social value.
Doubt has been thrown on the most gloomy assessments about farming (most on a
small- to medium-scale basis) across Africa, for reasons of doubtful data within countries
let alone across different countries, particularly in light of the complexity of multiple cropping, inter-cropping and crop sequencing in small elds (Berry 1984, Wiggins 2002). More
recently, Oya (2010) has argued against Agro-Afro-pessimism and emphasizes the substantial evidence of success [despite] the marked unevenness in agrarian/rural development
trajectories between and within countries (2010, 2). Oya goes on to cite a Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) assessment that over the last 40 year period and especially
since the mid 1990s both domestic production and imports increased on aggregate and
food imports did not compete or displace domestic production (with exceptions like
rice in Senegal and meat in Cte dIvoire) (Oya 2010, 4). He concludes that African performance in agriculture has not been bad but could have been very much better given the
favourable international demand conditions (6). Oya is quick to emphasize, as do other
writers, the socio-economic differentiation among smallholders already mentioned. The
obvious concomitant of this recognition is that not all producers are going to benet
equally from all the required interventions to support small- to medium-scale production.
The landless and near-landless are more likely to provide the labour for large farms and
other large-scale production, as well as for manufacturing and industry. Some richer governments are also providing or considering such income supports as child and old-age
grants (South Africa, Botswana, Namibia). The responses will have to be as varied as
the variations across the countries of Africa.
None of this positive positioning for small- to medium-scale land-based living seeks to
deny the challenges how to enable small farmers to produce crops for own consumption26
and for sale and how to link them to the currently expanding global food regime. Nor is
this concern meant to imply the complete exclusion of large-scale farming: as noted above,
the more appropriate aim is a combination of scales and modes of production without the
systematic marginalization of smallholders. I propose that the rst and most signicant
need is to secure the rights of the millions of small to medium farming groups to their land.
In addition, what is needed are:
bold and longer-term approaches substantial increases in public investments in infrastructure (particularly in irrigation and land improvement), making use of labour intensive public
26
Note that I do not mean full self-sufciency that is not a goal, nor is it possible except for a tiny
minority.
555
works also designed to tighten rural labour markets; a revamp of agricultural research and innovation to fulll the obvious potential to improve crop yields on a large scale;27 careful attraction
of agribusiness investments to transform productivity in segments of the agricultural sector and
open access to high-value markets on conditions of monitorable employment and net foreign
exchange generation; development of national food markets and systems of provision in a way
that benet both a class of dynamic market-oriented farmers and the mass of poorer net buyers
of food for whom low and stable food prices are key for survival; all complemented by sustainable forms of universal protection (Oya 2010, 13)
These are Carlos Oyas words but very similar recommendations are made by researchers
speaking from different theoretical and policy positions (Dorward and Kydd 2004, Cousins
and Scoones 2010, Jayne et al. 2010). Also, in recognizing that the majority of rural landowners will continue to depend on diversied income sources, initiatives are needed to
encourage the development of employment in manufacturing and industry which so far
has been totally insufcient in most countries of Africa.
Writers arguing for a future for small- to medium-scale use of landed resources often
invoke past efforts, some successful, that have provided institutional supports (subsidized
inputs, buying and selling, technical services and so on) for small producers.28 The devastations wrought by the removal of such supports through the neoliberal policies under structural adjustment and market liberalization are clear and recognized, as is the hypocrisy of
the rich countries imposing such bans in the name of market liberalization when they have
the highest subsidies and levels of protection. There are also the new challenges of an ever
more unequal world market situation for most African countries.
On the other hand, there is, as mentioned above, the relatively new research showing the
high ecological and environmental costs of conventional industrial large-scale agriculture
with its high dependence on chemical fertilizers and pesticides, vast monocropping, costs
that have not been included in the comparisons of small-scale and large-scale agriculture
cum land use.29 Such analyses may help shift the balance towards the many ecological
and cost benets of small- to medium-scale use of landed resources. The challenges are
enormous, but why would they be considered impossible if, as is the historical case,
some of the approaches now considered appropriate were in place in the past?
As a nal point but by no means the least important, I want to stress the signicant
social and cultural valence of land ownership. In their comprehensive introductory article
on the new enclosures, B. White et al. (2012) point to the need to discuss labour processes
and accumulation from a critical political economy approach. They draw on discussions of
the structure of capitalist production, including labour regimes, but note the tendency of
structural approaches to omit the essential aspects of agency and power (623), while elsewhere they note the frequent omission of politics from overly structural political economy
approaches. Similarly, Borras et al. (2010, 575576) cite the exact same four questions of
Henry Bernstein about agrarian change (Who owns what? Who does what? Who gets what?
27
Experts point to the considerable conventional plant breeding still possible for African farmers even
before recourse is had to genetically modied crops, and insist both should be based on close working
relations between scientists and farmers (which has not been the norm). See Kloppenburg (2010) and
Richards (2010).
28
Oya (2012) points to the parallels between the past system of marketing boards and associated channels of regulation and some forms of contract farming. A challenge will be to avoid the rigidity and
corruption of that old system.
29
See Weis (2010). More criticism of conventional agriculture is also being raised even in its heartland
in the USA see Hertsgaard (2012) for a recent piece in public media.
556
Pauline E. Peters
What do they do with the surplus wealth?) as do B. White et al. (2012), but they too want to
add the need to assess emergent social and political relations [and] interactions as well as
the politics of representation (cf. Fairhead et al. 2012).
The challenge of accounting for agency and power, politics and representations is
to document the ways in which different actors see, think, judge and value, how they assess
what they do, what they want, what they object to and so forth. This entails careful sociocultural analysis in order to capture the irreducible sociality of human existence and to
document how the world is affectively and cognitively experienced, acted upon, [and]
inhabited by sentient human subjects (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012, 42, 49).30 Many
studies in different parts of Africa show how people identify with certain areas not just
as sources of livelihood but as home, as a place where they belong, where their ancestors
are buried, or where they have historical memories of having arrived and settled, or of
having struggled mightily to obtain and keep. Many people also express liking, even
love, of certain rural places and rural practices. The villagers in southern Malawi where
Ive lived and researched for many years express satisfaction if they are near enough kin
or neighbours or friends to get help when they need it, but at a sufcient distance that
they enjoy a certain privacy and sense of independence. This is almost impossible for
most to obtain in urban areas. They express satisfaction in work well done on the land
a ne eld of maize or pigeon peas, a good tobacco harvest for sale, fat goats and laying
chickens, a healthy stand of trees for fruit and timber, well-brewed sorghum beer these
are appreciated not only as material goods but as aesthetic and cultural values to be cherished. For many, the kind of life they live may well be difcult and short on what many
consider to be the comforts of life, but they would not accept that it is a life to be considered
irrelevant and unviable or themselves to be considered surplus to other peoples visions of
wealth. Why not work to protect and sustain such valued lives and refuse to accept the
erasure from futures on African lands that still seem possible, even if for only the next
few generations? If one is to answer yes to this, as clearly I want to, then the next task is
to identify what research, writing and action are needed to support such a ght.
In this paper, I have suggested two conclusions relevant for further research and action.
One is to combat the denial of property to the many forms of customary tenure under
which millions of resource users in Africa hold land, thus providing one basis for preventing further misappropriation by more powerful agents, domestic and foreign. The other is to
counter a single-minded view of an agro-industrial future for Africa by demonstrating the
economic and social viability of small- to medium-scale production across the continents
lands, albeit in combination with larger scales of production.
Acknowledgments
I have also benetted from discussions with Ben Cousins, Bridget O'Laughlin and Henry Bernstein
during a fellowship at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, South Africa, in 2011.
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Pauline E. Peters is a social anthropologist, retired from the teaching faculty, but still afliated as
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com

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