New investment, old challenges. Land deals and the water constraint in African agriculture

By P. Woodhouse. 2012

110 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Foreign investment in agricultural land acquisition in sub-Saharan Africa has been viewed primarily as driven by a set of linked ‘crises’: in financial capital markets, in security of energy and food supply, and in global environmental governance. This paper argues that a focus on the ‘buyers’ of land risks overlooking the dynamics that operate on the side of the land ‘sellers’. Accordingly, the first part of the paper argues that it is important to view the current ‘land grab’ as the latest stage in a longer historical process of competition for control of land and other natural resources by different ‘domestic’ economic and political actors within African countries. While such struggles are often characterised as the ‘state versus the peasantry’, with the state acting on behalf of ‘urban elites’, the paper argues that processes of accumulation and associated enclosure of natural resources need to be examined more critically in specific contexts if the role and impact of foreign capital investment are to be understood. The second part of the paper seeks to identify the ways in which questions of scale (in the sense of greater capital intensity) can be considered to be constraints to the development of African agriculture. Particularly, it considers the extent to which the production models most frequently mentioned in connection with foreign investment (large-scale mechanised farms and small-scale outgrower contract farming) respond to current productivity constraints. The paper argues that current debates about foreign investment in agricultural land underplay the importance of water resources needed to overcome production risks associated with irregular rainfall. Bringing the water dimension of land deals more clearly into focus is necessary if the scope for positive and negative impacts of new investment on existing land users is to be fully understood. The paper concludes by considering the implications of such challenges in the current context of foreign investment in agriculture in Africa.

Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Soil Science, Urban Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/04df596d10d287d4ebe747573cff00c938af1e7c

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

1. P. Peters
2. I. Scoones
3. R. Hall
4. Saturnino M. Borras Jr.
5. Wendy Wolford
6. Les Levidow
7. B. White
8. P. Woodhouse

In Soil Science

1. P. Peters
2. I. Scoones
3. R. Hall
4. Saturnino M. Borras Jr.
5. Wendy Wolford
6. Les Levidow
7. B. White
8. P. Woodhouse

In Urban Studies

1. P. Peters
2. L. Cotula
3. Les Levidow
4. T. Sikor
5. P. Woodhouse
6. Saturnino M. Borras Jr.
7. R. Hall
8. I. Scoones

Citations in the corpus

• Green Revolution in Sub-Saharan Africa: Implications of Imposed Innovation for the Wellbeing of Rural Smallholders (2016, background): “Such impacts resulting from coercive development policies are not new to SSA (Abro et al., 2014; Scott, 1998; van Leeuwen, 2001; Woodhouse, 2012).”
• The international political economy of the global land rush: A critical appraisal of trends, scale, geography and drivers (2012, background): “However, water is not explicitly covered as it is discussed in another paper, by Philip Woodhouse (Woodhouse 2012).”
• Land appropriation, surplus people and a battle over visions of agrarian futures in Africa (2013, background): “…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).”
• EU criteria for sustainable biofuels: accounting for carbon, depoliticising plunder (2013, background): “Unlike traditional rain-fed agriculture adapting to seasonal rainfall, the recent shift to high-value crops via irrigation systems has stimulated water grabs; this shift enhances some livelihoods while undermining others (Woodhouse, 2012: 783–784).”
• Land grabbing in Latin America and the Caribbean (2012, unknown): “…manifests in a number of ways, including, ‘land grabs’ (capture of vast tracts of lands’), ‘(virtual) water grabs’ (capture of water resources – see Woodhouse 2012, Kay and Franco (2012)), and ‘green grabs’ (resource grabs in the name of the environment – see Fairhead, Leach and Scoones…”
• The new enclosures: critical perspectives on corporate land deals (2012, background): “Phil Woodhouse ( 2012 , this volume) focuses on the supply side of land deals in Africa specifically, placing the current enclosures in a longer historical context.”
• African farmer-led irrigation development: re-framing agricultural policy and investment? (2017, background): “The absence in Africa of a ‘green revolution’ following this Asian model is taken to signify ‘stagnation’ in a technological sense, but is also read by some as a lack of socioeconomic differentiation in rural areas, as evident in the recent ‘land grab’ literature (De Schutter 2011; Woodhouse 2012).”