- "The deal South Korea's Daewoo Logistics is negotiating
with the Madagascar Government looks rapaciousThe Madagascan case looks
neo-colonialThe Madagascan people stand to lose half of their arable land." Financial
Times Editorial, November 20, 2008
-
- "Cambodia is in talks with several Asian and Middle
Eastern governments to receive as much as $3 billions US dollars in agricultural
investments in return for millions of hectares of land concessions" Financial
Times, November 21, 2008
-
- "We are starving in the midst of bountiful harvests
and booming exports!: Unemployed Rural Landless Workers, Para State,
Brazil (2003)
-
- Introduction
-
- Colonial style empire-building is making a huge comeback,
and most of the colonialists are late-comers, elbowing their way past the
established European and US predators.
-
- Backed by their governments and bankrolled with huge
trade and investment profits and budget surpluses, the newly emerging neo-colonial
economic powers (ENEP) are seizing control of vast tracts of fertile lands
from poor countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, through the intermediation
of local corrupt, free-market regimes. Millions of acres of land have been
granted in most cases free of charge to the ENEP who, at most,
promise to invest millions in infrastructure to facilitate the transfer
of their plundered agricultural products to their own home markets and
to pay the ongoing wage of less than $1 dollar a day to the destitute local
peasants. Projects and agreements between the ENEP and pliant neo-colonial
regimes are in the works to expand imperial land takeovers to cover additional
tens of millions of hectares of farmland in the very near future. The great
land sell-off/transfer takes place at a time and in places where landless
peasants are growing in number, small farmers are being forcibly displaced
by the neo-colonial state and bankrupted through debt and lack of affordable
credit. Millions of organized landless peasants and rural workers struggling
for cultivatable land are criminalized, repressed, assassinated or jailed
and their families are driven into disease-ridden urban slums. The historic
context, economic actors and methods of agro-business empire-building bears
similarities and differences with the old-style empire building of the
past centuries.
-
- Old and New Style Agro-Imperial Exploitation
-
- During the previous five centuries of imperial domination
the exploitation and export of agricultural products and minerals played
a central role in the enrichment of the Euro-North American empires. Up
to the 19th century, large-scale plantations and latifundios,
organized around staple crops, relied on forced labor slaves,
indentured servants, semi-serfs, tenant farmers, migrant seasonal workers
and a host of other forms of labor (including prisoners) to accumulate
wealth and profits for colonial settlers, home country investors and the
imperial state treasuries.
-
- The agricultural empires were secured through conquest
of indigenous peoples, importation of slaves and indentured workers, the
forcible seizure and dispossession of communal lands and the rule through
colonial officials. In many cases, the colonial rulers incorporated local
elites ('nobles', monarchs, tribal chiefs and favored minorities) as administrators
and recruited the impoverished, dispossesed natives to serve as colonial
soldiers led by white Euro-American officers.
-
- Colonial-style agro-imperialism came under attack by
mass-based national liberation movements throughout the 19th and first
half of the 20thcenturies, culminating in the establishment of independent
national regimes throughout Africa, Asia (except Palestine) and Latin America.
From the very beginning of their reign, the newly independent states pursued
diverse policies toward colonial-era land ownership and exploitation. A
few of the radical, socialist and nationalist regimes eventually expropriated,
either partially or entirely, foreign landowners, as was the case in China,
Cuba, Indochina, Zimbabwe, Guyana, Angola, India and others. Many of these
'expropriations' led to land transfers to the new emerging post-colonial
bourgeoisie, leaving the mass of the rural labor force without land or
confined to communal land. In most cases the transition from colonial to
post-colonial regimes was underwritten by a political pact ensuring the
continuation of colonial patterns of land ownership, cultivation, marketing
and labor relations (described as a 'neo-colonial agro-export system).
With few exceptions most independent governments failed to change their
dependence on export crops, diversify export markets, develop food self-sufficiency
or finance the settlement of rural poor onto fertile uncultivated public
lands.
-
- Where land distribution did take place, the regimes failed
to invest sufficiently in the new forms of rural organization
(family farms, co-ops or communal 'ejidos') or imposed centrally controlled
large-scale state enterprises, which were inefficiently run, failed to
provide adequate incentives for the direct producers, and were exploited
to finance urban-industrial development. As a result, many state farms
and cooperatives were eventually dismantled. In most countries great masses
of the rural poor continued to be landless and subject to the demands of
local tax collectors, military recruiters and usurious money lenders and
were evicted by land speculators, real estate developers and national and
local officials.
-
- Neo-Liberalism and the Rise of New Agro-Imperialism
-
- Emblematic of the new style agro-imperialism is the South
Korean takeover of half (1.3 million hectares) of Madagascar's total arable
land under a 70-90 year lease in which the Daewoo Logistics Corporation
of South Korea expects to pay nothing for a contract to cultivate maize
and palm oil for export.1 In Cambodia, several emerging agro-imperial
Asian and Middle Eastern countries are 'negotiating' (with hefty bribes
and offers of lucrative local 'partnerships' to local politicians) the
takeover of millions of hectares of fertile land.2 The scope and depth
of the new emerging agro-imperial expansion into the impoverished countryside
of Asian, African and Latin American countries far surpasses that of the
earlier colonial empire before the 20th century. A detailed account
of the new agro-imperialist countries and their neo-colonial colonies has
recently been compiled on the website of GRAIN3.
-
- The driving forces of contemporary agro-imperialist conquest
and land grabbing can be divided into three blocs:
-
- 1.
- The new rich Arab oil regimes, mostly among the Gulf
States (in part, through their 'sovereign wealth funds).
- 2.
- The newly emerging imperial countries of Asia (China,
India, South Korea and Japan) and Israel
- 3.
- The earlier imperial countries (US and Europe), the World
Bank, Wall Street investment banks and other assorted imperial speculator-financial
companies.
-
- Each of these agro-imperial blocs is organized around
one to three 'leading' countries: Among the Gulf imperial states, Saudi
Arabia and Kuwait; in Asia China, Korea and Japan are the main land
grabbers. Among the US-European-World Bank land predators there are a wide
range of agro-imperialist monopoly firms buying up land ranging from Goldman
Sachs, Blackstone in the US to Louis Dreyfuss in the Netherlands and Deutschbank
in Germany. Upward of several hundred million acres of arable land have
been or are in the process of being appropriated by the world's biggest
capitalist landowners in what is one of the greatest concentration of private
landownership in the history of empire building.
-
- The process of agro-imperial empire building operates
largely through political and financial mechanisms, preceded, in some cases,
by military coups, imperial interventions and destabilization campaigns
to establish pliable neo-colonial 'partners' or, more accurately, collaborators,
disposed to cooperate in this huge imperial land grab. Once in place, the
Afro-Asian-Latin American neo-colonial regimes impose a neo-liberal agenda
which includes the break-up of communal-held lands, the promotion of agro-export
strategies, the repression of any local land reform movements among subsistence
farmers and landless rural workers demanding the redistribution of fallow
public and private lands. The neo-colonial regimes' free market policies
eliminate or lower tariff barriers on heavily subsidized food imports from
the US and Europe. These policies bankrupt local market farmers and peasants
increasing the amount of available land to 'lease' or sell-off to the new
agro-imperial countries and multinationals. The military and police play
a key role in evicting impoverished, indebted and starving farmers and
preventing squatters from occupying and producing food on fertile land
for local consumption.
-
- Once the neo-colonial collaborator regimes are in place
and their 'free market' agendas are implemented, the stage is set for the
entry and takeover of vast tracts of cultivable land by the agro-imperial
countries and investors.
-
- Israel is the major exception to this pattern of agro-imperial
conquest, as it relies on the massive sustained use of force against an
entire nation to dispossess Palestinian farmers and seize territory via
armed colonial settlers in the style of earlier Euro-American colonial
imperialism.4
-
- The sellout usually follows one of two paths or a combination
of both: Newly emerging imperial countries take the lead or are solicited
by the neo-colonial regime to invest in 'agricultural development'. One-sided
'negotiations' follow in which substantial sums of cash flow from the imperial
treasury into the overseas bank accounts of their neo-colonial 'partners'.
The agreements and the terms of the contracts are unequal: The food and
agricultural commodities are almost totally exported back to the home markets
of the agro-imperial country, even as the 'host country's' population starves
and is dependent on emergency shipments of food from imperial 'humanitarian'
agencies. 'Development', including promise of large-scale investment, is
largely directed at building roads, transport, ports and storage facilities
to be used exclusively to facilitate the transfer of agricultural produce
overseas by the large-scale agro-imperial firms. Most of the land is taken
rent-free or subject to 'nominal' fees, which go into the pockets of the
political elite or are recycled into the urban real estate market and luxury
imports for the local wealthy elite. Except for the collaborationist relatives
or cronies of the neo-colonial rulers, almost all of the high paid directors,
senior executives and technical staff come from the imperial countries
in the tradition of the colonial past. An army of low salary, educated,
'third country nationals' generally enter as middle level technical and
administrative employees completely subverting any possibility of
vital technology or skills transfer to the local population. The major
and much touted 'benefit' to the neo-colonial country is the employment
of local manual farm workers, who are rarely paid above the going rate
of $1 to 2 US dollars a day and are harshly repressed and denied any independent
trade union representation.
-
- In contrast, the agro-imperial companies and regimes
reap enormous profits, secure supplies of food at subsidized prices, exercise
political influence or hegemonic control over collaborator elites and establish
economic 'beachheads' to expand their investments and facilitate foreign
takeover of the local financial, trade and processing sectors.
-
- Target Countries
-
- While there is a great deal of competition and overlap
among the agro-imperial countries in plundering the target countries, the
tendency is for the Arab petroleum imperial regimes to focus on penetrating
neo-colonies in South and Southeast Asia. The Asian 'Economic Tiger' countries
concentrate on Africa and Latin America. While the US-Europe Multinationals
exploit the former communist countries of Eastern Europe and the former
Soviet Union as well as Latin America and Africa.
-
- Bahrain has grabbed land in Pakistan, the Philippines
and Sudan to supply itself with rice. China, probably the most dynamic
agro-imperial country today, has invested in Africa, Latin America and
Southeast Asia to ensure low cost soybean supplies (especially from Brazil),
rice production in Cuba (5,000 hectares), Burma, Cameroon (10,000 hectares),
Laos (100,000 hectares), Mozambique (with 10,000 Chinese farm-worker settlers),
the Philippines (1.24 million hectares) and Uganda.
-
- The Gulf States are projecting a $1 billion dollar fund
to finance land grabs in North and Sub-Saharan Africa. Japan has purchased
100,000 hectares of Brazilian farmland for soybean and maize. Its corporations
own 12 million hectares in Southeast Asia and South America. Kuwait has
grabbed land in Burma, Cambodia, Morocco, Yemen, Egypt, Laos, Sudan and
Uganda. Qatar has taken over rice fields in Cambodia and Pakistan and wheat,
maize and oil seed croplands in Sudan as well as land in Vietnam for cereals,
fruit, vegetables and raising cattle. Saudi Arabia has been 'offered' 500,000
hectares of rice fields in Indonesia and hundreds of thousands of hectares
of fertile land in Ethiopia and Sudan.
-
- The World Bank (WB) has played a major role in promoting
agro-imperial land grabs, allocating $1.4 billion dollars to finance agro-business
takeovers of 'underutilized lands'. The WB conditions its loans to neo-colonies,
like the Ukraine, on their opening up lands to be exploited by foreign
investors.5Taking advantage of neo-liberal 'center-left' regimes in Argentina
and Brazil, agro-imperial investors from the US and Europe have bought
millions of acres of fertile farmlands and pastures to supply their imperial
homelands, while millions of landless peasants and unemployed workers are
left to watch the trains laden with beef, wheat and soy beans head for
the foreign MNC-controlled port facilities and on to the imperial home
markets in Europe, Asia and the US.
-
- At least two emerging imperial countries, Brazil and
China, are subject to imperial land grabs by more 'advanced' imperial countries
and have become 'agents' of agricultural colonization. Japanese, European
and North American multinationals exploit Brazil even as Brazilian colonial
settlers and agro-industrialists have taken over wide swathes of borderlands
in Paraguay, Uruguay and Bolivia. A similar pattern occurs in China where
valuable farmlands are exploited by Japanese and overseas Chinese capitalists
at the same time that China is seizing fertile land in poorer countries
in Africa and Southeast Asia.
-
- Present and Future Consequences of Agro-Imperialism
-
- The re-colonization by emerging imperialist states of
huge tracts of fertile farmland of the poorest countries and regions of
Africa, Asia and Latin America is resulting in a deepening class polarization
between, on the one hand, wealthy rentier Arab oil states, Asian billionaires,
affluent state-funded Jewish settlers and Western speculators and, on the
other hand, hundreds of millions of starving, landless, dispossessed peasants
in Sudan, Madagascar, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Palestine, Burma, China, Indonesia,
Brazil, the Philippines, Paraguay and elsewhere.
-
- Agro-imperialism is still in its early stages
taking possession of huge tracts of land, expropriating peasants
and exploiting the landless rural workers as day laborers. The next phase
which is currently unfolding is to take control over the transport systems,
infrastructure and credit systems, which accompany the growth of agro-export
crops. Monopolizing infrastructure, credit and the profits from seeds,
fertilizers, processing industries, tolls and interest payments on loans
further concentrates de facto imperial control over the colonial
economy and extends political influence over local politicians, rulers
and collaborators within the bureaucracies.
-
- The neo-colonized class structure, especially in largely
agricultural economies are evolving into a four tier class system in which
the foreign capitalists and their entourage are at the pinnacle of elite
status representing less than 1% of the population. In the second tier,
representing 10% of the population are the local political elite and their
cronies and relatives as well as well placed bureaucrats and military officers,
who enrich themselves, through partnerships ('joint ventures') with the
neo-colonials and via bribes and land grabs. The local middle class represents
almost 20% and is in constant danger of falling into poverty in the face
of the world economic crises. The dispossessed peasants, rural workers,
rural refugees, urban squatters and indebted subsistence peasants and farmers
make up the fourth tier of the class structure with close to 70% of the
population.
-
- Within the emerging neo-colonial agro-export model, the
'middle class' is shrinking and changing in composition. The number of
family farmers producing for the domestic market is declining in the face
of state-supported foreign-owned farms producing for their own 'home markets'.
As a result market vendors and small retailers in the local markets are
falling behind, squeezed out by the large foreign-owned supermarkets. The
loss of employment for domestic producers of farm goods and services and
the elimination of a host of 'commercial' intermediaries between town and
country is sharpening the class polarization between top and bottom tiers
of the class structure. The new colonial middle class is reconfigured to
include a small stratum of lawyers, professionals, publicists and low-level
functionaries of the foreign firms and public and private security forces.
The auxiliary role of the 'new middle class' in servicing the axis of colonial
economic and political power will make them less nation-oriented and more
colonial in their allegiances and political outlook, more 'free market'
consumerist in their life style and more prone to approve of repressive
(including fascistic) domestic solutions to rural and urban unrest and
popular struggles for justice.
-
- At the present moment, the biggest constraint on the
advance of agro-imperialism is the economic collapse of world capitalism,
which is undermining the 'export of capital'. The sudden collapse of commodity
prices is making it less profitable to invest in overseas farmland. The
drying up of credit is undermining the financing of grandiose overseas
land grabs. The 70% decline in oil revenues is limiting the Middle East
Sovereign Funds and other investment vehicles of Gulf oil foreign reserves.
On the other hand, the collapse of agricultural prices is bankrupting African,
Asian and Latin American elite agro-producers, forcing down land prices
and presenting opportunities for imperial agro-investors to buy up even
more fertile land at rock-bottom prices.
-
- The current world capitalist recession is adding millions
of unemployed rural workers to the hundreds of millions of peasants dispossessed
during the expansion period of the agricultural commodity boom during the
first half of the current decade. Labor costs and land are cheap, at the
same time that effective consumer demand is falling. Agro-imperialists
can employ all the Third World rural labor they want at $1 dollar a day
or less, but how can they market their products and realize returns that
cover the costs of loans, bribes, transport, marketing, elite salaries,
perks, CEO bonuses and investor dividends when demand is in decline?
-
- Some agro-imperialists may take advantage of the recession
to buy cheaply now and look forward to long-term profits when the multi-trillion
dollar state-funded recovery takes effect. Others may cut back on their
land grabs or more likely hold vast expanses of valuable land out of production
until the 'market' improves while dispossessed peasants starve on
the margins of fallow fields.
-
- The new agro-imperials are banking on the new imperialist
states committing resources (money and troops) to bolster the neo-colonial
gendarmes in repressing the inevitable uprisings of the billions of dispossessed,
hungry and marginalized people in Sudan, Ethiopia, Burma, Cambodia, Brazil,
Paraguay, the Philippines, China and elsewhere. Time is running out for
the easy deals, transfers of ownership and long-term leases consummated
by local neo-colonial collaborators and overseas colonial investors and
states. Currently imperial wars and domestic economic recessions in the
old and emerging imperial countries are systematically draining their economies
and testing the willingness of their populations to sacrifice for new style
colonial empire building. Without international military and economic backing,
the thin stratum of local neo-colonial rulers can hardly withstand sustained,
mass uprisings of the destitute peasantry allied with the downwardly mobile
lower middle class and growing legions of unemployed university-educated
young people.
-
- The promise of a new era of agro-imperial empire building
and a new wave of emerging imperial states may be short-lived. In its place
we may see a new wave of rural-based national liberation movements and
ferocious competition between new and old imperial states fighting over
increasingly scarce financial and economic resources. While downwardly
mobile workers and employees in the Western imperial centers gyrate between
one and another imperial party (Democrat/Republican, Conservative/Labor)
they will play no role for the foreseeable future. When and if they break
loosethey may turn toward a demagogic nationalist right or toward a currently
invisible (at least in the US and Europe) 'patriotic nationalist' socialist
left. In either case, current imperial pillage and the subsequent mass
rebellion will start elsewhere with or without a change in the US or Europe.
-
- NOTES
-
- 1. Financial Times November 20, 2008 page 3
- 2. Financial Times November 21, 2008 page 7
- 3. http://www.grain.org (November 22, 2008)
-
- 4. Stephen Lendman, "Another Israeli West Bank Land
Grab Scheme", Counterpunch. Org. October 10, 2008; Guardian.co.uk,
October 10, 2008.
-
- 5. See GRAIN.org, op.cit.
|