Don’t Touch my Land! Peasant resistance to land grabs in Mali

One thing is clear from my recent trip to Mali and Senegal, there is a war being waged against West African peasants and small farmers-and they are fighting back. At the World Social Forum in Dakar, Senegal, a broad coalition of farmers and NGOs released the “Dakar Appeal Against Land Grabs.” I met with peasant unions and organizations fighting to resist land grabs and working to promote food sovereignty.

In the aftermath of the 2008 food price hikes, there has been a jump in investor interest in African farmland for whom high cereal prices plus cheap land equals windfall profits. Since 2008, the number of land grabs, euphemistically labeled “foreign land acquisitions,” has accelerated: French, South African, Chinese, Korean and Libyan firms (among others) have bought up hundreds of thousands of acres of prime farmland. Estimates for Mali alone range between 600,000 and 1.5 million acres. Of course, the phenomenon of land grabs in Africa is not new, nor is their justification in the name of “progress.” Indeed, the new land grabs are being carried out in the name of “development” and, ironically, “food security.”

The 2008 food price crisis, and the urban “food rebellions” that followed, led to a number of emergency policy measures that set the stage for this assault. Often lacking democratic legitimacy in the first place-as we’ve recently seen in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya-many governments (rightly) feared that protests over the cost of bread reflected deeper grievances. For fear of being toppled, they had to bring down the price of food fast, especially in the cities.

So how do you make food cheaper quickly? Simple! First, you stop food from leaving the country, by curbing exports. Second, you encourage more food to enter the country, by lifting restrictions on imports. In a number of countries, from Bolivia to Nigeria, these twin measures succeeded in quickly stabilizing consumer prices, at least long enough to ward off a full-on upheaval. But in the countryside, peasant food-producers have been left extremely vulnerable.

In Mali, a country that produces most of the rice it consumes, the government was still spooked enough by rising prices in 2008 to follow the same emergency course: banning exports of Malian rice and suspending tariffs on foreign rice. With the help of foreign donors, it also led a big push for increasing rice production using hybrid seeds and chemical inputs (mainly fertilizers and herbicides). Indeed, Malian rice production increased by 13% between 2009 and 2010. What was the result of these “crisis management” policies? A flood of cheap Asian rice and a surplus of Malian rice farmers couldn’t sell.

According to representatives of the Malian rice farmers’ union Sexagon, who met with us in the village of Niono, farmers were now stuck with 350,000 tones of surplus rice from the year before. Because they were prohibited from exporting to Mauritania as they sometimes had in the past-and because they were undercut by Thai and Japanese imports-farmers had to sell their rice domestically at or below cost. As a result, they were left shouldering bank loans they couldn’t repay. Their credit-worthiness was at risk and so was their most important asset: their land. The rice farmers of the Office du Niger-a region of smallholders who grow rice for the Malian market-pay water use fees for access to irrigation. If they can’t afford to pay, they face eviction.

But non-irrigated farmers in this region may be even more at risk, since their land is considered “undeveloped” and thus, ‘up for grabs,’ so to speak. A 2009 land deal, for instance, granted 100,000 hectares (about 250,000 acres) to the Libyan government. The “Malibya project” as it is known, promises to “develop” the land for irrigated rice production in Macina, a community in the Ségou region. It is unclear how many people have been displaced so far-in a first wave of seizures 57 farm families were kicked out. Although their lands were classified as “undeveloped,” these families had grown corn, millet, cassava, fruit trees and vegetables for home and local consumption. They are now slated to be replaced with monocultures of hybrid rice. The loss in biodiversity alone is staggering.

While some of the affected families displaced by Malibya have received cash payments for the value of their houses and trees, many have not. And none have been compensated for the land itself, let alone given new lands to continue farming. Sexagon-which represents small, irrigated rice producers-insists that irrigable lands should be given first and foremost to Malian farmers producing food for domestic consumption, not to foreign firms and governments. Smallholders in the Office du Niger farm only a few hectares each, barely enough to survive.

In another case, 20,000 hectares were expropriated from peasants in the village of Sanamadougou and granted to the national company GDCM (Large Cereals Distributor of Mali). This land deal-named the “Modibo project” after the company’s CEO Modibo Keita-was authorized by the Office du Niger. Eager to begin construction in June 2010, Keita offered the villagers everything from soccer balls and t-shirts to a new school in exchange for vacating their lands. Despite their refusal, Keita began bulldozing lands and digging his new canal-dumping the mud in farmers’ nearby millet fields. When villagers protested, Keita brought in over a hundred police to forcibly remove them. Dozens were beaten, including a 91-year old village elder who suffered broken fingers. A woman, five-months pregnant, was also beaten resulting in the loss of her baby: “Everyone ran,” she says “but I didn’t run because I hadn’t done anything wrong.”

In 2003, Keita received funding and support from USAID and the World Bank to expand his milling operation, with the clear intention of “vertically integrating” his business by acquiring land for large-scale wheat production. The 2003 USAID report states, “In spite of a total net worth in excess of $20 million, the company GDCM is managed by its owner Modibo Keita as a small family business.”

In the face of intimidation and repression, peasant farmers from all parts of the country came together in November 2010 in Kolongo, Mali to publicly denounce the land grabs. They also announced a collective plan to: identify and document cases of land dispossession and human rights violations; widely disseminate information about land grabbing at home and abroad; and pursue legal action to defend land and human rights in national, regional and international courts. Strong alliances have also been built with NGOs and peasant organizations throughout West Africa. Under the umbrella organization COPAGEN–The Coalition for the Protection of African Genetic Resources–they have spoken out, using the campaign slogan: Don’t touch my land, It’s my life! (Touches-pas a ma terre, c’est ma vie!).

These land grabs are not merely a product of corrupt officials and greedy elites. Rather, insists Ibrahima Coulibaly, president of the Malian Confederation of Peasant Producers (CNOP), they fit squarely within the neoliberal development model: “The message is that peasants and small farmers are unable feed their populations.” Aid agencies like the World Bank Group and large-scale development efforts like the Alliance for a new Green Revolution in Africa reinforce this message. For this reason, the “Dakar Appeal Against Land Grabs”, published in February 2011 at the World Social Forum, calls on individuals and civil society organizations everywhere to:

Support by all means possible (human, media, legal, financial or popular) all those who fight against land grabs and to put pressure on national governments and international institutions to fulfill their obligations towards the rights of the people.