The Great African Land Grab? Agricultural investments and the global food system by Lorenzo Cotula (review)

Lorenzo Cotula examines the history, political economy, legal context and emerging outcomes of recent agricultural land deals in sub-Saharan Africa. His main messages are that the rural people most likely to be affected by land deals generally lack political power, legal protection and opportunities for participation in decisions about the deals – and that significant changes are needed to shift outcomes in their favour.

The book begins by locating recent land deals in relation to history. The legacies of colonialism include centralized government power over land, policies linking land rights to ‘productive use’ (excluding pastoralism), and laws designed to attract foreign investment. These features continue to facilitate land grabs today. Cotula describes a ‘historical pendulum’ between large- and small-scale farming in Africa: after a colonial push for large plantations followed by a period of emphasis on contract farming, recent trends suggest a shift towards plantations again. Cotula concludes that farm size is less important than who has control over farming decisions, and recommends ‘investing in farmers rather than farmland’ (p. 181), whether on small, medium or large farms.

Cotula sees the demand for energy and consumer products in rich countries and in emerging economies as a stronger driver of large land acquisitions than the often-stated quest for food security. With food production identified as a relatively minor driver, the analysis focuses on broader processes of investment, competition for resources and the livelihood impacts of changes in land control. It is thus interesting that ‘food systems’ feature in the book’s subtitle, while non-agricultural investments with similar impacts on land rights are mentioned only briefly. The occasional examples that touch on mines, dams and conservation projects provide welcome hints at an even broader analysis that hopefully can be extended in future work.

Regarding the actors involved, Cotula proposes that ‘local nationals’ often play a more prominent role in land deals than foreign actors, who in turn are more often from Europe, North America or other African countries than from China or the Gulf states. He highlights the importance of relatively small grabs by local and national elites, members of the middle class and the diaspora. His argument – that small acquisitions can cumulatively increase competition for resources just as much as one or more large deals – challenges the common view that the land rush is driven by big, foreign companies or governments. But in Chapter 5, ‘Winners and losers’, the focus returns to foreign-run, corporate monocultures, and this nuance fades away. Presumably there is a knowledge gap – and a research opportunity – with regard to the cumulative impacts of small grabs.

The author argues that most land grabs comply with existing laws: governments may officially own land or have the right to expropriate it for loosely defined projects of national interest. Where local officials have the authority to allocate land rights, better outcomes for rural people are not guaranteed. Cotula describes how legal reforms have taken place ‘at two speeds’: measures protecting investments have evolved quickly and are more often binding, while those safeguarding the rights of affected people have evolved slowly and tend to be voluntary. He temptingly imagines the reverse, asking how investors would react if the measures protecting their investments were only voluntary, and those protecting local people’s rights were mandatory.

Cotula finds few cases where the local benefits of land deals have outweighed their problems. Estimates of job creation have been overstated, while social differentiation means that those who suffer most from the loss of land and livelihoods are usually not the same people who are most likely to benefit from any new jobs. Where land is allocated for a project but not used, communities can suffer from lost access to land without gaining any benefits at all. This situation leads Cotula to observe that: ‘The real “idle...