The Great Land Giveaway: Neo-Colonialism
by Invitation
by James Petras
This article previously appeared in Global Research and Information Clearinghouse.
"The deal South Korea's Daewoo Logistics is negotiating
with the Madagascar Government looks rapacious...The Madagascan case looks
neo-colonial...The 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)
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.
"Newly emerging neo-colonial economic powers are seizing
control of vast tracts of fertile lands from poor countries in Africa, Asia and
Latin America."
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, dispossessed natives to serve as colonial
soldiers led by white Euro-American officers.
"Great masses of the rural poor continued to be landless."
Colonial-style agro-imperialism came under attack by
mass-based national liberation movements throughout the 19th and
first half of the 20th centuries, 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 GRAIN.
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.
"These policies bankrupt local market farmers and
peasants."
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.
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.
"Imperial investors from the US and Europe have bought
millions of acres of fertile farmlands and pastures."
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. Taking 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.
"The biggest constraint on the advance of agro-imperialism
is the economic collapse of world capitalism."
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.
"We may see a new wave of rural-based national liberation
movements."
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 loose...they 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.
James Petras can be contacted at [email protected].