The African island has been the setting for some of the most controversial cases of land grabbing without "any benefit" for the local population. Here are two stories from which we can learn how to accelerate the transition to a sustainable food system.
Madagascar is a state of the African continent that is home to a rich biodiversity that is unique in the world. Its isolated location has meant that its territory has developed living species not found anywhere else in the world. The phenomenon of land grabbing to make way for intensive agriculture, has therefore caused moments of great tension in the country where there have been some of the most controversial episodes ever studied in the world: from Daewoo Logistics Corporation in 2008 to Tozzi Green in 2012.
The legacy of the land to land grabbing
Until the early twentieth century, local communities lived off the earth with respect, leaving a legacy to future generations in the same condition in which they had received it from those that came before them: "Families boasted of their land rights through inheritance and, in case of disputes, local authorities intervened to resolve the matter," writes Liliana Mosca, professor of the department of political science and legal studies at the University of Naples. In the study published in 2013 in the Economia & Diritto agroalimentare (Economics & Law Journal of Agribusiness), Mosca said that "with colonization has gone the affirmation of private property, granted to individuals on the basis of deeds in their possession."
After independence, the governments that followed continued with this policy, initiating reforms that, while recognizing the right of indigenous communities to inherit lands, also allowed the state and private investors, especially foreigners, to "usurp" lands expropriating them from local farmers and shepherds.
The Daewoo Logistics Corporation case
The South Korean company in 2008 attempted to exploit this opportunity by trying to secure 1.3 million hectares of land to produce corn and palm oil.
When news of the agreement began circulating in the Malagasy and international media, discontent began to rise within the population, mainly because the details of the transaction were not clear: "Over time, attention and protests became increasingly vocal and the highly publicized sale of the ancestral lands became an open condemnation of the Malagasy government and the President Marc Ravalomanana," writes Mosca.
On March 8, 2009, the protests led to the fall of the government. Instead of Ravalomanana Andry Rajoelina came to power, the then mayor of the capital, Antananarivo. One of his first acts was the cancellation of the agreement with Daewoo. According to Mosca, the episode has caused many land grabbing "projects to fail", "more than half related to foreign investors. Those who have gone ahead, were mostly for the cultivation of jatropha."
The Tozzi Green case
"I do not even know what jatropha is," says a villager of Ambararatabe, in the municipality of Satrokala, inhabited by the ethnic Bara whose livelihood is sheep farming and breeding of zebù. His story is told in a document called Assalto alla terra! (Assualt on the the earth!) published by Re: Common, an association that works to help improve the agricultural policy of the World Bank in 2008, which gave the green light to this type of investment.
"The cultivation of jatropha does not provide any benefit for us," said another resident. Yet it is the cultivation of this plant that led to land grabbing by another company – which is Italian – called Tozzi Green, a subsidiary in the renewable sector of Tozzi Holding Group. The contract was signed in 2012 and provided a lease for 30 years of 6,558 hectares. The ultimate goal is to reach 100 thousand hectares by 2019.
Jatropha is used to produce biofuels to fuel biomass power plants. The report by Re: Common states that jatropha plantations "are scattered over a wide area - too wide to allow zebu to move as they did before." And the entrance of the cattle in the fields would result in fines too high for shepherds who are now afraid even to go near those lands.
Towards a sustainable food system
These two examples of land grabbing clearly show the problems caused by an agricultural policy without rules, from the risk of a decline in employment and production of food to the local transformation of economic and social systems that have worked for decades. As Liliana Mosca concludes, it is now time to "become conscious of the urgency to spur the political word and that of institutions, businesses and civil society to rethink the current system of world economic development that has always been linked to the food." What is needed is a transformation that responds to environmental requirements and a growing demand for food, but not at the expense of a country like Madagascar and its inhabitants.