The Great Land Grab

While Ottawa is consumed with talk of an election, a troubling development has been occurring in Africa that could witness the hollowing out of the entire continent.  If our Parliament functioned properly this would be big news, but, alas, it’s an overlooked tragedy.Ignored for the last few years, wealthy nations who are running out of farmland are finding a convenient substitute in Africa.  Thirty billion dollars in value, already 20 million hectares of prime agricultural land is being bought up by rich nations.  Called “offshore farms,” they have become enough of a concern that the United Nations is calling for some kind of regulation to be established to keep affluent nations from removing food from the mouths of hungry African citizens.Effectively, the foreign owners grow their needed food supplies miles away on the African continent and then ship them back to their home nation.  Community groups on the continent are beginning to organize as they witness what to them is the food required to feed their families heading out on ships to Europe and Asia.  Poor legal systems exist to protect local landowners and often deals are done with corrupt officials who pocket the money and leave their citizens in poverty.But the main onus lies with those affluent nations who are now practicing a new colonialism.  They naturally seek to keep their enterprises quiet because the thought of taking food away from the mouths of hungry families is the kind of scandal nobody wants to endure.  And yet it’s happening more and more each year, with some nations even renting land in order to produce the food.At first it was thought that offshore farms might well be a way of building up local economies, but many of these nations aren’t in it for Africans but for their own domestic needs and a bottom line serves their purpose.  That's why the community groups are raising their collective voice.At the G8 Development Ministers meeting in Italy last week, I listened as the German representative spoke about this troubling practice and the need to regulate it.  Sadly, it was the only time the subject was raised, thereby leaving the G8 nations talking about the need for more development funds for Africa while at the same time permitting other nations to hollow out the continent’s vast agricultural possibilities for the sake of endless consumption.This is an area where Canada can take a leadership role in the world.  Our agricultural history and the regulatory guidelines that have kept it prosperous and protected equip us as world leaders on this file.  While our own CIDA takes development funds out of a number of nations in Africa, it is ironic that other wealthier nations take out the continent’s food supplies for their own use.  Oversight is clearly required and Canada could hold a key multi-lateral conference in one of our prairie regions to make plans for protecting Africa from losing its economic future crop by crop.  But then that would require all of us in Ottawa to turn away from our own self-created mayhem to listen to the sound of a continent being sucked dry.