 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we have with us Professor Jyothi Ghosh to discuss the new emerging land grab that is taking place in Africa in which the Indian companies are also leading the way. Jyothi, good to have you with us. It appears that Indian companies are doing what global multinationals have been doing much earlier, grabbing land in Africa and it seems that they have gone to the most distressed areas, Ethiopia and Somalia and similar areas. What do you think of this phenomenon that is emerging? Well, this is something that really started 15 years ago I would say with countries like Kuwait and others encouraging their companies to go out and in fact some of times their sovereign investment funds to go out there and acquire land in long term leases. The Indian companies have gotten to this I would say about 10 years ago and have massively expanded their holdings maybe 5 years ago. This is part of a global trend, yes you are right and it is a repetition of if you like the great sort of land grabs that occurred in the 18th and 19th centuries but it is slightly different in this case as well because it reflects a pattern of investment that the Indian corporates would not be allowed to do in India. Basically well above what would be called the land sealing act and so on. Well certainly but you know lease arrangements are not subject to land sealing. What happens in India is that it is harder to get contiguous land on lease because we have stronger small holders and a more complicated kind of land holdings which prevents often the company from leasing in contiguous land. We have more protection of the people who are giving out their land and we have some kinds of controls on corporate activity. What is happening now in a number of these countries especially as you mentioned Ethiopia, Somalia and others is that hundreds of thousands of hectares are being offered by governments at very very low rent. Something like in some of these cases the rent is extraordinary. In Ethiopia for example there are some lease agreements which have recently been released by the government which show that the initial transfer cost is only about 35 dollars per hectare and the annual rent for a 99 year lease is 1 dollar 20 per hectare. Compared to this what would be the Indian for instance per hectare leasing costs? 340-350 dollars per hectare let's say in Punjab for something like that. Now mind you this is largely undeveloped land and the idea is that these are companies that would come and develop it. It is also argued by the Ethiopian government that this is surplus land. We know that's not true. We know that mostly this is grazing land that pastoralists have been effectively evicted from. A large part of it is also cultivated land but it was dry land area. Now imagine if you went to dry land areas of central India and said well this is land that we're just going to take over and we're going to allow a company to come and they will be given access they will be allowed to drill their own pumps and bore wells and get water from the ground and so on. There would be a massive outcry. Also it seems that it's not only bore wells but also dams rivers even those have been promised to the corporates who would invest in land. Well effectively it's not so much promised as they have been allowed to do what they can and the contracts that we have seen some six or eight of them are very hazy on the details. They don't say what kind of payment will be made for this water. It's not even clear that payment will have to be made. If a company chooses to divert a river or to dig a canal from an existing water source there's no restraint whatsoever and there's no clear payment that is to be made. So you're really offering them carte blanche in a way. Are the local communities involved in this transaction in any way or it's purely between the government and the corporate sectors which are going in the corporates which are going in. You see the difficulty in large parts of Africa especially in these so-called land surplus countries is that they really don't they don't have traditional land rights so there isn't a defined ownership and so often they are seen as tenants of the government and so once they have these hazy land rights it really means that the government can do what it likes. Nobody can claim compensation. No one can say well this is my land and you have to give me so much compensation for it. So evictions can occur without often any compensation. What you are saying is no defined land rights in this sense. The traditional rights are not being recognized. Absolutely. That's right. Traditional rights of people communities who have been living there for centuries is ignored and compensations are not clear at all. Most of the lease agreements promise that the government will hand over land free of any encumbrances which is to say that they are promising that they're going to get rid of anybody who claims that they've been living there and settled there or using that land to raise their livestock or pastoralists moving through that in a migratory fashion. All of them will be shall we say cleared off from the premises. You know things like 99 years lease is completely new clothing if I may use an overused word because this is not something which any country would allow today for instance which has at least a strong peasant movement. No country would really allow this kind of leases would they. Yes I mean certainly they wouldn't be allowed in India or we hope that they will not be allowed and there will be a lot of resistance to that in India. But I think it's very important to realize that the companies that are doing this are not companies with a wonderful track record even in India and what is effectively happening is that companies that are interested in the production of oil seeds in the production of maize for biofuel are moving in along with those that are looking for food. And it's really a transfer of a lot of land that was used for traditional staples. In Ethiopia there's teff. A lot of that land was used for teff cultivation which goes into one of their staples you know the Injana which they use as a staple. That is the price has already quadrupled in the last four years basically related to the fact that there's a decline in that kind of production. If you look at it two in two ways one is what's in interest of the government of India they're obviously supporting it there is also a lot of loans which are being extended in that that's one part of it. The government of India's argument what is it what is the government of India's argument for giving this kind of incentives for companies to go out and grab land in Africa? Well you know first of all the government has generally been giving a lot of incentives to domestic investors for our outward foreign investment. Second this is part of a global pattern in fact it's quite extraordinary now every country thinks the Bangladesh Prime Minister recently announced oh you know we should give our country companies subsidies before all the land gets used up. So there's this perception that there's this land that's available to be grabbed and you have to be quickly in on it before some other country like China or Kuwait or Saudi Arabia gets in and grabs this land. That's very much part of it. There is this notion that there will be some greater food security for India. If we actually do grow food crops or oil seeds that are also or pulses which are all problematic in terms of domestic supply I think that's fundamentally misconceived because the way we will get food security is to encourage our smallholders to become more viable to make them actually engage in more viable and sustainable cultivation and there's a whole range of policies you can do for that. Instead of doing that we are basically moving to a corporate pattern of cultivation both internally and externally. What would be the interest of countries like Ethiopia? What what explains a government really sacrificing their own internal traditional communities for this kind of pillage in the larger sense? There is a perception that you know and it's true that relatively speaking these are countries that are land surplus. They're relatively low population density on this land and that this land is not being adequately utilized. Now just like our own government the governments in these countries have this feeling that smallholder agriculture can't do it. So they really are not inclined to promote small-health agriculture. Very few. I mean Malawi is one of the few countries in the region which has recently actively promoted smallholder cultivation. There's this whole perception that corporates are better at it. They'll bring in new technology, they'll bring in capital, they'll bring in infrastructure and that is going to somehow modernize agriculture. I believe it's a false premise but it is a premise that is shared by the Indian government as well. Do you think there is an alternative model in which Indian investment can take place which would be cooperative and not adversarial to the traditional communities of this land? Yes but I don't even really see why you need FDI. I would argue that both in India and in Ethiopia and Somalia, Kenya and all these other countries what you really need to do is to make smallholder cultivation viable, give them access to the best technologies, give them access to sustainable means of cultivation, give them cooperative methods of marketing, access to credit and so on which will enable them to get the economies of scale where they are relevant and that in that sense modernize agriculture. And also higher investment by the state and agriculture? Certainly, absolutely, in infrastructure and so on, higher investment by the state which will be very rapidly recouped. Water is a very critical issue. A lot of the land grab in these countries is really water grab. If you look at it in most of this region the conflicts have really been either about mineral resources or water. All of the recent conflicts which are called civil wars, ethnic conflicts etc. they're either about minerals and diamonds or they're about water. And the recent land grab is ultimately about water. It's about the ability to appropriate the surface water and the groundwater. Water management is critical because it's not just about this generation, it's also about future generations. What's happening today is a completely unplanned extraction of the available water resources especially groundwater. If we look at it this seems to be taking the wheel back and not forward in terms of development for these countries as well as the local communities. Yes and I think it's important for us in India to worry about this not just in terms of international solidarity that of course is the case that we have to be worried that investors from India are behaving in exactly the same way as neocolonial investors from other parts of the world in some of the poorest countries in the world. I think it matters because if these companies can behave in this way in Africa, it's a matter of time before they start behaving in this way in India too. And so we really have to be concerned about the way Indian corporates are being allowed to behave whether in India or outside if we want to preserve any kind of economic justice inside our own country. Thank you very much. We'll come back on this issue again as the things unfold. Thank you.