Land grabs, government, peasant and civil society activism in the Senegal River Valley

Finance

After the formation of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in the 1970s, the world financial system was flush with money. Many African countries found it incredibly easy to borrow for infrastructure projects. Senegal's foreign debt rose from 15.5% of gross domestic profit in 1970 to 99.5% in 1985 (Dembele 2003, pp. 15, 18). During that period Senegal invested over US\(1 billion in massive dam and irrigation projects in the Senegal River Valley (Koopman 2007). Then, suddenly, the World Bank reversed course, reducing its agricultural sector loan portfolio from 30% of total funding in 1980 to a mere 6% in 2006. Bilateral funders followed suit, reducing agricultural loans from 19% of overseas development assistance in 1980 to only 3% in 2003 (Diagne 2011).

Starting in 1984, the World Bank initiated an increasingly invasive programme of structural adjustment forcing the dismantling of agricultural support agencies (Dembele 2003), often with disastrous results. This was evident in the Senegal River Valley, where the government's ability to continue constructing the much-needed irrigation schemes to replace the traditional flood recession agriculture was crippled (Crousse et al. 1991). Support systems that had helped farmers cope with the costs of the high-tech, highly expensive irrigated rice production systems were gradually weakened to the point that by 2003, most farmers had to give up producing rice. Families coped by sending their sons abroad in search of income (Lavigne Delville 1991).

Since the 2008 global food crisis, foreign funds have begun to trickle back into the agricultural sector, but there is a hitch: the ‘big’ money comes with conditions resembling those of the much-despised structural adjustment era. The US Millennium Challenge Corporation's US\)500 million grants, for example, are conditioned on government acceptance of land tenure systems that take customarily owned land from peasant-pastoralist community control and make it into a commodity that can be sold or leased for 100 years to anyone who can ‘invest’ in it, including foreign agribusiness. This new aid scenario contains a veiled, but ominous threat made explicit by Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food: ‘the alternative that is sometimes presented to us [is] either you accept large-scale investments in agriculture, or you deprive yourselves of all investment whatsoever’ (La Via Campesina 2012, p. 15). De Schutter suggests that countries try to channel investment into agricultural support systems that benefit family farmers – crop processing, storage facilities, and feeder roads – but these are rarely the types of investments that private investors seeking high profits want to make. Clearly it is not easy for governments to resist pressure from the World Bank and bilateral funders to make their economies friendlier to foreign investment, including investment in industrial agriculture.

How can African governments refuse foreign aid with unacceptable strings attached and still make the heavy investments in agriculture, energy, and transportation that their populations are demanding (Niang 2012)? Are there other sources of funding? Yes. Today, a growing number of Africans are becoming wealthy. But to mobilise privately held resources for public, rather than private investments in agriculture, government must tax richer Africans more effectively, curtail high-level corruption, and stem illegal capital flight. The Forum Civil – the Senegalese affiliate of Transparency International – estimates that US$900 million was illegally sent abroad under President Wade's government alone (Radio France International 2012a). Senegal's new president, Macky Sall, has begun a process to return and tax these monies and to punish high-level corruption, two moves that have proved highly popular.

The promotion of elite farming: internal land grabs under former President Wade

In response to the global food price crisis of 2008, President Wade created GOANA, the Grand Agricultural Offensive for Food and Abundance. Touted as a massive programme to solve Senegal's food production problems, GOANA actually focused on getting top ministers, civil servants, businessmen, and rich emigrants to take up ‘modern’ commercial farming by giving them land and heavily subsidising their production costs. Since 2008, a huge number of land transfers have been approved by rural councils, the elected local bodies authorised to allocate land. During the Wade era (2000–2012), 16% of Senegal's arable land, over 400,000 hectares, was taken from local peasants and given to ‘people who can invest in it’ (Faye et al. 2011, p. 15, Sané 2012). Using a provision of the national land law of 1964 that stipulates that land cannot be alienated except where it has not been ‘developed’ (mise en valeur) – an ambiguous concept often interpreted as meaning investment in irrigation, machines, and buildings – the Wade government instructed rural councils to alienate land from peasant farmers and pastoralists, who by common knowledge lacked resources to ‘develop’ it, in order to allocate it to wealthy foreign or national ‘investors’, who, by definition, did. The president of the Diama Rural Council told land grab researchers: ‘We cannot refuse to allocate land to private investors because it's the state that has demanded that we give land to those who can develop it’ (Faye et al. 2011, p. 27).

In a now famous case in the Senegal River Delta, in 2009, the Mbane Rural Council allocated more land to top government leaders and other elites than the rural community actually had (Sidy 2011). The local outcry resulted in the opposition party's victory in Mbane's 2009 local elections. Yet when the newly elected rural council tried to annul the land allocations to government elites, President Wade countered with an administrative order that split the rural community itself and reinstated the rural council he favoured. Wade's fierce determination to protect his elite allies has created so much political and social tension that few of the new land holders in Mbane have tried to fence ‘their’ farms or to break ground, much less ‘develop’ the land (Sarr 2012). Meanwhile, Mbane's peasant population has gained support from Senegalese non-governmental organisations (NGOs) who have made a powerful video featuring the voices of the local population. In May 2012, the newly installed Macky Sall government rescinded Wade's administrative order that split the Mbane rural community and facilitated the land grabs. While this move has been hailed as ‘re-establishing justice’, it is not yet clear how it will affect the land that national elites still claim (Fall 2012). Macky Sall's government has not yet provided a clear policy statement on how it will proceed in cases where land has been transferred to investors who ‘have the capacity to develop it’ but have not done so (Radio France International 2012b).

Pressure on the Sall government to rescind land grabs by the national elite is rising. Peasants and pastoralists who have lost their land, only to see it left idle, are increasingly angry and willing to take action. In a fascinating case, 12 peasants who lost their land when President Wade himself took 2070 hectares from 99 peasants five years ago, have directly challenged their dispossession. In February 2012, when Wade was still in power, they cut the fences to an uncultivated portion of the president's ‘farm’, telling the press that they planned to clear the land and plant their crops. All 12 were arrested and jailed for trespassing and destroying the property of another. They were released just before the presidential elections, but the charges have not been dropped (Thiam 2012, Agence de Presse Sénégalaise 2012a).

Buying loyalty: the seed and fertiliser scandals

President Wade's Grand Offensive for Food and Abundance (GOANA) raised subsidies for seeds to 80%. In 2010, the government also distributed huge amounts of free seed to elite farmers – especially those with high government positions, with amounts ranging from three to 14 tons per person (Faye 2010)! The director of ISRA, the Senegalese Institute of Agricultural Research which produces certified seeds, justified these allocations by saying:

Indeed, the entire agricultural input subsidy programme has become extremely problematic. The diversion and misuse of subsidised inputs has grown to the point that Senegal's most important peasant federation, the Conseil National de Concertation et de Coopération des Ruraux (CNCR), has actually demanded that the government end its subsidy programme (CNCR interviews March 2011). This demand speaks to the incredible level of inequities in a programme that accounts for over half the total agricultural budget (Benkahla 2011). The Macky Sall government, while retaining the subsidies, has responded by trying to develop, in partnership with the World Bank, a system that will trace exactly who has received subsidised seeds and how many hectares each recipient has planted. There has not, however, been any government programme to replace expensive, petro-based chemical inputs by promoting agro-ecological agriculture. This may be, in part, due to the power of the California vision.

The California vision

African elites have long equated modern agriculture with huge fields, tractors, hybrid seeds, fertilisers, and irrigation. From as early as the 1960s, the socialist government popularised its investments in dams and irrigation by saying they would make the Senegal River Valley into the California of the Sahel (Koopman 2007). The first Senegalese California vision was not, however, a vision of industrial agriculture. It was a modern, pump-based irrigation programme for African peasant farmers in the Senegal River Valley. As recounted in the previous Briefing, Senegal's expensive irrigation schemes were initially very popular. Unfortunately, when government support was gradually pruned away, the whole system slowly, but surely, imploded. Today, after 30 years of massive infrastructure investments, the Senegalese government has not been able to achieve high levels of sustainable output from a ‘modern’ irrigated rice sector without providing huge subsidies. I have argued that this is due to excessive inputs costs, with those who designed the petrol and input-dependent irrigation schemes getting the economics wrong.

Nonetheless, the California vision still lives. Former President Wade evoked it in December 2011 when he promised to make the Ile à Morphil, a fertile, but isolated and impoverished island in the Senegal River Delta, into the ‘California of Senegal’ (Kane 2011a). Moreover, Wade's vision was not of a California of small peasant farms, but of something that more closely resembled the real California with large fields and machines, but this time managed by foreigners. This is the California vision for which peasants are being asked to give up their land in exchange for wage work on large commercial farms.

What kind of jobs will these be?² Interviews that Iba Mar Faye and I conducted in March 2011 with farm workers on foreign-run vegetable farms in the Senegal River Valley found that the wage for field workers was less than US$4.00 a day, an amount that villagers said was not enough to purchase the food needed for a single meal for the typical family of 10 to 15 persons. Unsurprisingly, then, the push for industrial agriculture is fiercely resisted by Senegal's federation of peasant organisations, the CNCR. ‘We refuse the attempt to turn us into agricultural labourers on our own land!’ (Interviews with CNCR leaders, March 2011).³

At the same time that peasant leaders are fighting the threat of displacement by large-scale industrial agriculture, Macky Sall's new government is being insistently pushed toward it. The World Bank has recently loaned Senegal US$80 million to support private agro-business (Sy and Niasse 2012). AGRA, the Gates Foundation's Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, has provided US\(3 million to train 120 researchers and doctoral candidates in agricultural economics so that they can ‘contribute to a globally competitive agriculture’ (Sane 2012).

The case of Fanaye: a farmer-pastoralist community struggling against a land grab

The story of the Fanaye community's struggle to save its land shows how farmers and pastoralists both have vital interests in pastures and forests that investors see as empty; how foreign investors and state agencies collude against local communities; how the highly emotional as well as economic issues of land loss can easily lead to violence; and how local opponents of land grabs attract attention and gain allies as they struggle to retain and protect their land. It also shows how wealthy national investors in a foreign-controlled project can mobilise to put pressure on even a reform-oriented government like Macky Sall's to support land grabs that local communities vehemently oppose.

The rural community of Fanaye is made up of 47 villages strung along 80 miles of the only highway on the Senegal side of the Senegal River. Senethanol, a biofuel company owned by an Italian investor, wanted to take over 20,000 hectares, a third of the Fanaye rural community's land. Before making its bid, Senethanol got support from a group of Senegalese investors who currently hold 49% of Senethanol's shares (Cadre de Réflexion et d'Action sur le Foncier au Sénégal/CRAFS 2011).

An agreement between Senethanol and the president of the Fanaye Rural Council was signed on 30 March 2011. It stated that 300 hectares would be available to Senethanol a month later. The rest of the 20,000 hectares would be taken over between 2011 and 2015. Senethanol agreed to pay US\)50 a hectare to the rural council and US$1.6 million for social investments that might include a school, a health centre, and a mosque (Protocole d'Accord 2011). In May, before any of the rural councillors, village chiefs, peasants or pastoralists, were notified about this agreement with Senethanol, a letter from the Minister of Decentralisation and Local Communities gave a favourable opinion on the 20,000 hectare land transfer (CRAFS 2011).

In June, the president of the rural council convened a meeting with only 24 hours notice. After a heated discussion, 23 rural councillors voted for the agreement with 21 against. Three were absent (Kane 2011c). The 47 village chiefs in the rural council area had not been informed of the meeting and were not present. Soon after the June meeting, people from the Fanaye community living in Dakar became alarmed about what they saw as a massive land grab. They formed a ‘Committee for the Defence of Fanaye’ and on 1 August they organised a large and peaceful protest march along the national highway that runs through Fanaye (Kane 2011c).

The Defence Committee also commissioned an investigation by CRAFS, a newly formed coalition of professional researchers, human rights activists, and representatives from Senegal's powerful peasant-pastoralist federation (CNCR), who sent a committee to Fanaye from 21 to 24 August 2011. The committee's findings illustrate a common disconnect between investors’ perceptions and peasant/pastoralist lived realities. The technical director of Senethanol said that he had just toured the area and had received a favourable response to his proposed investment from nearly all those he interviewed. He also claimed that several young farmers said that the 20,000 hectares which Senethanol had been granted were ‘unused’. The CRAFS committee, however, found classified forests, wetlands, and a rich flora and fauna in those 20,000 hectares, which, while not farmed, were used on a daily basis by hunters, by women gathering medicinal plants, firewood, and wild foods, and, most importantly, by Fanaye's pastoralists whose herds of cattle, sheep, goats, and horses are among the largest in the entire country (CRAFS 2011).

In early October, Senethanol began cutting down trees. Seeing this, a shocked young pastoralist attacked one of the Senethanol workers with his sabre. On 26 October 2011, an extremely violent confrontation broke out during a meeting of the rural council. Two people were killed and over 20 wounded (Kane 2011d). Two days later, the prime minister attempted to calm the situation by meeting in Dakar with people from Fanaye. Women and young people attended in great numbers. When the prime minister announced that the president would suspend the Senethanol project, people were not satisfied. They demanded that the project be abandoned (Agence de Presse Sénégalaise 2011).

In November, Senethanol's opponents took their case to the Supreme Court. It is unimaginable, they asserted, that by using the pretext of creating jobs, a bio-fuels project is implanted in a zone where people can barely nourish themselves. Agricultural workers get only ‘slave wages’, so young men from Fanaye will still have to migrate to find decent work. The project, by taking the community's land, also represents a danger to both future generations and current residents, especially to pastoralists whose livelihoods depend on the community's pastures, wetlands and forests. The court documents also pointed out that the proposed project location is in an area that had been designated a priority agro-pastoral zone under a community planning document called the Plan for the Occupation and Allocation of Land (POAS), adopted in 2006. The farmers and pastoralists who helped develop the POAS land use plan had been led to believe that it would protect their customary land rights (Ndiaye 2011).

On 22 November 2011, President Wade met with 50 Senethanol opponents from Fanaye. After hearing their report, he said that only now had he begun to understand that ‘Senethanol had not followed his principles for investment’ (Kane 2011e). Wade promised to suspend the project definitively.

One would think, therefore, that the battle was over. However, after President Wade lost the second round of the presidential election to Macky Sall in March 2012, the Senethanol project popped up again. In July 2012, President Sall suddenly asked his government to ‘make an arrangement with the Senegalese–Italian company that conforms to the interests of Senegal’ (Agence de Presse Sénégalaise 2012b). In August, a new site was announced for Senethanol's 20,000 hectare project in the special wildlife preserve of Ndiael, an area covering the villages of Gnith, Ronkh and Diama in the Senegal River Delta. There was an immediate outcry. Salif Ka, spokesperson for the youth of the three villages targeted, rejected the project in no uncertain terms. ‘We don't have enough land for our own agriculture and livestock…. We want peace and we are not against investment, but we will protect our land. Whoever comes here will find us in his way … ready to block, to our last breath, the installation of this project’ (Diop2012a). A week later, on 9 August 2012, Enda-Pronat, a leading NGO in the anti-land grab struggle in Senegal, and Rencontre africaine pour la défense des droits de l'homme (RADDHO), a well-known human rights organisation, held a press conference to denounce ‘the delocalization of the Fanaye project’ (Agence de Presse Sénégalaise 2012e). Nonetheless, on 1 September, the government announced that the project would go ahead; there would, however, be extensive consultations with the communities about the content of the contract with Senethanol. Meanwhile the land clearing machines had already begun their work (Diop 2012b). Nevertheless, the local opposition to the proposed 20,000 hectare land grab did not let up. When the Senethanol project was allocated 10,000 hectares rather than 20,000 (Lo 2012), local residents said the project still encroached on their pastureland. On 1 November 2012, a large crowd gathered to protest the project, and the police used tear gas to disperse them (Agence de Presse Sénégalaise 2012d).

The fact that Macky Sall allowed the Senethanol project to be revived and relocated even in the face of local opposition suggests there are some very powerful people among the Senegalese who hold 49% of the Italian company's shares. The spokesperson for the new group of villagers opposing the Senethanol project alluded to these people when he said, ‘there are a certain number of intermediaries who, for personal [clientélistes] reasons, want to facilitate the implantation of this project in a zone that they don't even know’ (Diop 2012a).

Which way will the Macky Sall government ultimately go?

In April 2012, Macky Sall won his presidential bid by a large margin. But since he had to form a large political coalition to win, and because Wade's profligate pre-election spending nearly drained the government coffers dry, President Sall has continued the long-standing tradition of using government funds to solidify his political power. He recently bought US$90,000 all-terrain vehicles for each of the 150 new parliamentarians – quite a perk on top of their US$4000 a month salaries (Diop G.N. 2012). On the other hand, in September he decided to abolish the 75-member senate and to used the funds saved to aid the victims of recent floods. This move was highly acclaimed.

During the campaign, candidate Sall made strong commitments to build rural roads, improve the electrical grid, extend rural water supplies, and build more irrigation schemes. As the new president begins to implement these promises, his government has a huge need for funds. Thus, we should not be surprised that President Sall is actively seeking foreign investment in agribusiness. This, of course, has implications not only for government policy, but also for land reform. Peasants want a land reform that will protect them from land grabs. The largest foreign funders – the World Bank, the United States and the European Union – want a land reform that will allow foreign investors to gain secure access to large areas of land. The Sall government is squarely in this camp.

The continuation of land grabs under the Macky Sall government raises the pressing issue of land reform. Current land law gives peasant communities little, if any, land security – a crucial issue in the face of the government's desire to reallocate their land to ‘investors’. Recent press reports suggest that both peasant organisations and civil society are mobilising to put pressure on government to work with rural populations to craft a land reform that will give peasants and pastoralists land security (Agence de Presse Sénégalaise 2012e). These groups do not, however, have a unified set of demands. A critical unresolved problem is how to deal with centuries-old cultural norms that place decisions on land use in the hands of a class-based patriarchal gerontocracy. This makes the problem of securing the land rights of women, younger men, artisans, and people descended from slaves very difficult.

Land reform will undoubtedly be a big issue in the coming months and years, even though it may be an issue that the current government, like the Wade government, would prefer to put off. After all, as the late Ndiogou Fall, a tireless leader of the peasant federation, emphasised to me in a March 2011 interview, the current situation puts a great deal of power in the hands of the government as the sole legal ‘owner’ of peasant and pastoralist ‘occupied’ land. Still, the increasingly determined pushback from communities whose land is coveted by ‘land grabbers’, will surely push land reform into the queue of priorities the government simply cannot ignore.