Land grabs – the new colonialism? (2009)

From the July 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalist states have started to acquire land outside their borders again.

At the start of capitalism land was grabbed on a large scale by Europeans in the Americas, Africa and Asia – wherever there were useful, desirable, valuable resources. Never mind the indigenous populations, they could be bought off cheaply or cowed into submission militarily. Accumulation was the name of the game, on behalf of powerful states and royal families.

Colonies sprang up worldwide explaining, among other things, the curious spread of different languages from relatively tiny nations to huge continents across oceans – English, Spanish, Portuguese and French – and ultimately to the use of English/American as the global business language.

It is now widely recognised that colonialism was responsible for subjugating local populations, imposing governmental and legal systems and generally exploiting and expropriating whatever natural abundance or rare animal, vegetable or mineral matter happened to be discovered. As time went on the exploitation was taken over by corporations and continues not only unabated but increasingly rapacious, bringing commodities to customers worldwide, degrading environments worldwide and impoverishing populations worldwide whilst enriching a tiny minority.

Now local populations are starting to fight back, to protest against their treatment as second-class or non-citizens, demanding land and water rights. Populations from China to South America and many places in between are in struggles against domestic or transnational mining corporations, against governments over population dispersal for big dams and Special Economic Zones, against food corporations and agribusiness trying to enforce small farmers’ removal from their land in order to grow mono-crops for food and bio-fuels specifically for export.

Against this back-drop of “peasant/worker awakening” is the very latest emergence of a new form of colonialism – of land-grab – by “food insecure” governments fearing for the future of their own populations’ food needs and also by food corporations and private investors looking for new ways to make profits in this current economic crisis. Since March 2008 “high-level officials” from countries such as Saudi Arabia, Japan, China, India, South Korea, Libya and Egypt have been visiting countries with fertile farmland including Uganda, Brazil, Cambodia, Sudan and Pakistan to strike deals which guarantee them sole use of farmland to grow crops for export back to their own lands. The reciprocity is foreign investment or oil or technology deals.

Another angle to this new colonialism – financial returns – is seeing all manner of players getting involved, seeking a new avenue for profit; investment houses, hedge funds, grain traders and others from the finance and food industries, all looking to take control of fertile soil with access to water supply in foreign lands. Whilst governments are largely the ones making the deals for food security it has been made plain that it is the private sector that will control the enterprises. Likewise, the hunt for financial returns is the business of private investors. In both cases foreign private corporations will be taking control of farmland to produce food not for the local communities but for export back to the investor countries. Another form of accumulation by driving more local farmers from their land and stealing their livelihoods.

Here are three examples of deals struck so far (a full report is available from www.grain.org plus an annex in table form of over 100 cases of land-grab for offshore food production; online there is also a notebook of full-text news clippings being added to continuously to which people can contribute by emailing landgrab@grain.org).

First, China has sealed 30 agricultural cooperation deals which gives them access to “friendly country” farmland in exchange for Chinese technology, training and infrastructure development funds, in Kazakhstan, Queensland, Mozambique and the Philippines (to mention a few) and to which China flies in its own farmers, scientists and extension workers to grow rice, soya beans and maize as well as sugar cane, cassava and sorghum as bio-fuel crops.

Second, the Gulf States, short of water and productive soil but rich in oil and money, have been hard hit by the simultaneous rise in world food prices and fall in the US dollar to which (most) of their currencies are pegged. Their collective strategy has been to make deals particularly with other Islamic countries to which they will supply oil and capital in exchange for guarantees to farmland from which they can export the crops back home. Deals have been and continue to be made with Sudan, Pakistan and others in SE Asia, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Uganda, Ukraine, Brazil and others. From the millions of hectares of farmland already leased under contract harvests are expected to begin this year, particularly of rice and wheat.

Third, India’s corporate agribusinesses and the government-owned State Trading Corporation are looking to produce oilseed crops, pulses and cotton abroad. One deal with Burma to enable India to have total control of the agricultural process entails providing Burma with funds to upgrade its port infrastructure. They are also doing deals with Indonesia for palm oil plantations, talking to Uruguay, Paraguay and Brazil about land for growing pulses and soya beans for export back home.

How will the indigenous populations react to this latest threat? This aggressive new policy of colonisation of land specifically for export crops and speculation is bound to increase pressure on local populations, more of whom will be struggling to feed their families working for wages, if so lucky, at a pittance level. Populations who don’t need to be bought off cheaply this time because their own governments will willingly sell them out and who can easily be subdued militarily should the need arise, this time by the self-same government’s police and armed forces.

Janet Surman

Middle East: Thirsting for conflict (1999)

From the February 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ismail Seageldin, vice-president of the World Bank, made a disturbing prediction in 1995: “Many of the wars this century were about oil, but the wars of the next century will be about water.” It was a comment that was to find many echoes at a meeting of UN hydrologists and meteorologists, convened by UNESCO in London back in November.

According to scientists, 7 percent of the world’s people do not have enough water to survive. With the world’s population set to rise by an India every ten years, by the year 2050, with a global population in excess of 10 billion, 70 percent will have an insufficient supply of water.

With similar facts in front of them, the London meeting agreed to a decade-long campaign to highlight the case for urgent action. UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme) has already started the ball rolling and committed itself to making water disputes a priority, currently mediating in disputes in the Zambezi river basin and in the stand-off between Peru and Bolivia over access to Lake Titicaca.

From Africa, which has 19 of the 25 countries with the greatest number of people lacking access to clean water, to Central Asia, where 5 countries contest the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, conflict could indeed break out at any moment, and ironically over the world’s most abundant resource.

There is so much water that, shared out, each person could have 100 billion litres. Of course, 97 percent of this is sea water, and of the remainder only 0.8 percent is accessible. Still, taking into account that a person’s annual requirement is one million litres, there is still enough. The point is that it is not evenly distributed throughout the world and some countries control much greater resources than others. If we add to this the fact that three-quarters goes on growing food, and that a lot is lost through drainage, poorly constructed channels and evaporation, then we really understand UNEP spokesman Klaus Topfer when he declares that the “potential for water disputes is great and the issue needs urgent political action” (Guardian, 2 November 1998).

Egypt anticipates that its population will double to 110 million within 35 years. Even now it is faced with a water shortage and has for some time imported “virtual water”—grain and other foodstuffs which removes the necessity to use water for home-grown food. Egypt finds itself in the unique position of being totally dependent on the Nile, a river whose flow and tributaries are controlled by 8 other countries.

Already, Egypt has rattled its sabre at Ethiopia, which controls 80 percent of the supply and which has embarked upon a series of dams and irrigation schemes along the Blue Nile and, which if extended, would also interfere with Sudan’s supply.

With Egypt looking to irrigate reclaimed desert along its northern coast and needing to increase its share of Nile water by 15 billion cubic metres per year, and with a further 8 countries seeking to increase their share, it takes no great leap in the imagination to see how water is increasingly dominating Egypt’s foreign policy and why Egypt sees the taking of more water by its neighbours as an act of war.

At the other end of the scale, Turkey possesses an abundance of water and has primary control over the flow of the Tigris and Euphrates—rivers that both Syria and Iraq are heavily dependent on.

In 1984, Turkey began the South Eastern Antollia Project at a cost of £20 billion—a mammoth effort to construct 22 dams, 19 hydro-electric plants and thousands of miles of irrigation channels.

As Turkey directs more and more water for its own use, Syria and Iraq feel that should they upset their northern neighbour, water could be used as a weapon, and thus are anxious not to upset the controller of their water supply. Turkey has already used its control of Syria’s water to great effect, forcing Syria to withdraw its support for the Turkish Guerrilla movement, the PKK. And it’s a fair bet that Turkey’s political might will be felt further in the region when the 1984-begun project nears its completion in 2005.

Forty percent of Israel’s water depends on territory occupied in 1967 and still not handed back. Studies of hydrologists’ maps further reveal a pattern of settlement construction in the “occupied territories” along the ridges of aquifers suggesting a wider Israeli game plan to control an increasing share of the region’s water.

Interestingly, at a time when Israel is losing interest in Gaza, it can be found that Gaza’s groundwater is sinking by 8 inches per year. Just as it’s a fact that Israel controls 80 percent of the Palestinian water supply, so too do we find 26 percent of Palestinians with no access to clean water while the average Israeli consumes three-and-a-half times as much water as those Palestinians fortunate to have access.

Meanwhile, Israel’s continuing control of the Golan Heights and south eastern Lebanon enables it to guard a series of pumps and pipelines which moves the Jordan’s water throughout Israel and as far north as the Negev desert.

Israel’s case is echoed the world over. In the former Soviet Union, while the Aral sea continues to shrink because of HEP plants and irrigation, five countries are becoming increasingly dependent on its diminishing waters.

Sensing trouble ahead, the UN adopted a convention on international waters in 1997—basically a framework for sharing rivers and lakes. Before it can become operational it requires 35 signatories. So far only 11 have signed—such is the reluctance of governments to sign such a valuable resource away.

In an age when we have the scientific and technological know how to enable us to solve almost all our problems, it is indeed an indictment on capitalism that so many humans, living on a planet, seven eighths of which is covered in water, have so little access to it. With the ever-present drive to cut costs and make profits, it is little wonder that better irrigation and improved channels are as rare as desalination plants and reservoirs? What wars our master will plunge us into in the coming millennium is anyone’s guess, but among them don’t be alarmed if the cause of many is water and its control by a profit-crazed élite.

John Bissett

War on the Nile? (2014)

From the May 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

When Egypt’s now deposed president Mohamed Morsi said in June 2013 that ‘all options’ including military intervention were on the table if Ethiopia continued to develop dams on the Nile River, many dismissed it as posturing. But some experts claim Cairo is deadly serious about defending its historic water allotment, and if Ethiopia proceeds with construction of what is set to become Africa’s largest hydroelectric dam, a military strike is not out of the question.

Last May some Egyptian parliamentarians were calling for sending commandos or arming local insurgents to sabotage the dam project unless Ethiopia halts construction of its £2.9 billion ($4.2 bn) Grand Renaissance Dam in 2011. Former president Hosni Mubarak made plans for an air strike on any dam that Ethiopia built on the Nile, and in 2010 established an airbase in southeastern Sudan as a staging point for just such an operation, according to emails from Wikileaks. Sudan however now backs Ethiopia’s plans so that military option is no longer available.

‘It is a matter of life or death, a national security issue that can never be compromised on,’ says foreign ministry spokesman Badr Abdelatty (www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-26679225).

Egypt is totally dependent on the Nile. Without it, there effectively is no Egypt. To Ethiopia, the new dam is a source of national pride and the hydro-electric power it will produce is essential to its economic future.

‘Ethiopia’s move was unprecedented. Never before has an upstream state unilaterally built a dam without downstream approval,’ Ayman Shabaana of the Cairo-based Institute for Africa Studies had told IPS news agency last June. ‘If other upstream countries follow suit, Egypt will have a serious water emergency on its hands’ (www.ipsnews.net/2014/03/egypt-prepares-force-nile-flow)

Egypt fears that the new dam, which will begin operation in 2017, will reduce the downstream flow of the Nile, on which 85 million Egyptians rely for almost all of their water needs. Citing a pair of colonial-era treaties, Egypt argues that it is entitled to no less than two-thirds of the Nile’s water and has veto power over any upstream water projects such as dams or irrigation networks. Accords drawn up by the British in 1929 and amended in 1959 divvied up the Nile’s waters between Egypt and Sudan without ever consulting the upstream states that were the source of those waters. The 1959 agreement awarded Egypt 55.5 billion cubic metres of the Nile’s 84 billion cubic metre average annual flow, while Sudan received 18.5 billion cubic metres. Another 10 billion cubic metres is lost to evaporation in Lake Nasser, which was created by Egypt’s Aswan High Dam in the 1970s, leaving barely a drop for the nine other states that share the Nile’s waters.

The desire for a more equitable distribution of Nile water rights resulted in the 2010 Entebbe Agreement, which replaces water quotas with a clause that permits all activities provided they do not ‘significantly’ impact the water security of other Nile Basin states. Five upstream countries – Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda – signed the accord. Burundi signed a year later. Egypt rejected the new treaty outright. Cairo now finds itself in the uncomfortable position of watching its mastery over the Nile’s waters slip through its fingers.

While the treaty’s water allocations appear gravely unfair to upstream Nile states, analysts point out that unlike the mountainous equatorial countries, which have alternative sources of water, the desert countries of Egypt and Sudan rely almost entirely on the Nile for their water needs. But upstream African states have their own growing populations to feed, and the thought of tapping the Nile for their agriculture or drinking water needs is all too tempting.

As we said in an earlier article: ‘Scarcity of any resource that is vital for the production of profits could be, and has been, seen by states as a reason to go to war’ (Socialist Standard, December 2012). The waters of the Nile may well be the cause of another conflict.

ALJO

War, Weapons and Water (2012)

From the December 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Whisky is for drinking; water is for fighting over.’ (Mark Twain)

The BBC in November 1999 reported on a UN Development Programme which argued that potential ‘water wars are likely in areas where rivers and lakes are shared by more than one country’. Speaking in New Delhi in March 2001 the then Secretary General of the UN, Kofi Annan, predicted that: ‘if we are not careful, future wars are going to be about water and not about oil.’ John Reid, Minister for Defence warned in 2006 that: ‘climate change may spark conflict between nations – and … British armed forces must be ready to tackle the violence,’ Independent (28/02/06).  And in March of this year in the Guardian Energy Secretary, Ed Davies stated that: ‘I have a fear for the world that climate instability drives political instability,’ and continued by saying: ‘The pressure of that makes conflict more likely.’ Mark Twain may have got it right then.

The Pacific Institute (worldwater.org) underline Twain’s words through their chronology of 225 entries from 3000 BC to 2010 of violent conflicts relating to water. Water and air are the two necessities of human life. Fortunately, only water has evolved into private property and only recently as a commodity for sale on the market. Fortune magazine extols its virtues as a commodity: ‘One of the world's great business opportunities. It promises to be to the 21^st century what oil was to the 20^th’ (CBC News, 02/03). Which might give Kofi Annan something to brood over.

The origins of conflicts over water developed with the ownership of domestic livestock and the growth of agriculture several thousand years ago. Water had gradually taken on an economic character. Thus, when grazing pasture and natural watering holes dry up, and farmers seem to be flourishing, then peaceful cooperation inevitably stops working. Latterly, under capitalism, the procuring, extracting, treating, storing and delivery of water has a cost and, as Fortune magazine points out, a profit is expected in return. If supplies of any commodity become short, it can be expected that the price will rise.

Growth is as important to capitalism as water is to a human being. And water is a crucial element in any future growth of capitalism. Global capitalists compete to harness and control water because it is an indispensable component for commercial fisheries, agriculture, manufacturing and tourism, and most importantly it is a source of energy through hydroelectric power, which at present supplies around 6 per cent of the world’s commercial energy. But this commodity is becoming scarce. A CIA report in 2000 predicted that ‘By 2015 nearly half the world's population –more than 3 billion people –will live in countries that are 'water-stressed' –- have less than 1,700 cubic meters of water per capita per year –mostly in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and northern China’ (sourcewatch.org).

In Africa, The Okavango Basin is a source of tension between Botswana and Namibia. Both countries are victims of drought and Namibia has already built a water canal and has proposed building a pipeline to divert water from the river back into Namibia. At stake for Botswana is its only source of water and an expanding income from tourism. Namibia argues that it is entitled to any water that flows through its country. Egypt’s economy is highly dependent on agriculture and thus the distribution of the waters of the Nile. Egypt claims to have a historical right to the Nile, but upstream, Ethiopia and Sudan see matters differently. The former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak threatened in 1989 to send demolition squads to destroy a projected dam in Ethiopia, and ‘The Egyptian army still has jungle warfare brigades, even though they have no jungle’ (aljazeera.com/).

In the Middle East just one per cent of the world’s water is competed for by five per cent of its population. Thus, the former Israeli Prime Minister, General Ariel Sharon, could state that, ‘People generally regard 5 June 1967 as the day the six-day war began. That is the official date. But, in reality, it started two- and-a-half years earlier, on the day Israel decided to act against the diversion of the Jordan.’ And in 1979 following the signing of the peace treaty with Israel, President Anwar Sadat said that ‘Egypt will never go to war again, except to protect its water resources’. Likewise King Hussein of Jordan stated that ‘he will never go to war with Israel again except over water’ (mideastnews.com). Israel maintains control over the River Jordan and has restricted supplies during times of scarcity as the people of the Palestinian Territories will validate.

The Euphrates River has been a regional flashpoint for a number of years. Minor skirmishes had been fought between Syria and Iraq over water rights. In May 1975 tensions were ratcheted up when both sides massed troops on their borders following Syria’s claim that Iraq had reduced the flow of water by 50%. In January 1990 Turkey shut off the flow of the Euphrates for 30 days by closing the gates of the Ataturk Dam. And in 1998 distrust, which some observers believed could lead to hostilities, arose because of Turkish plans to build dams that could be used to control supplies to downstream Syria. The escalating scarcity of water in the region has done nothing to improve this situation.

China and India’s economic growth is jealously eyed by other capitalist states. With the predicted consequences of climate change and faster glacial melt factored into the thinking of state planners, alternative methods for power, such as hydroelectricity, have been a strategic dynamic in their efforts to maintain future levels of growth. Power shortages are acting as a constraint on India’s factory output. Outages are frequent and for an economy that is already slowing a serious handicap. And, of course, the damming of rivers brings with it control: a useful adjunct to cheap power.

China and India boast two of the world’s mightiest armies who fought a brief border war in 1962. Both stand poised over tensions concerning upstream Chinese proposals to divert water from the Brahmaputra River. The Brahmaputra flows from its source in the Himalayas into Eastern India where it unites with the Ganges. To the east The Kishanganga River thunders down through Northern Kashmir to The Kishanganga Hydroelectric Plant, which was constructed to divert water from the river to a power plant in the Jhelum River basin. The Kishanganga flows on down past one of the world’s most heavily defended borders into Pakistan. The Pakistan state is concerned that the dam will have a detrimental effect on the flow of the river. Water has long been a source of strain between India and Pakistan.

Meanwhile China is also busy in Southeast Asia, along with Laos, in constructing dams over the Mekong River to the alarm of downstream states. Moreover China has built almost 20 dams, and around 40 more are planned, on the eight Tibetan rivers. It is believed that hydropower alone is not the only motive for China’s increasing control over the sources of rivers.

In a society that is awash with weapons that come in various guises, water might appear to be less menacing than many. However, water is now talked of as a ‘Political Weapon’, which is synonymous with the deceptive language conjured up by the school of wordsmiths who gave birth to the snappy idiom, ‘The Nuclear Deterrent’. Brahma Chellaney, the author of the book ‘Water: Asia's New Battlefield’ has asserted, ‘Whether China intends to use water as a political weapon or not, it is acquiring the capability to turn off the tap if it wants to – a leverage it can use to keep any riparian neighbours on good behaviour.’

Problems globally will be exacerbated with the expected rise in grain and oilseed prices as US crops suffer from the country's worst drought since 1936 and the farming regions of South America and Russia suffer similar water shortages (Daily Telegraph, 5 September). According to Rabobanks’ commodities analysts, ‘By June 2013, the basket of food prices tracked by the United Nations could climb 15pc from current levels.’ Rising food prices are always a source of social discontent and thus political instability.

A growing number of environmental writers and strategic analysts view water as a potential trigger for future wars. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in 2007 stated that: ‘The consequences for humanity are grave. Water scarcity threatens economic and social gains and is a potent fuel for wars and conflict.’

Socialists view war as the last resort for states. Scarcity of any resource that is vital for the production of profits could be, and has been, seen by states as a reason to go to war.

Andy Matthews

Pathfinders Column: High and Dry (2006)

The Pathfinders column from the October 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Water World 1

"We were just standing around in our shorts, stunned and amazed, trying to make sense of it". Thus spoke one Inuit villager, on describing winter temperatures of 9 degress celsius that should have been -30 degrees celsius (Independent on Sunday, 27 August). As the Arctic warms up twice as fast as the rest of the world, and sea ice has shrunk in area by a quarter and in thickness by a half, its inhabitants are discovering that their igloos are heat traps, their water supply needs wells and their workplaces need air-conditioning. Meanwhile Greenland farmers - for they do exist - are starting to grow broccoli, cauliflower and Chinese cabbage, while having to make up, among their thousand words for reindeer, some new words for the salmon which are appearing in their rivers, and the barn owls, hornets and robins which are now adventuring to the far north. What the Inuit think of global warming can be surmised by the number of their houses and snowmobiles that have started falling through the ice, and one can easily see why they think "the world is slowly disintegrating." Meanwhile in Siberia, roads and buildings built on the permafrost are starting to collapse, and the Permafrost Institute in Yakutsk has recently suffered a major flood (BBC Online, 12 September).

Greenland is the second biggest ice mass after Antarctica, with glaciers as large as Manhattan and as high as the Empire State Building, and it is now melting at a rate that has alarmed even the alarmists. Evidence from NASA satellites and ground-based researchers concluded in February 2006 that Greenland's glaciers are melting twice as fast as they were five years ago. If the ice cap were to completely disappear, which it is quite likely to do by the end of 2100 at this rate, global sea levels would rise by 6.5m (21 feet) (BBC Online, 11 August). If this happens, New York, New Orleans and half of Florida including Miami, Tampa and Fort Lauderdale will be underwater.

Not surprisingly perhaps, Washington is facing rebellion from state governors all over the country to stop stalling over Kyoto and do something, not least because their own oil and gas companies are already one jump ahead with 'greener' technology and need the relevant legislation to be enacted so they can capitalize on it. Leading the way is Da Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who when not terminating crooks by state execution is so keen to display his green credentials he sided with the Democrats against his own party in order to pass the Global Warming Solutions Act, which aims to cap emissions in California, the world's 12th largest CO2 emitter, by 25 percent by 2020 (BBC Online, 1 September). But even Arnie is unlikely to hold back the Arctic flood, because capitalism just doesn't sit down and listen to reason, as his Republican ex-buddies know perfectly well. The reason they opposed his cosy Californian carbon-capping caper was because they knew perfectly well that unless such a plan was federal, so that nobody could get out of it, all the investment would leak out of the state into neighbouring ones which were not required under their state law to worry so energetically about the problem.

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Water World 2

While the Inuit are fast running out of ice, a third of the world's population are faced with a shortage of any water at all. The situation has arisen twenty years earlier than projections forecasted, according to a report by the International Water Management Institute in Colombo, Sri Lanka (New Scientist, 26 August). The report states that while in some places physical shortage of water is to blame, in others it is a question of lack of financial investment. So are they talking billion-dollar pipelines from the water sources to the dry interiors in Africa, Asia and parts of China? Not a bit. The state-of-the-art technology is, wait for it, plastic buckets and bags, lots of big ones, to catch the stuff as it falls out of the sky. Storing roof and road run-off, they argue, could double or triple food production in sub-Saharan Africa and south-east Asia. Not only that, but saving water for 'unrainy days' in this way could slow the expansion of rain-fed agriculture into virgin habitats from 60 per cent by 2050 down to 10 per cent.

The predictable response of most people reading this would be a Homer Simpson-like 'Duh'. You don't need to be an engineering genius to figure out that water butts are a good way of saving water, so why in hell aren't they doing it already, you cannot resist asking? Presumably because in the capitalist scheme of things, poor Africans, Indians and Chinese peasants don't have the price and don't rate the price even of a plastic bucket.

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Water World 3

Socialists always welcome any sincere attempt to solve the world's problems, even if some of these attempts are inevitably misguided. One doesn't in all honesty expect a great contribution to be made by new-age mystics so it is no surprise that when Madonna and husband Guy Ritchie approached the UK government with a scheme to clean up nuclear waste, using a deeply mystical Kabbalah water which they claimed had received extensive testing in a Ukrainian lake, the government didn't show much interest in the Ritchies' esoteric knowledge of Jewish mystical liquids and in fact showed them the door (New Scientist, 26 August). One might expect however that the government official who recounted this story would show the appropriate respect for such eminent celebrities, or at least a cool and precise scientific detachment. Instead, the official described the encounter as follows: "It was like a crank call . . . The scientific mechanisms and principles were just bollocks." Lovely to see scientists descend to plain English occasionally.

Paddy Shannon