Daily Mail: On the trail of the land grabbers

Tony Gosling tony at cultureshop.org.uk
Mon Aug 27 15:55:52 BST 2012 

On the trail of the land grabbers: The British 
imperialists snapping up swathes of Africa to 
cash in on the world's food shortage - and forcing out small farmers

By Fred Pearce

PUBLISHED: 22:00, 11 August 2012 | UPDATED: 22:00, 11 August 2012
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2186946/The-British-land-grabbers-snapping-swathes-African-farmland-cash-worlds-food-shortage.html
http://www.911forum.org.uk/board/viewtopic.php?t=21508&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=

It is an odd retirement hobby. Britain’s top 
soldier, the former commander of British Land 
Forces and the man who capped his military career 
by presiding over the funeral of the Queen 
Mother, has been planting crops in the African bush.

Not personally, you understand.  But Sir Charles 
Redmond Watt has been mixing with Chinese 
billionaires, Saudi sheiks, Wall Street whizzkids 
and a motley array of British adventurers who 
agree with the financial guru George Soros that 
‘farmland is one of the best investments of our 
time’. And for those wanting lots of land, 
nothing comes cheaper than a slice of Africa.

I have spent the past two years on the trail of 
these land grabbers, who have between them taken 
control of an area roughly ten times the size  of 
Britain, most of it in Africa. And  I discovered 
that Britain is the world’s biggest centre for 
private land grabbers. City financiers are the 
new imperialists, returning to colonies we walked away from half a century ago.

Emacs!


Harvest time: Huge tractors on a soya bean farm 
in Brazil. Farmland is now considered to be one 
of the best investments of our time

Upon leaving the Army, Sir Charles, who once 
commanded 125,000 military personnel, became 
chairman of a shell company, Las Vegas-registered 
Kryptic Entertainment, which later changed its name to Farm Lands of Guinea.

The company, set up by British sheep farmer Mark 
Keegan, controls 250,000 acres of bush in the 
West African state of Guinea, bought on what it 
describes as ‘extremely generous’ terms from the 
government there. It will plant 8,000 acres of maize and soya this year.

Fellow board member Nigel Woodhouse, a trustee of 
Labour peer Lord  Melchett’s Soil Association, 
told me one village handed over its land for ‘the equivalent of £3’.


It doesn’t sound much for a company that says it 
is ‘unlocking the riches of an African 
agricultural treasure trove’, and which is on 
such good terms with local leaders that it has 
also secured exclusive rights to market a further 
3.7 million acres of Guinea – an area roughly the size of Yorkshire.

His job done, Sir Charles resigned from the 
outfit last December. He declined to comment on 
his African sojourn, but who can doubt that his 
prestige helped clinch deals in the former French colony?

Many of the big beasts of British business have 
joined the global land rush. Sir Richard Branson, 
who famously bought two of the Virgin Islands in 
the Caribbean, has now bagged 25,000 acres of 
prime South African safari country.


Squeezed out: Zam Zam Juna on her plot in 
Tanzania, where a biofuels firm is snapping up farms

Jim Slater, a notorious asset-stripper from the 
Seventies, is growing genetically modified maize 
on Brazilian prairie once owned by the father of 
racing driver Ayrton Senna. City ‘superwoman’ 
Nicola Horlick is investing the pension funds of 
Hampshire and Merseyside councils in Brazilian farmland.

Meanwhile, feted bond trader Guy Hands bought 
cattle  stations three times bigger than Wales 
from the estate of the legendary TV mogul Kerry 
Packer. And Joe Lewis, the owner of Tottenham 
Hotspur, has invested a chunk of the fortune he 
made betting against sterling two decades ago to 
buy a slab of scenic Patagonia.

Then there is Phil Edmonds, England’s wily Test 
bowler of the Eighties whom Wisden praised for 
his ‘aristocratic manner’. Maybe that manner 
helped him persuade the government of Mozambique 
to let him have 75,000 acres for growing sugar cane.

But some villagers claimed the land was used 
without their consent. When the scheme went 
belly-up, he bounced back with a beef ranch on an 
area recently cleared of land mines. Will the 
master of spin prove a  better cow-puncher than sugar baron?

Farmers need support not an eviction notice


Investors say farmland is the new big thing 
because the world is running short of food. They 
insist their efforts will be good for Africa, 
too, because they bring much-needed investment.

But what I saw was small farmers being bumped off 
their land and replaced by big machines. As 
Graham Davies, of British investors Altima 
Partners, told a conference last year, the ‘vast 
majority of investors in Africa are focused on 
commercial Western agriculture, largely ignoring 
the continent’s 60 million small farmers who produce 80 per cent of its food’.

Instead, I’d like to see investors help those 
small farmers grow their businesses. All over 
Africa I found peasant farmers experimenting with 
new seeds, and selling products such as 
vegetables, honey and  milk in the cities – or 
even green beans to British supermarkets. What 
they need is support, not an eviction notice.

Some of the land grabbers themselves appear to 
agree. British farmer James Siggs joined a 
venture to run ‘US-style large-scale agricultural 
systems’ in the Congo. But he left and now says 
‘industrial-scale farming displaces and alienates 
people, creates few jobs and causes social disruption’.

Sure, big farm projects could do some good, and 
there are people behind them who are genuine. 
Peter Bayliss, with whom I had a beer in Liberia, struck me as one of those.


Job done: Former Army chief Sir Charles Watt

He was rehabilitating and expanding a big 
palm-oil plantation that the Getty family had 
left behind when civil war broke out there 20 
years ago. He showed me the clinic he had started, and a new primary school.

Other would-be land grabbers get lost in the 
wilderness. British banker Leonard Thatcher’s 
Nile Trading and Development company claims 1.5 
million acres – about the size of Devon – in Lainya county in South Sudan.

But I have a copy of the lease he signed with a 
local chief and provisional government officials. 
He can’t possibly have that much land because the 
whole of Lainya county is only just over half that size.

Thatcher’s American partner Howard Douglas, a 
former ambassador for President Reagan, admitted 
to me that there is no map marking Thatcher’s 
land. A proper survey was not possible during the 
country’s long independence war.

He said: ‘We can renegotiate if necessary.’ But 
who with? The chief who signed the lease is one 
of four in the county. The others had not signed. 
And when the BBC’s local reporter went to 
interview him, the chief claimed he didn’t know what he had signed.

There have been several corporate failures in 
recent months as the  claims of some land 
grabbers – and of the people selling them land – 
have rubbed up against reality. Many involve the 
new supposed wonder-crop, jatropha, whose berries 
can be made into biodiesel. Native farmers have 
always regarded it as a weed – now it looks as if they were right.

In March last year, International Development 
Minister Stephen O’Brien went to Mozambique to 
bang the drum for Sun Biofuels, a British company 
growing jatropha there, but the oil yields have 
been poor. Five months after the ministerial 
tour, Sun Biofuels went into administration.

There are plenty of rogues, too, ripping off 
investors here as well as African villagers. At 
their offices  in  Twickenham, West London, I met 
would-be jatropha profiteers Philip Peters and Lawrie Smith.

They told me about their 99-year lease on 
farmland in the tiny West African state of Togo. 
Heaven knows how they got the land, but their 
company, Greenleaf Global, was sub-leasing 
five-acre plots to small investors. I could have 
one for £6,000, they said. Greenleaf would plant 
my jatropha and harvest my profit for me.

I was right not to be tempted. In April, a 
British court ordered the company into compulsory 
liquidation after Government investigators found 
‘a clear intention to mislead would-be 
investors’. The company had lied about its 
harvests. Promises of a 20 per cent return were 
‘not evidence-based’. The scam had been nipped in 
the bud, but investors had lost about £8 million.

That’s the trouble in Africa. A few of the land 
grabbers are good guys, but many ride roughshod 
over people in search of a quick profit. And some 
defraud investors as much as their hosts. If I 
were an African, I’d be telling them to go home.

The Landgrabbers by Fred Pearce is published by 
Eden Project Books, priced £20. To order your 
copy for £15.99 inc p&p, call the Review 
Bookstore on 0843 382 1111 or go to mailshop.co.uk/books
MOST READ NEWS 
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