Land grabbing in Mali

Another story about the great African land grab , this time from Mali .

Mali has approved long-term leases for outside investors to help develop more than 160,000 hectares of land. The region, 300km northeast of Bamako, contains some of the most fertile rain-fed land in Mali.

Rice producer Siaka Daou is among those farmers concerned that they will be reduced to being day labourers for foreign-owned concerns.
"The way the government is parcelling out land from Office of Niger [region] is worrisome. This will stamp out small producers. We will no longer have land to cultivate and will be forced to work for industrial agriculture producers."

Mali's land code protects local land rights, but only as far as the land is used for "productive use". But "productive use" is not clearly defined and this may open the door to abuse .

"Most of the sample contracts are silent on the issue," said the FAO report.
For example concerning a Libyan-funded irrigation project, Mali's National Association of Farmers issued a communiqué demanding more information about the contract signed between Libya and Mali.
"The contract signed remains invisible...there are no guarantees in the contract that the [local] population would benefit from it," the association said

china africa

Chinese President Hu Jintao said he wanted to deepen Beijing's trade and investment links in Africa despite the global economic slowdown.

China's trade with Africa has shot up 10-fold since 2000, soaring 45 percent to nearly $107 billion last year alone. China's investments in and imports from Africa are dominated by minerals and oil -- Angola is China's single biggest crude supplier. Chinese companies are expanding sectors such as mobile telephones as well as food and agricultural businesses, such as fisheries and sesame production in Senegal. Tanzania and Mali are also Africa's third and fourth biggest gold miners and Senegal has a burgeoning gold and iron ore sector. China's Sinopec is looking for oil in northern Mali, while the state-owned China National Petroleum Company signed a $5 billion deal to produce oil in neighbouring Niger. China has invested heavily in Africa, building parliaments, stadiums, bridges and roads in numerous countries. But critics say the hastily built infrastructure is nothing more than a bribe for access to Africa's vast mineral wealth, natural resources and bountiful coastline.
Fishermen in neighboring Guinea-Bissau say after their government accepted China's gift of a new parliament, their coastline was invaded by Chinese trawlers who have fished their waters dry.

Sudan claims China is working with it to head off a possible International Criminal Court arrest warrant for President Omar Hassan al-Bashir for alleged war crimes in Darfur. China, whose firms pump Sudan's oil, says a warrant would worsen instability. This trip , according to some observers , is also to counter the accusations that they only do business with resource-rich autocracies

Africa: Kosovo Revives Hopes for Secession

The recognition of Kosovo by some of the West’s major powers is boosting the hopes of secessionist movements across Africa , according to this news item . In an article titled “Kosovo—the precedent that will enflame Africa,” a columnist for the Ivoirian newspaper Notre Voie predicts a revival of secessionist groups across the continent and doubts that the international community will be able to resolve the resulting crises.

“The world is about to witness… another political and diplomatic revolution which may give birth to some new nations," reads an opinion piece published on Somalilandnet.com, a website that caters to the autonomous region of the same name that seeks to secede from Somalia.

“Kidal will follow the example of Kosovo to become independent,” reads a forum entry on Kidal.info, a website named after a city in the northeastern part of Mali that is home to a Touareg rebellion that has clashed sporadically with governmental forces.

“This hard-won freedom by Kosovar citizens will serve as an example for the future autonomy of Kabylia,” wrote a contributor to Kabyle.com, a website committed to the affirmation of Algeria’s Kabyle Berbers, who resent the arabization of the country at the expense of the Amazigh culture.

At Rewmi.com, one of Senegal’s major news sites, one commentator wonders if the Senegal's government’s recognition of Kosovo will not reignite the separatist tendencies of MFDC, a rebel group that wants independence for the southern Casamance region.

Africa’s strongest case will likely come from Western Sahara, which has been recognized as an independent country by the African Union but whose sovereignty is not effective because of Morocco’s insistence that it is a province of its kingdom. A Saharawi blogger at Saharaopinions.blogspot.com, noted what he regards as the inconsistency of Western powers: “In Kosovo they imposed an independence that was not based on international legality, but in Western Sahara they’re opposed to self-determination that has been recommended multiple times by that same legality.”
Another wrote “Kosovo is an example of how we can effectively make our case,”

Article 20 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights affirms "the unquestionable and inalienable right to self-determination," but this has to be balanced against the inviolability of territorial boundaries that resulted from colonization (the so-called uti possidetis principle under Article 4 of the African Union’s Constitutive Act).

Cooking With Poison

Cut-price cooking oil used in most Malian households has been found to contain gossypol, a toxic substance that is known to cause sterility, cancer and inhibit growth.The majority of Malians buy the oil for cooking since, at an average of US$1.25 a litre, it is about half the price of imported oils.
Only two out of 57 oil producers studied around the country had the necessary equipment to produce safely-refined cooking oil , the rest were producing oil containing gossypol, a harmful poison.

Adama Haidara doctor at the Hope Clinic, a medical centre in Sikoro near Bamako, backed this up, stressing it is also linked to cardiac arrests and cancer. “The risks to the consumer after a long period of absorption of non-refined oil are enormous.”

The government has ordered producers to update their equipment, but not all can afford to and some have been forced to shut down production for good.

"The government had no controls in place, no follow-up, nothing…the quality of the oil produced, and the health of consumers mattered little to it,” said Seydou Samaké, a Bamako resident who used to frequently cook with the oil.
“The doctor has arrived after the death. It’s always like that. It took us being poisoned for the government to intervene,” complained Oumar Traoré, a member of the Mali Coalition for the Protection of Consumers (REDECOMA).

Beyond any drought

A new report discusses NGOs .

The Sahel has long been vulnerable to drought, impoverishment and food insecurity, as the droughts of the mid-1970s, 1980s and 2005 show.In the Sahel, shocks from drought and flood are inevitable, but unpredictable in terms of location and timing, andlargely uncontrollable. The people of the Sahel are thus intrinsically exposed to climatic shocks or hazards.This assumption equates vulnerability with inadequate food production as opposed to food access. The levels of malnutrition seen in Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso in 2005 were out of all proportion to the drop in production levels and could not be explained on the grounds of climatic variation alone, [not even in combination with the locust invasion] . Climate does not cause vulnerability. Since independence, development agencies and development programmes have been promising real change in these three incredibly poor countries. Why has this development been unable to break the cycle of poverty ?

Inappropriate aid policies are partly responsible for the Sahel region’s poverty according to a strongly-worded report issued jointly by 10 international NGOs to be released on Wednesday in London. The report, which is called ‘Beyond Any Drought', is supported by a network of high-profile international NGOs including Oxfam, the British Red Cross, CARE International, Save the Children and Action Against Hunger, breaks with the usual positive image of the work of aid agencies to say donor-funded projects in the region are often based on “shallow analyses” that ignore common sense.

More specifically, the report says that donor pressure means aid agencies focus too much on measuring the production of heavy, nutrient-scarce staples like millet and sorghum while ignoring basic economic issues such as whether people can afford to buy them. Nutrition appears as a medical issue rather than an issue of access and power. Food security is too easily seen as a set of technical questions, but is in fact based on profoundly political issues.

The most vulnerable households are highly dependent on the exploitation of common-property natural resources,particularly during drought years. Examples include firewood collection for sale, collection of leaves and other wildfoods for human consumption and for medicine. In northern Nigeria the dependence on wild products is an effective indicator of low levels of wellbeing at household and at community level. Households unable to access common property resources, such as wild foods, are more susceptible to draw on their assets and get into debt.The capacity for local communities to manage common-property resources, such as village forests and water sources,has been eroded through the expropriation of many of these resources by the state. Government agencies put in place to take responsibility for the management of these resources have largely failed. In practice, government departments were reluctant to pass on authority over resources (such as timber from forests) that often provided a valuable source of income, and communities were expected to assume responsibility with very few benefits

The American government’s aid agency USAID is singled out for specific criticism. It undertakes what the report calls “risky” policies including the dumping of thousands of tonnes of American surplus food stocks on the continent. the US Government allocates a budget of $1.2 billion annually to purchase surplus grain for food relief, with the overt objective of creating export markets overseas. This food may be distributed in kind or “monetized”, sold on local markets in exchange for cash to be spent on activities related to emergency relief and recovery. The process is hugely costly and inefficient once transporting and marketing is taken into account. Further, the risks of flooding local markets, depressing the price of grain and thereby undermining local producers’ livelihoods is well known.The report says that CARE, another of the NGOs behind the report, is going to stop accepting USAID food on “ideological and practical” grounds.

In spite of rhetoric around learning, NGOs find it very difficult to apply lessons on the ground. In five or six years there could be a complete change of staff in all the major development agencies, leading to institutional forgetfulness and a lack of profound understanding of the issues. Socialists have a longer memory and know that attempts to tackle Third World poverty will often be thwarted by the international market system and will frequently be foiled by the national ruling class appropriation of the local resources and wealth . The majority of aid organisations develop their programmes “on the basis of their own priorities and their own visions” the report says and when designing aid projects the views of locals are usually ignored . It will be the democratic empowerment of the workers by socialism that will begin to genuinely address the needs of the people of Africa .

State and class in pre-colonial West Africa

Was the state instituted for mutual protection or did it arise when society became divided into classes?

Long before Marx and Engels, political thinkers and philosophers had written extensively on the concept of the state. In the 1640s, Thomas Hobbes had argued that the state was essentially a contract between the individual and the government. The alternative, called by Hobbes the state of nature, was a thoroughly unpleasant life—solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

This, according to Hobbes, the state emerged to improve mankind's lot. However, Engels, summing up his historical analysis in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, argued that the State was a product of class society: "It is an admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it has split into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel." As if to echo Engels, Marx pointed out that the state could not have arisen, let alone maintained itself, had it been possible to reconcile classes. According to Marx the state is an instrument of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another.

Marx revealed that a definite level of development of labour productivity is essential before there is real opportunity for humans to exploit other humans. If people produce only the minimum of products required to maintain their physical existence and reproduction, any systematic appropriation of someone else's labour is out of the question. The opportunity to appropriate someone else's labour appears only when the productive forces have developed to the level at which the quantity of goods produced somewhat exceeds the minimum required to maintain the direct producers' lives. The question then arises: Did Africa's labour productivity reach a level that provided the opportunity for humans to exploit their fellow human beings? The answer is both no and yes. The appropriate answer to this question would enable us to determine the original of the state in pre-colonial Africa.

But it would be absurd to think of only the level of productive forces without the relations of production. Productive forces cannot be developed in a vacuum. People produce them jointly—in groups rather than on their own. People's relationship to the means of production determine their position and place in the production and the mode of distribution of the products. Where one group of people makes its living by appropriating the labour of the other, then society is divided into the exploiter and exploited. The need to maintain this vampiric relationship of production leads to the rise of an apparatus of coercion and conditioning to systematically brainwash the exploited into accepting their exploitation as a normal condition of life or to crush their resistance.

Before private ownership

If this analysis of state and class is anything to go by then one cannot authentically talk of the state among some of the communities in Ghana before the 14th century. The predominant principle of social relations was that of the family and kinship associated with communalism. Among the Gur social groups in the Upper East Region of Ghana, for example, every member of the society had their position defined in terms of their relationship with their mother's or father's family. Leadership was based on religious ties to the Tindana, or custodian of the land, who ran the affairs of the people with a committee of elders chosen from all the families and clans of the territory. This committee administered land, the major means of production not as its personal property, but as the property of all the people in Gurum-Tinga (Gur land) who had the right to till it. Hunting, fishing and grazing grounds for animals were organised in a similar manner. No-one starved whilst others stuffed themselves with food and threw the excess away or sold it for profit. The basic economic law was that of providing the members of society with the necessary means of subsistence through communal ownership of the means of production.

The absence of private property in the means of production, of the division into classes and the exploitation of man by man excluded the need for a state. Production was essentially of use values; and there was no alienation of the producer from his means of production.
The fundamental flaw in the social organisation of the Gur however was that the position of the Tindana was supposedly sanctioned by the gods, and therefore permanent. This notion also applied to the elders of families and clans who served in the committee of elders. Only death could loosen their grip on authority. This meant that people occupying positions of trust could use their positions for personal gain, taking a significant share of communal property and becoming rich; indeed vestiges of private ownership of property began to rear its ugly head in the Gur community around the 16th century. However this development did not reach its fullest maturity before the violent intrusion of British colonial rule. To a very large extent, this explained why the British colonial government had to create chiefs in Gur land and use them as instruments of its policy of exploitation and dehumanisation.


It is also important to note that once African societies began to expand by internal evolution, and the instruments of labour were perfected, people obtained more means of subsistence than was essential for their survival. The restricted nature of communal property and the egalitarian distribution of products of labour that characterised people such as the Gur acted as a drag on the further development of the productive forces. The need for joint labour disappeared with the appearance of sickles, iron-tipped hoes, spears and arrows. What this meant was that the possibility of individual labour also emerged. But individual labour brought about private ownership, private ownership brought about inequality between the people; and rich and poor people emerged. In the Mali empire, for example, the dominant mode of production was feudalism even though the communal and slave modes of production had not completely died out. By the end of the 15th century there were both chattel and domestic slaves in Mali comparable to the feudal serfs in Europe. In Senegal Portuguese traders also found that there were elements in the population who worked most days for their masters and a few days per month for themselves—a budding feudalist tendency.


A cursory look at the socio-economic and political scene in Africa before colonisation does not reveal one dominant mode of production. Also it is not easy to compartmentalise the socio-economic formations and arrange them in a sequence as some writers do, because the social and economic terrain reveals considerable unevenness in development. There were social formations representing hunting bands, communalism, feudalism while other formations represented a mixture of these. It was upon these that colonialism was superimposed.

ADONGO AIDAN AVUGMA

First published Socialist Standard May 1999