Mali: A Libya-Chinese rice landgrab strikes a blow to local farmers

Posted: 01 December 2008  

In the wake of this year's food crisis, African capitals have been buzzing with renewed talk of the need for food self-sufficiency, and rice is often at the top of government agendas. Mali, like several other countries in West Africa, recently went from being a net rice exporter to a major importer. Now the government's embarked on a multimillion dollar national rice initiative that is supposed to restore self-sufficiency by helping the country's farmers to produce more. So why then has the government handed-over an enormous tract of prime rice land to a Libyan investment fund and Chinese companies?

A couple of years ago, on the sidelines of a summit of the Community of Sahel-Saharan States (CEN-SAD) in Bamako, Mali's President, Amadou Toumani Touré, offered up 100,000 ha of land within the Office du Niger, Mali's main rice producing area. Libya, a country flush with petro dollars but lacking in its own food production and which essenially runs CEN-SAD, jumped at the chance. Through its sovereign wealth fund, the Libya Africa Investment Portfolio (LAP), it signed a deal with its Malian counterparts giving Libya control over the 100,000 ha, as part of a larger infrastructure investment project for the area that includes the construction of a canal and a roadway. The project claims that it will begin with rice production and will eventually add tomato production and livestock.

Details of the how the project will operate are finally starting to come out. With Malibya, LAP's subsidiary, managing the project, the infrastructure construction has been contracted to CGC, a Chinese company owned by China's big oil corporation SINOPEC. Another unnamed Chinese firm has been contracted to supply Chinese hybrid rice seeds for the project and to train local experts, some of whom are already in China, on its cultivation. Most likely this unnamed company is China's largest hybrid rice seed producer, Yuan Longping High-tech Agriculture, which already has extensive programmes in Africa and a similar CGC project for hybrid rice production in Nigeria.

This is not the first big investment in hybrid rice production in West Africa for Libya's sovereign wealth fund. In December 2007, LAP invested $30 million in a rice project in Liberia that it will manage in partnership with the local NGO Foundation for African Development Aid (ADA) on 15-17,000 ha of land that ADA had received from the Liberian government.

In both instances, the stated objective of the projects are to help meet local food needs. Yet, between the lines, there is plenty of reason to suspect that the real motivation is for export to Libya. In 2005, the most recent year of available data from the FAO, Libya imported 177 thousand tonnes of rice, valued at $62 million. Those imports will certainly expand, as Tripoli moves forward with an ambitious $130 billion infrastructure development programme that is forecast to require a million foreign workers, mainly coming from Asia. Just one month ago, Libya singed an agreement with Bangladesh for the recruitment of a "large number" of workers. Libya, like other Arab countries, is looking to get out of its dependence on corporate-controlled global commodity chains for its food needs by outsourcing food production to other countries. "Ensuring food security in rice also makes it possible to overcome another major difficulty, that is to say the developed countries that monopolise agriculture production and the global companies that monopolise the prices of staple foods," says Malibya's director Abdjalil Youssef.

The Vice-President of the LAP told the Liberian Times in December 2007 that their project in Liberia would target both local and international markets. With the Mali project, although it is said the priority for the project is the domestic rice market, there are clear signs that exports to Libya are part of the plan. During a visit to Mali, Amadou Kanté dit Bany, a senior director with LAP told L'indépendant that the project would produce rice "to meet the needs of Mali, Libya and all other countries of CEN-SAD."

Wherever the rice goes, however, its production will do little for local farmers. Indeed, in Mali, the project is going to push some local farmers off the land and compete directly with others for water from the Niger River, the most important source of irrigation for the Sahel-Sahara. Already, Malibya is negotiating with the Malian government for priority in water allocation during the off-season, when the water levels are low. 

"When it comes to the reorganisation of people, meaning the villages that will have to leave their area, I say that any arrangement creates a disturbance, and I am asking for everyone's cooperation in this regard. For us this is not about chasing away the people or evacuating them, but simply about reorganising them," says Malibya's Abdjalil Youssef.

Mamadou Goita, executive director of the Institute for Research and the Promotion of Alternatives in Development in Mali, places the Malibya project within a larger reorganisation of the Office du Niger that is paving the way for the private sector to take control over farm land. "The projects in the Office du Niger, such as the Malibya project and projects financed by way of the US government's Millenium Challenge Account, are brutally pushing forward the industrialisation of agriculture and the privatisation of lands in the area," he says.

There are also concerns about how these projects are destroying the area's rich diversity of local rice varieties by promoting a few modern varieties, notably the Nerica varieties of the African Rice Centre. As reported in a recent GRAIN briefing, the widespread and heavy promotion of Nerica in Africa poses a major threat to the continent's farmer seed systems, which continue to supply up to 90% of its seed needs. Dr. Assetou Samaké, professor of plant genetics at the University of Bamako and a member of the Coalition for the Protection of African Genetic Heritage (COPAGEN), says that, in the area of the Office du Niger, Nerica is now displacing local varieties. She also says that the zone has been turned into a "forest of experiments" with no transparency about what seeds are being brought in and she worries that it could become a testing ground for GMOs and hybrid seeds. 

In the case of the LAP projects in Mali and Liberia, they will both be supplied with imported Chinese hybrid rice seeds. Hybrid rice can achieve high-yields, but only when high-tech machinery and high-levels of chemical inputs are used. Plus, seeds from hybrid rice cannot be saved by farmers; they have to be purchased every year, making them out-of-reach and impractical for Liberia's or Mali's small farmers. Moreover, while it's poor eating quality is a major deterrent to small farmers supplying local markets, hybrid rice is less of a problem when the goal is to supply migrant labourers with a cheap food source, which is likely the case with the LAP projects in Mali and Liberia. The LAP's use of hybrid rice could open the door to more large-scale hybrid rice projects, setting a dangerous precedent for African rice farmers and their seed systems.

A little less than two years ago, over 500 people representing farmers, fisherfolk, indigenous peoples, food workers and civil society organisations from around the world gathered in Mali to strengthen the global movement for food sovereingty. They decalred: "Most of us are food producers and are ready, able and willing to feed all the world’s peoples." No doubt this movement is growing and gathering force, but so too are the forces threatening to take away the seeds and lands of small-scale food producers-- the very basis of their capacity to feed people and assure their livelihoods. The conflict between the two visions for the future of food and farming is a gathering storm-- and the skies above the Office du Niger are clouding over.

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