‘Land Grabbing’ and the Politics of Evidence The case of Senegal1 rama salla Dieng Doctoral Researcher at SOAS University of London Abstract The renewed interest in land, especially after the 2007-2008 global financial crises, has led to land being viewed as a new strategic asset. The drivers of this rush, sometimes referred to as ‘land grabs’, are contested, as are its actors and scale, creating a fierce debate between activists, academics and politicians. This battlefield of competing claims on methods and evidence sometimes espouse the blurred lines of ‘North’ and ‘South’. In this context, assessing the available literature is a difficult but critical step if the current knowledge-building efforts are to be sustained. This paper argues that what is known about ‘land grabs’ is the outcome of how it is known. To ascertain this, this paper firstly seeks to review the existing body of knowledge and then questions the politics of methods to understand why not much is known, using evidence from Senegal. Introduction After 2007, several continental development initiatives targeting land, water and mining have been observed in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), such as the Land Policy Initiative in Africa,2 the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) and the African Mining Vision (AMV) for 2050 implemented under the leadership of the African Union (AU) and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA). These initiatives by States and Regional Economic Communities (RECs) in Africa seek to improve the mobilisation of the domestic resources necessary to structurally transform national economies, as well as attain growth and poverty reduction objectives. In this context, many governments strive to create incentives for ‘conducive’ business environments to attract foreign investment in their agriculture, including Senegal, which adopted its Loi d’Orientation Agro-Sylvo-Pastorale (LOASP) in 2004 as its agricultural development framework for the following 20 years. © Africa Institute of South Africa AfricA insight Vol 46(4) – March 2017 25 ‘Land Grabbing’ and the Politics of Evidence | Rama Salla Dieng A parallel development has been experienced in developing countries, including Senegal, which has been denounced by non-governmental organisations (NGOs), think-tanks and academia: ‘land grabbing’. In many developing countries, the increasing speculation that has accompanied such deals was considered worrisome and harmful for national economies by a myriad of actors interested in social justice. Yet, the drivers of this rush, sometimes referred to as ‘land grabs’, are contested, as are its actors and scale, creating a fierce debate between activists, academics, policy-makers and politicians. This battlefield of competing claims on methods and evidence sometimes espouse the blurred lines of ‘North’ and ‘South’ contestations. In this context, assessing the available literature is a difficult but critical step if the current knowledge-building efforts are to be sustained. Besides, concerned governments need to establish strong monitoring systems to safeguard the security of Africa’s essential assets through improving the transparency of such deals and capacitating their administrations for improved contract negotiation. This paper argues that what is known about ‘land grabs’ is the outcome of how it is known. To ascertain this, this work firstly reviews the existing body of knowledge to acknowledge that, while there is a growing body of knowledge on land grabs, there are still questions that are elusive and hardly researched. Secondly, with Senegal as a case study, it tries to bridge the research gap by questioning the politics of the evidence underlying it, to explain why not much is known. What do we know about land grabs? Reviewing the existing literature A review of the current literature on ‘land grabs’ or ‘land grabbing’ reveals an inflation of literature culminating in 2011. This section examines the main questions explored by this literature. What and how? A quick survey of the literature singularly highlights the obvious lack of consensus on concepts: ‘land grab’ or ‘appropriation’ or ‘acquisition’ for some, ‘deals’ for yet another group of authors. In fact, the ‘catch-all phrase’3 ‘land grabs’ is often used interchangeably with, or opposed to, ‘large-scale land acquisition’– LSLA henceforth, or ‘agricultural investment’ – even if they are very dissimilar, as ‘not all land deals are investments and not all investments in agriculture involves land deals’.4 Since GRAIN’s 2008 report,5 several research publications, NGO advocacy and journalistic reports have sought to conceptualise the term with a focus on its speculative dimensions, as well as its social justice issues. For the International Land Coalition, a ‘land grab’ is an acquisition or a concession that shows one or more of the following: ‘(i) violation of human rights, particularly the equal rights of women; (ii) not based on free, prior and informed consent of the affected land users; (iii) not based on a thorough assessment, or disregard for social, economic and environmental impacts, including the way they are gendered; (iv) not based on transparent contracts that specify clear and binding commitments about activities, employment and benefit sharing; and (v) not based on effective democratic planning, independent oversight and meaningful participation’.6 Large-scale land acquisitions are defined as including the ‘purchase of ownership rights, but also the acquisition of user rights, for instance through leases or concessions, whether short or long-term’.7 In addition, even the term ‘acquisition’ might be misleading, since most of such transfers in Africa are in the form of long-term leases, due to the specificity of the legal and customary 26 AfricA insight Vol 46(4) – March 2017 © Africa Institute of South Africa ‘Land Grabbing’ and the Politics of Evidence | Rama Salla Dieng tenure systems and the rarity of cases of outright purchases.8 Yet, what is understood as ‘largescale acquisition’ is variable and depends not only on local contexts, but also on researchers’ methodological choices. For example, an International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) report of 2009 focused on deals above 1 000 ha.9 On the contrary, another study on Ethiopia defines large-scale acquisitions as those including more than 2 000 ha, while qualifying as ‘smallscale’ the transactions involving less than 500 ha.10 The Land Matrix prefers the use of the term ‘land deal’ for its Global Observatory. It defines it as: an intended, concluded or failed attempt to acquire land through purchase, lease or concession that meets the following criteria: i) entails a transfer of rights to use, control or ownership of land through sale, lease or concession; ii) has been initiated since the year 2000; iii) covers an area of 200 hectares or more; and iv) implies the potential conversion of land from smallholder production, local community use or important ecosystem service provision to commercial use.11 While even their periodisation (from 2000) is debatable, since most of the literature on land deals emerged after 2006-2007, focusing on scale alone is not the right approach, because hectares are messy and tenure systems in developing countries are complex. Land deals may not be of large scale, still they can be ‘land grabs’ if the capital involved is, or if they are in the form of a conglomerate of smaller acquisitions involving various actors.12 This is also the position of Bernstein, for whom size alone is no longer a relevant measure of scale, since in modern capitalism, farm capitalisation is more relevant a criterion. He defines it as ‘the amounts of capital required to establish different types of farming (entry costs) and to reproduce them’.13 Therefore, Edelman denounces the ‘fetishisation of hectares’.14 Finally, the term ‘land grab’ is also used to cover different things such as ‘green grabbing’ or ‘water grabbing’. ‘Green grabs’, a term coined by John Vidal in 2008, are defined as the ‘appropriation’ or ‘acquisition’ of land and resources for environmental ends.15 This is not less contentious, because a grab remains a grab, even when the motives behind it are nature conservation and sustainability, or the ‘economy of repair’. As for the term ‘water grabbing’, it refers to ‘situations where powerful actors are able to take control of or reallocate to their own benefit water resources at the expense of previous (un)registered local users or the ecosystems on which those users’ livelihoods are based. It involves the capturing of the decision-making power around water, including the power to decide how and for what purposes water resources are used now and in the future’.16 While the first phenomenon seems new, the second one is not; the only difference with contemporary water grabs is the commodification of water resources and subjugation to international law and other new governance mechanisms. To add a level of complexity, the term ‘land grab’ is now coupled with or replaced by terms aiming at describing some of the things a land grab does such as control grabbing: meaning grab of access to and use of the land; and production grabbing: appropriating all that is produced on or under the acquired land. Using the term ‘control grabbing’ for all land grabs (including water and green grabs) allows us to overcome the difficulties of concepts aiming at rendering the fact of grabbing an ‘illegal appropriation’, since the means mobilised by investors or ‘grabbers’ to gain and maintain access to and benefit from such resources often involve © Africa Institute of South Africa AfricA insight Vol 46(4) – March 2017 27 ‘Land Grabbing’ and the Politics of Evidence | Rama Salla Dieng legal but also illegitimate practices.17 As for ‘production grabbing’, it can occur without necessarily acquiring the land, but by controlling the various segments of the value chain through contractual arrangements, but more particularly through vertical integration and direct investments.18,19 While production grabbing may happen without land grabbing, control grabbing and land authority cannot: they are the very causes of struggles over land. Therefore, controlling land means controlling its access, use and transfer. It is therefore crucial to acknowledge that the land grab literature is replete with binary concepts and polar positions defended not only by the main actors involved in land deals (states, investors, populations), but also by academics themselves.20,21,22 For example, for Derek Hall, the ‘land grab’ literature is dominated by critical agrarian political economy approaches, whereas for Oya, neoclassical and neopopulist claims are more common.23 Hence the need to acknowledge that there is a ‘moral’ a n d a n ‘ideological’ dimension reflecting a standpoint vis-à-vis the main theoretical debates. The naming of deals as ‘grabs’ or ‘appropriation’ reflects a political ‘charge’ acknowledged by many authors who use terms such as ‘deals’ or ‘rush’ instead.24,25,26,27,28 For example, at an international Roundtable on the topic organised in Addis Ababa in 2013, Hubert Ouédraogo of the Economic Commission for Africa, reflecting on evidence-based land policy, preferred to use the term ‘large-scale land-based investment’ (LSLI) arguing that ‘those in charge of post-colonial African states rejected accusations of involvement in land grabbing considering those deals as foreign investment in Africa’s land resources instead’.29 Ouedraogo is not the only one claiming the inappropriateness of the term ‘land grab’. The term is criticised because, on the one hand, land has been acquired at the invitation and with the support of interested states, often using the law as facilitator and articulating different kinds of powers vested in it to carry out the implementation and regulation of land deals.30,31,32,33 On the other hand, because most deals have been very recent, it is too early to characterise outcomes as positive or negative. Another difficulty is that, when such research on outcomes and impact exist, they are most of the time neither published in peer-reviewed journals, nor based on primary research, with evidence collected through rapid and short appraisals.34 No wonder then, according to Oya, that most of the existing publications reported negative outcomes as being dominant (60%) against a ridiculous number reporting positive outcomes (3%).35 Such arguments are undermined by those who, after recognising the political charge of the term ‘grab’ or ‘appropriation’, still use it above and beyond, for it reminds of the risks at stake and grabbing remains a potentiality until claims of ‘grabs’ are dismissed based on evidence.36 Why? Where colonisation and economic expansion, and the need to catch up through agricultural intensification, were respectively identified as the principal drivers of the two first great ‘land grabs’,37 there is no consensus about the drivers of the current deals. They are said to be many different things: the food crisis and subsequent food security imperatives, changes in agricultural commodity markets and new exports (biofuels, food grains, etc.), population pressure, low interest rates in financial activities, etc.38,39,40,41,42,43 The ‘new’ yet ‘almost old’ land rush has systemic causes, as well as specific antecedents, such as concentration of land by domestic and foreign capital, massive privatisation of state and common lands, and so on. But its involving high financialisation, the presence of non-Western competitors in the ‘new scramble’, and relative autonomy of contemporary states and ability to organise, differentiates it considerably from the first ‘two waves’ of 28 AfricA insight Vol 46(4) – March 2017 © Africa Institute of South Africa ‘Land Grabbing’ and the Politics of Evidence | Rama Salla Dieng land rush.44 Therefore, arguments that have built on the triple crises narrative (food, energy and environment) and unprecedented economic growth in transitions countries 45,46 or banked on neocolonialist narratives, are just showing the tip of the iceberg since several intersecting processes, such as speculation, financialisation, urbanisation and industrialisation, have together increased interest in land as a ‘new strategic asset’.47,48,49,50,51,52,53 ‘Land grabs’ have also been analysed in the light of concepts such as ‘primitive accumulation’ and ‘accumulation by dispossession’, as a form of new imperialism54 or ‘sub-imperialism’,55,56 or as the ‘remorseless expansion of capital(ism)’. 57,58 Where and how much? Land deals are reported to take place mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia and Central America. This creates a false dichotomy between the ‘North’ and the ‘South’ as such deals also happen in Australia, New Zealand and the former USSR. The exact scales of the same deals vary according to the sources of information, even if the focus is more on large scales. As for research purposes, many studies focus on transactions over 1 000 hectares,59 and the Land Matrix covers areas above 200 hectares. Who? While the role of states has been highlighted,60,61 there is also a dichotomisation of ‘foreigners/nationals’ with a focus on the former. The dominant cliché is that private or public companies from the Gulf, Europe and the United States, as well as emerging countries, are the main grabbers. However, such accounts are mostly not supported by evidence. To illustrate this, a study was undertaken in Senegal, motivated by a reportage by France 2, a French TV Channel, that alluded to the perception that a Chinese agricultural training centre established in Dakar since 2004 was preparing the ground for Chinese investments in Senegal, concluding: ‘to take, one must first give’.62 Surprisingly, it found no evidence to support such common claims. Another similar research with case studies in Cameroon, the DRC, Mozambique and Zimbabwe also concluded that the conventional wisdom around Chinese green investments in Africa is not supported by evidence.63,64 Final evidence is that Cotula estimates acquisitions by nationals in Senegal at 61 per cent of total transactions,65 leading other researchers to further contend ‘the underlying assumption which is that the “local” should always be defended against the “outsiders”’.66 While the abovementioned questions have been extensively researched, this literature is also full of ‘noisy’ silences, especially about outcomes and impacts, despite an emerging literature on livelihood impacts and their implications.67 To understand this knowledge gap, there is a need to further examine ‘how what is known is known’ and the stakes behind knowledge production. Why don’t we know much? Understanding the ‘politics of evidence’ This section is mainly based on the argument that research is political and this affects its outcomes. Firstly, it is crucial to understand the strategies behind the politics of research and evidence. Research is eminently political and this affects its outcomes. Land being especially at the crossroads of the social, the political and the economic due to its ‘social embeddedness’ (to borrow Polanyi’s expression); it constitutes a battlefield of methods and discourses; and ‘all research, from whatever source, carries with it a politics’.68 Due to the lack of agencies centralising reliable information, as is the case in Ethiopia, global land databases, such as the Land Matrix and © Africa Institute of South Africa AfricA insight Vol 46(4) – March 2017 29 ‘Land Grabbing’ and the Politics of Evidence | Rama Salla Dieng farmlangrab.org created by the NGO Genetic Resources Action International (GRAIN) were central in drawing attention to the phenomenon. The 2008 GRAIN report Seized! was one of the first of such works reporting over a hundred cases of land deals, especially in the developing world and concluded that these deals were driven by food and financial security motives. As for the Land Matrix, it calls itself a ‘global and independent land monitoring initiative’69 and is today the main online database on land deals,70 despite some criticism relating to some limitations of their crowd-sourcing: using data from different sources and inviting the public’s participation in the fact-building process. The multiplicity of sources and methods, combined with speculation cases and the general uncertainty about the longevity of the ‘land grab’ phenomenon, which might as well be a declining phenomenon, a ‘hype’ according to Kaag and Zoomers,71 as well as the hurry to find ‘killer facts’ and sacrificing methods, invalidate the findings of many works. It is also another reason why fact-building is sometimes rushed leading to ‘quick and dirty research’ to feed the demand for sensational and scandalous titles.72 Besides, the fight over which of the competing claims succeed in being most widely covered by the media, the media and the advocacy’s own rationale and agendas are equally political. This underpins how examining stakes is crucial to better appreciating the noises of the current literature, especially on ‘messy hectares’, scale, actors, and the ‘naming’ of deals and its silences regarding impacts and outcomes. All the above confirms that ‘the politics of evidence is an oxymoron: evidence is something that is concrete and indisputable, whereas politics refers to “activities concerned with the acquisition or exercise of authority”’.73 Therefore, it is important to pay attention to the rising convergence between evidence-building and the politics behind it. Secondly, one needs to analyse the epistemology of existing datasets and sources of data on land. In other words, one must go beyond the information provided and interrogate the context and circumstances of their generation, the goals behind these data production initiatives, their silences, their claims, the publics and geographical areas targeted, the assumptions of the producers of the data, etc. In the case of the land rush, Edelman goes even further and proposes to question how some media over-report or under-report some deals, how they obtained the leaked information, why the focus is on some types of investors and not others – for instance in the case of domestic and foreign investments.74,75 In Senegal for instance, data obtained from the Land Matrix in 2014 and through a desk review of media articles and the grey literature showed that the focus was more on international foreigners, even in the case of partnerships between international and national partners. In addition, at the national level, the leaked information is more likely to involve wellknown politicians, such as the former President Wade or other politicians or marabouts – religious leaders close to the liberal regime then in power, leaving one to consider the possibility of such information being leaked to the press by the political opposition or civil society organisations, for instance. This reinforces the value of Edelman’s following interrogations on: ‘Who constitutes the “crowd” that does the “sourcing”? What motivates them to become “sources” and how does that affect what they report?’76 The non-neutral relationship between the researcher and the researched also begs for a constant transparency on positionality. Thirdly, it is also necessary to understand that many land deals have hardly been implemented. Most land deals have not yet arrived at maturation, making any definitive conclusion a guesstimate at best; yet, this should not give way to complacency, because as Cotula puts it so well: 30 AfricA insight Vol 46(4) – March 2017 © Africa Institute of South Africa ‘Land Grabbing’ and the Politics of Evidence | Rama Salla Dieng i) deals matter even if they have not been yet fully implemented; and deals that are not implemented still exacerbate land pressures and create opportunities and costs; ii) the pressures that the deals create for nonlocal land relations are shaped not only by the aggregate land area acquired, but also by the quality and location of that land; and iii) transnational land deals for plantation agriculture are not happening in the vacuum: they are the result of multiple processes.77 However, there is a great many land transactions that have been implemented for a sufficiently long time to allow for an analysis of short- and medium-term impacts. This is evidenced by a multicountry study in Ethiopia, Ghana and Tanzania, which found, despite the lack of reliable baseline, that many land deals have had limited implementation rates or have fallen behind schedule.78 Many other deals have simply been suspended. Also, when the deals are implemented it may be so on only a smaller portion of the total land negotiated: not all the hectares are exploited.79 While avoiding simplifications and dichotomic constructions, one must bear in mind that it is not because research is conducted poorly that what it is trying to prove does not exist. In other words, failure to provide evidence successfully on outcomes is not evidence of a lack of outcomes out there. Faced with these many challenges, it is crucial for researchers to bank on in-depth in-country empirical cases to have a much more comprehensive picture of land grabs and their evolution over time. Such case studies are not sufficient in themselves, they need to explore the relationship of local outcomes with their ‘cumulative footprint’ and need as well to try and make sense of the dynamics at play between the local, the national and the global. What do we know on land deals in Senegal? Stylised facts This section reviews the main stylised facts of Senegal’s agrarian political economic landscape. The literature review for Senegal reveals firstly that research undertaken on land deals is quite recent. An illustration of that is large-scale land acquisitions that were added to the 5 main areas of assessment requiring policy intervention in a study to evaluate the current Senegalese Land Law using the Land Governance Assessment Framework (LGAF).80 The Senegalese agrarian experience has been marked by rural social differentiation and rural exodus. An important act is the adoption by the state of Act 64-46 of 17 June 1964 relative to the national domain whose objectives were: i) legal: to establish one legislation based both on traditional, religious and modern-legal statutes; ii) economic: to promote rural and national development with the participation of all, especially rural populations, to productively use natural resources; and iii) social: to ensure equitable access for all, especially the rural world, to natural resources.81 This land law recognises three uneven types of land, each defined by a specific regime: (i) private property, a legacy of the colonial system that mainly exists in urban areas; (ii) public ownership, which was essentially conceived as a regulatory instrument allowing the State to take control over land from the rural councils in exceptional circumstances and for reasons of public utility; (iii) rural lands, most of which are covered by the national land law, which constitutes the common law regime.82 © Africa Institute of South Africa AfricA insight Vol 46(4) – March 2017 31 ‘Land Grabbing’ and the Politics of Evidence | Rama Salla Dieng Rural lands are the largest part of the national domain and account for more than 95 per cent of it. The land becomes free from any rights and is established as the ‘national domain’. All unregistered lands that are not subject to a pending procedure of affectation were added to the national domain. The lands held by the peasantry are classified as ‘zones de terroir’ and were transferred to the rural councils who manage them. They must be shared and distributed by the concerned rural council and its president. With the adoption of the 1996 decentralisation law, rural communities were created, introducing fully-fledged municipalities and providing the presidents of rural councils with executive powers. This still ‘unfinished business’ of decentralisation affects the current land rush while further revealing the inconsistencies of the 1964 land law. Even if it attempted to end the customary rights of farmers, establishing a breakdown with the traditional kind of land management vested in chiefs, customary management has never been totally abandoned and in some areas of Senegal, traditional land management remains the primary mode of management that people refer to. Therefore, there is an inefficient land system allowing the State to use the notion of lack of ‘productive use’ of the land or ‘mise en valeur’ that replaced the notion of ‘empty and plentiful lands’ to dispossess many local populations of their land rights without offering them sufficient compensation in many cases.83 This notion of ‘productive use’ also encouraged land speculation since the State progressively adopted a politics of disengagement as from 1988. And despite the abolition of the customary rights of the farmers in 1964, they have never accepted it, nor complied with the reform.84 Neither the State nor the rural communities in charge since the law on decentralisation of 1996 have the economic means and human resources to enforce the law. This is partially revealing of the current conflicts over intersecting relations over land described by Pauline Peters.85 political authorities and private actors – in land deals. The article first outlines the historical heritage of the colonial construction and post-colonial reproduction of customary tenure and its denial of full property to customary land-holders. The second part considers the escalating competition and conflict centered on land; the increase in land transfers implicated in the pervasive social conflict focused on land; and the associated rise in social inequality and contestation over belonging and citizenship. All these processes intensify the vulnerability of customarily held land in face of an escalation in efforts to acquire landed resources. The third and final part discusses ‘land grabs’, the most recent surge of international interest in African land, and the equally significant appropriation of land by national agents. The article concludes that the land question in contemporary Africa has to be linked to the dynamics of social transformation and inequality at multiple levels - global, regional, national, sub-national – that are reshaping not merely access to landed resources but the very bases of authority, livelihood, ownership and citizenship. The post-2007 land rush in Senegal can be related to some political and economic developments in the country that are explored in this section as stylised facts. Firstly, large-scale development models are encouraged as a means for developing countries to boost their agricultural sector and improve domestic food security and rural infrastructures. In Senegal, agriculture accounted for 20,3 per cent of the country’s GDP in 1991, and in 2015 it amounted to 17,5 per cent.86 The renewed interest should therefore also be linked with agricultural modernisation imperatives.87 This is materialised with the country reaffirming its commitment to revitalise both family-farming and agribusiness and through the 2004 Loi d’Orientation Agro-Sylvo-Pastorale (LOASP),88 a long-term 32 AfricA insight Vol 46(4) – March 2017 © Africa Institute of South Africa ‘Land Grabbing’ and the Politics of Evidence | Rama Salla Dieng agricultural development strategy (20 years), which clearly states the priority given to poverty reduction, especially in rural areas (LOASP 2005). Initially a Presidential Initiative,89 the law saw the participation of the main agricultural producers’ organisations including the CNCR – the umbrella organisation for peasants and agricultural producers in Senegal.90,91 In addition, the plethora of presidential initiatives targeting the increase of national agricultural production through special programmes (bissap, manioc, sesame, jatropha or biofuels, maize) hindered the implementation of the LOASP while facilitating the land rush. Programmes, such as the 2006 REVA (Return to Agriculture), launched in 2006 and funded by Spain, mainly intended to reduce clandestine immigration by improving employment rates of women and young cultivators in agriculture via the creation of economic poles; the 2008 GOANA Grand Agricultural Offensive for Food Security, with an initial budget estimation for the GOANA of 345 billion CFA francs;92 and the national programme for rice self-sufficiency. These programmes were the main responses of the then government to the 2008 food crisis, but failed due to unrealistic production objectives93 and the support of agri-business by the government. Besides, the food self-sufficiency objective promoted everywhere by officials was in stark contradiction to the continuing increase of food importations, especially rice. The government decided to improve its ‘business climate’ to attract investment, particularly in this sector and especially after the April 2008 food riots in the main cities of the country. While there are linkages between land transactions and national development policies, their scope and extent need to be better documented. There is also a renewed interest in reforming the tenure regime illustrated by the creation in 2012 of the National Land Reform Committee (CNRF) in a context of renewed interest in land and horticulture in the country. Moreover, the intersection politics interest groups (private sector, religious leaders, lobbies, etc.) have been an important factor in the land rush. In addition, many deals are reportedly operated by – and in many instances for – government officials, domestic investors and religious leaders (marabouts), especially in pre-election periods, as in 2009.94 Under the GOANA, for instance, each rural community was encouraged to provide 1 000 hectares for the programme to be successful, but management and control over land use was difficult afterwards. The Senethanol case in Fanaye also ‘grabbed’ the media headlines in 2011 and also illustrates government’s involvement. Senhuile Senethanol,95 a Senegalese-Italian company, began its activities in Fanaye, Ronkh and Gnith in Senegal after being granted 20 000 ha for the cultivation of sweet potatoes for biofuel production. The project was stopped for the first time in 2013, after social uprisings of local populations (and loss of three lives) who claimed negative outcomes before being relocated to Ndiael by the then president, by declassifying protected reserves and granting the company 20 000 ha again, against 6 650 ha to local populations that would need to relocate due to the project. The next president, Macky Sall, also cancelled the project soon after the election, before authorising it, leading yet again to new social mobilisations against the deal. The project was eventually stopped in 2014, but as of February 2016, its website is still active and several cases of dismissal were reported towards the end of 2015. In addition, the project decided to change its production from biofuels to food (peanuts, sunflowers and food supplies for livestock).96 Based on the many lives and places of the project, including, in its later stages, cases of displacement and claims of loss of employment opportunities, outcomes are susceptible to vary largely over time for different peoples. © Africa Institute of South Africa AfricA insight Vol 46(4) – March 2017 33 ‘Land Grabbing’ and the Politics of Evidence | Rama Salla Dieng Furthermore, while the role of the state has been crucial in Senegal, one must reflect on the governance aspect of such decisions beyond consideration relating to personal leadership styles. Many academics have critically assessed the outcomes of the reign of the liberal regime and have concluded that the governance of public resources was clearly an issue.97 Yet, a detailed analysis of how some presidential initiatives relating to land in favour of both nationals and foreigners (the focus has so far been on the latter) constituted cases of ‘land grabbing’ has yet to be undertaken. This is the reason why cases involving domestic and foreign capitalists and their outcomes are important. Seven studies focusing on Senegal mainly report upstream aspects and the state’s tendency to accept without discernment any business model proposed by investors on very favourable terms to attract Foreign Direct Investment (FDI).98,99,100,101,102,103 Such aspects, also observed by Lavers in Ethiopia (in the case of ADLI), pertain to development models that consider agricultural modernisation, for instance, as the only way to development not only in Africa, but also in some Asian countries, such as India.104,105,106 The Senegalese studies also report governance and transparency issues, lack of affected populations’ participation in negotiations (as if being at the table and having the legal and governance framework would automatically lead to win-win solutions). Additionally, regarding the scale of the land rush, the 2016 Report107 of the Land Matrix on LSLAs in Senegal lists 19 concluded deals, involving 12 investor countries, mainly French and Italian. It also appreciates that Senegal has been only marginally affected by LSLAs, as more than 50 per cent of the transactions involve areas under 5 000 ha. Besides, the majority of the deals are for estates, with only three intended for contract farming. In addition, most of the concluded deals are leaseholds lasting between 10 and 99 years. The report also establishes that the deals accelerated since 2004 (which supposes that the land rush in Senegal started before the 2007/2008 crises) to reach a peak in 2010/2011 and estimates the total of large-scale land transactions by foreign investors to account for three per cent of Senegal’s arable land, which comprises 270 908 hectares.108 This figure has been contested by an online fact-checking website: Africa Check,109 which has interviewed some of the 19 investors, and even the Senegalese Land Reform Commission, was not able to confirm the number of land deals! It also interviewed the Land Matrix, which further explained that their data is not 100 per cent reliable and that their crowd-sourcing method is based on media articles, academic research and investors’ websites. Data from the Land Matrix website consulted in March 2017 show 20 deals were inventoried on the database. The filters on the database are automatically set to show oral and contractual transnational agreements, and one needs to tick other boxes to have information on the 10 additional failed, intended and domestic deals. Therefore, the uninformed users are led to focus only on concluded deals and not to question the cases of cancellations of contracts or negotiations, failures at implementation stage, as well as domestic involvement in the deals. In 2016, the LM was warning the user that the 26 deals they then reported constitute about 60 per cent of all deals in Senegal and did not provide the proportion of land under implementation when the status was ‘in operation’, hence the need to triangulate these data with other sources. Conversely, Cotula110 estimated on the basis of another study,111 that acquisitions by nationals account for 61 per cent of total transactions in Senegal. While these issues are mostly related to the fact that most of the databases are works in progress,112 it also shows how the data provided might be biased and how it 34 AfricA insight Vol 46(4) – March 2017 © Africa Institute of South Africa ‘Land Grabbing’ and the Politics of Evidence | Rama Salla Dieng can lead to focus research or advocacy in some directions and account for how questions regarding the nature outcomes (and scale and actors) are framed, and reinforce tendencies to assume a priori potential outcomes or perceptions and not actual impact. Therefore, the secondary data used must be questioned before they join the ‘domain of the factual’.113 Last but not least, regarding the impacts of the land rush in Senegal, most of the existing reports and ‘so-called’ impact assessments present several issues.114,15,116,117 The first of them is the framing of the land grab debate and the ideological part-pris in the definition of land grabbing as concerning only cases involving displacement and expropriation.118 In addition, there is a pervasive confusion between processes and outcomes. Despite the linkages between the two, most reports focus on the lack of transparency and consultation to conclude negative impacts without trying to situate the role of the state and its institutions in such processes, thereby confusing potential and actual impact. Most of such studies also assess the perceptions of populations on their exclusion of such processes, for example, or ‘fairness’ and social justice to conclude that outcomes are negative impacts. Methodological aspects are also neglected, especially issues related to ‘crowd sourcing’, as well the research techniques of many studies available online and how they have been used, tested and verified. This, combined with quick data collection with no triangulations and using mostly media, global databases and quick research methods, such as focus groups, makes it difficult to unpack impact and outcomes.119 For instance, the 2011 IPAR Study used literature review and semi-structured interviews focused on i) the perceptions of the different actors; (ii) their diverse positioning on the issue of LG; (iii) analysis of the evolution of land tenure; and (iv) prospective visions of the main stakeholders interviewed.120 The interviewees were mostly ‘affected communities’; investors were not interviewed. In addition, there are issues related to the timeframe of analysis with most studies mixing cases before 2007 and those after (in the COPAGEN 2013 Report: 1 case in Keur Moussa from 1972 and three cases from 2004).121 The conclusion of this quick survey of the existing literature on the Senegalese land rush is the need for more rigorous research on impacts, not only economic, but also sociocultural and environmental, especially at a time when the president of the national land reform commission calls for the rehabilitation of land as a ‘cultural good’.122 Conclusion The purposes of this paper were threefold. It firstly analysed the current body of knowledge on drivers, processes, actors and scale of land deals. The existing body of knowledge on ‘land grabbing’ is centred around questions of what? – land grabs or large-scale land-based acquisition; who? – profile of investors and other actors; where? – geographic location of the deals, and how much? – scale of the concerned lands; how? – contracts and negotiations, as well as the history of land grabs in Africa. This is probably so because this first set of questions is easier to investigate in the short timeframe required by advocacy and lobby that characterises the grey literature on land deals, which does not always allow for impeccable research. Secondly, this paper analysed why not much is known, despite an important literature, by examining the politics of evidence. However, due to the relative ‘novelty’ of this third land rush, what © Africa Institute of South Africa AfricA insight Vol 46(4) – March 2017 35 ‘Land Grabbing’ and the Politics of Evidence | Rama Salla Dieng remains to be explored in greater depth despite a small body of emerging literature are the questions of how? (processes and negotiations); and with what consequences? (impacts and outcomes including governance implications). The lack of empirical research on the impact and outcomes of such land transactions can be explained by the fact that these take longer to materialise, as such projects last several years, leading to some stakeholders’ expectations for rapid outcomes being disappointed. Thirdly, it analysed the politics of evidence focusing on Senegal. The choice of this country is justified by the fact that it has experienced some social tensions following large-scale land deals between the government and domestic or foreign investors, especially in 2011 and 2013. This happened after the launch in 2006 and 2008 of agricultural programmes, with great fanfare, funded by foreign donors and supposed to allow the country to be food self-sufficient and revitalise the agriculture through attractive incentives. In conclusion, the use of rigorous research methods to move beyond the pseudo-scientific, ‘hectare-centric and alarmist’ fact-building strategies is strongly recommended. To minimise the effects of how what is known is known on what is known, there is a need for a more rigorous research that encompasses constructed dichotomies on land transactions. Reflexivity on the researcher’s positionality can also help, if not to reduce the impacts of ‘politics’ on the emerging literature, then to take into account the political unconscious. While the Land Matrix is attempting to improve its methods,123 GRAIN openly recognises its non-neutrality and interests in preserving its niche, rather than researching outcomes.124 This is a call for researchers to bank on methods to improve their niche. Notes and References 1 This paper was first presented at the third Pan-African Roundtable Dialogue on ‘Land Policies, Agrarian Conflicts, Agricultural Production, Food Security and Identity Challenges in Postcolonial Africa’ held in Harare, Zimbabwe, from 15–17 September 2015. It was updated in March 2017. 2 ‘The Land Policy Initiative is a joint programme of the tripartite consortium consisting of the African Union Commission (AUC), the African Development Bank (AfDB) and United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA). Its purpose is to enable the use of land to lend impetus to the process of African development.’ UNECA LPI Website: http://www.uneca.org/lpi. 3 Borras, S. M. and Franco, J. C., 2013. Global Land Grabbing and Political Reactions ‘From Below.’ Third World Quarterly, 34(9), pp.1723–1747. DOI:10.1080/01436597.2013.843845. 4 Cotula L., 2013. The Great African Land Grab? Agricultural Investments and the Global Food System, African Arguments. London: Zed Books, p.7. 5 Seized! The 2008 land grab for food and financial security. 6 International Land Coalition (ILC) Tirana Declaration. Available at: http://www.landcoalition.org/sites/default/files/documents/resources/tiranadeclaration.pdf [Accessed 29 March 2017]. 7 Cotula, L., Vermeulen, S., Leonard, R. and Keeley, J., 2009. Land Grab or Development Opportunity? Agricultural Investment and International Land Deals in Africa, p.17, Available at: http://pubs.iied.org/12561IIED.html [Accessed 29 March 2017]. 8 Cotula, L. 2013, p.37; Schoneveld, G., 2011. The anatomy of large-scale farmland acquisitions in sub-Saharan Africa. Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), Bogor, Indonesia. p.13. 9 Cotula et al, 2009. Op Cit. 10 Rahmato, D., 2011. Land to Investors: Large-Scale Land Transfers in Ethiopia. Available at: www.landgovernance.org/system/files/Ethiopia_ Rahmato_FSS_0.pdf [Accessed 29 March 2017]. 11 See the Land Matrix website. Available at: http://www.landmatrix.org/en/about/#what-is-a-land-deal [Accessed 29 March 2017]. 12 Kaag, M., Zoomers, A., 2014. The Global Land Grab: Beyond the Hype. London, Halifax: Zed Books Ltd., p.3. 36 AfricA insight Vol 46(4) – March 2017 © Africa Institute of South Africa ‘Land Grabbing’ and the Politics of Evidence | Rama Salla Dieng 13 Bernstein, H., 2010. Class dynamics of Agrarian change (Agrarian Change and Peasant Studies). Sterling, VA: Kumarian Press, p.93. 14 Edelman, M., 2013. Messy hectares: Questions about the epistemology of land grabbing data. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 40(485–501), p.497. DOI:10.1080/03066150.2013.801340. 15 Fairhead, J., Leach, M. and Scoones, I., 2012. Green Grabbing: A new appropriation of nature? 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