Behind Accumulation and Dispossession: State and Large-Scale Agricultural Land Investments in Nigeria

Abstract

The academic, policy, and popular debate about large-scale land deals, particularly in Africa, centres on the extent of dispossession involved. The World Bank maintains that the investment of international capital into Africa’s land will lead to economic development through sales, leases, employment, and new cropping patterns. Investments in African farmlands, however, create false expectations as rural farmers are displaced from their land and livelihoods. In Nigeria, the dominant state narrative is that large-scale investments in land are crucial to “modernizing” agriculture, generating jobs, increasing export earnings, and transferring technologies. The Nigerian state promotes investments in agricultural land for the production of food crops and biofuels, primarily for export. Although accurate data on land deals are difficult to obtain, available records suggest that investors acquired more than a million hectares of farmlands since 2004. Many of these land deals produced conflicts over land rights and the lost livelihoods of rural people. Large-scale land investments became part of an ongoing political and economic process of primitive accumulation that reconfigures patterns of land use and ownership. Drawing on evidence from selected cases of large-scale land deals in Nigeria, this chapter highlights the linkages between state-driven development dynamics and land alienation.