Large-scale agricultural investments in Eastern Africa: consequences for small-scale farmers and the environment

Julie Gwendolin Zaehringer,Peter Messerli,Markus Giger,Boniface Kiteme,Ali Atumane,Maya Da Silva,Lovasoa Rakotoasimbola,Sandra Eckert

doi:10.1080/26395916.2021.1939789

Abstract

ABSTRACT Available empirical evidence about the impacts of large-scale agricultural investments (LAIs) in low-income countries is skewed towards the assessment of economic benefits. How LAIs affect land use and the environment is less understood. This study assesses how small-scale farmers living close to an LAI perceive the changes LAI's inflict on land use, land management, and tree cover in Kenya, Mozambique, and Madagascar. It also investigates their perceptions regarding LAI's impacts on the general environment and people's health, as well as on employment opportunities, infrastructure, and conflicts. 271 small-scale farmers were interviewed and their perceptions supported by a remote-sensing-based analysis of land use and land cover changes. Results show that LAIs contributed both directly and indirectly to deforestation in Mozambique, triggered changes in small-scale farmers’ agricultural land management in Kenya, and caused pastoralists to lose access to grazing land in Madagascar. Despite some benefits from employment opportunities and infrastructure improvement, the majority of respondents perceived the overall impacts of LAIs as negative, highlighting reduced access to land and water, pollution, health issues, and unsatisfactory working conditions. We urgently need to invest in devising concrete transformative options to improve LAIs’ contribution to sustainable development in their host countries.

Highlights

Since the 2008 food–energy–finance crisis, transforma tive pathways towards increasing low-income countries’ agricultural production and national income while simultaneously improving poor land users’ livelihoods and well-being have still not been found
Our spatial data analysis revealed that several land use and land cover (LULC) changes occurred both in and around the active Large-scale agricultural investments (LAIs) between the two points in time analysed (Table 2; Figure 2)
In Kenya, where land users were not dispossessed of their land, we found that the LAIs had an indirect impact on land management rather than land use

Summary

Introduction

Since the 2008 food–energy–finance crisis, transforma tive pathways towards increasing low-income countries’ agricultural production and national income while simultaneously improving poor land users’ livelihoods and well-being have still not been found. Large-scale agricultural investments (LAIs) into what is often considered ‘idle’ or ‘underused’ land have been propagated as potential win–win situations that make it possible to meet various national-level development objectives (Collier and Dercon 2014). Unlike the Land Matrix Initiative (Nolte et al 2016), we interpret the word ‘large-scale’ in ‘large-scale agricultural investments’ as referring to the size of the cultivated area, and to economic size in terms of capital involved and labour employed. Many African governments met this renewed interest in their agricultural sector with great optimism (The World Bank 2011; Cotula 2012). Several studies have shown that large investments in agriculture do have a certain positive effect on local communities’ livelihoods, for example through employment, newly generated live lihood opportunities, and the uptake of technological farming practices, or by improving access to agricultural inputs (Smaller et al 2015; Deininger and Xia 2016)

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Conclusion