'When the cat is away, the mice will play': the political ecology of tobacco production and manganese mining in Nansanga farm block in Zambia

Andrew Chilombo,Dan Van Der Horst

doi:10.2458/jpe.2974

Abstract

Large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) have emerged as an important policy issue in development discourse. Governments in host countries play a critical role in engineering policy landscapes for enclosing local community resources for capital accumulation by business entities with more financial resources and access to power. Case studies have highlighted failed implementation of LSLA deals, resulting in cancellations, scaling down, abandonment or change of investment business models. However, few attempts have been made to understand what accounts for such failures and what happens when both state policy and private sector implementation of land deals fail. Taking Nansanga farm block, a government of Zambia-led LSLA deal currently in limbo, this article presents a study that aimed at understanding the political ecology of tobacco production and manganese mining as opportunistic economic activities – that is, activities that are taking advantage of new infrastructure created by an otherwise 'failed' government project and flourishing in an area where local people's rights were previously protected through customary tenure. Drawing on stakeholder interviews, the study shows that the government's role in the development of Nansanga vanished; creating a development vacuum that opened the door to opportunistic tobacco production and open pit manganese mining. Tobacco and mining, heavily extractive as they are of forest resources, have emerged as double-edged swords: in the short term increasing financial inflows and job creation on one hand, and, on the other, leading to flight from production of traditional crops, deforestation and land degradation, anomie and deracination as some land use and land users are (re)defined.

Highlights

Managing, mediating, delivering, and producing the environment is a core and foundational feature of the modern, territorially defined, capitalist state. (Parenti, 2015, p. 830)Large scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) have stirred contentious debates among different stakeholders
We highlight the socio-economic and environmental impacts ensuing from these two flourishing activities in Nansanga on what was once customary land farmed for food crops
The frequent implementation failures of LSLAs support the critiques made by their opponents: namely that outside LSLA investors are engaged in capital accumulation through dispossession and externalization

Summary

Introduction

Managing, mediating, delivering, and producing the environment is a core and foundational feature of the modern, territorially defined, capitalist state. (Parenti, 2015, p. 830)Large scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) have stirred contentious debates among different stakeholders. Interest in the LSLA phenomenon has brought together scholars from different academic disciplines. Platforms such as the annual Land and Poverty Conference and research in journals have helped to elevate the profile of LSLAs in development policy discourses. Promoted on the assumption there is 'surplus land and surplus labor' in host countries, that both investors and states say needs to be exploited (Li 2011), the contemporary wave of LSLA is linked to neoliberal capitalism. Development practitioners (e.g. the World Bank) and policy makers in host countries view LSLAs as a mechanism for development and the alleviation of rural poverty (see critiques by De Schutter 2011). Governments play a critical role in the contemporary wave of LSLAs (for a historical review, see Roudart and Mazoyer, 2015)

Results

Discussion

Conclusion