This OpEd published by Panoramana News was originally written in Norwegian and M.J. Santos translated it into English for wider audience. The views expressed in the text are the writer’s own.
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Migration within and from Africa has significant consequences for both aid efforts and immigration to Europe. However, we overlook an important factor when discussing it.
In 2015, one million migrants, including many from African nations, crossed the Mediterranean to Europe. After a brief decline, there’s a resurgence in migration from sub-Saharan Africa to North Africa and Europe, with approximately half of all boat migrants originating from West Africa.
But Why Do So Many Want to Leave?
Commonly mentioned causes include poverty, unemployment, population growth, and climate change. These are general and unsatisfactory explanations. Additionally, there is the challenging security situation in the Sahel, marked by jihadist uprisings and increasing violence, which has resulted in many internally displaced refugees.
What is often overlooked, however, is the extensive occurrence of “land grabbing” across the African continent.
This factor is ignored, despite the high likelihood that people displaced from their land will move to the nearest city or attempt to reach a country where jobs are available.
In recent decades, significant changes have occurred in who has access to land. Pressure on land comes from many different sources.
After the financial crisis of 2007–2008, food and energy prices rose, leading to increased international interest in investing in agricultural projects in Africa.
The idea was: “Here, there is plenty of cheap, unused land available.”
Land grabbing refers to a well-known and documented process where capital interests and African elites have used bribery and national legal frameworks inherited from colonial times to seize large agricultural areas at the expense of local villagers.
A common denominator in these processes is that some are left without access to land and resources, often with little compensation, while others enrich themselves through investments.
These legal frameworks are generally not aligned with customary practices and give significant power to politicians and bureaucrats to define ownership.
The result is that small-scale farmers and herders have been pushed off land they have historically used—ranging from peri-urban agricultural areas converted into residential developments to grazing lands that are now cultivated.
A common denominator in these processes is that some are left without access to land and resources, often with little compensation, while others profit from the investments.
Climate Projects and “Greenwashing”
Over the past 10–15 years, climate projects have emerged as a new threat to the livelihoods of rural communities. This includes forest conservation, where Norway is a dominant actor, and tree-planting projects.
The negative consequences we’ve seen from such projects are minor compared to what can be expected from the plans currently in place. These include the massive tree-planting initiatives required under the scenarios outlined by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to meet the 1.5-degree target, which could have enormous social consequences.
Ahead of the COP28 climate summit in Dubai, the company Blue Carbon, based in the United Arab Emirates, announced agreements with five African countries: Zimbabwe, Zambia, Kenya, Liberia, and Tanzania. The agreements involve protecting and planting forested areas equivalent to the size of the United Kingdom.
Through such initiatives, fossil-fuel-producing countries like the UAE and Norway aim to use forests to greenwash their oil and gas production by selling carbon credits.
Such a shift in land use will, of course, have enormous consequences for those already using these areas.
Migration in the Sahel
I lead a research project studying whether land grabbing contributes to migration in the Sahel. Recently, we held a project seminar in Bamako, the capital of Mali, where researchers from Chad described how a military elite in their country seizes fertile land on the northern shores of Lake Chad.
This has led to increased recruitment for the terrorist organization Boko Haram as well as heightened migration to Libya. Once in Libya as African labor migrants, the journey to attempting to reach Italy can be short.
One of Africa’s most fertile areas, the inland Niger Delta in Mali, is another hotspot for coveted land, where small-scale farmers have been displaced on a large scale.
The process began in the 1930s when the French colonial state confiscated the southern part of the delta to establish the state-owned company Office du Niger, initially to supply cotton for textile factories in Nîmes and Marseille.
After Mali gained independence in 1960, rice and sugarcane production took precedence. Before the country’s crisis in 2012, large tracts of land were leased on long-term contracts at low costs to investors from Libya, China, the USA, and other nations. Land areas were expanded by building canals and demolishing villages.
In Bamako, we also spoke with the head of Mali’s association for displaced migrants. They advocate for migrants’ rights and are actively involved in the fight against land grabbing, seeing it as a key driver of migration.
The association’s leader highlighted that in 2008, many people lost land in Office du Niger, prompting a wave of young men from the area to migrate north in an attempt to reach Spain. It is well known that many African migrants work in agriculture in Southern Europe without permits because they are essential labor.
Currently, there is very little focus or documentation in research literature on the link between land grabbing and migration. Nor is there any political focus on what such a connection might mean for European aid and immigration policies.
Author: Tor A. Benjaminsen, Professor at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences