This is one of the many reasons why Americans should pay attention to Africa. Whether through a foreign aid and development approach, a military approach, or a business approach, the United States is pulling levers in countries all over the world. As citizens, it is often hard to know what is being done in our name by our government, or under our watch by our corporations.
Corporations, many based in the United States, have been grabbing so much land in South Sudan that by the date of independence for Southern Sudan, nearly 10% of the land was already in foreign hands. According to one of the new MPs, in referring to the years of bloodshed that won their independence, “At the rate we are losing land, soon there will be no where left to bury the dead.”
Land Giveaway in Southern Sudan
In March of 2008, Texas-and-Delaware-based Nile Trading and Development, Inc, purchased a 49-year lease on 600,000 hectares (about 1.5 million acres) of land in South Sudan, with the option of expanding that to 1 million hectares if they choose.
Included in this lease is pretty much everything. They have the right to all mineral development (mining, petroleum, etc), timber production, carbon offsets generated by tree farming, agriculture, biofuel plant production and on and on. The price tag for this incredible bounty? About $25,000 dollars. The price of a low-end Prius. For a forty-nine year lease on a piece of land larger than Delaware.
Who in South Sudan would enter into what seems like such an unfavorable deal? The Mukaya Payam Cooperative, supposedly led by a “Paramount Chief.” Unfortunately,
According to Sudan’s Agency for Independent Media (AIM), the Mukaya Payam Cooperative is a “fictitious cooperative” comprised of “a group of influential natives from Mukaya Payam and the neighboring payams (districts)…The influential natives leased out the land behind the backs of the entire community…”
The lease agreement between NTD and Mukaya Payam includes revenue sharing, starting at 60% of profits to the company and 40% to the cooperative, with a shift to 50/50 over time. But what does that mean if the Cooperative doesn’t actually exist?
Now you have, potentially, 1 million hectares of land taken out of smallholder agricultural production. Let’s say an average family in South Sudan could survive on what they produce from 1 hectare. That means one million families could be supported (albeit barely) by this same piece of land. Will that many families benefit from the revenue-sharing through the Cooperative?
I also don’t see any revenue-sharing structure with the government of South Sudan beyond paying taxes. If oil is discovered, which is not unlikely in this part of the world, it seems like the income generated will be shared by the Company and the Cooperative, and not by the government that is expected to provide services to its people.
Let’s Partner with Warlords Instead of Fake Cooperatives
New York-based Jarch Management entered into a joint venture with the son of General Paulino Matip, a Nuer warlord responsible for many of the atrocities we have heard about in South Sudan in the past two decades to buy up between one and two million acres in Sudan.
Led by Phillipe Heilberg, Jarch Management has been investing in Sudan for years, and seems to have made an intentional decision to “go with the guns” – ie. work through warlords rather than government entities.
South Sudan Land Deals are being Investigated
The way I see it, international corporations have taken advantage of the instability in Southern Sudan over the last ten years and have used their power to negotiate deals that will hamstring the nascent country for decades to come, separating the people from their resource base and making it even more difficult for the country to provide for its people.
Norwegian People’s Aid and other international rights groups are investigating these and other land deals. It may be that the new government could nullify some of the deals that were negotiated under the pre-independence administration.
Nile Trading and Development, Inc, is an affiliate of Kinyeti Development. Feel free to e-mail them and let them know you will be watching to make sure they give the people of South Sudan a fair shake.
You can contact the Jarch Management Group to let them know that you think they should now be sure to work through the legitimate government of South Sudan.
All land deals in South Sudan are supposed to involve consultation with the local people who will be affected. However, only two out of the last 28 have actually gone through that process.
Foreign investment can help move South Sudan and other countries along the development path if it is used for that purpose. Let’s make sure that our corporations keep that in mind when they negotiate deals around the world.
Mark D. Jordahl
This question was asked by Larry Kanyike in the Daily Monitor in his article Does Uganda Have a Future. His opening statement, and the rest of the article, should stir up some interesting debate:
It reminds me of a story that Henry, one of the rangers at Murchison Falls National Park, told me on one of my visits there. He said when he was growing up, there was an old man who had lived under colonial rule, through independence, and through the difficult regimes of the 70s and 80s.
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Mark D. Jordahl says:
I think “illegal” is murky in this case given the instability in southern Sudan when these deals were brokered, and I agree that probably none of these firms are doing anything technically illegal. I just think “legal” is a low bar in situations like this. Unethical is more the issue, and since money has no ethics, the only way to get many corporations to act in an ethical way is to make sure that the public is watching what they are doing. Many legal things are still wrong.
It isn’t the government officials selling the land, so saying they “want the maximum amount” doesn’t really apply here, unless they are accepting bribes (which you know as well as I do that they probably are, even though there is no “proof” or mention of it in the articles). In the case of NTD, it is the Cooperative selling the lease and, if they don’t actually exist in the form they say they do, it is the Cooperative, not the US company, breaking the law. If this is the case, do you honestly believe that NTD doesn’t know about it? Also, if it is true that 26 out of 28 land deals did not do a consultation with the local people, that does seem like the law is, at least, being skirted.
You are very right to mention China, and that is a big issue globally, not just in Sudan. How do we hold our corporations or our government to a higher standard when China is happy to step in wherever we step out? If our government tells Uganda, for instance, that we will only give aid dollars if they improve their human rights, of course they will just look to China for investment dollars instead since they don’t care. How do we deal with this?
And do we drop our own standards to make sure we are on par with China just to keep them out? If our corporations knowingly enter into deals with warlords, are we a “better” option? Maybe it’s better to have China in there, since they are more up-front about their motives and aren’t quite as sneaky in their dealings. It might be easier to monitor.
And you are right that it would be good to put pressure on (or give support to) the South Sudan government to think about their long-term interests in land deals and tighten their laws, but I honestly don’t know how to do that.
You are also right that the issue is the deals more than the fact that the deals are with American corporations. However, I am here in the U.S., as are most of the people reading this, and I think it is often difficult for people to see why they should care about Africa since it is so far away and we don’t realize how much involvement our country actually has there on many levels. Norway sounded the trumpet on this, and I hope there are people in other countries that are buying up land there who are also shining a spotlight on it.
Thanks, as always, for thinking deeply about these issues!