Land Grabbing by Stefano Liberti

Author:Stefano Liberti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2013-11-19T05:00:00+00:00

‘Let’s hope we don’t get sent packing’

Susan Payne is the quintessential finance manager who throws herself into the new agribusiness sector. Modern, convincing and, most of all, inspired by good intentions. Many of the other participants at the conference use her very same words. The most widespread formula used in the room is: ‘We are not an NGO, but we want to contribute to the future of the planet.’ Everybody professes that their objective is the general wellbeing of people, along with the good health of their pockets. As the speeches roll on, I find myself a little wrong-footed: I’d expected to meet avid financiers who couldn’t care less about the environment, were indifferent to the plight of landless farmers, and insensitive to the poverty of families who can’t put two daily meals together. Instead, I’m at a meeting where every time money is mentioned it is immediately qualified by phrases such as ‘a better world’, ‘social responsibility’, ‘food sovereignty’, and so on. Everything seems designed to be politically and ecologically correct: the Media Director has sent the other accredited journalists and me an email with the biographies of the participants, and the specification that ‘this material won’t appear in the press kit for the good of the environment’.

This gloss of good intentions is sullied only at brief moments of epiphany, during impromptu and informal discussions in corridors away from the speeches. Like the one I have with Mikael Von Euw from Zurich, who I meet at a cocktail party organised for the end of the first day. Surrounded by little tables laid with shrimp and salmon hors d’oeuvres and other titbits, this stocky thirty-five-year-old sits apart from the others, drinking a beer. I approach him and we introduce ourselves. He tells me he’s the manager of a ‘family office’, which really means that he and his brother look after the fund of a wealthy family. ‘We’ve put a lot of that money into a company in Mozambique. We’ll be producing some stuff for the local market, but mostly we’ll be concentrating on biofuels. We’ve signed a leasing agreement for twenty-five years.’ Mikael claims to have obtained the land for a symbolic rent, which he doesn’t want to specify, limiting himself to adding ‘really symbolic’. As we crunch on prawn crackers and down some excellent white wine, he tells me about the feasibility studies he carried out together with a South African partner, describing the technology they had to bring in, and giving a few details on their interaction with the Maputo government. ‘They gave us fiscal exemption, they did absolutely everything to pave our way.’ By the time the fourth glass has gone down, Mikael is a lot less reticent. He tells me about a trip he made to the region, ‘florid and luxurious, like a paradise on earth’. He digresses for a moment to talk about the ‘extraordinary beauty of the local women’. Then he looks me in the eye and says: ‘It was all so fast, maybe too fast.

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