SOUMOUNI, Mali — The half-dozen strangers who descended on this remote West African village brought its hand-to-mouth farmers alarming news: their humble fields, tilled from one generation to the next, were now controlled by Libya’s leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, and the farmers would all have to leave.
“They told us this would be the last rainy season for us to cultivate our fields; after that, they will level all the houses and take the land,” said Mama Keita, 73, the leader of this village veiled behind dense, thorny scrubland. “We were told that Qaddafi owns this land.”
Across Africa and the developing world, a new global land rush is gobbling up large expanses of arable land. Despite their ageless traditions, stunned villagers are discovering that African governments typically own their land and have been leasing it, often at bargain prices, to private investors and foreign governments for decades to come.
Organizations like the United Nations and the World Bank say the practice, if done equitably, could help feed the growing global population by introducing large-scale commercial farming to places without it.
But others condemn the deals as neocolonial land grabs that destroy villages, uproot tens of thousands of farmers and create a volatile mass of landless poor. Making matters worse, they contend, much of the food is bound for wealthier nations.
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Technically Canada isn’t any further ahead than the folks in Timbuktu because our Charter of Rights does not even include property rights. Maybe Justin Trudeau will bring that little shortcoming up in a private member’s bill, when he’s not too busy campaigning for Liberal losers like Smitherman or Whatshisname in Vaughan.
Meanwhile what needs to happen in the third world has been preached by the Peruvian Hernando de Soto who President Clinton called "The world’s greatest living economist”. The main message of de Soto's work is that no nation can have a strong market economy as long as most of its people remain on the outside just looking in and that won’t be fixed unless property rights are enshrined, he says of most third world countries :
"The existence of such massive exclusion generates two parallel economies, legal and extra legal. An elite minority enjoys the economic benefits of the law and globalization, while the majority of entrepreneurs are stuck in poverty, where their assets –adding up to more than US$ 10 trillion worldwide– languish as Dead capital in the shadows of the law. The extra legals create their own rules.”
Closer to home with our First Nations, doesn’t this sound familiar?
In the third world, without the rule of law and fundamental rights such as title to property, our aid is not really helping much. We are simply enabling parallel economies by sending them aid because it turns into a fight between Slumdogs versus Millionaires.