Mali: A Victim of the Land Grabbing Phenomenon

Land grabbing occurs when a country seeks land outside of their borders in order to produce agricultural crops. Land grabs destroy the local culture and get rid of many local jobs. Local farmers are forced to move to make room for larger manipulative governments to come in and land grab. In Africa, farmers and their families are displaced when many African villages are already in distress, therefore, we should take an interest in their situation and be aware of the events happening in our world today. Africa is the leading country in land grabs and accounts for 70% of the world's total land grabs. It has only gotten more frequent and worse in recent years too. Such is the case between Libya and Mali. An article in the New York Times points out that Libyans ship rice, beef, and other agricultural products back to their country after using the arable land in Mali and displacing many of the farmers there. When farmers in Mali were brought the news of the land grabbing they were told, "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." The Libyan government says that they will compensate the people of Mali whose livelihoods are at risk, but there is no guarantee of a follow through. The compensation depends on trust, something that is risky between nations. In addition, Mali is taking a big risk in an attempt to improve their political relations with other countries, particularly Libya, since the land grabbing is not favoring them economically. The country's agricultural well-being is at the mercy of another country.

I found a website that allows you to interactively see the amount of arable land in hectares by African country. As of 2011, Mali had 6.9 million available hectors, 100,000 of which is under the control of the Libyan government. The image below (obtained from the New York Times article) shows the country of Mali and the countries in which agricultural transactions are popular.

This image below from QGIS shows the available agricultural hectares by country (for which there is data). As you can see from the dark blue, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Mozambique, as also seen in the image above, are some of most popular places for land grabbing to occur. Not far behind them is Mali. Mali gives a fairly large amount of agricultural hectares to Libya, considering the amount of total arable land they have.