Over the last year, the Liberian government has agreed to sell or has sold about 10% of the country’s land — equivalent to 10,931 square kilometres — to Dubai-based company Blue Carbon to preserve forests that might otherwise be logged and used for farming, the primary livelihood for many communities.

Blue Carbon plans to make money from this conservation by selling carbon credits to polluters to offset their emissions as they burn fossil fuels. Some experts argue that the model offers little climate benefit, while activists label it “carbon colonialism.”

Blue Carbon has done several such deals across several African countries, including for 8% of Tanzania’s land (20 million acres), 10% of Zambia’s land (20 million acres), and 20% of Zimbabwe’s land (18 million acres), and several million acres of forest in Kenya, to name the more stand out cases.

Blue Carbon is not alone. It only happens to be the poster boy for these carbon land pacts. The sale and leasing of land in Africa for carbon offset purposes have grown significantly in recent years. By 2023, it was estimated that hundreds of millions of hectares across Africa collectively far larger than Uganda have been leased or sold for these projects.

The deals for carbon offset projects are separate from land acquired for old-fashioned farming. Over the past 20 years, it’s estimated that foreign companies, organisations (including Western universities), and governments have acquired or leased between 60 to 100 million hectares of African land – and that’s based on data that’s almost four years old. In addition to Liberia, and Zimbabwe, these land deals, have focused on countries like Ethiopia, Sudan, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Madagascar, and Tanzania. They have led to concerns about food security for local populations, loss of livelihoods, environmental degradation, and social unrest.

African nations that have attracted these investments often view them as a way to boost their agricultural sectors or infrastructure. Still, hardly any of the countries have posted notable growth in food production. On the contrary, a few have declined – due in part to climate change disruptions and civil war. With the sharp drop in “indigenous production”, as it were, any gains from foreign commercial production have been cancelled out.

This “land grabs” and “carbon colonialism” is becoming a very vexing issue in Africa, but it is complicated and hydra-headed. Africa rarely discusses its responsibility to provide or contribute global goods – peace, security, health, food, or a clean environment. It is cast – and often opportunistically accepts to be – either as a victim (it emits the least carbon but suffers the bulk of the consequences of pollution), or it is a pitiful recipient (of aid, vaccines, emergency relief, peacekeeping).

This won’t stand. As national security experts and hardnosed pan-African geopolitical minds, most notably  Eriya Kategaya, Uganda’s leftwing former and late First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for East African Community Affairs, have noted, the world will not just fold its arms and die of hunger as Africa sits on the largest chunk of earth’s most arable land and does nothing with it. It is just not how the global power set-up works. If Africa can’t contribute to putting food on the world’s table, someone will buy or seize its lands by force and do so. You can take that to the bank.

In politics, it is possible for several contradictory things to be true at the same time. So it is also true that land grabs are a huge threat to the existence not just of nations, but the African people’s themselves. In a continent which spends over $50 billion on food imports, where no country is even marginally food-sufficient, and which at the start of this century was even more dependent on food aid than it was 35 years previously, the foreign companies and governments buying farmlands aren’t angels of mercy flying in to farm and feed the continent’s hungry. They are doing it primarily for their people and shareholders first, and if any scraps remain, sell at market price to African citizens.

Part of the solution to the land grabs, and Africa’s food crisis is therefore not in the gardens. It is in politics and governance. Good and effective governments that can get their countries to produce more than enough food for themselves, end food import dependency, and have quality supply to sell to the rest of the world, will put a stop to land grabs.

It is a humongous task. Some years back, Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni visited a Gulf nation, and there he boasted about how Uganda is one of the most fertile countries in the world and could feed a large part of it if it used its land optimally and deployed advanced agricultural technology. He was asked if Uganda could supply the country with eggs. Sure, he said, Uganda was producing so many eggs – and milk – they were being thrown away.

A deal was done, and some weeks a huge cargo plane arrived from the Gulf nation to pick up tons of eggs.  It landed at Entebbe International Airport and waited, and waited, and waited. After several days, with the cost of keeping the plane seated on the tarmac skyrocketing, it left barely half-full. Uganda couldn’t produce even 500,000 trays of eggs. Moving around Uganda and being assaulted with the sight of trays with eggs piled high, they look like a great amount. But the reason there are so many eggs out there is not because too much is produced. It is because most Ugandans who want to consume eggs can’t afford them. Otherwise, they would snap up all the eggs in a blink.

I remember going to the massive plant of the largest producer of frozen foods in East Africa outside the Kenyan capital Nairobi. I had never seen so much chicken, beef, and pork coming off production lines. When I wondered where all the large amounts of products were going, one of the directors told me:

“That’s nothing, we are barely producing at 50% capacity.”

“All that and you are at half, what is the problem”, I asked.

“If Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and Rwanda collected all the chicken, pork and beef they produce and brought it to market, they would provide us with enough for produce at 100% and to meet the external demand we don’t even try to service today yet”, he said.

That points to the other thing African governments must do – fix the economies.

As it is, time could be running out. As with minerals, we seem to be sliding into an era where countries that are broken by conflict, wrecked by cruel and corrupt leaders, or been hijacked by a predatory class, are the best thing for foreign land entrepreneurs. Such governments are desperate and will do cheap deals quickly, or won’t have the political legitimacy and authority to resist land grab schemes. And may the force be with the nationalist government that is able to resist and oversee bumper harvests; it could be a target for regime change.

The bottom line, though, is that countries must eat. Even if they have to eat other countries to do so.