the lie of the land Land grabbing is alive and well in a twenty-first century mutated form. Characters clearly recognisable from historical accounts of colonial rule – corrupt government officials speculating with a syndicate of friends, local figures entrusted with community land who successfully convert it to their own, the company supported by government influence or platoons of lawyers – all these are still present, especially in Africa and South America. The one figure that is missing today is the settler. In the changed situational dynamics, the settler’s role, conflated with investment capital and sovereignty over the land, is no longer asserted as a necessary prerequisite for securing assets. In the desire to secure resources (oil, minerals, timber, water), the demand for agro-fuel (produced from maize, oil palm, sugar cane, jatropha), or simply to assure the supply of food for their customers, companies and governments are engaged in buying or leasing large tracts of land wherever it is cheap and potentially productive. Not all foreign investment is bad although the workings of the market do produce strange blooms – food-insecure Ethiopia with much arable land at its disposal, produces via an Indian company a major share of cut roses for Europe (95% of roses sold in the Netherlands for example), while at the same time a lack of investment capital and technical equipment forces Ethiopia to be dependent on food imports. The development of agro-fuels as part of a ‘green revolution’ spearheads the opening up of markets in Africa and the consequent removal of land control and production from African hands and community-based systems. Those under the most pressure are the middle-to-small subsistence farmers holding their land under a system of traditional tenure derived from families, lineages and communities or government title. Agro-fuel for the local market is not the same as agro-fuel for Western Europe with its recently imposed targets; large scale food farming for national use is not the same as production for the export market, however foreign investors demand growth and security for their investment along with security of title of any assets, often achieved by bi-lateral treaty agreements at government level. Companies, put on the same footing as nationals, regulate divestment and compensation procedures that allow foreign investors to bypass national courts in any disputes and to present their case in an international court or tribunal appointed to deal with treaty disputes. Foreign interests often mesh with those of centralised governments, jointly pushing towards a centralised system of commodified land ownership with clearly defined boundaries (courtesy of GPS surveying technologies) and away from communal multi-level use, negotiated, administered and endorsed locally. In the lack of consultation, power slips away from the periphery to the centre, and the periphery organises to resist dispossession without consultation. China’s attempt to take 1.5– 2.5 million hectares in the Philippines and Daewoo’s 2008 attempt to lease half Madagascar’s arable land, failed because of protests. Even so, the arguments are similar to those used two hundred years ago — the land in question is waste land, marginal, under-used, unexplored, empty, all categories imposed by central governments that ignore complex uses ‘on the ground’ and which arrogate the right to dispose of land as it sees fit.
some specifics of place In 1871 when British Columbia joined the Canadian confederation, one of its pre-conditions was that BC be linked overland to the rest of Canada, fulfilled by the Canadian Pacific Railway by 1884. In the 1880s on Vancouver Island, Robert Dunsmuir founded a railway company, the Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway. Both the CPR and E&NR received land grants for their efforts: 30km each side of the line. Dunsmuir’s deal also included mineral rights which meant that the company ‘owned’ around 20 percent of the island (which is about three-quarters the size of Switzerland), while the CPR ‘owned’ much of Vancouver, which with the arrival of the railway took on new importance. Significantly it was the CPR land commissioner, Lauchlan Hamilton, who laid out the street grid for Vancouver after its almost complete destruction by fire in 1886. One of the first pieces of business for the newly-formed Vancouver City Council was the designation of a large area of land for recreational purposes (leaving enough time for the friends of one of the aldermen to log the area) on a peninsula looking west to the Strait of Georgia and east up Burrard Inlet. Now it may be that the gentlemen in question were motivated by municipal well-being but it is worth noting that many of them had, or represented, interests in the remaining real estate in the neighbourhood. Had the British Crown put 950 acres of prime property on the market, both their holdings and those of the CPR (Lauchlan Hamilton, was a CPR employee and well as an alderman) would have suffered. However if it was turned into a municipal park it would not only increase the value of the remaining plots and provide a space for middle class leisure occupations such as sailing and cricket, it would also increase the potential attraction of Vancouver to outside investors. This was the 950 acres that became Stanley Park. However, there was still one other problem; some of the peninsula was inhabited. Apart from some Coast Salish people who had always lived there, the proposed park was home to a number of Chinese families, European immigrants married to First Nation women, fisherman with houses on stilts on the beach of Dead Man’s Island and, just across the inlet, the Kanaka Ranch, where Hawaiian men lived with First Nation wives and their children. The newspapers were induced to start a campaign against the ‘undesirable squatters’ and the ‘loose and disorderly sort of people’ – terms that might justifiably be used by the Coast Salish for the interlopers instigating the campaign – and in the long term they were successful, using either legal instruments, intimidation or, when forced, compensatory payments. Legal cases involve claims by many occupants to title to the land on the basis of ‘adverse possession’ (proof of 20 to 60 years of uninterrupted occupation). The courts ruled that the oral testimony of ‘Indians’ was not to be relied on, a judicial way of silencing the land. Having succeeded in ridding the area of ‘Indians and mixed bloods’ the Vancouver Parks Department suggested erecting a fake Indian village as an attraction. Though this idea was never realised, totem poles representing many First Nations from BC (but not those who had recently occupied that piece of land – they had no tradition of wood carving) were erected.
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