1 - The Indian Ocean's Land Politics—An African-Indian Perspective

Chinese and Indians have been implicated in land grabs in Kenya, Ethiopia, and other East African nations. These lands have been used for bio-fuels, food crops, and flowers. The impact of such incursions by the world’s two most populous countries has mostly been studied for African agriculturalists, who are still the majority on the continent even with accelerating urbanization. The issue of land is, however, not a new source of contention nor is it only affecting farmers. Rather, land politics is part of an Indian Ocean complex connected to mass production of agroproducts, transshipment systems across land and sea, and technologies enabling large-scale agriculture where farming has not been possible in previous centuries.

This paper situates land politics in East Africa within a broader Indian Ocean zone of environmentalist technologies. Many grabbed lands are not African farmlands but rather are arid or “unused” regions where intensive farming requires investments in water management, fertilization, consistent energy supplies, and human labor. These laborers were once nomadic peoples now caught in conflict zones (often precisely over grazing and water) who face a bitter irony that farming may be their only option for survival. Many of the machines making “gardens in the desert” are produced in China and India, arriving via container ships and trucks. Thus even without older settler colonialism and with the acquiescence of African politicians located far from “remote” and “undeveloped” areas, Indian Ocean extraction has engulfed the East African interior.