Lands to foreigners: the green party says stop

According to the first ecological party in Madagascar, providing lands to foreign nationals is no taboo, all conditions, however, have to be gathered. “It is not the right time to rent to sell lands to foreign enterprises”, declared Saraha Rabeharisoa, chairwoman of Ny Hasin’i Madagasikara. The excuse is a political reason linked to the crisis presently engulfing the country. “Even though the Daewoo and Varun cases are different, the Malagasy people’s aspiration for no national wealth to be sold out must not be forgotten” she added. 

The green party wants the State to refrain and reassess the conditions and the stakes of land sells to foreigners. “Everything must be stopped because we have no land policy at all to stand out to the forthcoming kind of pressure commonly addressed worldwide”, explained Saraha Rabeharisoa. The Varun file’s required land surface is not as important as the one asked by Daewoo, merely 230 000 hectares. 

“Three-quarters of these lands belong to private groups, nothing is yet known about the advantages to be returned by sale and renting”, underlined the chairwoman of Ny Hasin’i Madagasikara. Varun is actually renting already exploited lands to peasants and granting them a percentage of the harvests. Varun commits to buy the production sold by Malagasy agriculturists at a jointly agreed price. Peasants are entitled to keep a share of their production for their own consumption. 

The Daewoo business naturally influenced the opinion on the issue. As for today, about fifteen agricultural groups are opposing the Varun project in the region of Soafia. The Indian enterprise was yet committed to invest in agriculture in the current world food crisis and shortages of rice, the corn or lentils background. According to the ecologist party, any industrial exploitation of the land is bad. Ny Hasin’i Madagasikara bluntly turns down agribusiness, asserting that it only benefits investors. The green party recommends the current shape of agriculture which creates incomes for farming households.  

In Madagascar, agricultural automation is barely on the starting line up, all for most restricted to experimental sites. The weak agricultural production capacity pushed the authorities to make lands available to foreign corporations. It is no definitive sale but a grant of land restricted in time. The central state all as well as communities should be benefiting from it. 

The ministry  in charge of land reforms under the Ravalomanana regime allowed the Korean Daewoo to prospect a surface of 1.3 million hectares in the setting of a grant of land to corn culture. The opposition, then, diverted the information by affirming on public places that the state had allegedly given half of the lands to a foreign corporation. Misinformation and lies reached their goal of hurting a sensible issue for most of Malagasy: the sacred statute of the forebears’ lands.