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If you want to learn more about the alarming enclosure of land commons in Africa – its history, current developments and the future – you can do no better than Liz Alden Wily's just-released series of briefing papers, “Reviewing the Fate of Customary Tenure in Africa.”   The series of reports are published by the Rights and Resources Initiative, which describes itself as “ a global coalition of organizations working to encourage forest land tenure and policy reforms and the transformation of the forest economy so that business reflects local development agendas and supports local livelihoods.”

The five-part, 80-page document is a brisk, clear introdution to the history of land commons in Afrtica.  Alden Wily, who studies land tenure practices from Nairobi, Kenya, explains the role of law, money and force in dispossessing native Africans of their customary lands. The basic story is that community-governed commons are being converted into private property traded in the market, resulting in all the familiar pathologies:  People's sense of identity and connection to others wanes; they lose access and use of resources critical to their survival; ecosystems are damaged by market-driven enterprises and investors; and the displaced commoners, unable to support themselves, migrate to cities and become wage slaves, or fall to the margins of the new market culture by becoming beggars, pirates or hapless improvisers in the “informal economy."

A massive international land grab is now underway as investors and national governments buy up millions of acres of farmlands in Africa, Asia and Latin America.  It amounts to an unprecedented and novel set of enclosures of worldwide land, much of it customary land that rural communities use and manage collectively.  Hundreds of millions of rural poor people rely upon the land for their families' food, water and material -- but they don't have formal property rights in the land.  Those rights typically belong to the government, which is authorizing the sale of “unowned” lands or "wastelands" to investors, who will then use the land for market-based farming or biofuels production.

The implications for global hunger and poverty are enormous.  Instead of commoners having local authority to grow and harvest their own food, they are being thrown off the land so that large multinational corporations and investors can feed their own countries or make a speculative killing on the world land market.  A commons is converted into a market, with all the attendant pathologies.

The 2008 financial crisis and the recent round of rising food prices on world markets have spurred much of the interest in buying up arable lands in poor countries.  Food-insecure countries figure they should take care of their own future even if it means depriving commoners in poor nations thousands of miles away.  So Saudi Arabia is spending $1 billion for 700,000 hectares of land in Africa for rice cultivation.  South Korea is buying up 700,000 hectares of African land as well.  India is assembling investment pools to buy up farmlands.

While common lands and waters are being stolen by investors and developers the world over, the Supreme Court of India decided it was not going to look the other way.  In a bold, surprising ruling, the Court made a sweeping defense of the commons as commons. 

In the January 28 decision, the Court held that the enclosure of a village pond in Rohar Jagir, Tehsil, in the State of Punjab, by real estate developers was a totally illegal occupation of the commons.  The developers, who were appealing a lower court ruling, had filled in the pond with soil and started building houses on it.  The Court ruled in unmistakable terms that the pond/land must revert to the commoners immediately and the illegal occupiers must be evicted.  Even more remarkable, the Court held that similar enclosures of common lands elsewhere in India must be reversed even if they have been in effect for years.  (Thanks, Trent Schroyer, for alerting me to this case!)

You can read the 12-page decision by Markandey Katju here [pdf file].  Given the ideological capture of American jurisprudence, it is astonishing and inspirational for me to encounter a no-nonsense affirmation of the rights of commoners by the highest court of any nation.