After Daewoo? Current status and perspectives of large-scale land acquisition in Madagascar

On March 17, 2009, the fall of the Ravalomanana government in Madagascar resounded in the national and international media. The event assumed a unique character, as land questions appeared to be among the claims that led to the uprising. Accusations of "selling off the ancestors' land" were brought against President Ravalomanana following the revelation of a project to lease more than one million hectares of agricultural land, under obscure conditions, to a South Korean company, Daewoo Logistics. Since the beginning of the 2000s, a number of land acquisition projects in the agricultural sector have been announced or revealed by the press. The little information available implied that they were aimed at the production of food commodities, agrofuels, or wood. The land areas in question comprised between 1,000 and 200,000 hectares per invest-ment project. This study presents the evolution of large agricultural investments in Madagascar between 2005 and 2010. Commissioned by the International Land Coalition (ILC), it was realized by the Malagasy Land Observatory (l'Observatoire du Foncier à Madagascar) and CIRAD. Its aims are to: Examine the establishment processes of the Daewoo and Varun projects, both of which were eventually abandoned; Describe the status of land investment projects, by differentiating between those that have simply been announced and those that are effectively underway; Determine the operators' objectives with regards to land acquisition and to pinpoint the status of their applications for land; Examine the legal framework that is meant to regulate these investments; Analyze operators' practices in accessing land as well as the means of regulation, both formal and informal, of these investments at the local and national levels; Raise core questions to be addressed in the framework of a future debate on the role of these investments in the agricultural sector and on the institutional mechanisms that need to be reinforced in order to improve the transparency of land acquisition projects, to clarify the procedures for investors to follow, and to limit negative social, economic, and environmental impacts. (Résumé d'auteur