Global Compact International Yearbook 2013
53
CSR in Africa
Agenda
though, has been Africa’s natural wealth, including both non-
renewable resources such as oil, gas, and minerals, as well
as renewable ones, which include agricultural land, forests,
wildlife, water, and fisheries.
The way that natural resources are managed and governed will
have enormous implications for the future of African societies.
For extractive resources such as fossil fuels and minerals, the
challenge is to establish transparent and equitable governance
systems to avoid the “resource curse,” whereby these indus-
tries fuel corruption and thereby undermine governance and
development. An additional challenge is to balance extractive
industries with rigorous environmental and social standards
and safeguards, in order to avoid the large-scale negative
externalities seen in areas such as the Niger Delta.
For renewable resources, the foremost need is for establishing
institutional frameworks that promote sustainability in use and
exploitation, for example by clearly allocating and enforcing
property rights over land, forests, wildlife, and other valuable
resources. These issues of natural resource governance lie at
the center of the struggle for sustainable development in Africa
today; future investments may either contribute to balanced
and more equitable growth, or they may alternatively lead to
disenfranchisement and resentment, and eventually to the
all-too-familiar path of resource-linked violence. As global
markets and the demand for African resources continue to
expand, the decisions made today about policy reform and
development models will have an enormous impact in shap-
ing these future outcomes in fundamental ways.
Africa and the global land and resource rush
The past decade has witnessed a new global rush for land and
natural resources due to a range of economic and social factors.
Global food prices have more than doubled since 2000, lead-
ing to a major shift in demand for agricultural land, as both
sovereign nations and major commercial producers seek to
acquire large areas of fertile or irrigable land. New industries
such as biofuels are further contributing to a surge in land
acquisition. Tourism, forestry, and carbon markets generate
further demand for rural lands and resources across much of
the developing world. In 2009, the World Bank estimated that
more than 50 million hectares of agricultural land was being
sought that year for acquisition and investment around the
world, compared to an average annual acquisition of around
4
million hectares prior to 2008.
Africa has been the focal area for this land and resource rush
for several basic reasons. First, African nations such as Sudan,
Mozambique, and Ethiopia have large areas of land that are
not actively cultivated, and thus appear to be “unused” and
available for external allocation and conversion. Secondly,
formal legal rights over land, water, and natural resources in
Africa tend to be heavily centralized, with the state usually
claiming ownership over lands that are not directly farmed or
settled, which includes most forests and rangelands. The result
of this situation is that the majority of people living in rural
areas – perhaps up to 500 million Africans in total – have
insecure or inadequate recognition of their customary rights
over their land and territories. This particularly impacts forest-
dependent communities and pastoralists – groups of people
who are heavily reliant on collectively held and managed
pastureland and forests, which tend to cover extensive areas.
For example, in Africa less than 1 percent of all forests are
formally owned or controlled by local communities, compared
to about 25 percent of forests in Latin America.
These legally unrecognized community lands – which some
estimates place at roughly 1.6 billion hectares in total across
sub-Saharan Africa, or around 70 percent of the total land
area – also contain much of the region’s natural wealth,
in terms of forests, watersheds, rangelands, and wildlife. In
Kenya, for example, about 70 percent of all large mammals
are found outside of state lands such as national parks, mostly
on communally managed rangelands where wildlife lives
alongside resident pastoralist communities. These wildlife
resources support a tourism industry that accounts for more
than $1 billion in annual revenue and roughly 13 percent of
GDP in direct and indirect contributions. The reality is similar
in Namibia, Tanzania, Botswana, Zambia, and many other
countries where wildlife is a major source of tourism invest-
ment and one of the most valuable resources in rural areas.
The widespread failure of African governments to legally
recognize rural citizens’ customary lands and resources is
highly problematic – and dangerous – on a number of
fundamental levels. Secure rights over the land that one lives
on and depends on for one’s livelihood is an essential human