Global Finance

2009-11-09-ROAD-to-KONO-Addax-village-001-300x225We were meeting under a thatch roof at the makeshift headquarters of Addax Bioenergy in northern Sierra Leone. Aminata Koroma, Social Liaison Officer for the company, was extolling for me the virtues of the project that was transforming great swaths of farmland, grassland and woodland around us into massive sugarcane plantations. Addax Bioenergy, part of the Addax & Oryx Group headed by Swiss billionaire Jean-Claude Gandur, had recently leased more than 50,000 hectares in the area, with the intention of processing the sugarcane to produce ethanol for export to Europe, where it would be used to fuel vehicles. Koroma was more than enthusiastic about the project, despite a good deal of local opposition among farming communities.

I was challenging her about the wisdom of transforming the diverse countryside, much of it used for farming, into monocultural plantations of sugarcane. She responded that there would be “environmental corridors”, and that they were going to have a “tree-planting day”.

To make way for its sugarcane plantations in Sierra Leone, Addax Bioenergy had to fell many trees, including ones that produce valuable food such as kenda.

To make way for its sugarcane plantations in Sierra Leone, Addax Bioenergy had to fell many trees, including ones that produce valuable food such as kenda.

I countered that I had seen the bulldozers taking down valuable indigenous leguminous trees that did not lend themselves well to planting, such as the locust bean tree, or Parkia biglobosa. This tree is cherished through West and Central Africa because of its many medicinal properties, the sweet edible yellow powder that is harvested from its pods, and its seeds that are fermented and prepared to produce an extremely nutritious and tasty condiment that has long been a mainstay in local cuisines. In Sierra Leone it’s known as kenda.

“Nobody’s planting those trees, the ones that produce kenda,” I said to Koroma. “They grow naturally, they’re not cultivated.”

“Why are you thinking about producing kenda?” she retorted. “ I mean, we call it the poorest man’s food. There is even a song that says, ‘kenda and dry rice, na poor man’s choice’.” She said that the only people in Sierra Leone who ate kenda were people who could not afford the modern alternative, the chemical-ridden Maggi cubes from Nestlé. For her, traditional foods such as kenda had no place in a modern diet. She seemed to think my defence of the condiment and the diverse local farms that produced traditional crops meant I was backward. Against progress and development. Continue reading Poor man’s food? Saving Africa’s foods, ferments and farms from the “saviours”

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Previously: Billionaires at play in the fields of the poor (part 5) Chinnakannan Sivasankaran

There is a great deal of buzz about Africa’s economic awakening, with some countries experiencing substantial growth in gross domestic product that is being driven by waves of foreign capital, as investors from Asia, Europe, North America, the Middle East and also Latin America descend on the continent. Many of the investors are after natural resources, mineral and oil riches and also farmland. This raises the question: is the foreign investment benefitting the continent or is it just another scramble for Africa, the last stage of colonialism? In this, the last of six articles on the issue, Joan Baxter profiles another of five billionaire investors in Sierra Leone, French national Vincent Bolloré and his complex investment portfolio in Africa. The article concludes the series by looking at how — even if — the wave of foreign investment in Sierra Leone benefits the country.

 Billionaire investors and prosperity for whom?

P1011484-300x225Not even 50 kilometres from the disputed land lease taken out by the Siva Group  in Kpaka Chiefdom in Sierra Leone’s Pujehun District, where angry youth leaders and local chiefs are denouncing their Paramount Chief for signing away their precious farmland, there is similar discontent and dis-accord over a land deal in the Malen Chiefdom. There, Socfin Agricultural Company (SL) Ltd, or SAC, has leased 6,575 hectares and converted more than half of that into monoculture oil palm plantation. It is now seeking to lease and plant an additional 5,500 hectares, for a total of 12,000.[i]

SAC is 85 percent owned by Socfinaf,[ii] part of the extremely complex Socfin [Société Financière des Caoutchoucs] Group, with its contact address[iii] in Luxembourg, a ”major” secrecy jurisdiction at the ”dirty” end of the spectrum. [iv] Thirty-nine percent of the shares of Socfin are held by the Bolloré Group,[v] of which the prominent French billionaire Vincent Bolloré is Chair and Chief Executive Officer. Although the Group is listed on the Paris stock exchange, the Bolloré family holds ”majority control of the company through a complex and indirect holding structure”.[vi] The major shareholders of SOCFIN SA are all very much associated with the Bolloré Group, as they are controlled by the Fabri or de Ribes families, who are intertwined in the various interconnected companies.

Continue reading Billionaires at play in the fields of the poor (part 6): prosperity for whom?

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Previously: Billionaires at play in the fields of the poor (part 4): Jean Claude Gandur

In this, the fifth in a series of six articles on foreign investment in Sierra Leone’s natural resources and farmland, Joan Baxter profiles another of five billionaire investors in the country, Indian national Chinnakannan Sivasankaran and his quest to make his Siva Group into the largest player in the production of  palm oil by leasing land and establishing oil palm plantations from Papua New Guinea to Sierra Leone to South America.

 King of Oil Palm

The magnitude of the ambitions of other investors working to get their hands on Sierra Leonean real estate in the form of farmland pales next to those of the Siva Group. Siva is an Indian conglomerate with offices in Singapore, ”a big, dirty Asian tax haven”. [i] The Siva Group is working to become ”the largest global player in the production of sustainable palm oil”. [ii] According to its country representative in Sierra Leone, it is acquiring more than 200,000 hectares of arable land for oil palm plantations in the country,[iii] with agreements that will give Siva control of the land for 50 years with possible extensions up to 99. This is part of the Group’s quest to plant one million hectares of oil palm in Africa and Asia.[iv]

P1012091-300x225Atop the Siva Group is another reputed billionaire, the enigmatic Indian entrepreneur Chinnakannan Sivasankaran. [v] A former employee of the Group says that Sivasankaran does all he can to avoid appearing on the Forbes List. [vi] He is one of the largest landowners in The Seychelles,[vii] and the owner of three private jets. He was the first to join Dragon Blaze, an exclusive ultra-luxurious lifestyle company based in Malaysia, which gives its members, limited to a maximum of 50, the right to use their fleet of private jets and yachts.[viii] Continue reading Billionaires at play in the fields of the poor (part 5): Chinnakannan Sivasankaran

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Previously Billionaires at play in the fields of the poor (part 3) Frank Timis

In this, the fourth in a series of six articles on foreign investment in Sierra Leone, Joan Baxter profiles another of five billionaire investors, Swiss national Jean Claude Gandur and his investment in Sierra Leonean farmland to produce ethanol for export to Europe.

King of Sugar and Bioenergy

While some foreign investors focus on underground riches in Sierra Leone, other moneyed foreign investors are seeking to further their fortunes by acquiring large tracts of arable and well-watered land for industrial agriculture in the country. They’re part of what has been called a global land grab that began after the combined financial and food crises of 2007 and 2008, when investors sought safe and profitable places to park their wealth. The land rush is also being driven by and capitalizes on the increased production of agrofuels or biofuels, as well as fears of future food and water shortages caused by climate change, environmental degradation and population growth.

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 Land- and water-hungry investors have found welcoming arms with the Government of Sierra Leone [pdf], which has resulted in a spate of large land deals in the country. Despite a great lack of transparency in many of the deals, it can be estimated using actual leases and investor fliers that in the past few years, foreign investors — primarily from Europe, the UK, China, India — have taken out leases of 50 years, some with possible extensions up to 99, on more than 1.2 million hectares of land, nearly a quarter of all the arable land in Sierra Leone. [i] Continue reading Billionaires at play in the fields of the poor (part 4): Jean Claude Gandur

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Previously: Billionaires at play in the fields of the poor (part 2) Beny Steinmetz

This, the third in a series of six articles on foreign investment in Sierra Leone profiles another one of  five billionaires,  Frank Timis and his investment in the country’s extractive sector.

King of Iron Ore

Another Ultra High Net Worth Individual — or Ultra HNWI in the curious shorthand of the wealth management industry — working in Sierra Leone’s extractive sector is Frank Timis, originally from Romania and now based in London, UK. In 2011, Timis made his debut on the Forbes List of billionaires.[i] He is said to be the richest Romanian, with a personal fortune in 2012 estimated at over 1.7 billion Euros or about US $ 2.2 billion.[ii] He’s also the owner of two Bombardier Challenger jets.

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Wet ore – or soil containing ore – is loaded into train cars and untold tonnes of it taken directly to port for export to China. Photo credit: Joan Baxter

Timis is a controversial figure, with two convictions for possession of heroin in Australia.[iii] In 2007, the Toronto Stock Exchange declared him an ”unsuitable” person to act as director or major shareholder of any companies listed on the TSX.[iv] In 2009 while he headed the UK-listed Regal Petroleum, the UK authorities fined the company close to US $1 million for issuing misleading statements about its oil reserves.[v] Today he is Chairman of the Timis Corporation, “a portfolio of businesses in the mining, oil and gas, life sciences and agricultural industries”.[vi] It is registered in Bermuda, which appears on the Forbes list of the world’s “top ten tax havens”. Continue reading Billionaires at play in the fields of the poor (part 3): Frank Timis

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There is a great deal of buzz about Africa’s economic awakening, with some countries experiencing double-digit growth in gross domestic product that is being driven by waves of foreign capital, as investors from Asia, Europe, North America, the Middle East and also Latin America descend on the continent. Many of the investors are after natural resources, mineral and oil riches and also farmland. This raises the question: is the foreign investment benefitting the continent or is it just another scramble for Africa, the last stage of colonialism? This, the first in series of six articles, Billionaires at play in the fields of the poor, investigates how foreign investment is playing out in one small African country. It looks at five billionaire investors, their big investments and at what’s in it all for Sierra Leone.

Part 1. Sierra Leone on a silver platter?

Africans and their leaders have every reason to be fed up with the negative way their continent has been portrayed and viewed by the outside world. It is definitely time that they tried to undo the damage by painting pictures that highlight the continent’s many strengths and riches.

PVB-GN_06-002-300x225So it was that in late 2009, Sierra Leone’s President Ernest Bai Koroma took the podium at the Sierra Leone Trade and Investment Forum at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in London, England. The country was still better known internationally for “blood diamonds” and a brutal civil war they fuelled, than for its impressive peace-building efforts in the ten years since the war ended. President Koroma wanted to change that.

“Our soils are fertile and our land under-cultivated, offering ideal investments in rice, oil palm, cocoa, coffee and sugar,” he declared.  “Our ground is rich in minerals: iron ore – the third largest deposit in the world; bauxite, rutile, gold and yes, diamonds. Our shores boast 400 kilometres of white sandy beaches, just waiting to be developed for tourism . . . Our seas are some of the most well-stocked and under-fished in the world”. Continue reading Billionaires at play in the fields of the poor (part 1): Sierra Leone on a silver platter?

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Half of the population of Sierra Leone was displaced by the brutal and senseless civil war that raged in the country from 1991 until 2002. During that time, more than two million people fled their villages and farms as rebels terrorized them and others joined the fray. Because of this and the destruction of the nation’s infrastructure, by the end of the war, Sierra Leonean farmers were producing just over half of the staple rice consumed in the country. By 2007, they had upped their output and were producing nearly three-quarters of its rice needs. And that, thanks mostly to small-scale farmers toiling in rice swamps and mixed upland farms. They did so without much support from anyone; at that time family farming just wasn’t a priority with major donors and governments.

Then in 2008, in the wake of the global financial meltdown and fuel and food crises, some new and powerful players suddenly turned their attention to farms, or rather, to land as an asset in their portfolios. Foreign investors suddenly saw farmland as the new “gold, only more profitable” and set about acquiring enormous tracts of arable land in Africa, some just speculating on the new asset and some because they planned to turn the land into giant offshore farms that would turn Africans into lowly wage labourers (if they were lucky) or landless peasants on their own land in their own countries. Foreign donors and African governments alike began to clamour for the transformation of the family farm from a way of life into agribusiness, and large mechanized farms that would conform to economies of scale.

Jusu-Kamara-close-V-225x300The experts drawing up the blueprints for millions of lives in Africa almost invariably repeated the assumption that young people prefer city life and that they don’t want to work the land the way their parents and their forefathers did. Sierra Leone’s national rice development strategy was developed jointly by Japanese International Cooperation and the Alliance for a Green Revolution for Africa, that like AGRA was funded by the Rockefeller and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundations. Neither of these have much in common with the very people they claim to be trying to help, namely the unemployed Sierra Leonean youth or the hard-working Sierra Leonean farming families.

This doesn’t prevent them from speaking on behalf of the youths and farmers. In a blueprint for a rice strategy in the country, the Coalition for African Rice Development make this statement: “The existing labour intensive farming is no longer attractive to the youths who are drawn to urban areas for easier jobs.”

Easier jobs? Doing what? Working as a watchman for a foreign-owned security company twelve hours a day, six days a week, for just over one dollar a day? Peddling on the streets a backpack of pirated DVD collections from Asia? Making a few cents a day selling top-up credit for mobile phones? Or worse, begging? Stealing to feed themselves? Continue reading Diamonds are not for dinner

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This post was first published on Thursday, 23 May 2013 09:57 by Truthout

For their secret meeting, they’ve chosen a very small village surrounded by forest in Kpaka Chiefdom in southern Sierra Leone. About one hundred men – chiefs, elders and youth leaders from all over the chiefdom – have gathered in the shade of a very large tree. Conspicuously absent is their Paramount Chief, the supreme traditional authority in the chiefdom, without whose approval they should not even be here. But this is no ordinary meeting; its purpose is to contest the Paramount Chief’s authority to sign away their land. Also absent are women, but in neighbouring villages they express support for the men meeting here and for their cause.

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One after another, the men stand up to complain. They say the Paramount Chief leased their land to a foreign company without consulting them, without the consent of the family heads who are the customary landowners. They have never even laid eyes on the lease agreement, which was signed in January 2011 by the Paramount Chief. It gives an Indian company, Biopalm Energy, control of nearly 20,000 hectares (close to 50,000 acres) of land in Kpaka Chiefdom for 50 years, with a possible extension of 21 years.

Tempers flare in the afternoon heat. Some at the meeting want to write a letter of protest right now to the government authorities in Pujehun, the headquarters town of Pujehun District, which includes Kpaka Chiefdom. Others say that they want the company representatives to come and negotiate directly with them. Meanwhile, they say if anyone enters their “bush” – their land – without their permission, there will be big, big problems. The threats of violence do not bode well for peace in the chiefdom. Continue reading Farmland – the new “Blood Diamonds” in Sierra Leone?

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