ABSTRACT
Large-scale land acquisitions that promoters have considered ‘development opportunities’ and critics labelled as ‘land grabs’ escalated in the last couple of decades as a result of converging and mutually reinforcing financial, food and energy crises. Their resurgence, which presents historical continuities with previous waves of colonial dispossession, especially in settler colonies, altered existing patterns of land tenure and use. Ostensibly, Africa has been the epicentre of what some have termed ‘a new scramble for land’. Further research has shown that more than half of these land deals revolved around crops with diverse fungibility and multiple ends use, that is, food, feed and fuel. The chapter explores the significance of sugarcane cultivation in driving land enclosures and contract farming schemes in Africa with particular attention to the making of state-capital politico-economic assemblages. It analyses the patterns of expansion of sugarcane cultivation through the concepts of commodity frontier, flex crops and agro-extractivism. Drawing from several case studies in Uganda and Tanzania, it argues that advancing the sugar frontier has been instrumental in driving land enclosures, generating widespread dispossession and social conflicts, on the one hand, and adverse incorporation of poor farmers, on the other, while simultaneously jeopardizing agrarian livelihoods and existing agro-scapes and eco-systems.
