DANIEL BORNSTEIN
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security will be forgotten. Examination of poor countries’ global market linkages in a historical perspective supports this point in three ways. First, African nations’ global agricultural trade occurred in the context of political subordination at the hands of European colonial powers, and thus was far from a natural or even autonomous phenomenon 37. The political relations of the colonial era were antithetical to the democUDWL]DWLRQ RI WKH JOREDO V\VWHP WKDW ZRXOG KDYH EHQHĂ€WHG SRRU IDUPHUV 6HFRQG ZKHQ the SAPs oriented African agricultural economies toward export, Western agribusiQHVV FDSLWDO DOVR VROLGLĂ€HG VXSSO\ FKDLQV 7KH UHVXOWLQJ H[DFHUEDWLRQ RI SRRU FRXQtries’ vulnerability should give pause to any development models that wish to replicate the type of foreign investment that proceeded in the wake of the SAPs. Third, and most recently, developing world agriculture has increasingly served as a source of inputs for manufactured foods controlled by agribusiness38. These three historical examples are linked by the diversion of cropland from local food production, as well as an association with Western political and economic dominance. It is troubling, then, that development institutions continue to embrace this model of export production that has driven today’s food crisis. Land grabs The third troubling trend since 2008 is the escalation of large-scale land acquisitions, or “land grabs.â€? Asian and Middle Eastern countries are buying up large tracts of African farmland to secure food supplies for their own populations, while Western countries are doing so mainly for biofuel production. Land grabs are evidence that integration of African agricultural land into the global economy is still a dominant paradigm, even though many agricultural development programs are emEUDFLQJ GRPHVWLF SURGXFWLRQ 7KHVH ODUJH VFDOH ODQG SXUFKDVHV DUH RIWHQ MXVWLĂ€HG E\ the assumption that the injection of capital into the land will automatically generate food security and employment for local people. But these land grabs can only be see as a positive development if the displacement of local people is viewed as a “negative externalityâ€? mitigated through employment of local people39. Besides the fact that mitigation distracts attention from more equitable land access structures, it is also DFWXDOO\ EHFRPLQJ PRUH DQG PRUH GLIĂ€FXOW WR RIIVHW QHJDWLYH LPSDFWV RQ ORFDO SHRSOH High global food prices are rendering it impossible to guarantee that displaced people will even be able to afford food from outside markets. In fact, the acceleration of land grabs portends a fate eerily similar to that which befell Africa in the wake of the SAPs. Once countries oriented agriculture toward export, they became susceptible to price volatility in global markets. The 2008 food crisis repudiated the shift to export production. It seems, then, that by pushing for the liberalization of African land markets and therefore enables land grabs, the IFIs are setting up African countries for another blow as devastating as the one in 2008. As Shepard Daniel writes, “The [International Finance Corporation and Foreign Investment Advisory Service] prioritize the improvement of investment climates and promote business-enabling environments and, in doing so, it appears they overlook the more urgent problems of hunger and poverty that persist in their client countries, losing sight of their principle mission: to