The world’s population is estimated to grow from seven billion to nine billion by the year 2050. Africa’s population will then have doubled, reaching two billion people. This means that more food will be needed by Africans in the coming decades.

But instead, less and less arable land in Africa is used for growing food crops. How is this possible?

Africa’s declining food production is largely connected with increased economic growth and living standards in Europe and the US, and lately also in China and India. More stuff and higher material standards demand ever increasing energy consumption. This increased energy use is not good for the environment and aggravates climate change.

Despite the fact that Africa’s surface area is almost as large as those of Europe, India, China and the US combined, carbon dioxide emissions from Africa amount to only 4 per cent of the global total. But the impact of the other 96 per cent hits Africa hard.

Drought has become more frequent and so has unpredictable and heavy rainfall leading to floods. Drought and floods in turn result in lower harvests and threaten food security. This is a price paid by African populations who have no responsibility for the climate change.

With increasing consumption in the industrial countries comes a growing demand for new sources of energy. The idea is to replace the fossil fuels in part by biofuel from plantations. In the last ten years, foreign investors have bought or leased an estimated 230 million hectares of arable land in developing countries.

In Africa, an area twice the size of France has already been sold or leased, and this is likely to accelerate in the next few years. Many leasing contracts are fixed for 99 years, which means that this African arable land cannot be used by the local population for generations to come.

The investors are interested mainly in the most fertile land. Thus, instead of producing food parts of Africa’s best arable land is now used to grow crops for conversion to energy for the transports and consumption of the global rich.

The transnational corporations involved justify this use of farm land with the claim that biofuels are better for the environment than fossil fuels. But some research indicates that the emissions increase. If that is so, Africa is again being hit the hardest. Biofuels take over from food crops, and this also leads to increased emissions and more climate change.

Firstly food production is reduced, and secondly climate change  leads to the replacement of food crops by biofuels.

The large land transfers also have other negative consequences for Africa. When people lose their land, they are forced to move. Further, large-scale industrial agriculture does not require a lot of labour. For many people, livelihoods become more insecure, since low and seasonal incomes mean that they have to buy food instead of producing it themselves.

Thus, land investments lead both to decreasing space for people to produce their own food, and to increasing food prices, since the total amount of food produced decreases.

Never before has food been as expensive as today. This is partly a direct consequence of the replacement of food crops with biofuels; food prices in many developing countries have doubled. When wages are stagnant, more and more people  find themselves in a situation of deeper poverty and at risk of starvation.

Africa needs its own resources of land, water and energy. The people living on the continent are already paying a high price for the wellbeing of other people. Should Africa in addition abandon parts of its own food production for the benefit of the increased energy consumption of the global rich?

The present foreign investments in agriculture in Africa may be compared to colonialism and Europe’s exploitation of the continent’s natural resources. Today, it is done in a more refined manner with a nicely packaged and easily digested rhetoric, but the consequences for people in Africa are largely the same.