Jérémy Lucchetti

Salle 101 - bâtiment Veil - domaine universitaire Saint-Martin-d'Hères

Jérémy Lucchetti est professeur associé d'économie au sein de la faculté d’économie et de management de l’Université de Genève.

Il présentera l'article Large land deals and conflicts in Africa, co-écrit avec Mathieu Couttenier, Maleke Fourati et Raphael Soubeyran.

Résumé :

Many international firms recently acquired large areas of productive agricultural land in Africa, as evidenced by the stark increase in the number of international land deals since 2000 over the continent. On one hand, this set of investments may increase the productivity of local agriculture (through, e.g., the use of modern agricultural technology and better market access). On the other hand, many NGO reports raised concerns that land deals create tensions through  disrespect of local (informal) people rights or through intensive water usage. Using a new database on large land deals in Africa we first document that land deals are located primarily in cells where agricultural soils are suitable to "cash crops" and  where groundwater is easily accessible, thus pointing out at possible conflicting water usage. Exploiting exogenous variations in World prices of crops, we indeed find a positive impact of land deals on local conflicts (riots and protests). We document that this effect is especially strong in cells where groundwater is easily accessible to all farmers and likely shared among users. We highlight further that this effect is driven by the deals located upstream in the river network (i.e. watershed). This set of results paints an overall consistent picture: land deals are not systematically associated with immediate conflicts when they are implemented, but they tend to increase violence related to conflicting water usage in the direct neighborhood and downriver.