What does Africa have tons of that no one knows how to handle?

(Okay, that’s a little bit off, but these blog titles get tweeted now, so they have to be short and perky.)

Land, of course!

The African continent is freaking huge. Most of its inhabitants subsistence farm that land. Meanwhile, as oil bubbles up on the western coast and foreign-owned agro-farms crop up in the east and south, every acre may be getting more valuable. But it’s trapped value, in a way, because there’s confusion about who owns what. Thanks, colonialism!

I wrote about this situation last month in the Christian Science Monitor’s cover story “The African Divide.”  Apparently it’s so interesting that I’m going to be talking about it on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal tomorrow at 9:15 am, when pretty much only my mother will be awake.

I chose a very narrow angle on a very big issue, and even that angle is big enough to have supported dozens of dissertations. Since then, I’ve heard from lots of people, many of them sharing resources on different angles of the issue.   One of them?  Forests. “The era of the hinterland is ending,” says the Rights and Resources Initiative. Damn straight, I think, Liberia in mind: Liberia is making major forest concessions to foreign companies (even while it won’t allow land sales between citizens, citing confusion over customary and statutory land systems). Here’s what RRI says:

“Forest lands are booming in value for the production of food, fuel, fiber and now carbon. New global satellite and communications technology allow the world to peer into, assess the value of, and potentially control forests from anywhere in the world. More than ever, forests are bargaining chips in global climate negotiations and markets. This unprecedented exposure and pressure, and risk to local people and their forests, is being met by unprecedented levels of local organization and political influence, providing nations and the world at large tremendous opportunity to right historic wrongs, advance rural development and save forests.”

Another place to dig around a bit if you’re into this land thing is the website of The Millennium Challenge Corporation, which has a portfolio of land projects across Africa. You can get a quick list of them on the second page of this short document, and you can dig around on their site for a look at what’s going on in those countries. My quick, randomly-chosen-three-places look for M&E didn’t reveal much, but hey, at least you know where stuff’s happening.