Land Grabbing in Sub-Saharan Africa and Food Security

Land grabbing has been on the rise in sub-Saharan Africa since the early 2000s. According to the States and institutions that promote it, it is intended to promote investment in agriculture, correcting the inability of family farming to produce beyond self-subsistence to ensure food security. The article takes stock of the issue in sub-Saharan Africa (scale, actors, nature of investments and their purposes) and qualifies the justifications for land grabbing, which, contrary to the arguments of their promoters, rather contribute to a weakening of the resilience capacities of rural populations by dispossessing their main factor of production (land) without providing them with other sources of income. Finally, the article analyzes the destructuring consequences of the WTO’s free trade rules as well as those of African states’ public policies based on the state’s disengagement from sectors as strategic as agriculture. The article, in the continuation of previous reflections on the question of land grabbing, was produced from an exploitation of documentary sources to feed the reflection. Keywords: Land Grabbing, Family Farming, Food Security, Food Self-Sufficiency, Sub-Saharan Africa