Understanding agricultural and tree plantation frontiers emergence in Southern and Eastern Africa

The objective of this contribution is to investigate the processes that condition and shape the emergence of agricultural frontiers, i.e. regions with rapid development of natural resource exploitation and land-use changes, in territories considered as marginal in terms of agricultural productivity and global market connections. This research focuses on the dry forest and woodland regions of southern and eastern Africa, and in particular on northern Mozambique. We combined an ethnographic approach, based on interviews and participant observation over several years, exploring the role of successive “waves” of pioneers (commercial farmers and investors), a mapping of tree plantation expansion led by foreign investors, based on remote-sensing data, and a Bayesian decision-making model based on interviews of investors and agricultural operators from the farm level to the financial decision centres. Linking these approaches allows providing much-needed empirical evidence on land-use dynamics in a littlestudied region — to nuance simplistic narratives on investments and investor dynamics in Africa — and establishing the basis for proactive governance of these dynamics. We show that current large-scale investments still cover only a small fraction of the landscapes, yet their impact goes well beyond these small footprints. Past investment waves and failures have led to the emergence of a new group of investors and commercial actors who may have more diversified land-use practices, with medium-scale farms, and more constructive ways of engaging with local populations than the typical large-scale monoculture “land grabbers”. Beyond this, we show a wide diversity of investors’ profiles and logic, presenting different trade-offs. Investors with an extensive track record continue to push the frontier expansion into natural environments. Yet, these actors are also those who are more likely to survive the challenging conditions for commercial agriculture in the region, and thus might have higher chances of stimulating employment and economic development, compared to newcomers who have no track record in the sector and region.