Exposed | 21 August 2024 Koch invests in massive land grab from West African herders
By Don Wiener
An investment arm of the largest private company in the U.S. — Koch, Inc., formerly known as Koch Industries — is investing in an agricultural business venture that will provide corporations with carbon offsets while pulling local natural resources from almost 7.2 million acres (2.9 million hectares) of land in three West African countries, the Center for Media and Democracy has learned.
The project, led by the U.S.-based company African Agriculture Holdings, will consume large amounts of water in a drought-prone region and prevent the land from being used for subsistence farming in order to grow cattle feed for export and provide corporations needing to offset their CO2 emissions with carbon credits.
Koch, largely owned by Charles Koch and his brother’s widow, Julia Koch, bought 266,666 shares of African Agriculture in the fourth quarter of 2023 through one of its many investment arms, Spring Creek Capital, which invests in publicly traded companies. African Agriculture went public on NASDAQ on December 7, 2023, issuing a total of 58 million shares.
The Oakland Institute, a nonprofit advocacy group promoting local land ownership in Africa along with environmental good practices on that land, says that the company is already producing alfalfa as cattle feed for export from Senegal and that its “claim over this staggering amount of land and critical water rights raises serious concerns over the potential impact of the project on the livelihoods of local communities,” according to a February 1 press release.
“It is shocking to see a U.S. firm taking over pasture land from herders in Africa to export animal feed to the Middle East and South Korea,” said Frederic Mousseau, the institute’s policy director. African Agriculture is also holding land as an investment for when water is expected to run out in cattle feed producing areas in the U.S.
The company’s largest shareholder is Global Commodities and Investment, a firm based in the Cayman Islands and run by the Romanian billionaire Frank Timis, who fled his home country decades ago when faced with drug convictions. His companies have been accused of fraud, corruption, and influence peddling, especially in their successful pursuit of oil leases off the coast of Senegal and in its mining operations.
Using his connections to two consecutive Senegalese presidents, Timins “gained control of two major… offshore oil blocks worth billions of dollars,” paying just $5 million before flipping them for more than $650 million to U.K. oil giant BP and its U.S. partner, according to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).
The “sweetheart deal” cost Senegal billions in lost rights and royalties, OCCRP said. “The loss hits hard in a country in which 75 percent of families live in chronic poverty.”
Koch has its own sordid history of exploiting indigenous populations. In the late 1980s, the Senate investigated the company for stealing oil from Indian reservations in the U.S. Koch later admitted in court that by falsifying oil well receipts, it had collected roughly $10 million a year in crude oil from these reservations without paying for it.
