Even before the current political crisis that rocked Madagascar and led to the killing of 28 opposition supporters at the weekend, a socio-economic one which has the potential to blossom into a huge political catastrophe was in the offing.

News reports say that a South Korean company, Daewoo Logistics, has acquired a 99-year lease over a vast amount of land totaling 1.3 million hectares in the island country. The total amount of land suitable for farming in Madagascar is 2.3 million hectares.

This means that Daewoo has got more than half of the country's arable land. The company also got the land without any payment to the country's treasury. Daewoo Logistics has announced that it will use 300,000 hectares for planting palm trees and one million hectares for growing maize meant mainly for export to South Korea and other markets outside Madagascar.

"We can either export the harvests to other countries or ship them back to Korea", Daewoo Logistics is quoted to have stated. The company has said that it is responding to the current food insecurity that is threatening the internal stability of many countries, including Egypt, Senegal, Kenya and Liberia, in Africa alone.

The Madagascar story reads like fiction. That rich countries have got access to vast tracts of land in Africa, often at a pittance, has traditionally been a monopoly of Europeans and Americans.

Their record was often also drenched with the blood of slaughtered African owners of such land. Over three decades after Zimbabwe's independence in 1980, the British government and commercial interests are still directing muscular blows at that country's rulers for insisting on seeking to get back lands expropriated by European settlers.

It, however, comes as a matter of shock that an African government, located in a part of Africa where horrendous suffering had been inflicted on the people by those who have robbed them of their lands, would in 2008 give away vast tracts of land to a South Korean company for a lease as long as 99 years; and without a cent or franc being paid in exchange.

There is no mention of the Malagasy local peasant producers who, as Africans, hold the land as communal property. The comment by Daewoo that the company will provide jobs to Madagascans seems to be a thinly- veiled plot to turn peasants into modern- day landless serfs, who would be forced to sell their labour with tools of coercion.

This should be familiar from the record of apartheid South Africa. Koreans have in their own history, terrible experiences of slave labour under Japanese colonial rule and may well be salivating to also exercise it over hapless Malagasies.

The Democratic Republic of Congo and its peoples have suffered enormous abuses in the hands of foreign interests that hunger for and grab its vast resources. Between 1998 and 2003 alone, as many as 5 million rural Congolese died as foreign interests cynically created conditions of instability and violence, conducive to their easy access to rare minerals, without any checks, in the absence of a functioning local and national government structure.

So far the African Union has been more concerned with military conflicts than with economic and social dislocations. In Zimbabwe it is President Robert Mugabe's insistence on economic violence rooted in lack of land that has forced the African Union to recognize its importance.

The giving away of vast tracts of land by the government of Madagascar calls for urgent and rapid response by the African Union as a corrective measure against impending and certain economic and social violence against helpless peasants.

The African Union has adopted the principle that it has a right to intervene in the internal affairs of a member state, if the rulers are grossly violating the human rights and well being of the people. There is no way that vast tracts of land can be given away to a foreign company without gross violations of the rights of peasant farmers and their inheritors.

Failure to act in Madagascar will, furthermore, merely postpone the explosion of future violence as dispossessed peasants will surely rise to fight for rights to their land and means of livelihood.