South Korea's Daewoo Logistics will plant corn in Madagascar, a company official said on Tuesday, with a long-term aim to replace more than half the corn it currently imports from mostly the United States.
Due to the lack of arable land in its home market, Savola must look abroad for agricultural land and has named Sudan, Egypt, Ethiopia and Ukraine as target countries where it plans to buy the land necessary to grow seeds such as sunflower and corn seeds.
Gulf nations now are quietly scouring the globe for rich farmland to rent or buy outright.
This analysis looks at how the oil-rich Muslim economies could leverage their existing relationships with agriculture based Muslim economies (which have a wide productivity gap with the worlds net agriculture exporters) taking them to globally competitive levels; reaping for themselves high investment returns, securing their own food sources, and contributing to alleviation of the food crisis from other Muslim countries.
Recently, Sudan was reported to have leased more than 800,000 hectares of its most fertile land to the Saudis. Several other Gulf countries, including Egypt, are in the process of closing similar deals. It is expected several hundred thousand hectares more will be leased out by the end of this year. The lease tenure is 99 years. At least two generations of Sudanese will have to live with the decisions made by their leader.
Talks are on with investors from Qatar, UAE and Saudi Arabia. 25,000 Punjab villages will be affected.
West Java governor Ahmad Heryawan said his province will become one of the many regions targeted by the Binladin Group for investment in food production.
Soaring food prices, supply fears among import-dependent countries and rising demand for biofuels have driven up investment in agricultural land, notably in Africa.
The deputy leader of the Democratic Left Party (DSP) Turkey has stated that Turkey possesses some great advantages in agriculture, despite the major problems that remain in place in the sector, but emphasized that it is a mistake to sell agricultural land to foreigners.
Sudanese Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry will spend three billion Sudanese pounds (1.5 billion USD) up to the end of the year to implement a massive program to develop the agricultural sector.
Arabia is phasing out its domestic wheat growers and seeking to shift production overseas.
Some of the world's richest nations are coming to grow crops and export the yields, hoping to turn the global epicenter of malnutrition into a breadbasket for themselves.
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