Small-scale farmers with limited knowledge of their rights stand to lose most as countries such as China and Saudi Arabia expand their quest for African farmland, analysts have warned.
Even as it receives a billion pounds of free food from international donors, Sudan is growing and selling vast quantities of its own crops to other countries, capitalizing on high global food prices at a time when millions of people in its war-riddled region of Darfur barely have enough to eat.
Big Money from Wall St. to the Middle East are on the hunt for farmland. Canada, especially Ontario, stands to profit but will the costs be too great?
Saudi Arabia, which is making efforts to provide food security for its nationals, can look up to Ethiopia where huge tracts of unutilized agricultural land are available for growing cereals, according to Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.
A bilateral agricultural venture between Cambodia and Kuwait proposed during an official visit by Kuwait's prime minister left Cambodia very positive about future cooperation, Agriculture Minister Chan Sarun said yesterday.
The United Arab Emirates is beefing up its agricultural investments in Sudan in wake of a food crisis that led to world wide protests primarily in developing nations.
Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen said Wednesday that he would visit the Gulf states of Kuwait and Qatar in January to discuss rice exports in a bid to corner the Gulf market. His announcement came one day after Kuwaiti Prime Minister Sheikh Nasser al-Mohammed al-Ahmed al-Jaber al-Saba ended a three-day visit to Cambodia and discussed swapping his country’s technical assistance for arable land for cultivation of quality rice for Kuwait.
Goldman Sachs recently invested US$300 million to acquired full control of more than 10 poultry farms in China.
Investors are plowing money into Russia’s open lands to resuscitate the long-neglected farm sector and supply a world in ever greater need of food.
Kuwait is eyeing Cambodian farmland for investment in agriculture to produce food supply for the state, a minister said yesterday.
Kuwait’s premier has advised Prime Minister Hun Sen to turn Cambodia into an agricultural powerhouse to speed the Kingdom’s development.
A food mega-project planned for a vast area in the Papuan district of Merauke is causing concern that indigenous people's land will be taken and their livelihoods destroyed.
MAP services group’ is in the process of setting up a fund to develop model dairy and livestock farm in Pakistan. The fund will focus on private equity, SME funding and development as well as donor facilitation of project. The company plans to have 10 model farms in Pakistan by the end of 2010.
As other countries have pushed their industrial bases thousands of miles offshore in search of resources and labor, China is doing the same thing with agriculture, expanding as far away as Africa in its effort to feed its people.
Ahmed Al Sadhan, General Manager of the National Office for Industrial Strategies, at the Ministry of Commerce, stressed a desire to maintain a low profile on the feasibility study, for fear that target countries might inflate the cost of farm-land in anticipation of investment.