Kenya

Investments in industrial scale agriculture must balanced by equitable flow of benefits to smallholder farmers

1st Annual Africa Food Security Conference - AFSC 2012 is a regionally focused forum that aims to bring the interrelated parties together for discussions that will refocus food security issues in Africa in alignment with the continent’s requirement.

Dominion Farms will start planting rice in December 2012 on its 30,000 ha rice farm in Taraba and has trained 50 commercial farmers in Kenya who will soon start their own commercial rice operations in Nigeria.

Indigenous communities are under threat from a recent spurt of investors and multinational companies interested in putting their money into Kenyan oil, mining, wind farms and agribusiness projects.

With minimal consultation, governments and local authorities are signing away huge tracts of land for lease on the cheap. Now communities are raising their voices in opposition to these projects that bring little local development.

GRAIN looks behind the current scramble for land in Africa to reveal a global struggle for what is increasingly seen as a commodity more precious than gold or oil - water.

Karuturi, which has 300,000 ha in Ethiopia, is now targeting the DRC, Tanzania, Mozambique, Senegal and Sierra Leone.

Largest cut flower exporter Karuturi Global ventures into food business

“There is no villagization programme,” Sai Ramakrishna Karuturi, founder of Karuturi Global, told Mint via telephone. “This is a completely jaundiced western vision. They assume anything in Africa has to be done by the whites and the Chinese and Indians should have businesses only in their own countries.”

Karuturi Global is now one of the biggest private land owners in the world. They have invested over a quarter of a billion dollars in Ethiopia and Kenya alone. BBC reports.

The Dominion Farms at Yala Swamp, Kenya has seen the local community turn against what they initially welcomed with open hands.

Indian author and media commentator Anand Giridharadas joins this Al Jazeera programme along with Oakland Institute’s Executive Director, Anuradha Mittal, and Christine L. Adamow, Managing Director of Africa BioFuel, a US company invested in farmland in Kenya and Tanzania.