DMCI President Isidro Consunji said the family's agriculture business was developing a 12,000-hectare African palm oil plantation in Negros Occidental, as well as a partnership with Japan's Marubeni and UP Los Baños to plant 1.5 million trees across 15,000 hectares for carbon credits.
Marubeni is partnering with the Philippines government and a construction company owned by the billionaire Consunji family to develop a 10,000 ha tree plantation project in Negros Occidental that it says will produce up to 100,000 tons of carbon credits every year.
Marubeni plans to plant sugar cane on an area of 75,000 hectares and to construct a factory to transform the sugar cane into sugar and ethanol.
Ghana government pledges its "absolute support" for Marubeni's sugar plantation project in Northern Ghana, saying it will facilitate the acquisition of land.
Palm oil cluster industry Chairman Raul Nuevas said most of these foreign investors are looking for “big contiguous area” of 100,000 ha that they can lease for 100 years.
Angola e Japão assinaram ontem, em Luanda, um protocolo para a construção das fábricas de produção e refinação de açúcar e etanol, no município de Humbe, no Cunene. O projecto tem uma área total de 66 mil hectares de plantação de cana-de-açúcar.
China's biggest manufacturer of animal feed and Japan's biggest grain trader sign a letter of intent to expand in Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and South America.
After focusing for decades on oil, metals and minerals, Japan's huge trading houses are turning to agricultural commodities, with Tokyo enthusiastically supporting the shift amid concerns about local and global food security .
Marubeni Corporation and Amaggi Exportação e Importação announced on May 1 that the companies have concluded a comprehensive collaboration agreement
The initial welcome given to rich countries’ investment in African farmland by agricultural and development officials has faded as the first ventures prove to be heavily weighted in favour of the investors. The FAO warned of such a trend when it said this year that the race to secure farmland overseas risked creating a “neo-colonial” system.
On the heels of tight crop production reports and the recent memory of individual nations experiencing food disruptions, there is a scramble to control or own agricultural assets and food stocks.
Japan's big trading houses, which have enjoyed bumper years from betting on iron ore and metals, are getting into the food market, aiming to tap voracious demand in China and emerging economies.
