Egyptian private equity firm Citadel Capital, which has leased 259,500 acres for farming in Unity state, is among dozens of foreign entities to have struck large land deals in the new country.
"It is profoundly distressing to learn of numerous rural communities being evicted from their ancestral lands in the headwaters and upper floodplains of great rivers like the Nile and Niger to make way for export-oriented estates," says Prince.
"I wonder if greater returns could come for Africa if attention were paid to backing the continent’s millions of smallholders? And yet, as I speak, many are being driven off their land and swelling the ranks of the urban dispossessed."
"Because of the nation's limited agricultural resources, we have to look overseas," Jiang Hua, a COFCO board member said. The company is trying to connect China's consumer market with overseas supplies of commodities such as sugar, wheat and soybeans.
The Brazilian government's decision to block major foreign land purchases from August 2010 has had a very real impact: prices for lots larger than 3,000 hectares have fallen by 10% or more over the past year, depending on the region.
Multinational corporations are buying enormous tracts of land in Africa, putting countries on the path to increased food insecurity, environmental degradation, increased reliance on aid and marginalisation of farming and pastoralist communities.
The West African nation of Liberia is rich is oil, diamonds and timber, but these natural resources have been both a blessing and a challenge for the fledgling democracy.
“We decided to go on hunger strike at the ADAX Energy Canteen at Kontobi in Port Loko as fellow Sierra Leone employees were facing segregation,” says Sierra Leone Deputy Minister.
The Finance Ministry and the National Bank of Bahrain have agreed to set up a $265.2m fund that will invest in companies and purchase land in overseas countries for captive production.
Tanzanian peasaants complain that the government has been allocating huge tracts of land to certain investors in the district, while refusing to allocate the same pieces of land to local groups that had applied for them.
One of the manifestations of the greed of Africa's domestic plutocrats and their imperial overlords is the massive land grab that we are witnessing today.
Aquila Capital Green Assets, part of the Aquila Group, is pleased to announce today that it has become an official signatory to the recently launched Principles for Responsible Investment in Farmland.
