Australia's left-leaning Greens party on Friday called for foreign investment laws to be beefed up to cover farming land and water licenses, fearing too much was falling into overseas hands.
Pambazuka News spoke to Anuradha Mittal, Jeff Furman and Frederic Mousseau about what prompted their research on large-scale investments in land in Africa and what they discovered.
Minister of Agriculture says Chinese government controlled company's acquisition of some of the Australia's richest food growing areas is too great a risk for the nation.
African farmers do need investment and support. They desperately need decent roads and access to local markets, processing equipment to add value to their own diverse farm produce, storage and drying facilities to prevent post-harvest losses, and basic amenities such as schools and health centres and water wells to improve rural lives, so that farming communities can thrive. But foreign investors are not in business to provide any of these things.
For obvious reasons, there isn't much out there about who's buying what and how much in Africa. But what OI has discovered is a small number of investors paying sometimes nothing for large plots of land in some African countries.
PepsiCo Inc, the world's second-largest food and beverage company, will continue its investment in China's agricultural sector.
The investment is expected to boost Cyprus-based UkrFarm’s arable land holdings in the Ukraine to 300,000 hectares by 2013 from 250,000 hectares.
UK-based SilverStreet Capital has received about $198 million in commitments to its Africa-focused fund from the Danish pension fund Pensionskassernes Administration (PKA) and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC).
Rising food prices, the need for irrigation, and a hunger for biofuels have led to a recent rise in land acquisitions in the Global South, with the potential for large-scale forest and pasture conversion, biodiversity losses and increased competition for water, writes UNEP
Land Investment Firm, TW Hammerson sees soaring values for farmland in the UK, with an increasing demand for farmland in Africa.
Politicians throughout the Parliament united this week to raise concerns about the level of foreign investment throughout Australia.
A leading Sierra Leone opposition party has called on the government to cancel major land deals signed with international investors, saying they were taking away the livelihood of peasant farmers.
