Gulf investors and sovereign wealth funds are pouring more cash into regional projects in renewable energy, farmland and infrastructure as focus turns to home, a PricewaterhouseCoopers partner said yesterday.
High on Chongqing's shopping list is more than 333,000 hectares of farmland, which Huang said would reduce the city's dependence, for example, on imported edible oil.
Hostility to foreign investment in a sensitive border area has forced the Turkish government to shelve plans to turn a minefield along its frontier with Syria into organic farmland.
Iraq is offering Gulf investors farmland on long term lease contracts as part of a plan to restore its agriculture sector, an official said on Monday.
A flurry of announced international purchases of grain-producing acreage sparks debate about their merits
Abdullah Alireza, the Saudi minister of Commerce and Industry, talked about farming abroad in a recent visit to Seattle, where he addressed a private gathering of local business people.
Oman has sought the assistance of the specialised UN agency, UNCTAD, in conducting a study on food security.
These arrangements are reminiscent of “banana republics” when many African countries served as plantations for European countries -- but even those did not come with such explicit restrictions and rigidities.
Cambodia has been signing deals with Kuwait and Qatar to help develop its agricultural sector. Cambodian officials, however, refuse to disclose details of the agreements, worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
"At this stage, we have not sold a single square metre to the South Africans," Rigobert Maboundou, Congo Republic's minister of agriculture said over the weekend.
If land is being unused or under-utilized in poor regions across Africa and Southeast Asia, outsourcing to capital-rich and land-poor nations could help prevent another global food crisis, but it must be fair and productive, Adam Wolfe writes for ISN Security Watch.
This would be the first time for an international set of guidelines of this kind to be formulated
