The Angolan government plans to invest $1 billion in 2009 in the farming sector and welcome in U.S. Chiquita Brands International Inc to its banana industry. Other foreign companies and countries, including China have also said they plan to invest millions of dollars in the war-shattered nation’s coffee, sugar, cassava and palm oil industries.
Although it slipped past the world’s media, in mid-April it emerged that Jarch Capital had doubled its landholdings in Southern Sudan. That takes the acreage owned by Phillippe Heilberg and chums to a massive 800,000 hectares, or 3,000 square miles, which the firm claims will become a gigantic agricultural plantation.
Von Braun says many details of the land deals are unknown because of a lack of transparency. But he estimates the amount of land and money involved. “It adds up to 15 to 20 million hectares currently under negotiation…. So it’s fairly large. How much money is involved? If we add up the deals negotiated and the investments planned, it adds up to $20 to $30 billion of investment,” he says.
These land acquisitions have the potential to inject much-needed investment into agriculture and rural areas in poor developing countries, but they also raise concerns about the impacts on poor local people, who risk losing access to and control over land on which they depend.
Egypt may start selling farmland in tenders to foreign and local investors by June as part of a new agro-industrial zones project, the head of the country's Industrial Development Authority said.
The Philippines has offered to become a major source of agricultural products to Saudi Arabia ahead of a planned visit by the kingdom’s agricultural minister Fahd Balghunaim, Arab News reported on Wednesday.
Less than two weeks ago, Daewooinformed the public through the press that it stopped its plans for large-scale plantation in Madagascar. However, it was only a diversion to keep the local press away.
The Japanese government is drawing up plans to finance investments in agricultural production in developing countries, in the latest sign of nervousness about food security among countries that import agricultural commodities.
Emirates Investment Group is in the process of acquiring farmland in Pakistan to export more food to the Gulf region and is seeking international partners, a company executive said on Tuesday.
“African countries have not been in a reasonable bargaining position,” AU Agriculture Commissioner Rhoda Peace Tumusiime told Reuters in an interview at AU headquarters in Addis Ababa. “The pace of the trend was very fast and they didn’t envisage that there should be benefits to the community.”
Foreign investors in overseas farmland “should not have a right to export” during a food crisis in the host country, a government-backed think tank is to propose on Thursday, in the first code of conduct to address the so-called land grabbing trend.
Growing food in foreign lands has a long history. But the 21st century version of outsourced agriculture presages something fundamentally new.
