Some of the world's richest nations are coming to grow crops and export the yields, hoping to turn the global epicenter of malnutrition into a breadbasket for themselves.
Once committed largely to perceived safe-haven investments in the United States, Gulf nations are now looking to send their petrodollar surpluses towards a more exotic global destination: Southeast Asian farmland.
Driven by food security concerns, about 15 companies, led by the State Trading Corporation (STC), have formed a consortium to engage in corporate farming either in Paraguay or Uruguay. Among other notable firms that have joined the consortium are Gujarat Ambuja, Ruchi Soya Industries and Jhunjhunwala Vanaspati Ltd.
Conséquence directe de la crise alimentaire mondiale et de la volatilité des cours, les projets d'achat ou de location de terres agricoles à grande échelle, parfois sur des centaines de milliers d'hectares, se multiplient.
Japanese food corporations are stepping up their diversification and security of food sources, in particular taking ownership of the entire supply chain, from owning the farms in other countries, through to the processing and distribution of the food stuffs.
China is looking at the Philippines to meet its domestic food and energy requirements even as the Chinese economy is being restructured into an enormous assembly hub of manufactured goods for the American, Japanese and European markets.
Agrowill Group AB, the largest agricultural investment company in the Baltic States, intends to sell all land owned by the Group in Lithuania to the Land Fund that will be established.
Cru Investment Management, the UK-based $800 million absolute return investment company, yesterday announced targeting the region and unveiled its plans to offer its new Africa Agriculture Fund in the Middle East early next year .This fund will invest in commercial agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa, with the aim of helping to alleviate poverty in the region, while not compromising returns for investors.
Lured by soaring food prices, corporations - both domestic and foreign - have been snapping up land in this fertile region the size of France, replacing inefficient Soviet-style collective farming with modern farming techniques and economies of scale.
“Foreigners who come here get astonished at the gleaming black earth,” said Viktor Karnushin, head of a local subsidiary of Sweden’s Black Earth Farming corporation, one of the biggest foreign players in Russian farming.
"In a wide-ranging conversation, Sudanese business magnate Osama Daoud outlined a project to gradually develop as much as 1.26 million acres in northern Sudan for agricultural production," reports the US Embassy in Khartoum
As with timberland, while direct ownership and management (i.e., being a farmer), is a possibility, such a route is similarly fraught with difficulties. One of the most significant of these is the issue of diversification in the farmland itself - especially with a single investment. A well-diversified holding of farmland (row crop, permanent crop, pasture and even timber) will, therefore, not only require a significant investment, but may also involve land holdings in a number of different locations.
