Rich nations buying huge tracts of land in Africa to grow crops

LONDON, Sunday - Rich nations are buying up huge tracts of land across sub Saharan Africa to grow food or bio fuels for the future according to new evidence from the United Nations Food and Agriculture organisation.

Following reports in SaturdayNation that some rich westerners were buying up some of the best stretches of Kenya’s coastline to build multi-million pound villas comes the news that it is not only prime coastal areas that are attracting western interest

According to the head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, Jacques Diouf, a number of the western governments and corporations are buying up the rights to millions of hectares of agricultural land in developing countries in an effort to secure their own long-term food supplies.

Mr Diouf has warned that the controversial rise in land deals could create a form of “neo-colonialism”, with poor states producing food for the rich at the expense of their own hungry people.

The UK newspaper the Guardian said that the escalating cost of the world’s food prices had already set off a second “scramble for Africa”.
This week, the South Korean firm Daewoo Logistics announced plans to buy a 99-year lease on a million hectares in Madagascar.

Its aim is to grow 5m tonnes of corn a year by 2023, and produce palm oil from a further lease of 120,000 hectares (296,000 acres), relying on a largely South African workforce. Production would be mainly earmarked for South Korea, which wants to lessen dependence on imports.

“These deals can be purely commercial ventures on one level, but sitting behind it is often a food security imperative backed by a government,” Carl Atkin, a consultant at Bidwells Agribusiness, a Cambridge firm helping to arrange some of the big international land deals told the Guardian.

Madagascar’s government said that an environmental impact assessment would have to be carried out before the Daewoo deal could be approved, but it welcomed the investment. The massive lease is the largest so far in an accelerating number of land deals that have been arranged since the surge in food prices late last year.

“In the context of arable land sales, this is unprecedented,” Atkin said. “We’re used to seeing 100,000-hectare sales. This is more than 10 times as much.”

At a food security summit in Rome, in June, there was agreement to channel more investment and development aid to African farmers to help them respond to higher prices by producing more. But governments and corporations in some cash-rich but land-poor states have opted not to wait for world markets to respond and are trying to guarantee their own long-term access to food by buying up land in poorer countries.

At present the buy-up has generally have been welcomed by sellers in developing world governments desperate for capital in a recession with Madagascar’s land reform minister saying revenue would go to infrastructure and development in flood-prone areas.

Sudan also is trying to attract investors for almost 900,000 hectares of its land, and the Ethiopian prime minister, Meles Zenawi, has been courting would-be Saudi investors.

Huge tracts of land in Tanzania have also attracted interest from western companies interested in growing bio-fuels.

“If this was a negotiation between equals, it could be a good thing. It could bring investment, stable prices and predictability to the market,” said Duncan Green, Oxfam’s head of research. “But the problem is, [in] this scramble for soil I don’t see any place for the small farmers.”

Alex Evans, at the Centre on International Cooperation, at New York University, said: “The small farmers are losing out already. People without solid title are likely to be turfed off the land.”