Land grab: The race for the world's farmland

Neo-colonialists are buying up agricultural land in Africa – and local farmers could be crushed unless there are international rules to protect them.

Margareta Pagano
The Independent
Sunday, 3 May 2009

In Africa they are calling it the land grab, or the new colonialism. Countries hungry to secure their food supplies – including Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, South Korea (the world's third biggest importer of corn) China, India, Libya and Egypt – are at the forefront of a frantic rush to gobble up farmland all around the world, but mainly cash-starved Africa.

Over the past few months, Saudi Arabian investors have paid $100m for an Ethiopian farm where they hope to grow wheat and barley, adding to the millions of acres they already own in the war-ravaged country, as well as in neighbouring Sudan. The Saudis also have land in Indonesia and Thailand for growing rice. China owns vast tracts of overseas land, mainly in Algeria and Zimbabwe, and one estimate suggests that more than a million ethnic Chinese farm workers will be living on the continent this year. Kenya and Tanzania have leased land while the Ugandans have been big sellers, allocating two million acres of land to Egypt for wheat and corn.

Further afield, the Saudi government and other Gulf States are negotiating with Pakistan to buy another million acres. The deal includes the services of a 100,000-man private army to protect the food being exported. Buyers or lease-holders have have also been promised legal cover in case a future government in Islamabad is less welcoming.

Soaring wheat and rice prices over the past two years – which have caused riots in more than 30 countries from India to Haiti – were the catalyst for the latest dash for land. But the rush really took off at the end of last year when many big food-exporting nations introduced export controls.

(More here.)