Chinese, Brazilian and Indian Investments in African Agriculture: Impacts, Opportunities and Concerns
Report for Acord International (June 2016)
This study offers new analysis of Chinese, Brazilian and Indian investments in African agriculture. It brings together three new case studies of Chinese investment and aims to assess the impacts of investment on Africa’s small-scale farmers. The report aims to assess how appropriate these investments are for Africa’s small-scale farmers, including how aligned they are to Africa’s own agriculture strategies. The report finds that there are major problems with Chinese, Brazilian and Indian investments. Some investments are associated with land grabs, several projects are having adverse consequences on local farmers, and the kind of technology being promoted in Africa tends to be more suited to Chinese, Brazilian and Indian agribusiness interests than to Africa’s smallholder farmers. Above all, investments and cooperation programmes do not appear to systematically involve African smallholder farmers in project design or implementation, but appear more suited to large-scale farming. This is despite some projects which proponents claim are resulting in significant crop yield increases, although there are few genuinely independent evaluations of these projects.
Download the report: http://curtisresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/chinese-brazilian-and-indian-investment-in-african-agriculture-1-1.pdf
