India, once the colonial jewel of Britain's empire, has been accused of 'neo-colonialism' in Africa where its business people have joined a race with China, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere to buy up agricultural estates and take advantage of cheap labour.
I wonder why the people (and more importantly the political leaders and elite) of the African and Latin American countries are not opposing and driving these companies out from within their national borders. The reason is simple. The rich and elite of every country is the real beneficiary of the process of globalisation.
Indian firms have signed land deals in Ethiopia, Kenya and Madagascar to produce a range of food crops for export to India.
Codes of conduct don’t work, said Devinder Sharma of Forum for Biotechnology and Food Security, Delhi. “It is unethical to grab land in other countries; it will lead to food crisis as investor countries will grow food for profit.”
It's a tsunami of land deals and, as all of the experts who have studied the phenomenon have agreed, no nation is truly prepared for its implications.
Suudi tarım şirketi Planet Food World, Türkiye'de 20 milyar dolar yatırımla 5 yılda 20 bin modüler organik çiftlik kuracak.
What we are witnessing in countries like Ethiopia today is an extreme form of the banana republic syndrome.
A multi-million birr investment project by Karuturi Global Limited, an Indian company in Etang Special Woreda of Gambella State was launched on Saturday.
Abdullah Alireza, the Saudi minister of Commerce and Industry, talked about farming abroad in a recent visit to Seattle, where he addressed a private gathering of local business people.
These arrangements are reminiscent of “banana republics” when many African countries served as plantations for European countries -- but even those did not come with such explicit restrictions and rigidities.
Las adquisiciones de tierra en África, Asia y Latinoamérica, tal y como se hacen en la actualidad, suponen condenar a los más pobres a ser desalojados de sus fincas o a perder acceso a la tierra, al agua y a otros recursos, según el primer estudio sobre la nueva tendencia de grandes corporaciones y gobiernos de invertir en tierras en países pobres, encargado por las agencias de las Naciones Unidas de la Agricultura y Alimentación y del Desarrollo (FAO y UNDP).
After years of competing for overseas oil and mines, India and China are silently scouring the world for their next great need: farmland to grow food.
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Unrecognised wealth of customary land
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Fresh Del Monte enters row crop business
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La tierra no es para quien la trabaja
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