EU

As land acquisition becomes increasingly borderless, new mechanisms and codes of conduct are required to govern the relationship between investors, governments and local communities.

South Korea will develop 100,000 ha of farmland in Tanzania to make inroads into African and European markets, a state-run rural development corporation said Thursday.

The terms of farmland deals are hardly made public. Although a theoretical possibility exists in a few cases for some transfer of technology for agricultural development, risk also exists to peasant farmers who cannot compete with well-resourced commercial farms. Take, for instance, the case of barley and oilseeds producers in Ethiopia.

The left-leaning fisherfolk alliance Pamalakaya and staunch ally KMP on Thursday exposed what they called a secret agricultural pact between the Philippines and Bahrain.

"We have our experiences about foreign ownership of land in Mindanao, where Dole and Del Monte controlled hundreds of thousands of hectares of lands, through leaseback agreements, cultivating their raw materials, thus, peasants have been transformed to mere lowly agricultural workers whose rights of their lands have been stripped off," said Antonio Flores, KMP Spokesperson.

African countries may need to put in place a code of conduct to govern farmland purchases on the continent by foreigners, an agribusiness conference heard on Monday.

The European Union is concerned by the trend of foreign investors and countries acquiring large tracts of farmland in developing countries to guarantee their own food security, a senior EU official said on Wednesday.

The European Union is coercing some West African governments into allowing European-based fishing companies to deplete West Africa’s fishing stocks in a new "food colonialism" that is now taking place between rich and poor countries around the world, according to British author George Monbiot.

The 9th Brussels Development Briefing took place on 25th February 2009 in Brussels on “Land access and rural development: New challenges, new opportunities” and discussed the links between property rights, investment and the generation of economic opportunities in rural areas.

China’s increasing dependence on foreign farming requires the European Union to take several measures.