Since details emerged of Saudi Arabia’s plans to ensure supplies of wheat, rice, corn, soya beans and alfalfa through overseas agricultural investments, officials have insisted that they intended the programme to be private-sector led.
The Sudanese capital state of Khartoum has $45 billion worth of agricultural projects that are available for investors, Saudi newspaper Al-Watan reported on Sunday, quoting a senior official. One of the projects is worth $500 million and consists of tendering 2,100 sq km of farmland west of Omdurman.
CNN's John Defterios takes a look at how Middle Eastern countries are scouring the globe for farmland.
Despite internal conflicts and an inability to feed its own people, Sudan believes it can be not only Africas breadbasket, but also the world's.
More important is for Africa to realise its own potential for food production, which would in the long-term negate the need for these deals.
Sudan is trying to diversify and strengthen its economy to make up for plummeting oil revenues. Ministers have been wooing agricultural investors, particularly from the Arab world.
Mohammed Mbwana, who farms in the Tana River delta area and is an official of a local NGO, said the Qatar agreement would displace thousands of locals. At least 150,000 families in farming and pastoralist communities depend on the land in question, said to be part of Kenya’s biggest wetland.
Agricultural investment in Sudan by Arab countries looking to guarantee supplies of staples such as wheat for their people will account for up to 50 percent of all investment in the country from 2010
Although it slipped past the world’s media, in mid-April it emerged that Jarch Capital had doubled its landholdings in Southern Sudan. That takes the acreage owned by Phillippe Heilberg and chums to a massive 800,000 hectares, or 3,000 square miles, which the firm claims will become a gigantic agricultural plantation.
“African countries have not been in a reasonable bargaining position,” AU Agriculture Commissioner Rhoda Peace Tumusiime told Reuters in an interview at AU headquarters in Addis Ababa. “The pace of the trend was very fast and they didn’t envisage that there should be benefits to the community.”
The issue of food security is getting higher on Riyadh’s priority list.
"Il n'y a pas de liberté pour une société qui mange au-delà de ses frontières". Le colonel Kadhafi applique à la lettre ce principe du Livre vert.
