Swedish, Norwegian and Dutch investors in Mozambique land grab: powerful new documentary gives a compelling visual portrait of how investment by private financial players can undermine food security and human rights in developing countries.
Swedfund film focuses on the people living in the Sierra Leone countryside affected by the Addax Bioenergy sugarcane project.
Pension funds across the globe are ramping up holdings of so-called “real assets” such as property, infrastructure and farmland, as they move to protect their portfolios against inflation.
A multi-million dollar “ethical” plantation development in northwestern Mozambique - the initiative of a clutch of Scandinavian faith-based organizations - has faced alleged acts of sabotage by the very people it was designed to assist, illustrating the divisions between foreign benefactors and local communities.
Sweden’s SEK227.3bn (€26.7bn) state buffer fund Andra AP-fonden (AP2) has been accused of a lack of transparency and snapping up cheap agricultural land in Brazil by campaign group Swedwatch. AP2 denies the allegations.
A new Swedwatch report shows a lack of transparency and inadequate auditing of ethics and environmental impacts in AP2’s investment in farmland in Brazil. For business reasons, the investment is surrounded by a high level of secrecy, which makes scrutiny from the outside impossible.
Mats Widgren provides an update on a Swedish company's land grab for sugar cane production in Tanzania.
"I’ve put together a table with what I think are the main Swedish land investments in Russia and Ukraine," writes Brian Kuns. "In doing this, I ran into some of the known difficulties associated with monitoring the phenomenon of large-scale land-acquisition."
Bagamoyo villagers are up in arms over the government supporting an investor they accuse of grabbing about 6,000 hectares of their land in the district.
In New Zealand, an opposition party is demanding hard figures on how much farmland is owned by foreigners, but the government says it can't produce the figures.
The 16,000-hectare farm which Första AP-fonden bought in Australia in December was one of a clutch of purchases of farmland, worth some $100m, by the pension fund.
Major asset managers, cowed by the cost, the risk and the controversy involved in investing in farmland, are joining forces to increase investment in the historically under-capitalised sector.
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Papua New Guinea realising rice dream
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