A US Department of Agriculture-led investment scanning of potential business matches in the Philippines has identified $330 million worth of prospects in agriculture, with large tracts of land offered along the pattern provided to Saudi Arabian business groups
BDFC has already been given 17,400ha of land in 2008 for the production of sugar cane, a year after it came to Ethiopia. It is also getting close to receiving an additional 13,000hct in the same area of the Tana-Beles Basin of Jawi Wereda, Hawi Zone of Amhara Regional State.
Cambodia will be the fourth country after Sudan, Egypt and Pakistan to receive UAE investments intended to achieve a food security plan drawn up by the government. Large-scale planting on Cambodian land acquired through purchase or 99-year lease may be launched there next year.
Foreigners have an interest (partial or total ownership) in 1.6 percent of all privately held US agricultural land, a 1.4 million acre increase from 2007.
Contract between the government of Cameroon and SGSOC granting the company control over 73,000 ha in Cameroon for 99 years, for the production of plam oil. SGSOC is a subsidiary of Herakles Farms, owned by US venture capital firm HeraklesCapital.
The Lahore High Court Bar Association stated that farmlands were being acquired by the Arabs as front men for the Americans who would eventually use them for possible military bases, because Arabs had been front men in the bid to purchase Pakistan Steel Mills (PSM) for an Indian businessman.
Une filiale américaine de la Financière Manuvie qui a récemment fait une percée au Québec en achetant des terres agricoles totalisant 450 hectares dans les Bois-Francs affirme qu'elle est venue au Canada avec la ferme intention d'y rester et d'y prendre de l'expansion.
Hancock Agricultural Investment Group, a Boston-based unit of Toronto's Manulife Financial Corp., decided its first Canadian purchase would be an 1,100-acre (450-hectare) patch of land that it called "one of the most highly productive properties in the industry." The company will not disclose how much it paid, or even the exact location of the farm. But president Jeff Conrad said the company is in Canada to stay, and the fund plans to seek more land.
"In any resource sector, if you want to get involved, you always want to be in the upstream. It doesn't matter whether it's mining, whether its oil and gas or agriculture," says ABN AMRO's Tariono.
Abdulaye Wade says there is nothing wrong with leasing land: Saudi Arabia is already in Senegal and China is close to a deal with farmers' groups to use 100,000 ha for growing peanuts.
A focus on agricultural productivity should not become a cover for foreign private companies to grab land or impose expensive, input-intensive methods in the name of modernisation.
Activists say as many as 150,000 people in the Tana River delta could be displaced by the Qatari land-lease deal -- and it is not the only one in Kenya.
