China

"Initially we asked the Africans how much they wanted in rent. They said it's free, just share the food with us. We made a deal that we only pay $1 per year per acre in rent. At the start we didn't promote the idea because we didn't want people to say we were grabbing land."

L'Etat cède 880000 hectares de terre arable pour 670 millions d'euros. Publiée mi-août par le Financial Times, l'annonce du gouvernement soudanais n'est plus vraiment une nouveauté. Comme d'autres avant lui, le pays est prêt à céder un territoire presque aussi grand que l'Ile-de-France à des investisseurs étrangers trop contents de s'exécuter.

Quelque 95 tonnes de graines de sésame transportées par un avion charter sont arrivées samedi à l'aéroport Léopold Sédar Senghor de Dakar pour les besoins d'un projet de partenariat entre un investisseur privé chinois et l'Etat du Sénégal

Corporate ownership of world food sources may be shifting into high gear. Goldman Sachs, the private equity investment bank of the ultra wealthy and powerful, has announced that it's in the race to scoop up assets related to food production.

Japan's big trading houses, which have enjoyed bumper years from betting on iron ore and metals, are getting into the food market, aiming to tap voracious demand in China and emerging economies.

Alarmed by exporting countries’ trade restrictions, importing countries have realised that their dependence on the international food market makes them vulnerable not only to an abrupt surge in prices but, more crucially, to an interruption in supplies.

The Chinese government is more and more worried over the control that overseas firms are exercising over a good portion of China’s food supply, and there is even some thought that the recent inflation might have been triggered by foreign food giants as they have expanded into every corner of China’s agriculture.

Small-scale farmers with limited knowledge of their rights stand to lose most as countries such as China and Saudi Arabia expand their quest for African farmland, analysts have warned.

Goldman Sachs recently invested US$300 million to acquired full control of more than 10 poultry farms in China.

As other countries have pushed their industrial bases thousands of miles offshore in search of resources and labor, China is doing the same thing with agriculture, expanding as far away as Africa in its effort to feed its people.

Chinese and Mozambican governments want to make the Zambezi Valley region of Mozambique a centre for rice production for the Chinese market, which is faced with increased consumption and less and less arable land, says researcher Loro Horta, a specialist in relations between China and Portuguese-speaking African countries.

Emerging nations are trying to cash in on the global food crisis by getting big importers of crops to effectively lease their farmlands -- a new trend that is already sparking complaints from farmers in some countries who are concerned about their own food supplies.