Jarch Capital

On Al Jazeera’s talk show South2North, Redi Tlhabi debates the new scramble for Africa with former Mozambican president Joaquim Chissano, Nigerian politician Nkoyo Toyo and Philippe Heilberg, a land investor from the US.

An ex-Wall Street banker jets off to South Sudan to show how investors are rushing to Africa in a modern-day land-grab. Watch Al Jazeera 'Witness'.

Investors, such as Jarch Management and Nile Trading and Development, are buying up huge tracts of fertile land in Southern Sudan.

Four months before South Sudan becomes an independant nation nine percent of the country has been targeted by investors, a Norwegian People's Aid report reveals.

As African leaders, many out to line their own pockets, sign away their people's land to foreigners, the continent's people face not having enough food to eat.

Accaparement des terres - cas du Soudan - par AGTER

Because of the political sensitivity of the modern-day land grab, it is often only the country's head of state who knows the details. Der Spiegel investigates.

Regierungen und Investmentfonds erwerben in Afrika und Asien Ackerland, um Nahrungsmittel anzubauen – ein lohnendes Geschäft, weil die Preise rasch steigen. Das Milliarden-Monopoly führt zu einem modernen Kolonialismus, dem sich viele arme Länder notgedrungen unterwerfen.

It's a tsunami of land deals and, as all of the experts who have studied the phenomenon have agreed, no nation is truly prepared for its implications.

As world population expands, the demand for arable land should soar. At least that's what George Soros, Lord Rothschild, and other investors believe.

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.

Sub-Saharan African countries have of late become the target of a new form of investment that is strongly reminiscent of colonialism: investors from both industrialised and emerging economies buy or lease large tracts of farm land across the continent, either to guarantee their own food provisions or simply as yet another business.