Agrifirma, a private investment company backed by financier Lord Rothschild, transferred around half of its assets to a new joint venture with Brazilian private equity firm BRZ Investimentos.
Asian and Middle East buyers want to buy agriculture companies in Ukraine to secure supply of grains and oilseeds, Vienna-based Raiffeisen Investment AG said.
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.
Los defensores del modelo de poner a producir las tierras desde los gobiernos, inversionistas o grandes corporaciones argumentan que se generan puestos de trabajo, que se hace rendir tierras ociosas y que se producen alimentos. Pero en ese análisis falta el principal elemento. La pobreza en el mundo reside en el campo, precisamente por modelos como éste.
“Foreigners who come here get astonished at the gleaming black earth,” said Viktor Karnushin, head of a local subsidiary of Sweden’s Black Earth Farming corporation, one of the biggest foreign players in Russian farming.
“Look at the colour, what a beautiful crop,” says Richard Spinks, pointing to wheat and rapeseed fields that his company sowed this season in western Ukraine. “If all of Ukraine’s farms could produce the yields we are getting, this country could play a big role in feeding the world and establish itself as a geopolitical power,” says the British chief executive of London-listed Landkom.
The expectation in Ukraine is that billions of dollars of fresh investment and agriculture reforms, namely sanctioning of agriculture land sales, could double or triple domestic grain production to 100-150 million tons levels in the long term.