Wafra, Citadel Capital’s Platform Company for investments in the Sudanese agricultural industry, released today details of recent operational milestones including the conclusion of its first commercial wheat harvest in Sudan’s White Nile State.
The most disturbing question here is: who should have powers to give 800,000 hectares to a foreigner under a 99-year lease arrangement, and under what procedures?
Small farmers are the backbone of worldwide food production. But their existence is endangered because their governments are leasing large tracts of land to foreign companies.
Investors, such as Jarch Management and Nile Trading and Development, are buying up huge tracts of fertile land in Southern Sudan.
Villagers vow to resist as wildlife vanishes and they are driven from their land to make way for water-thirsty crops.
Asian investors have overtaken Europeans as the biggest buyers of Australian land, a snapshot of foreign acquisitions reveals.
EBRD funds Ukrfarm, a subsidiary of the Renaissance Group, to bring an additional 50,000 hectares of land in the Ukraine into crop production.
Australia's left-leaning Greens party on Friday called for foreign investment laws to be beefed up to cover farming land and water licenses, fearing too much was falling into overseas hands.
Pambazuka News spoke to Anuradha Mittal, Jeff Furman and Frederic Mousseau about what prompted their research on large-scale investments in land in Africa and what they discovered.
Minister of Agriculture says Chinese government controlled company's acquisition of some of the Australia's richest food growing areas is too great a risk for the nation.
African farmers do need investment and support. They desperately need decent roads and access to local markets, processing equipment to add value to their own diverse farm produce, storage and drying facilities to prevent post-harvest losses, and basic amenities such as schools and health centres and water wells to improve rural lives, so that farming communities can thrive. But foreign investors are not in business to provide any of these things.
For obvious reasons, there isn't much out there about who's buying what and how much in Africa. But what OI has discovered is a small number of investors paying sometimes nothing for large plots of land in some African countries.