Farmers and activists have opposed a plan for a business consortium from Saudi Arabia to invest in rice farming in Thailand. The scheme is said to be the creation of former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra. Farmers fear they could lose their livelihood and rice farming could be held hostage by foreign investors.
Egypt, Jordan and Kuwait are among the Arab countries who invest in agriculture in Suda. Also there are some private Saudi investors working in this field in the country.
Pakistan’s agriculture sector has the potential to cater to the food requirements of the GCC region, which spends over $200 billion on farm imports.
A British entrepreneur is leasing land from smallholders in an attempt to revive the breadbasket of the former Soviet Union
“Buying farms is not a bad thing,” Panos Konandreas, acting director of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in Geneva, said in a telephone interview. “If you are like Saudi Arabia and have all the resources in the world, you can help farms optimize their strategies and there will be more production.”
Investors in Saudi Arabia, one of the world's top rice buyers, are looking for joint ventures with Thai partners to invest in rice farming in Thailand and Africa.
The Jordanian Prime Minister Nader Dahabi said his country will cultivate lands allocated for his country in Sudan as part of his government strategy to deal with rising prces of food items on the international market.
Talks aimed at acquiring large agricultural plots of land in Pakistan were not expected to yield results any time soon, a senior Pakistani government official has said.
Calyx Agro is a newly created venture focused on the acquisition, development, rental and operation of agricultural land located in South America with an emphasis on Brazil.
Alpcot Agro is currently in control of 128,800 hectares of arable land in Russia and wants to control 200,000 hectares by the end of 2008.
UAE wants to boost investment in Egypt’s agricultural sector in the light of the current rise in prices of commodities worldwide.
Landkom has leased 165,000 acres from thousands of landowners in Ukraine and will reap its first big harvest this year.
