La véritable nouveauté semble être le déplacement de l’épicentre de la spéculation de l’économie virtuelle vers l’économie réelle, précisément l’agriculture de marché, qui est non pas un facteur de sécurité alimentaire, mais la source même de péril climatique, d’insécurité alimentaire, et d’insécurité tout court.

There is something amazingly patronising in the way Payne claims that Emergent has ‘adopted’ a Mozambican village of 3,000 people and hired its citizens to clear 2,000 acres of land to farm it with her firm.

Suivant l'exemple du Brésil, l'Indonésie ambitionne de devenir un grand producteur agro-alimentaire, en proposant des centaines de milliers d'hectares de rizières et de champs aux investisseurs nationaux et étrangers.

The chairman of Golden Gras says the solution to problems around buying farmland abroad for Saudi food production is 60:40 partnerships.

BKK Partners, an Australian financial advisory firm, has a client that wants to buy 100,000 ha of Cambodian farmland. Human rights workers and politicians are concerned.

Jeddah-based Islamic Development Bank is tapping Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund as well as other government and private entities as the bank seeks to double financing for agriculture sector in developing countries.

Egypt will invite bids in March for 50,000 acres of land in North Sinai for agro-business projects under a new land scheme that could bring in as much as 66bn Egyptian pounds ($12bn) by 2020.

In the last four years, an area the size of Germany has been bought or rented to produce food and fuel in Africa. But not by Africans, nor for Africans, say critics.

Parliament yesterday approved a resolution calling on the government to get the EU to extend a ban on the purchase of farmland by foreigners for another three years. The current moratorium will end in 2011.

Three options both governments were looking at are whether Egyptian investors would own and cultivate farmland, whether land would be owned in partnership with Egypt and Uganda, or whether land would be owned as a concession right.

Foreign investors must avoid provoking resentment as they buy and lease farmland from developing nations by using local manpower instead of industrialised agriculture, the head of the UN's IFAD said.

Over the years many Big Ideas have been imposed on Africa from outside. The latest is that the region should sell or lease millions of hectares of land to foreign investors.