Investment opportunities between Africa and the GCC are ripe for the picking, says a top government official.

Due to the lack of arable land in its home market, Savola must look abroad for agricultural land and has named Sudan, Egypt, Ethiopia and Ukraine as target countries where it plans to buy the land necessary to grow seeds such as sunflower and corn seeds.

This analysis looks at how the oil-rich Muslim economies could leverage their existing relationships with agriculture based Muslim economies (which have a wide productivity gap with the worlds net agriculture exporters) taking them to globally competitive levels; reaping for themselves high investment returns, securing their own food sources, and contributing to alleviation of the food crisis from other Muslim countries.

Some experts believe that the emphasis should be on overseas agricultural investments as well as a boost in trade relationships, due to the unavoidable handicaps to domestic agriculture.

The fund will invest 70 percent of its money in agricultural companies that make fertilizers, forest products or biofuels. Commodities such as corn and soybeans will account for 15 percent, with the remainder in farmland.

Chinese investment in Africa is expanding beyond a race to secure minerals and energy sources to put an increasing focus on agriculture, the chief executive of Standard Chartered Bank said on Wednesday.

Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries must invest in foreign arable land to boost its food supply and increase food security in the region in the long term, Standard Chartered economists said on Tuesday.

GCC countries face growing constraints in agricultural capacity. Structural factors are exacerbating pressures on food prices. A new report from Standard Chartered supports additional investment in agriculture.

Cru, a small specialist fund management firm, recently launched a Malawi-based fund called Africa Invest. The fund has made an initial investment of £2m in 2,000 hectares of land that’s producing paprika for western supermarkets. With land prices starting at £800 per hectare (compared to £10,000 in the UK) it’s relatively easy to amass large farms that can be upgraded with new technology, mechanisation and better production methods. According to Cru, annual returns on capital should exceed 30 to 40 per cent.

There is growing interest in agricultural land, which Bramdean Asset Management is looking at and believes has huge potential

A British entrepreneur is leasing land from smallholders in an attempt to revive the breadbasket of the former Soviet Union

Landkom has leased 165,000 acres from thousands of landowners in Ukraine and will reap its first big harvest this year.

A military-driven Chinese hybrid rice-for-opium crop-substitution program in the northern part of Myanmar's Shan state has resulted in four consecutive years of poor harvests and driven many ethnic-minority farmers into heavy debt or out of rice farming altogether.

“MPs want ActionAid to keep off”, screams the caption of a story in the East African Standard of January 3, 2006. The story is attributed to MPs Oburu Odinga and Ayiecho Olweny who claim that the NGO is inciting residents of trouble ridden Yala Swamp rice scheme in which American investor Dominion Group of Companies has been embroiled in a tussle with the community over issues of land dispossession