An investor analysis of the case for buying up farmland

What we are witnessing in countries like Ethiopia today is an extreme form of the banana republic syndrome.

Russia and other ex-Soviet countries could boost world food supply by encouraging more private investment, the head of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) said on Saturday.

The Qatari land deal in Kenya’s Tana River Delta has been seized upon by locals who have promised to fight it – to the death, if it comes to that.

"Finance Minister Yousef Hussein Kamal said he had personally been traveling to Vietnam, Cambodia, Yemen, Sudan, Tajikistan, and elsewhere to look into investing in agricultural production for the Qatari market," reports the US Embassy in Doha about a visit from US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson

Hostility to foreign investment in a sensitive border area has forced the Turkish government to shelve plans to turn a minefield along its frontier with Syria into organic farmland.

Slater reckons shortages of soft commodities and the likelihood of rising inflation make farmland an excellent investment, not least in Brazil where Agrifirma is located.

Alarmed by exporters’ trade restrictions, food importing countries have realised that their dependence on the agricultural market makes them vulnerable not only to a surge in prices but, more crucially, to an interruption in supplies.

Pakistan dramatically increased the amount of farmland open to foreign investors to six million acres, but will require outsiders to share half of their crop with local growers, Pakistan’s investment minister told Reuters.

The Philippine agriculture department has assured that the government’s bid to attract foreign investments to farm ventures will not compromise the country’s food security and self-sufficiency targets.

Investors from the UAE are considering a number of investments in Pakistan, despite escalating violence in the north-west of the country.

A visit last week by Saudi Arabian businessmen could result in $300 million in investments to develop 20,000 hectares of farm lands for commercial crops.

THE Department of Agriculture (DA) wants to create exclusive economic zones for agribusiness that would take into consideration the nuances of food production and an expanded set of incentives for locators.

Several Arab investors visited this city last week in a mission to look for potential agriculture business in Mindanao where they can pour their investments.

Land grabbing and food speculation are not just overseas phenomena; they are also happening in North America.

The Philippine government yesterday proposed investment opportunities in the agriculture sector for Saudi Arabians to ensure the supply of agriculture commodities and develop idle government lands.

More than 20 million hectares of farmland in Africa and Latin America are now in the hands of foreign governments and companies, a sign of a global "land grab" that got a boost from last year's food crisis.

In its bid to experiment with new ideas, the Pakistani government has decided to play host to overseas investors keen on acquiring farmlands to capitalise on food insecurities post-2007-08 crisis.

The outsourcing of food has suddenly become a very big business. Richard Ferguson, a Europe-based analyst for the Japanese investment bank Nomura, calls what is going on now the “third great wave” of outsourcing after manufacturing in the 1970s and 1980s and information technology in the 1990s and 2000s. In his exhaustive 319-page report, he talks about the future of farming in terms of 1 million-hectare operations.

Agricultural investment in Sudan by Arab countries looking to guarantee supplies of staples such as wheat for their people will account for up to 50 percent of all investment in the country from 2010

Private equity used to stay away from anything to do with agriculture, put off by the uncontrollable risks of bad climate and natural disasters. And yet in the last three years some big funds have been launched in the agribusiness space, and they are busy trying different ways of mitigating the risks.

Neo-colonialists are buying up agricultural land in Africa – and local farmers could be crushed unless there are international rules to protect them.

The Global Land Grab: A Human Rights Approach seminar will analyze the global land grab through a human rights lens, assessing the trade and investment agreements that are enabling the trend, as well as its likely effects on small farmers, indigenous peoples and food sovereignty.

“African countries have not been in a reasonable bargaining position,” AU Agriculture Commissioner Rhoda Peace Tumusiime told Reuters in an interview at AU headquarters in Addis Ababa. “The pace of the trend was very fast and they didn’t envisage that there should be benefits to the community.”

Foreign investors in overseas farmland “should not have a right to export” during a food crisis in the host country, a government-backed think tank is to propose on Thursday, in the first code of conduct to address the so-called land grabbing trend.

Growing food in foreign lands has a long history. But the 21st century version of outsourced agriculture presages something fundamentally new.

Saudi Arabia's desire to secure its sources of food for its citizens by establishing overseas joint ventures in food production has received a positive response from a Philippine trade delegation.

The issue of food security is getting higher on Riyadh’s priority list.

The Federal Minister of Investment in Pakistan, Waqar Ahmed Khan, said this week that the government plans to sell or lease 1 million acres of farmland to foreign investors, primarily from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries. Although the news has yet to gain much coverage, if carried out it could punctuate growing unrest and frustration, given Pakistan’s limited amount of arable land and population of more than 170 million.

GCC countries' initiatives to safeguard food security by investing in agricultural projects abroad had stalled, illustrated by the Saudi Bin Laden Group's decision to postpone a planned $4.3-billion investment in Indonesian rice production.