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"this is equivalent to about 25 percent of all the farmland in Europe...
rich countries are buying poor countries' soil fertility, water and sun to
ship food and fuel back home, in a kind of neo-colonial dynamic...
increasingly the private capital is coming from pension funds, which are
staking their bets on farmland as the next profitable commodity to invest
in.. "


Foreigners Lead Global Land Rush
By Stephen Leahy*
Inter Press Service
May 5, 2009
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=46724


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.

Rich countries that are short on land or water at home are looking to
secure food-producing lands elsewhere as a way to ensure food security for
their populations, said Joachim von Braun, director of the International
Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).

"There is a major lack of transparency in these land deals," von Braun said
in a telephone press conference from Washington.

The IFPRI study, "'Land Grabbing' by Foreign Investors in Developing
Countries," by von Braun and Ruth Meinzen-Dick, which was presented last
week, estimates that 15 to 20 million hectares have been acquired or are in
the process of being sold.

Von Braun pointed out that this is equivalent to about 25 percent of all
the farmland in Europe.

Because hard data is difficult to come by - the study was based primarily
on information from press reports - IFPRI conservatively estimates that the
deals represent 20 to 30 billion dollars being invested by China, South
Korea, India and the Gulf States, mainly in Africa.

"About one-quarter of these investments are for biofuel plantations," von
Braun said.

China started leasing land for food production in Cuba and Mexico 10 years
ago and has extensive holdings in Africa, including pending or attempted
deals for millions of hectares in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia,
Zimbabwe, Uganda, and Tanzania, with many thousands of Chinese workers
brought in to work on these lands, according to the report.

The largest foreign ownership or control of African farmland is in Sudan -
in this case a group of Gulf States, including Saudi Arabia. Last year, the
United Arab Emirates negotiated several farmland deals with Pakistan. Qatar
has agricultural land in Indonesia, the Philippines, Bahrain, Kuwait and
Burma.

The huge Korean company Daewoo Logistics Corporation signed a deal to lease
1.3 million hectares in Madagascar to grow maize and oil palm, which
reportedly played a role in the political conflicts that led to the
overthrow of the government in 2009, the report noted.

"The number of land deals is much higher than the IFPRI numbers. No one is
monitoring all the private land deals," says Devlin Kuyek, a researcher at
GRAIN, a Barcelona-based non-governmental organisation dedicated to global
agricultural issues.

GRAIN published its own "Land Grab" report six months ago, concluding that
rich countries are buying poor countries' soil fertility, water and sun to
ship food and fuel back home, in a kind of neo-colonial dynamic.

Kuyek told Tierramérica that this 21st-century land rush is driven in
part by countries that no longer want to be held hostage by the big,
multinational food trading companies.

But increasingly the private capital is coming from pension funds, which
are staking their bets on farmland as the next profitable commodity to
invest in after the collapse of the global stocks and financial sector and
continuing weak prices for oil and metals.

"A huge chunk of the Australian cattle industry is now owned by a private
equity firm. The two biggest pork producers in China are owned by Goldman
Sachs (a private investment firm)," Kuyek said.

As a result, he noted, ranchers and farmers have turned into employees.

But it could be far worse than that for hundreds of millions of small
landholders, pastoralists and indigenous people who do not hold formal land
titles, because they are at risk of being driven off their land, he said.

Most of African farmland is under local customary land holding, without
formal land title, acknowledges IFPRI researcher Meinzen-Dick.

"When outsiders come they don't recognise those customary land rights. Such
rights must be respected," she told Tierramérica.

IFPRI is calling on the international community to develop a code of
conduct that would uphold local peoples' rights to their land, guarantee
transparency, share benefits, foment environmentally sustainable production
and ensure local food security.

Von Braun sees great potential in such land deals because they bring badly
needed capital to the agricultural sectors of poor countries, contributing
to infrastructure and research. "China is creating several research
stations in Africa to boost yields in rice and grain," he said.

Kuyek disagrees: "These investments are not about agricultural development.
This is all about making money and shipping food back to home markets."

Food processing companies and even food retailers are involved in this
because they are anxious to ensure "security of supply" as efficiently as
possible, says Janice Jiggins, of the International Institute for the
Environment and Development, in London. One of the world's biggest banks,
the Netherlands' Rabobank, is one of the main financiers for these kinds of
deals, Jiggins told Tierramérica via e-mail.

The 2009 report from the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Food
Sovereignty, Olivier de Scutter, detailed the legal implications of the
farmland deals, warning that they completely override existing rights,
enshrined in laws, constitutions, and customs, Jiggins wrote.

(*This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are
part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news
service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development
Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.)