New colonialism in a globalized world is a curious thing. Countries buying vast parcels of farmlands in poor countries poses new emerging problems. In such cases, only the countries’ respective heads of state know the full details. It gets complicated when provincial governors have auctioned off their land to the highest international bidders such as in Laos and Cambodia where the national governments have lost track of what’s left of the national territories the countries can still call their own.

The International Food Policy Research Institute can only make a guess. The UN agencies rely on newspaper reports in such queries. The World Bank wants countries to read carefully the fine print on such multinational agreements. The land policy division of the World Bank ‘estimates that 10 to 30 percent of available arable land could be up for grabs, although only a fraction of the potential number of lease and sale agreements have been signed.’

It was a particularly busy sale season in 2008, for instance, ‘when plans and applications in many countries more than doubled, in some cases tripled’ One such case was Mozambique where ‘foreign demand is more than double the existing cultivated farmland, and the government has already allocated 4 million hectares to investors, half of them from abroad.’

In many cases, the buyers of foreign land are not private investors but foreign governments themselves. Some examples of these are Sudan that has leased 1.5 million hectares of prime farmland to the Gulf states and where Egypt and South Korea have lease contracts for 99 years; Cambodia where Kuwait has leased 130,000 hectares of rice fields; Uganda where Egypt has leased 840,000 hectares to grow wheat and corn; the Democratic Republic of Congo that has offered to lease 10 million hectares to the South Africans; and hunger-stricken Ethiopia in whose land Saudi Arabia grows what it boasts as its export rice.

Almost all of these host countries are impoverished and incapable as food exporters. Their most important asset which is land is compromised as far as local farmers and local food production are concerned. Kazakhstan and Pakistan, for example, suffer from water shortages. Sub-Saharan Africa may have ample water resources but also own huge populations that necessitate huge productions for local consumption.

Instead of land acquisition, experts advice contract farming where ‘foreign investors provide the technology and capital, while the local farmers own or lease the land and supply rice or wheat at fixed prices.’ But while this is the ‘classic, tried-and-tested model,’ it is not what foreign investors want as they dangle to weak and susceptible governments such tempting lures as aid, infrastructure in the form of schools and paved roads, world-class technology, and most importantly, cold hard cash.

Image

Via salon