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| Residents of the Boeung Kak lakeside during a protest in Phnom Penh, Cambodia against eviction. A local developer and a Chinese investment company have been given a 99-year lease from the Cambodian government to develop the lake. Photograph: Mak Remissa/EPA |
Vast tracts of farmland in poor nations being gobbled up by foreign investors could undermine small farmers’ rights and food security in the host countries
Thursday 31 March 2011
Darryl Vhugen
guardian.co.uk
From Ethiopia’s lowlands to the hilltops of Madagascar, hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland in the developing world are being gobbled up by investors creating super-sized farms.
This high-stakes global land rush, which has the potential to transform, for good or ill, developing nations, is essentially a third wave of outsourcing.
The first wave, in the 70s and 80s, sent manufacturers scrambling to lower-wage countries; the second involved white-collar service jobs primarily to India and other English-speaking, low-wage countries.
This third wave has sent investors, eager to capitalise on rising food and energy prices or shore-up their own country’s food security, to lease or buy huge tracts of cheap land in the developing world.
Already, about 2.6 million hectares in soon-to-be-independent southern Sudan has been leased or acquired by international investors. An additional 2.5m hectares has been acquired in Ethiopia, Ghana, Madagascar, Mali and Sudan. Some nations, including Madagascar and Mozambique, have received requests from investors for more than half of their cultivable land area.
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