PARIS: Is it investment? Or a land grab?
Within a few years, acquisition of foreign farmland has become an issue with plenty of explosive potential for the environment and security.
Priming it is a rush by China, India, South Korea and Gulf petro-economies to snap up land abroad to secure their food supplies.
BACKGROUND STORY
DEPLETING THE LAND
'They bring in their own labour, they bring in their own equipment, soil, seeds, they use the soil of the host country and then they move off. They leave very little behind or they may leave depleted land.'
South African Farm Minister Tina Joemat-Pettersson on foreign land deals
Western countries are following suit.
According to a respected monitor called the Land Matrix Project, land totalling 203 million ha was transferred to foreign control from 2000 to 2010, either through purchase or long-term lease. That figure represents an area about eight times the size of Britain.
Africa, led by Ethiopia, Liberia, Mozambique and Sudan, is the prime target of the land rush, accounting for 134 million ha of the reported deals. The next target is Asia, with deals spread over 29 million ha.
But who is buying land where - and what they are doing with it - might never be fully documented, because many transactions are never publicly announced.
Mr Paul Mathieu, an expert with the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), said the craze peaked in 2008 or 2009 on the back of the world food crisis.
However, over the long term, demand will remain high, buoyed by the world's surging population, rising prices of fossil fuels and spiralling food demand, he said.
'I saw the land issue emerge before I came to the FAO 15 years ago. It is a bomb that can explode if it is unaddressed,' he said.
Yet, a flurry of published investigations, while incomplete, suggests relatively little of this investment is actually happening. And from corruption to environmental abuse, there are plenty of other things to worry about.
In a 2010 report, the World Bank looked at 14 countries and discovered that actual farming had begun on only 21 per cent of the land in the deals.
Intertwined with the emotional question of land tenure is how water is used for these huge deals.
The UN's fourth World Water Development Report, published two weeks ago, describes this issue as a very big unknown.
In particular, it sounds the alarm for the dry regions of West Africa, saying biofuels could be 'particularly devastating' there. To make just one litre of ethanol from sugar cane takes 18.4 litres of water and 1.5 sq m of land.
The risk posed by poorly supervised land acquisitions is that a wealthy economy could simply export its water 'footprint' elsewhere, said Mr Anders Jaegerskog of the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI).
If there are inadequate safeguards and poor governance in the host country, the richer nation will gets its rice, corn and biocrops on the cheap - but at the cost of adding to local water stress, he said.
'This is the great danger - that the weaknesses in the systems of these countries are being exploited,' he said.
In an interview last December on the sidelines of the UN climate talks in Durban, South African Farm Minister Tina Joemat-Pettersson blasted land acquisition as 'a new form of colonisation'.
She cited the new country of South Sudan, where she said 40 per cent of the farmland had been sold to foreign interests.
'They bring in their own labour, they bring in their own equipment, soil, seeds, they use the soil of the host country and then they move off. They leave very little behind or they may leave depleted land.'
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
