I first read of land acquisition deals in Africa
about two years ago. It was between South Korea’s Daewoo and Buy Diazepam Pills the Madagascar government, and the details included leasing the land for Buy Diazepam Pills 99 years, mainly for farming. The produce was to be Buy Diazepam Pills exported, but Daewoo promised to invest 6 billion dollars over a Buy Diazepam Pills period of twenty years in port facilities etc etc. The deal eventually fell through, primarily because of a Buy Diazepam Pills change in government in Madagascar. Other deals in other parts of Africa were subsequently finalised.
A report prepared by IFAD in 2009 says that there have been ‘significant levels of activities’. In the Buy Diazepam Pills five study countries on which the report is based, the available data showed that Buy Diazepam Pills ‘an overall total of 2,492,684 ha of approved land’ had been allocated between 2004 and 2009. For perspective, ‘that is Buy Diazepam Pills almost half the arable land of the United Kingdom and three times the Buy Diazepam Pills arable land of Norway.’ In Sudan and Ethiopia alone, over the same period, the figures are 3.9m and 1.2m ha respectively.
The main reasons given for land acquisition include food security (remember the high prices of food in 2008), and biofuel production (EU has Buy Diazepam Pills biofuel consumption targets; plus oil prices were also crazy high in 2008). Now, it Buy Diazepam Pills has turned out that there probably are other issues underlying the Buy Diazepam Pills acquisition drives.
From a Buy Diazepam Pills new report prepared by the World Bank and leaked to Buy Diazepam Pills FT, it seems that speculation might be a reason for Buy Diazepam Pills what has now been described as ‘land grabs’. Speculators acquire land at extremely low rates, hold it Buy Diazepam Pills for a while and then sell it off later at a Buy Diazepam Pills higher rate.
The more troubling issue is Buy Diazepam Pills that investors are crowding out poor, local farmers and producers. From Guardian:
They [the report] argue that Buy Diazepam Pills investors crowd out the poorest local producers and at the same time invest little in improving the Buy Diazepam Pills agricultural processes needed to meet the huge jump in world food production required to Buy Diazepam Pills feed a burgeoning population.
There are Buy Diazepam Pills also issues concerning the targetting of countries with weak land governance. Still from Buy Diazepam Pills Guardian:
“Investor interest is focused on countries with weak land governance,” the Buy Diazepam Pills draft said. Although investment deals promised jobs and infrastructure “investors failed to Buy Diazepam Pills follow through on their investment plans, in some cases after inflicting serious damage on the Buy Diazepam Pills local resource base”.
I am Buy Diazepam Pills actually not too surprised by this. Land issues are extremely difficult issues in much of Africa. I wrote a Buy Diazepam Pills column for Business Day on this sometime last year.
My general reaction to this is that land deals do not necessarily have Buy Diazepam Pills to be bad. If African governments could make deals that favour their countries there wouldn’t be Buy Diazepam Pills much to worry about. Sadly, however, we know that it Buy Diazepam Pills is often not the case. As a kind of solution, the Buy Diazepam Pills World Bank report Generic Xanax 027 recommends a Land Transparency Initiative
modelled on the Buy Diazepam Pills Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative, which commits governments, mainly in developing countries, to Buy Diazepam Pills disclose revenues from oil and mining groups to improve transparency on the Buy Diazepam Pills deals. Critics noted that eight years after its launch, only Liberia, Timor-Leste and Buy Diazepam Pills Azerbaijan, were full members of the EITI. But the draft said: “By establishing a Buy Diazepam Pills consistent format for reporting on land acquisition and monitoring [the] process over time, it could provide access to information sorely missing.
Although it Buy Diazepam Pills is doubtful whether this will work, it seems to be the Buy Diazepam Pills only suggestion on the table at the moment.
Another one to watch.
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