January 28th, 2010
Courtesy of The Financial Times, an interesting report discussing slowdown in the efforts by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Qatar to acquire or lease land overseas. As the article notes: “…Eighteen months ago, food was the hot topic in the Arab Gulf and the cause of much angst. Soaring prices of staples […]
Read more »Dirt Cheap: Ethiopia’s Great “Land Lease” Project
January 16th, 2010
Courtesy of The Guardian, a look at Ethiopia’s great land lease project, an initiative in which the government – in an effort to introduce large-scale commercial farming to the country – is offering up vast chunks of fertile farmland to local and foreign investors at almost giveaway rates. By 2013, 3m hectares of idle land […]
Read more »January 14th, 2010
The Woodrow Wilson Center recently published a balanced examination of the increasing frequency with which food-importing countries and private investors are acquiring farmland across the developing world. We recommend the full report but, for those short of time, here is the conclusion of this look at the future of overseas land investment: “…Today’s international land […]
Read more »An Emerging Market Farmland Bubble?
December 18th, 2009
Via Bad Idea magazine, a balanced look at what they call the farmland “bubble” that is developing in emerging economies around the world. As the report notes: “…According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, an arm of the UN, the global food crisis is worsening. In 2009, over 1 billion people were undernourished globally, up […]
Read more »November 28th, 2009
Courtesy of BusinessWeek, a report on the how farmland in developing countries has become an unlikely object of investor fascination. As the article notes: “…Goldman Sachs (GS), and Morgan Stanley (MS) are each raising hundreds of millions of dollars for agriculture funds aimed at Africa and Latin America. Agribusinesses in the U.S. are leasing vast […]
Read more »Conflicts of Scarcity: The Madagascar Model
November 27th, 2009
Courtesy of The Economist, a review of the conflicts of scarcity and what is now referred to as the Madagascar Model and the sobering likelihood of increased pressures related to such in 2010: “…In the world’s earliest written legal code, dating from 1790BC, Hammurabi, the king of Babylon, laid down rules governing the maintenance of […]
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