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 The Economist :Buying farmland abroad
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Buying farmland abroad
Outsourcing's third wave
May 21st 2009
From The Economist print edition
Rich food importers are acquiring vast tracts of poor countries' farmland. Is this beneficial foreign investment or neocolonialism?
EARLY this year, the king of Saudi Arabia held a ceremony to receive a batch of rice, part of the first crop to be produced under something called the King Abdullah initiative for Saudi agricultural investment abroad. It had been grown in Ethiopia, where a group of Saudi investors is spending $100m to raise wheat, barley and rice on land leased to them by the government. The investors are exempt from tax in the first few years and may export the entire crop back home. Meanwhile, the World Food Programme (WFP) is spending almost the same amount as the investors ($116m) providing 230,000 tonnes of food aid between 2007 and 2011 to the 4.6m Ethiopians it thinks are threatened by hunger and malnutrition.
The Saudi programme is an example of a powerful but contentious trend sweeping the poor world: countries that export capital but import food are outsourcing farm production to countries that need capital but have land to spare. Instead of buying food on world markets, governments and politically influential companies buy or lease farmland abroad, grow the crops there and ship them back.
Supporters of such deals argue they provide new seeds, techniques and money for agriculture, the basis of poor countries’ economies, which has suffered from disastrous underinvestment for decades. Opponents call the projects “land grabs”, claim the farms will be insulated from host countries and argue that poor farmers will be pushed off land they have farmed for generations. What is unquestionable is that the projects are large, risky and controversial. In Madagascar they contributed to the overthrow of a government.
Investment in foreign farms is not new. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 foreign investors rushed to snap up former state-owned and collective farms. Before that there were famous—indeed notorious—examples of European attempts to set up flagship farms in ex-colonies, such as Britain’s ill-fated attempt in the 1940s to turn tracts of southern Tanzania into a limitless peanut prairie (the southern Tanganyika groundnut scheme). The phrase “banana republics” originally referred to servile dictatorships running countries whose economies were dominated by foreign-owned fruit plantations.
But several things about the current fashion are new. One is its scale. A big land deal used to be around 100,000 hectares (240,000 acres). Now the largest ones are many times that. In Sudan alone, South Korea has signed deals for 690,000 hectares, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for 400,000 hectares and Egypt has secured a similar deal to grow wheat. An official in Sudan says his country will set aside for Arab governments roughly a fifth of the cultivated land in Africa’s largest country (traditionally known as the breadbasket of the Arab world).
It is not just Gulf states that are buying up farms. China secured the right to grow palm oil for biofuel on 2.8m hectares of Congo, which would be the world’s largest palm-oil plantation. It is negotiating to grow biofuels on 2m hectares in Zambia, a country where Chinese farms are said to produce a quarter of the eggs sold in the capital, Lusaka. According to one estimate, 1m Chinese farm labourers will be working in Africa this year, a number one African leader called “catastrophic”.
In total, says the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), a think-tank in Washington, DC, between 15m and 20m hectares of farmland in poor countries have been subject to transactions or talks involving foreigners since 2006. That is the size of France’s agricultural land and a fifth of all the farmland of the European Union. Putting a conservative figure on the land’s value, IFPRI calculates that these deals are worth $20 billion-30 billion—at least ten times as much as an emergency package for agriculture recently announced by the World Bank and 15 times more than the American administration’s new fund for food security.
If you assume that the land, when developed, will yield roughly two tonnes of grain per hectare (which would be twice the African average but less than that of Europe, America and rich Asia), it would produce 30m-40m tonnes of cereals a year. That is a significant share of the world’s cereals trade of roughly 220m tonnes a year and would be more than enough to meet the appetite for grain imports in the Middle East. What is happening, argues Richard Ferguson, an analyst for Nomura Securities, is outsourcing’s third great wave, following that of manufacturing in the 1980s and information technology in the 1990s.
Several other features of the process are also new. Unlike older projects, the current ones mostly focus on staples or biofuels—wheat, maize, rice, jatropha. The Egyptian and South Korean projects in Sudan are both for wheat. Libya has leased 100,000 hectares of Mali for rice. By contrast, farming ventures used to be about cash crops (coffee, tea, sugar or bananas).
In the past, foreign farming investment was usually private: private investors bought land from private owners. That process has continued, particularly the snapping up of privatised land in the former Soviet Union. Last year a Swedish company called Alpcot Agro bought 128,000 hectares of Russia; South Korea’s Hyundai Heavy Industries paid $6.5m for a majority stake in Khorol Zerno, a company that owns 10,000 hectares of eastern Siberia; Morgan Stanley, an American bank, bought 40,000 hectares of Ukraine in March. And Pava, the first Russian grain processor to be floated, plans to sell 40% of its landowning division to investors in the Gulf, giving them access to 500,000 hectares. Thanks to rising land values and (until recently) rising commodity prices, farming has been one of the few sectors to remain attractive during the credit crunch.
The great government grab
But the majority of the new deals have been government-to-government. The acquirers are foreign regimes or companies closely tied to them, such as sovereign-wealth funds. The sellers are host governments dispensing land they nominally own. Cambodia leased land to Kuwaiti investors last August after mutual prime-ministerial visits. Last year the Sudanese and Qatari governments set up a joint venture to invest in Sudan; the Kuwaiti and Sudanese ministers of finance signed what they called a “giant” strategic partnership for the same purpose. Saudi officials have visited Australia, Brazil, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, the Philippines, South Africa, Sudan, Turkey, Ukraine and Vietnam to talk about land acquisitions. The balance between the state and private sectors is heavily skewed in favour of the state.
That makes the current round of land acquisitions different in kind, as well as scale. When private investors put money into cash crops, they tended to boost world trade and international economic activity. At least in theory, they encourage farmers to switch from growing subsistence rice to harvesting rubber for cash; from growing rubber to working in a tyre factory; and from making tyres to making cars. But now, governments are investing in staple crops in a protectionist impulse to circumvent world markets. Why are they doing this and what are the effects?
“Food security is not just an issue for Abu Dhabi or the United Arab Emirates,” says Eissa Mohamed Al Suwaidi of the Abu Dhabi Fund for Development. “Recently, it has become a hot issue everywhere.” He is confirming what everyone knows: the land deals are responses to food-market turmoil.
Between the start of 2007 and the middle of 2008, The Economist index of food prices rose 78%; soyabeans and rice both soared more than 130%. Meanwhile, food stocks slumped. In the five largest grain exporters, the ratio of stocks to consumption-plus-exports fell to 11% in 2009, below its ten-year average of over 15%.
It was not just the price rises that rattled food importers. Some of them, especially Arab ones, are oil exporters and their revenues were booming. They could afford higher prices. What they could not afford, though, was the spate of trade bans that grain exporters large and small imposed to keep food prices from rising at home. Ukraine and India banned wheat exports for a while; Argentina increased export taxes sharply. Actions like these raised fears in the Gulf that one day importers might not be able to secure enough supplies at any price. They persuaded many food-importing
Panic buying
What to do instead? The obvious answer was: invest in domestic farming and build up your own stocks. Countries that could, did so. Spending on rural infrastructure is the third largest item in China’s 4 trillion yuan ($585 billion) economic-stimulus plan. European leaders said high prices showed the protectionist common agricultural policy needed to be preserved.
But the richest oil exporters did not have that option. Saudi Arabia made itself self-sufficient in wheat by lavishing untold quantities of money to create grain fields in the desert. In 2008, however, it abandoned its self-sufficiency programme when it discovered that farmers were burning their way through water—which comes from a non-replenishable aquifer below the Arabian sands—at a catastrophic rate. But if Saudi Arabia was growing more food than it should, and if it did not trust world markets, the only solution was to find farmland abroad. Other Gulf states followed suit. So did China and South Korea, countries not usually associated with water shortages but where agricultural expansion has been draining dry breadbasket areas like the North China Plain.
Water shortages have provided the hidden impulse behind many land deals. Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, the chairman of Nestlé, claims: “The purchases weren’t about land, but water. For with the land comes the right to withdraw the water linked to it, in most countries essentially a freebie that increasingly could be the most valuable part of the deal.” He calls it “the great water grab”.
For the countries seeking land (or water), the attractions are clear. But what of those selling or leasing their resources? They are keen enough, even sending road shows to the Gulf. Sudan is letting investors export 70% of the crop, even though it is the recipient of the largest food-aid operation in the world. Pakistan is offering half a million hectares of land and promising Gulf investors that if they sign up, it will hire a security force of 100,000 to protect the assets. For poor countries land deals offer a chance to reverse decades of underinvestment in agriculture.
In developing countries as a whole, the average growth in cereal yields has fallen from 3-6% a year in the 1960s to 1-2% a year now, says the World Bank. This reflects, among other things, a decline in public investment. In the 14 countries that depend most on farming, public spending on agriculture almost halved as a share of total public spending between 1980 and 2004. Foreign aid to farming also halved in real terms over the same period. Farming has done worst of all in Africa, where most of the largest land deals are taking place. There, agricultural output per farmworker was the lowest in the world during 1980-2004, growing by less than 1% a year, compared with over 3% a year in East Asia and the Middle East.
The investors promise a lot: new seeds, new marketing, better jobs, schools, clinics and roads. An official at Sudan’s agriculture ministry said investment in farming in his country by Arab states would rise almost tenfold from $700m in 2007 to a forecast $7.5 billion in 2010. That would be half of all investment in the country, he said. In 2007, agricultural investment had been a mere 3% of the total.
China has set up 11 research stations in Africa to boost yields of staple crops. That is needed: sub-Saharan Africa spends much less than India on agricultural R&D. Even without new seed varieties or fancy drip-feed irrigation, investment should help farmers. One of the biggest constraints on African farming is the inability to borrow money for fertilisers. If new landlords just helped farmers get credit, it would make a big difference.
Yet a certain wariness ought to be maintained. Farming in Africa is hard. It breaks backs and the naive ambitions of outsiders. To judge by the scale of projects so far, the new investors seem to be pinning their hopes on creating technologically sophisticated large farms. These have worked well in Europe and the Americas. Paul Collier of Oxford University says Africa needs them too: “African peasant farming has fallen further and further behind the advancing commercial productivity frontier.”
But alas, the record of large farms in Africa has been poor. Those that have done best are now moving away from staple crops to higher-value things such as flowers and fruit. Mechanised farming schemes that grow staples have often ended with abandoned machinery rusting in the returning bush. Moreover, large farmers are often well-connected and spend more time lobbying for special favours than doing the hard work.
Politics of a different sort poses more immediate problems. In Madagascar this year popular hostility to a deal that would have leased 1.3m hectares—half the island’s arable land—to Daewoo Logistics, a South Korean company, fanned the flames of opposition and contributed to the president’s overthrow. In Zambia, the main opposition leader has come out against China’s proposed 2m-hectare biofuels project—and China has threatened to pull out of Zambia if he ever came to power. The chairman of Cambodia’s parliamentary foreign-affairs committee complains that no one has any idea what terms are being offered to Kuwait to lease rice paddies.
The head of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, Jacques Diouf, dubs some projects “neocolonialist”. Bowing before the wind, a Chinese agriculture-ministry official insists his country is not seeking to buy land abroad, though he adds that “if there are requests, we would like to assist.” (On one estimate, China has signed 30 agricultural co-operation deals covering over 2m hectares since 2007.)
Objections to the projects are not simply Luddite. The deals produce losers as well as winners. Host governments usually claim that the land they are offering for sale or lease is vacant or owned by the state. That is not always true. “Empty” land often supports herders who graze animals on it. Land may be formally owned by the state but contain people who have farmed it for generations. Their customary rights are recognised locally, but often not accepted in law, or in the terms of a foreign-investment deal.
So the deals frequently set one group against another in host countries and the question is how those conflicts get resolved. “If you want people to invest in your country, you have to make concessions,” says the spokesman for Kenya’s president. (He was referring to a deal in which Qatar offered to build a new port in exchange for growing crops in the Tana river delta, something opposed by local farmers and conservationists.) The trouble is that the concessions are frequently one-sided. Customary owners are thrown off land they think of as theirs. Smallholders have their arms twisted to sign away their rights for a pittance.
This is worrying in itself. And it leads to so much local opposition that some deals cannot be implemented. The Saudi Binladin Group put on hold a $4.3 billion project to grow rice on 500,000 hectares of Indonesia. China postponed a 1.2m hectare deal in the Philippines.
Farms control
Joachim von Braun, the head of IFPRI, argues that the best way to resolve the conflicts and create “a win-win” is for foreign investors to sign a code of conduct to improve the terms of the deals for locals. Various international bodies have been working on their versions of such a code, including the African Union, which is due to ratify one at a summit in July.
Good practice would mean respecting customary rights; sharing benefits among locals (ie, not just bringing in your own workers), increasing transparency (current deals are shrouded in secrecy) and abiding by national trade policies (which means not exporting if the host country is suffering a famine). These sound well and good. But Sudan and Ethiopia have famines now: should they be declining to sign land deals altogether? Many of the worst abuses are committed by the foreign investors’ local partners: will they be restrained by some international code?
There are plenty of reasons for scepticism about these deals. If they manage to reverse the long decline of farming in poor countries, they will have justified themselves. But like any big farming venture, they will take years to reveal their full impact. For the moment, the right response is to defer judgment and keep a watchful, hopeful but wary eye on their progress.
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Re: The Economist :Buying farmland abroad (Re: Deng)
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Land deals in Africa and Asia
Cornering foreign fields
May 21st 2009
From The Economist print edition
The Chinese and Arabs are buying poor countries’ farms on a colossal scale. Be wary of the results
OVER the past two years, as much as 20m hectares of farmland—an area as big as France’s sprawling farmland and worth $20 billion-30 billion—has been quietly handed over to capital-exporting countries such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and China. They buy or lease millions of acres, grow staple crops or biofuels on it, and ship them home. The countries doing the selling are some of the world’s poorest and least stable ones: Sudan, Ethiopia, Congo, Pakistan. Usually, when foreigners show up in these places, it is with aid, pity and lectures (or, in one instance, arrest warrants for war crimes). It must make a nice change to find their farms, so often sources of failure and famine, objects of commercial interest instead.
Yet while governments celebrate these investments, the rest of the world might reasonably ask why, if the deals are so good, one of the biggest of them helped cause the overthrow of the government that signed it—the one in Madagascar. Will this new scramble for Africa and Asia really reduce malnutrition, as its supporters say? Or are critics right that these are “land grabs”, “neocolonialist” rip-offs, different from 19th-century colonialism only because they involve different land-grabbers and enrich different local elites (see article)?
Protectionism or efficiency?
It would be graceless to write off in advance foreign investment in some of the most miserable places on earth. The potential benefits of new seeds, drip-feed irrigation and farm credit are vast. Most other things seem to have failed African agriculture—domestic investment, foreign aid, international loans—so it is worth trying something new. Bear in mind, too, that worldwide economic efficiency will rise if (as is happening) Saudi Arabia abandons mind-bogglingly expensive wheat farms in the desert and buys up land in east Africa.
Yet these advantages cannot quell a nagging unease. For a start, most deals are shrouded in mystery—rarely a good sign, especially in countries riddled with corruption. One politician in Cambodia complains that a contract to lease thousands of acres of rice contains fewer details than you would find in a house-rental agreement. Secrecy makes it impossible to know whether farms are really getting more efficient or whether the deals are done mainly to line politicians’ pockets.
Next, most of these deals are government-to-government. This raises awkward questions. Foreign investment helps countries not only by applying new technology but also by reorganising the way people work and by keeping an eye on costs. Few governments do this well, corrupt ones least of all. One of the biggest problems of large-scale commercial farming in poor countries is that well-connected farmers find it more profitable to seek special favours than to farm. These deals may exacerbate that problem. Worse, the impetus for many of them has not been profit-seeking by those who want to turn around failing farms. Rather, it has been alarm at rising food prices and export bans. Protectionism, not efficiency, has been the driving force. It would be better to liberalise food markets and boost trade than encourage further land grabs.
Third, there are serious doubts about whether countries acquiring land are paying the true cost of it. Host governments usually claim the farmland they offer is vacant, state-owned property. That is often untrue. It may well support smallholders who have farmed it for generations. They have no title, only customary rights. Deals that push them off their land or override customary rights cannot be justified. International bodies, such as the African Union, are drawing up codes of conduct to limit such abuses. They are sorely needed.
Even then, land deals will never help the poor as much as freer trade and stronger property rights. But if the deals eventually raised yields, spread technology and created jobs, that would at least be some cause for celebration. At the moment too many seem designed to benefit local elites more than local farmers; they use foreign labour and export most of their production, harming local food markets. Until they show otherwise, a dose of scepticism should be mixed with the premature hopes the land deals have engendered.
Copyright © 2009 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.
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Re: The Economist :Buying farmland abroad (Re: Deng)
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Dear Deng
Thanks for posting these Economist articles
I tend to link this up with the Kuwaiti and Chinese investments in the building of dams in Sudan. Gulf countries are searching for new lands to extend their economic control zones, and Sudan and Ethiopia are good examples.
Regards,
Iman
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Re: The Economist :Buying farmland abroad (Re: Sidgi Kaballo)
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Quote: Deng
Thanks for posting the two important articles.
The answer to the question is simply it is neocolonialism> |
Sidgi
Sudan is going through tremendous transformation. Sudanese must pay their attention carefully to this serious transformation
Deng
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Re: The Economist :Buying farmland abroad (Re: Deng)
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الاخ
مع التحيه
يوجد بوست اخر بعنوان
| Quote: استثمار ام استعمار |
استثمـــــــــــار ام استعمــــــــــار؟؟
شراء الاغنياء اراضي الفقراء: استثمار ام استعمار
هذا الموضوع خطير للغايه والمصيبه ان اغلبيه الشعب السودانى لايعير هذا الامر اى اهتمام
وهذا ما يحيرنى ويقلقنى فى نفس الوقت
بعد سنوات قليله سيكتشف اهل السودان ان السودان ارضه وثرواته ومياهه قد اصبحت تحت سيطره مستثمرين اجانب لاهم لاهم سوى جنى الارباح والاغتناء من ثروات اهل السودان
نحن امام زمبابوى اخرى واستعمار اقتصادى جديد خطير لانه سيتحكم فى كل ثروات السودان
هذا التفريط جريمه كبرى يجب ان لايكتب لها النجاح
منقول من مشاركه سابقه تتناول الاستثمار الاجنبى فى الشماليه وحقوق انسان المنطقه
http://www.nubian-forum.com/vb/showt...?t=7594&page=4
وبوستات اخرى
اين انسان الشمال من كل هذا
http://www.nubian-forum.com/vb/showthread.php?t=4791
شركاء لا أجراء فى الوطن
http://www.nubian-forum.com/vb/showt...0495#post40495
هل تستحق الارض النوبيه منا هذا الاهتمام
(دعوة للحوار )
http://www.nubian-forum.com/vb/showthread.php?t=7384
استيقظوا يا اهل الشمال
http://www.nubian-forum.com/vb/showthread.php?t=6447
مصر تؤكد ( الزراعه ممنوعه من مياه السدود )
http://www.nubian-forum.com/vb/showthread.php?t=6467
| Quote: وبين الوزير البدوي -خلال لقائه مسؤولين في شركة القصيم الزراعية- أن الحكومة السودانية لا تفرض أية قيود على زراعة القمح، كما أنها تسمح بالتصدير للمنتج، مبينا أن الكمية المنتجة في السودان تتجاوز 600 ألف طن، ويصل سعر طن القمح إلى 500 دولار، في حين لا تتجاوز تكلفة زراعة القمح في السودان 250 دولارا للفدان، كما أنه مسموح بزراعة جميع المحاصيل الزراعية، ومن بينها القمح بالدرجة الأولى والذرة الصفراء والأعلاف بأنواعها المختلفة، وأضاف الوزير أنه يجب على المستثمرين في السودان اقتطاع 5% من إجمالي المشروع لصالح الفقراء وخدمات اجتماعية أخرى |
Quote: سبحان الله
(اصبح صاحب الثروه ( الارض والماء والوطن) فقيرا يستحق الصدقه ويستحق ان تشكل من اجله صناديق الفقراء . )
هل تعتقد استاذى كنينه ان التعامل مع اهل المنطقه واصحاب الارض والماء بموجب الاستحقاق الولائى بتخصيص 5% لهم باعتبارهم فقراء يستحقون الصدقات امر يحقق الفائده لهم
لقد كتبت فى السابق عن هذا الامر وطالبت بالزام المستثمر الاجنبى الذى لم يحضر الى السودان بعاطقته بل لمصلحته فى المقام الاول
اولا
تخصيص ما لايقل عن 25% من الارض الممنوحه للمستثمر لاهالى المنطقه بعد استصلاحها وتهيئتها للزراعه
ثانيا
تحديد مده الحيازه للارض الزراعيه وان لاتكون طويله لان القادم من السنوات يشير الى متغيرات كثيره منها قيمه الغذاء التى سترتفع وقيمه المياه وقيمه الارض الزراعيه نفسها
لذلك الدخول فى امتيازات حيازه الارض لسنوات طويله امر غير منطقى
ثالثا
يمنح المستثمر فتره سماح لاتزيد عن 5 سنوات وبعدها يلتزم بدفع قيمه المياه التى سيستخدمها للزراعه حسب سعر المياه عالميا وفق اتفاقيات تجدد كل 5 سنوات
رابعا
يلتزم المستثمر بعد فتره السماح بدفع قيمه اجاره للارض تجدد كل 5 سنوات
خامسا
تخصص على الاقل 50% من عائدات بيع المياه واجاره الارض للولايه الشماليه لتصرف على مشاريع التنميه ( الطرق والمدارس والمستشفيات والمرافق الخدميه)
سادسا
المساحه المستقطعه من حيازات المستثمرين توزع على اهالى المنطقه بعدل ومساواة لكى تعم الاستفاده على الجميع وذلك بتكوين مؤسسات اهليه تحت اشراف الدوله
سابعا
يتم تخصيص اراضى زراعيه مساويه لما هو مخصص للمستثمرين الاجانب للشركات التعاونيه المناطقيه فى الولايه الشماليه على ان تقوم الدوله بتشجيع الاهالى لتكوين هذه الشركات التعاونيه ودعمها بالامكانيات الفنيه والتسهيلات التمويليه
لكى لانجد ان انسان الشمال متفرجا على مسرحيه الاستثمار من المقاعد الجانبيه
ثامنا
صياغه قانون استثمارى ولائى للشماليه يشارك في صياغته ابناء المنطقه من الاقتصادين والخبراء ويتم اجازه هذا القانون لضمان حقوق اهل المنطقه
وتشكيل لجان لمتابعه تنفيذ هذه الاتفاقيات يشارك فيها اهل المنطقه عبر ممثليهم المنتخبين
تاسعا
الشفافيه والوضوح والاعلان عن كل اتفاقيه استثماريه فى الصحف ووسائل الاعلام
توضح شروط الحيازة العامه والخاصه
اخى الاستاذا كنينه
هذا ما حاولت ان اوضحه فى اللقاء الذى كان فى الرياض
وهذا ما حاولت ان اكتب عنه فى مشاركات سابقه
نحن لانعارض الاستثمار الاجنبى فى المنطقه علما ان الفجوة الغذائيه فى العالم
تجعل انتاج الغذاء فى السودان قضيه امن قومى يجب التعامل معها بوعى وادراك
المليارت الثلاثه التى صرفت فى سد مروى كان بامكانها ن تحقق التنميه الزراعيه فى شمال السودان ولو تم تخصيص هذه المليارات الثلاثه التى صرفت على مشروع سد مروى فى زراعه القمح والمحاصيل التجاريه الاخرى قبل 5 سنوات لكان وضع السودان الاقتصادى فى احسن احواله ولكان السودان الان اتكبر منتج للقمح فى العالم
المساحه المتوفره فى الشماليه تزيد عن 14 مليون فدان انتاجيتها من القمح فقط حوالى 70 مليون طن
المقاله اعلاه توضح ان تكلفه انتاج القمح اقل من 250 دولار مقابل اكثر من 500 دولار سعر الطن من القمح
وانت كاقتصادى تعلم جيدا ان السياسات التموليه فى العالم تغيرت بسبب الفجوة الغذائيه فى العالم
لم يعد الامر كسابق السنوات حبث كانت البنوك العالميه تمتنع عن تمويل المشاريع الزراعيه لان سعر القمح كان فقط 90 دولار
العالم يتغير من حولنا ونحن لازلنا نقيس الامور بمقايييس الامس
الان الحصول على المليارات من الدولارات لتمويل المشاريع الزراعيه امر سهل للغايه وبضمان القمح المنتج دون الحاجه الى ضمانات اضافيه
ما الذى يمنع السودان من القيام باستزراع ان لم يكن كل المساحات الزراعيه المتوفره الجزء الاكبر منها وفق منظور قومى يحقق للسودان الاستفاده الاقتصاديه القصوى
الامر الغير مفهموم ومستوعب هو عندما نطرح هذا الطرح يرد علينا بان السودان لايملك الامكانيات لزراعه ارضه وفى المقابل يتم تسويق السودان الدوله العظمى فى اعياد ثورة الانقاذ
توفير التمويل بضمان القمح هو الحل المتاح والايسر
لعلملك اغلب المستثمرين الذين يتسارعون الان لحيازة الارض فى السودان يقومون بنفس الدور
وهو تامين فقط من 5 الى 10% من اجمالى التكلفه والباقى عن طريق التمويل من المؤسسات الاقراضيه والبنوك العالميه
كمثال صادفت فى الانترنت طلب تمول لمشروع زراعى مساحته 6 مليون فدان فى الشماليه مملوك لشركه مصريه اسمها واسم رئيس مجلس ادارتها وتلفونه لدى
كيف حصلت هذه الشركه المصريه على 6 مليون فدان فى الشماليه وهى غير مؤهله ماديا على زراعتها
ما يحصل هو تفريط فى الارض والمياه السودانيه تحت مسمى الاستثمار
هذا التفريط هى فى حقوق انسان اليوم والاجيال القادمه
واخشى اخى كنينه ان تكون دون ان تدرى تشارك فى هذا الجرم وتساعد فى هذا التفريط
حتى الان لايعلم اهل السودان كيفيه حيازات الارض الزراعيه وماهى الشروط
وماهى مدة الحيازه وغيرها من التفاصيل
كل شىء يتم فى الخفاء وبسريه تامه وكان اهل السودان لاحق لهم حتى فى فهم مايدور
لكم جميعا مودتى |
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Re: The Economist :Buying farmland abroad (Re: خليل عيسى خليل)
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http://www.uruknet.de/?p=m49256&hd=&size=1&l=e
Quote: The Great Land Giveaway: Neo-Colonialism by Invitation
James Petras |
Quote: December 1, 2008
The deal South Korea’s Daewoo Logistics is negotiating with the Madagascar Government looks rapacious…The Madagascan case looks neo-colonial…The Madagascan people stand to lose half of their arable land.
– Financial Times Editorial, November 20, 2008
Cambodia is in talks with several Asian and Middle Eastern governments to receive as much as $3 billions US dollars in agricultural investments in return for millions of hectares of land concessions…
– Financial Times, November 21, 2008
We are starving in the midst of bountiful harvests and booming exports!
– Unemployed Rural Landless Workers, Para State, Brazil (2003)
Introduction
Colonial style empire-building is making a huge comeback, and most of the colonialists are late-comers, elbowing their way past the established European and US predators.
Backed by their governments and bankrolled with huge trade and investment profits and budget surpluses, the newly emerging neo-colonial economic powers (ENEP) are seizing control of vast tracts of fertile lands from poor countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, through the intermediation of local corrupt, free-market regimes. Millions of acres of land have been granted – in most cases free of charge – to the ENEP who, at most, promise to invest millions in infrastructure to facilitate the transfer of their plundered agricultural products to their own home markets and to pay the ongoing wage of less than $1 dollar a day to the destitute local peasants. Projects and agreements between the ENEP and pliant neo-colonial regimes are in the works to expand imperial land takeovers to cover additional tens of millions of hectares of farmland in the very near future. The great land sell-off/transfer takes place at a time and in places where landless peasants are growing in number, small farmers are being forcibly displaced by the neo-colonial state and bankrupted through debt and lack of affordable credit. Millions of organized landless peasants and rural workers struggling for cultivatable land are criminalized, repressed, assassinated or jailed and their families are driven into disease-ridden urban slums. The historic context, economic actors and methods of agro-business empire-building bears similarities and differences with the old-style empire building of the past centuries.
Old and New Style Agro-Imperial Exploitation
During the previous five centuries of imperial domination the exploitation and export of agricultural products and minerals played a central role in the enrichment of the Euro-North American empires. Up to the 19th century, large-scale plantations and latifundios, organized around staple crops, relied on forced labor – slaves, indentured servants, semi-serfs, tenant farmers, migrant seasonal workers and a host of other forms of labor (including prisoners) to accumulate wealth and profits for colonial settlers, home country investors and the imperial state treasuries.
The agricultural empires were secured through conquest of indigenous peoples, importation of slaves and indentured workers, the forcible seizure and dispossession of communal lands and the rule through colonial officials. In many cases, the colonial rulers incorporated local elites ('nobles’, monarchs, tribal chiefs and favored minorities) as administrators and recruited the impoverished, dispossesed natives to serve as colonial soldiers led by white Euro-American officers.
Colonial-style agro-imperialism came under attack by mass-based national liberation movements throughout the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, culminating in the establishment of independent national regimes throughout Africa, Asia (except Palestine) and Latin America. From the very beginning of their reign, the newly independent states pursued diverse policies toward colonial-era land ownership and exploitation. A few of the radical, socialist and nationalist regimes eventually expropriated, either partially or entirely, foreign landowners, as was the case in China, Cuba, Indochina, Zimbabwe, Guyana, Angola, India and others. Many of these 'expropriations’ led to land transfers to the new emerging post-colonial bourgeoisie, leaving the mass of the rural labor force without land or confined to communal land. In most cases the transition from colonial to post-colonial regimes was underwritten by a political pact ensuring the continuation of colonial patterns of land ownership, cultivation, marketing and labor relations (described as a 'neo-colonial agro-export system). With few exceptions most independent governments failed to change their dependence on export crops, diversify export markets, develop food self-sufficiency or finance the settlement of rural poor onto fertile uncultivated public lands.
Where land distribution did take place, the regimes failed to invest sufficiently in the new forms of rural organization (family farms, co-ops or communal 'ejidos’) or imposed centrally controlled large-scale state enterprises, which were inefficiently run, failed to provide adequate incentives for the direct producers, and were exploited to finance urban-industrial development. As a result, many state farms and cooperatives were eventually dismantled. In most countries, great masses of the rural poor continued to be landless and subject to the demands of local tax collectors, military recruiters and usurious money lenders and were evicted by land speculators, real estate developers and national and local officials.
Neo-Liberalism and the Rise of New Agro-Imperialism
Emblematic of the new style agro-imperialism is the South Korean takeover of half (1.3 million hectares) of Madagascar’s total arable land under a 70-90 year lease in which the Daewoo Logistics Corporation of South Korea expects to pay nothing for a contract to cultivate maize and palm oil for export.1 In Cambodia, several emerging agro-imperial Asian and Middle Eastern countries are 'negotiating’ (with hefty bribes and offers of lucrative local 'partnerships’ to local politicians) the takeover of millions of hectares of fertile land.2 The scope and depth of the new emerging agro-imperial expansion into the impoverished countryside of Asian, African and Latin American countries far surpasses that of the earlier colonial empire before the 20th century. A detailed account of the new agro-imperialist countries and their neo-colonial colonies has recently been compiled on the website of GRAIN.
The driving forces of contemporary agro-imperialist conquest and land grabbing can be divided into three blocs:
1. The new rich Arab oil regimes, mostly among the Gulf States (in part, through their 'sovereign wealth funds).
2. The newly emerging imperial countries of Asia (China, India, South Korea and Japan) and Israel
3. The earlier imperial countries (US and Europe), the World Bank, Wall Street investment banks and other assorted imperial speculator-financial companies.
Each of these agro-imperial blocs is organized around one to three 'leading’ countries: Among the Gulf imperial states, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait; in Asia – China, Korea and Japan are the main land grabbers. Among the US-European-World Bank land predators there are a wide range of agro-imperialist monopoly firms buying up land ranging from Goldman Sachs, Blackstone in the US to Louis Dreyfuss in the Netherlands and Deutsche Bank in Germany. Upward of several hundred million acres of arable land have been or are in the process of being appropriated by the world’s biggest capitalist landowners in what is one of the greatest concentration of private landownership in the history of empire building.
The process of agro-imperial empire building operates largely through political and financial mechanisms, preceded, in some cases, by military coups, imperial interventions and destabilization campaigns to establish pliable neo-colonial 'partners’ or, more accurately, collaborators, disposed to cooperate in this huge imperial land grab. Once in place, the Afro-Asian-Latin American neo-colonial regimes impose a neo-liberal agenda which includes the break-up of communal-held lands, the promotion of agro-export strategies, the repression of any local land reform movements among subsistence farmers and landless rural workers demanding the redistribution of fallow public and private lands. The neo-colonial regimes’ free market policies eliminate or lower tariff barriers on heavily subsidized food imports from the US and Europe. These policies bankrupt local market farmers and peasants increasing the amount of available land to 'lease’ or sell-off to the new agro-imperial countries and multinationals. The military and police play a key role in evicting impoverished, indebted and starving farmers and preventing squatters from occupying and producing food on fertile land for local consumption.
Once the neo-colonial collaborator regimes are in place and their 'free market’ agendas are implemented, the stage is set for the entry and takeover of vast tracts of cultivable land by the agro-imperial countries and investors.
Israel is the major exception to this pattern of agro-imperial conquest, as it relies on the massive sustained use of force against an entire nation to dispossess Palestinian farmers and seize territory via armed colonial settlers – in the style of earlier Euro-American colonial imperialism.3
The sellout usually follows one of two paths or a combination of both: Newly emerging imperial countries take the lead or are solicited by the neo-colonial regime to invest in 'agricultural development’. One-sided 'negotiations’ follow in which substantial sums of cash flow from the imperial treasury into the overseas bank accounts of their neo-colonial 'partners’. The agreements and the terms of the contracts are unequal: The food and agricultural commodities are almost totally exported back to the home markets of the agro-imperial country, even as the 'host country’s’ population starves and is dependent on emergency shipments of food from imperial 'humanitarian’ agencies. 'Development’, including promise of large-scale investment, is largely directed at building roads, transport, ports and storage facilities to be used exclusively to facilitate the transfer of agricultural produce overseas by the large-scale agro-imperial firms. Most of the land is taken rent-free or subject to 'nominal’ fees, which go into the pockets of the political elite or are recycled into the urban real estate market and luxury imports for the local wealthy elite. Except for the collaborationist relatives or cronies of the neo-colonial rulers, almost all of the high paid directors, senior executives and technical staff come from the imperial countries in the tradition of the colonial past. An army of low salary, educated, 'third country nationals’ generally enter as middle level technical and administrative employees – completely subverting any possibility of vital technology or skills transfer to the local population. The major and much touted 'benefit’ to the neo-colonial country is the employment of local manual farm workers, who are rarely paid above the going rate of $1 to 2 US dollars a day and are harshly repressed and denied any independent trade union representation.
In contrast, the agro-imperial companies and regimes reap enormous profits, secure supplies of food at subsidized prices, exercise political influence or hegemonic control over collaborator elites and establish economic 'beachheads’ to expand their investments and facilitate foreign takeover of the local financial, trade and processing sectors.
Target Countries
While there is a great deal of competition and overlap among the agro-imperial countries in plundering the target countries, the tendency is for the Arab petroleum imperial regimes to focus on penetrating neo-colonies in South and Southeast Asia. The Asian 'Economic Tiger’ countries concentrate on Africa and Latin America. While the US-Europe Multinationals exploit the former communist countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union as well as Latin America and Africa.
Bahrain has grabbed land in Pakistan, the Philippines and Sudan to supply itself with rice. China, probably the most dynamic agro-imperial country today, has invested in Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia to ensure low cost soybean supplies (especially from Brazil), rice production in Cuba (5,000 hectares), Burma, Cameroon (10,000 hectares), Laos (100,000 hectares), Mozambique (with 10,000 Chinese farm-worker settlers), the Philippines (1.24 million hectares) and Uganda.
The Gulf States are projecting a $1 billion dollar fund to finance land grabs in North and Sub-Saharan Africa. Japan has purchased 100,000 hectares of Brazilian farmland for soybean and maize. Its corporations own 12 million hectares in Southeast Asia and South America. Kuwait has grabbed land in Burma, Cambodia, Morocco, Yemen, Egypt, Laos, Sudan and Uganda. Qatar has taken over rice fields in Cambodia and Pakistan and wheat, maize and oil seed croplands in Sudan as well as land in Vietnam for cereals, fruit, vegetables and raising cattle. Saudi Arabia has been 'offered’ 500,000 hectares of rice fields in Indonesia and hundreds of thousands of hectares of fertile land in Ethiopia and Sudan.
The World Bank (WB) has played a major role in promoting agro-imperial land grabs, allocating $1.4 billion dollars to finance agro-business takeovers of 'underutilized lands’. The WB conditions its loans to neo-colonies, like the Ukraine, on their opening up lands to be exploited by foreign investors.4 Taking advantage of neo-liberal 'center-left’ regimes in Argentina and Brazil, agro-imperial investors from the US and Europe have bought millions of acres of fertile farmlands and pastures to supply their imperial homelands, while millions of landless peasants and unemployed workers are left to watch the trains laden with beef, wheat and soy beans head for the foreign MNC-controlled port facilities and on to the imperial home markets in Europe, Asia and the US.
At least two emerging imperial countries, Brazil and China, are subject to imperial land grabs by more 'advanced’ imperial countries and have become 'agents’ of agricultural colonization. Japanese, European and North American multinationals exploit Brazil even as Brazilian colonial settlers and agro-industrialists have taken over wide swathes of borderlands in Paraguay, Uruguay and Bolivia. A similar pattern occurs in China where valuable farmlands are exploited by Japanese and overseas Chinese capitalists at the same time that China is seizing fertile land in poorer countries in Africa and Southeast Asia.
Present and Future Consequences of Agro-Imperialism
The re-colonization by emerging imperialist states of huge tracts of fertile farmland of the poorest countries and regions of Africa, Asia and Latin America is resulting in a deepening class polarization between, on the one hand, wealthy rentier Arab oil states, Asian billionaires, affluent state-funded Jewish settlers and Western speculators and, on the other hand, hundreds of millions of starving, landless, dispossessed peasants in Sudan, Madagascar, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Palestine, Burma, China, Indonesia, Brazil, the Philippines, Paraguay and elsewhere.
Agro-imperialism is still in its early stages – taking possession of huge tracts of land, expropriating peasants and exploiting the landless rural workers as day laborers. The next phase which is currently unfolding is to take control over the transport systems, infrastructure and credit systems, which accompany the growth of agro-export crops. Monopolizing infrastructure, credit and the profits from seeds, fertilizers, processing industries, tolls and interest payments on loans further concentrates de facto imperial control over the colonial economy and extends political influence over local politicians, rulers and collaborators within the bureaucracies.
The neo-colonized class structure, especially in largely agricultural economies are evolving into a four tier class system in which the foreign capitalists and their entourage are at the pinnacle of elite status representing less than 1% of the population. In the second tier, representing 10% of the population are the local political elite and their cronies and relatives as well as well placed bureaucrats and military officers, who enrich themselves, through partnerships ('joint ventures’) with the neo-colonials and via bribes and land grabs. The local middle class represents almost 20% and is in constant danger of falling into poverty in the face of the world economic crises. The dispossessed peasants, rural workers, rural refugees, urban squatters and indebted subsistence peasants and farmers make up the fourth tier of the class structure with close to 70% of the population.
Within the emerging neo-colonial agro-export model, the 'middle class’ is shrinking and changing in composition. The number of family farmers producing for the domestic market is declining in the face of state-supported foreign-owned farms producing for their own 'home markets’. As a result market vendors and small retailers in the local markets are falling behind, squeezed out by the large foreign-owned supermarkets. The loss of employment for domestic producers of farm goods and services and the elimination of a host of 'commercial’ intermediaries between town and country is sharpening the class polarization between top and bottom tiers of the class structure. The new colonial middle class is reconfigured to include a small stratum of lawyers, professionals, publicists and low-level functionaries of the foreign firms and public and private security forces. The auxiliary role of the 'new middle class’ in servicing the axis of colonial economic and political power will make them less nation-oriented and more colonial in their allegiances and political outlook, more 'free market’ consumerist in their life style and more prone to approve of repressive (including fascistic) domestic solutions to rural and urban unrest and popular struggles for justice.
At the present moment, the biggest constraint on the advance of agro-imperialism is the economic collapse of world capitalism, which is undermining the 'export of capital’. The sudden collapse of commodity prices is making it less profitable to invest in overseas farmland. The drying up of credit is undermining the financing of grandiose overseas land grabs. The 70% decline in oil revenues is limiting the Middle East Sovereign Funds and other investment vehicles of Gulf oil foreign reserves. On the other hand, the collapse of agricultural prices is bankrupting African, Asian and Latin American elite agro-producers, forcing down land prices and presenting opportunities for imperial agro-investors to buy up even more fertile land at rock-bottom prices.
The current world capitalist recession is adding millions of unemployed rural workers to the hundreds of millions of peasants dispossessed during the expansion period of the agricultural commodity boom during the first half of the current decade. Labor costs and land are cheap, at the same time that effective consumer demand is falling. Agro-imperialists can employ all the Third World rural labor they want at $1 dollar a day or less, but how can they market their products and realize returns that cover the costs of loans, bribes, transport, marketing, elite salaries, perks, CEO bonuses and investor dividends when demand is in decline?
Some agro-imperialists may take advantage of the recession to buy cheaply now and look forward to long-term profits when the multi-trillion dollar state-funded recovery takes effect. Others may cut back on their land grabs or more likely hold vast expanses of valuable land out of production until the 'market’ improves – while dispossessed peasants starve on the margins of fallow fields.
The new agro-imperials are banking on the new imperialist states committing resources (money and troops) to bolster the neo-colonial gendarmes in repressing the inevitable uprisings of the billions of dispossessed, hungry and marginalized people in Sudan, Ethiopia, Burma, Cambodia, Brazil, Paraguay, the Philippines, China and elsewhere. Time is running out for the easy deals, transfers of ownership and long-term leases consummated by local neo-colonial collaborators and overseas colonial investors and states. Currently imperial wars and domestic economic recessions in the old and emerging imperial countries are systematically draining their economies and testing the willingness of their populations to sacrifice for new style colonial empire building. Without international military and economic backing, the thin stratum of local neo-colonial rulers can hardly withstand sustained, mass uprisings of the destitute peasantry allied with the downwardly mobile lower middle class and growing legions of unemployed university-educated young people.
The promise of a new era of agro-imperial empire building and a new wave of emerging imperial states may be short-lived. In its place we may see a new wave of rural-based national liberation movements and ferocious competition between new and old imperial states fighting over increasingly scarce financial and economic resources. While downwardly mobile workers and employees in the Western imperial centers gyrate between one and another imperial party (Democrat/Republican, Conservative/Labor) they will play no role for the foreseeable future. When and if they break loose…they may turn toward a demagogic nationalist right or toward a currently invisible (at least in the US and Europe) 'patriotic nationalist’ socialist left. In either case, current imperial pillage and the subsequent mass rebellion will start elsewhere with or without a change in the US or Europe.
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Re: The Economist :Buying farmland abroad (Re: خليل عيسى خليل)
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http://www.sudaneseonline.com/spip.php?article29999
| Quote: South Sudan company denies US investor purchased land tract |
Thursday 29 January 2009 05:00Quote: .
Printer-Friendly version Comments...
January, 28, 2009 (WASHINGTON) – A South Sudanese company affiliated with General Paulino Matip Nhial, the Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), clarified in a statement that it did not sell any land in oil-rich Unity State.
Philippe Heilberg, the chairman of Jarch Management Group, poses with Gen. Peter Gatdet Yaka (photo from Jarch website) Responding to coverage in other news organizations that referred to the agreement as a purchase, the company clarified that “there was no land sold to an American company … the two companies signed a joint venture agreement to open commercial agricultural schemes throughout South Sudan.”
A U.S. firm, Jarch Management Group, Ltd, had purchased a 70% interest in the Sudanese company Leac for Agriculture and Investment and leased approximately 400,000 acres of land claimed by General Matip, according Philippe Heilberg, the U.S. investor behind the deal.
Jarch has a long history of partnering with General Matip in a bid to exert rights over oil in Unity State, which lies on the disputed border region between North and South Sudan. Heilberg’s firm, which is registered in the Virgin Islands, is managed by commodities traders and former State Department and Central Intelligence Agency officials, among others.
Gordon Buay, who acts as a legal advisor to Leac, referred to the exaggerated media angle, saying “such a misleading report angered the whole African continent and we are hereby clarifying the matter.”
Buay insisted that the agreement between Jarch and Leac does not contravene the law governing companies and business enterprises in the South.
The terms of the deal designate Jarch with the responsibility for soliciting funding from investors while Leac determines the overall implementation of the projects. The two companies intend to summit their joint venture agreement to the South Sudan Ministry of Legal Affairs and Constitutional Development.
Leac, which is managed by Matip’s son, Gabriel Wiethiang Paulino Matip, said it will acquire "a sizeable piece of land from the government of Southern Sudan (GOSS) or local government land authorities for the purpose of establishing commercial farming…."
The press release from Leac stressed the potential benefits that mechanized agricultural schemes will provide to Sudan.
"There is no doubt that with effective mechanized agriculture, the financial benefits which local and state governments would reap shall triple. The state and local governments shall have budgets for development because of the cash flows from the agricultural schemes the two companies will operate," said the company.
During Sudan’s civil war, Paulino Matip led a militia among the Bul Nuer, and he was often backed by the government. Subsequently he came to terms with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, signing the Juba Peace Declaration with SPLA leader Salva Kiir Mayadrit in 2007, and he has technically incorporated his forces into SPLA in accordance with the terms of the 2005 peace deal |
http://www.nubian-forum.com/vb/showthread.php?p=40529#post40529
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Re: The Economist :Buying farmland abroad (Re: خليل عيسى خليل)
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بالفعل اهل السودان فى غفوة عميقه وعدم الاهتمام لمايدور على الارض مصيبه نتائجها ستكون كارثيه للسودان واهله وخاصه الاجيال القادمه التى ستدفع ثمن هذا التفريط فى الارض والثروة
الجيل القادم سيعاصر ازمه الغذاء العالميه والندره الكبيره للمياه وسيشاهد كيف يتمتع الغرباء بخيرات الارض السودانيه وكيف سيستفيد الاخرين من مخزون المياه الجوفيه السودانيه ( الحوض النوبى الرملى) وهو يعانى من الجوع والعطش والحرمان
هذا الجيل المتضرر المحروم من ثروات ارضه سيثور رافضا الاتفاقيات التى تمكن الغرباء من امتصاص ثروات الارض السودانيه واهلها يتفرجون او ينتظرون الصدقات والهبات
مايدور الان هو مشروع احتراب ودعوه للاقتتال بين صاحب ثروه حرم منها وبين مستغل يتمتمع بما لايملك
ان كتبت النجاح لهذا المخطط فلننتظر الكوارث والحروب والاقتتال وشلالات الدم
لكم مودتى
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Re: The Economist :Buying farmland abroad (Re: خليل عيسى خليل)
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أكثر من عشرين مليون هكتار حتي الآن: الأجانب يشترون أراضي العالم الثالث
الثلاثاء, 09 يونيو 2009 13:37
السودان يتصدر قائمة الدول التي باعت أو أجرت أراضيها لجهات أجنبية
بقلم ستيفن لييهي/انتر بريس سيرفس
أنكوراج: الولايات المتحدة: آي بي إس
إشترت حكومات دول غنية وشركات عالمية حتي الآن أكثر من 20 مليون هكتارا من أراضي بلدان العالم الثالث وهي المساحة التي تعادل ربع الأراضي الزراعية في أوروبا. وتتصدر السودان قائمة الدول التي باعت أو أجرت أراضيها لجهات أجنبية. فقد صرح جواكين فون بروان، مدير المعهد الدولي لبحوث السياسات الغذائية، أن الدول الغنية التي تحتاج إلي أراضي أو مياه، إنما تبحث عن أراضي زراعية تكفل لها ضمان أمنها الغذائي. ونبه إلي إنعدام الشفافية في مثل هذه الصفقات.
وأفادت دراسة للمعهد الدولي بعنوان "نزع ملكية أراضي الدول النامية علي أيدي المستثمرين الأجانب"، من إعداد فون براون وروث ماينزين-ديك، أفادت أن الحكومات والشركات الأجنبية قد إقتنت أو في سبيلها لإقتناء ما بين 15 مليون و20 مليون هكتارا من أراضي البلدان النامية حتي الآن.
وعلي الرغم من صعوبة الحصول علي معلومات دقيقة، فيقدر المعهد الدولي أن عمليات شراء الأراضي هذه تمثل إستثمارات يتراوح مجموعها بين 20 مليار و30 مليار دولار ، تأتي أساسا من الصين وكوريا الجنوبية ودول الخليج العربي، وتستهدف القارة الأفريقية بصورة رئيسية.
وحذر مدير المعهد الدولي أن "نحو ربع هذه الإستثمارات يخصص لزراعة محاصيل لإنتاج محروقات زراعية".
وأفاد المعهد الدولي أن الصين شرعت منذ عشر سنوات في إستئجار إراضي لإنتاج الأغذية في بلدان أخري ومنها كوبا والمكسيك. كما إشترت أراضي في أفريقيا.
كذلك أن الصين تتفاوض علي شراء ملايين الهكتارات في جمهورية الكونغو الدويمقراطية وتنزانيا وأوغندا وزامبيا وزيمبابوي، إضافة إلي "تصدير" عشرات الالاف من الصينيين للعمل في هذه الأراضي.
أما السودان فتترأس قائمة الدول النامية التي تبيع أو تؤجر أراضيها للأجانب، وبالتحديد لدول الخليج العربي. وفي العام الماضي، توصلت الإمارات العربية المتحدة إلي إتفاقيات مع باكستان، فيما تعتمد قطر علي أراضي زراعية في بورما والفلبين وإندونيسيا.
وبدورها، أبرمت الشركة الكورية الجنوبية العملاقة "دييوو لوجيستكس كوربوريشن" إتفاقيات لإستئجار 1,3 مليون هكتار ا من الأراضي في مدغشقر لزراعة الذرة ونخيل الزيت. وذكر التقرير أن هذا التواجد لعب دورا في الأزمات السياسية التي قادت إلي الإحاطة بحكومة هذه الدولة في العام الجاري.
وعلي الرغم من حجم هذه الأرقام، فقد أكد الباحث ديفين كويك بمنظمة "غرين" غير الحكومية المتخصصة في القضايا الزراعية ومقرها مدينة برشلونة الأسبانية، أكد أن "عدد الإتفاقيات (شراء وإستئجار الأراضي) يتجاوز كثيرا ما يذكره المعهد الدولي لبحوث السياسات الزراعية".
وشرح الباحث أن "أحدا لا يتحري في الصفقات الخاصة". وأشار إلي دراسة أعدتها المنظمة منذ ستة أشهر، أفادت فيها أن الدول الغنية تشتري من الفقراء أراضي خصبة ومياه وطقس مشمس، لتحمل إلي بيوتها أغذية ومحروقات، ما يعادل إستعمار جديد.
وشرح ديفين كويك لوكالة انتر بريس سيرفس أن ما أسماه حمي القرن الواحد والعشرين الزراعية تقودها أساسا تلك الدول غير الراغبة في الوقوع رهينة في أيدي كبري الشركات العاملة في تجارة الأغذية.
ومع ذلك، ثمة دورا متناميا في هذه العمليات تلعبه رؤوس الأموال الخاصة الواردة من صناديق التقاعد، لتراهن علي الأراضي كسلعة مربحة خاصة إثر إنهيار البورصات العالمية وإنخفاض أسعار النفط والمعادن.
وعلي سبيل المثال، ذكركويك أن "قطاعا كبيرا من صناعة تربية الماشية في أستراليا أصبح الآن ملكا لشركة إستثمارات خاصة. كما يملك مصرف الإستثمار غولدمان ساش إثنين من أكبر منتجي لحوم الخنزير في الصين”.
وبهذا "يتحول ملاك الأراضي والمزارعون إلي مجرد موظفين" وفقا لكويك، الذي شرح أيضا أن الوضع أصبح سيئا للغاية بالنسبة للملايين من صغار المزارعين والرعاة وأهالي الشعوب الأصلية الذين يفتقرون إلي حقوق ملكية الأرض، والذين يقعون ضحية الطرد من أرضهم.(آي بي إس / 2009)
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Re: The Economist :Buying farmland abroad (Re: Deng)
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شئ مؤسف جدا أن تقوم الحكومة السودانية ببيع وتأجير الاراضي الزراعية في السودان بمثل هذه الكميات وفي نفس الوقت هنالك عدد كبير من المواطنين السودانين يعتمدون أعتماد كلي على منظمات الاغاثة العالمية لكي تطعمهم بشكل يومي.
دينق.
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شركة أجنبية تعرض الأراضي السودانية للبيع بالخارج (Re: Deng)
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شركة أجنبية تعرض الأراضي السودانية للبيع بالخارج
لدينا أراضٍ زراعية للإستثمار الزراعي.. مساحات كبيرة.. أسعار مغرية.. إجراءات قانونية - مصادر ري طبيعية - إمكانيات الزراعة لكافة المحاصيل.. مصادر كهرباء - التمتع بحوافز الإستثمار - إعفاء ضريبي.. إستيراد معدات ومستلزمات المشروع بدون رسوم جمركية.. حرية تحويل الأرباح .. تصدير الناتج الزراعي.. أقل مساحة (500) فدان.. للإستفسار يرجى الاتصال على الأرقام التالية (تليفون «........» فاكس «.........» .. أو الإرسال على البريد الإلكتروني «...........».
هذه ليست دعاية أو إعلاناً من هيئة الإستثمار السودانية للترويج للأراضي الزراعية السودانية، بل خطاب من شركة أجنبية لتسويق الأراضي السودانية بعثت به الى شركة (الجوف للتنمية الزراعية) بالمملكة العربية السعودية، وعلى رأس الخطاب كتبت عبارة (فرصة للإستثمار الزراعي بالسودان).. على ضوء هذا الخطاب (الغريب) الذي تحصلت (حضرة المسئول) على نسخة منه.. نتساءل:
منذ متى أصبح إستثمار الأراضي السودانية يتم عبر السماسرة الأجانب؟ هل هو نوع جديد من أساليب الإستثمار أم إستثمار من الباطن؟
وهل فعلاً هولاء السماسرة الأجانب يقومون بعرض المزايا الإستثمارية وقانون الإستثمار السوداني بالصورة الصحيحة؟ أم المهم بالنسبة لهم قبض الثمن والمقابل ممن يسمسرون عليهم لبيع أراضينا السودانية؟
هل تعلم إدارة الإستثمار بهذه الشركة الأجنبية التي تعرض أراضينا الزراعية للبيع والإستثمار خارج حدود الوطن؟
الشركة الأجنبية تقول إنها شركة متخصصة في تسويق الأراضي، وتتعامل مع أفراد مالكين لهذه الأراضي وليس مع الحكومة.. ونتساءل مرة أخرى:
هل لدى هذه الشركة الأجنبية سجل بالسودان حتى تمارس هذا النشاط بالسودان؟ فالشركة تقول إنها لا تتعامل مع الحكومة، بل مع الأفراد المالكين لهذه الأراضي، وهذه (مصيبة كبرى) تعني صراحة أن هناك عصابة سواء داخلية أو خارجية إمتلكت أراضي داخل الوطن بزعم الإستثمار، وبالقيمة الإستثمارية، والآن تعرضها للبيع على الآخرين خارج حدود الوطن، وتعمل الشركة الأجنبية المعنية وسيطاً أو سمساراً لهم لبيع الأراضي الزراعية السودانية، وقبض ثمنها أضعافاً مضاعفة مقارنة مع القيمة التي منحت لهم بها هذه الأراضي تحت قانون الإستثمار!!!
واذا كان لدى الشركة الأجنبية رخصة وسجل إستثمار بالسودان، كشركة إستثمارية فهل هي فعلاً شركة مسجلة لتسويق الأراضي الزراعية؟ أم أنها حصلت على أراضٍ في السودان تحت قانون الإستثمار وتقوم بعرضها حالياً على الآخرين خارج البلاد؟
.. هل هذا الاسلوب يشجع على الإستثمار في السودان؟؟!! وهل يعقل ان تترك حكومة السودان مسئولية العرض والتفاوض على الأرض السودانية بيد السماسرة الأجانب ومكاتب تسويق الأراضي الأجنبية؟
- ومن يضمن حماية حقوق المستثمرين في السودان إذا حصلوا على أراضي إستثمارية بواسطة شركات أجنبية؟ هذه الواقعة تحتاج لمراجعة أداء الشركات الأجنبية التي حصلت على رخص إستثمار بالسودان لمعرفة مدى جديتها، فإن كانت جادة فلا غبار على ذلك، وإن كانت خلاف ذلك، فإنها إذن لا تمارس الاستثمار، بل مجرد حجز الأراضي ثم السمسرة فيها، مما يضيع الفرصة على المستثمرين الجادين وأصحاب إمكانيات الإستثمار الحقيقية..
المحرر:
اسم الشركة الأجنبية، والهاتف، والفاكس، والبريد الإلكتروني وخطابها الذي يروج للإستثمار في الأراضي السودانية والذي بعثت به لشركة الجوف للتنمية الزراعية طرف المحرر.
التاج عثمان
الرأي العام
---------------------------
شكلوا البلد اتباعت ونحن ماجايبين خبر
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Deng
إيمان أحمد
Sidgi Kaballo
عبد الوهاب المحسى
أحمد أمين
فيس بوك
تويتر
انستقرام
يوتيوب
بنتيريست