Africa's Farmland in Demand: 'Is There a Better Place than This?'

by Rick Westhead (The Star) ...Indian industrialist Sai Ramakrishna Karuturi has his eye on this lush scenery, too, but he sees something much different: the potential for large-scale commercial farming.

Karuturi, from the South Indian city of Bangalore, envisions the fields around Kimambila growing cut roses for Canada, lentils for India, tomatoes for the Middle East.

...Ethiopia, for instance, has long-term leases with Karuturi and others for 1.2 million hectares of land. The famine-prone country currently exports fruits and vegetables worth $60 million per year and flowers worth $160 million.

With 60 per cent, or 600 million hectares, of the world’s remaining arable, uncultivated land, according to the U.S. consultancy group McKinsey & Co., the continent is once again a coveted landscape.

...Only 7 per cent of farmland in Africa is irrigated, compared to 40 per cent in Asia. Foreign companies promise to share modern farming technologies, introduce new, high-output hybrid crops, and build schools and health clinics. They insist that they only lease land that isn’t already being used.

But environmentalists envision a doomsday scenario where foreign investors spend the next 20 years aggressively farming cash crops and leave when groundwater reservoirs dry up and soil is sapped of its nutrients.

...The Mangas may be happy but they are far from comfortable. They sleep on dirty foam mattresses and grow enough food to eat but not enough to sell at local markets. They have about 50 chickens and sell one every few months for about 7,000 shillings ($4.40). The money helps to cover the cost of charging their cellphones.

...As developed countries set goals for adopting biofuel, investors began committing millions of hectares of farmland to crops like jatropha, a hardy plant that can produce biodiesel. Less land was allocated to growing food. Countries, including India, struggled to cope with shortages — climate change was also blamed — and prices spiked. READ MORE