Sue Branford writes in The Guardian that:
China, South Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other nations have been buying and leasing huge quantities of foreign land for the production of food or biofuels.
A couple of days ago, Luigi mentioned in a footnote of a post on Malagasy coffee, that Daewoo is to lease 1.3 million ha in Madagascar. Apparently to produce maize. The Financial Times reported:
“It is totally undeveloped land which has been left untouched. And we will provide jobs for them by farming it, which is good for Madagascar,” said Mr Hong [of Dawoo]. The 1.3m hectares of leased land is almost half the African country’s current arable land of 2.5m hectares.
There might be some scope for agricultural expansion on the Malagasy high plateau, but 1.3 million ha of good arable land that is untouched? Except by the local population, of course.
Not quite, and not so fast, responded the government:
The contract (…) concerns only the facilitation of a land search. We are talking about a search for 100,000 hectares … It is only after this stage that the rest of the process will continue.
Grain has a report, and a Google notebook with clippings.
FAO’s Jacques Diouf talks about neo-colonialism. There is also this Guardian article on resentment in Laos. Expect more of that to come.