Water Scarcity, Food Security Concerns Prompt Global Land Grab

Last August Hassad Food, a year-old agricultural finance company owned by the government of Qatar, announced that the tiny Middle East emirate's primary food security investment group would change its funding strategy. Instead of securing its food supply principally by purchasing tens of thousands of acres of arable land in Africa, Asia, and Europe - a global trend that has stirred international concern and a grassroots backlash in some of the planet's poorest agricultural regions - Hassad Food would invest in food and farm companies.

"In many cases these deals are not win-win situations," Nasser Mohamed Al Hajri, the company's chairman, told reporters. "We don't want to be in a situation where the rich are taking away food and land of the poor."

But late last month Hassad Foods changed course again. The company signed a roughly $1 billion agreement to develop farmland in Sudan, a north African nation emerging from civil war and with millions of acres of arable land that is being eyed for food production by water- and resource-scarce nations on other continents.

"This is just the beginning on which I hope we can build on to secure food for Qatar, Sudan as well as the world," Al-Hajri said in comments published by Gulf Times last month.

More than 250,000 acres of Sudan farmland is involved in the agreement, the latest in a concerted global land buying spree by nations facing limits on land, water, and manpower to ensure their food security. Qatar and other nations are quietly purchasing or leasing vast tracts of farmland in land-rich nations that need new capital, technology, and markets to thrive.

Just in the last few weeks, according to news accounts, a joint venture between Pharos Financial Group, a fund management firm based in Dubai, and London-based Miro Holdings International, which specializes in agriculture assets management, announced plans to spend $350 million to buy farmland in Africa and Romania.

South Korea announced it will spend nearly $26 million to buy land in Paraguay and Uruguay. South Korean investment companies have rented 94,000 hectares in Mindoro in the Philippines to produce corn. And Gaeunpam, a South Korean agricultural corporation, is planning to develop 52,000 acres of farmland for Korean farmers to use in the Bulgan province of Mongolia, according to news reports.