An article I wrote for this month’s EMEA Finance magazine discusses the recent attempts by rich countries to buy up agricultural land in Africa with a view to sending home the food produced there. The main problem with the deals, I argue, is the difficulty of valuing them in a rapidly-changing global food market. For African countries which lack expertise in such matters, there is a huge danger that they will be ripped off. But the risks are also great for investor countries, as the recent collapse of South Korea’s bid to buy up land in Madagascar has shown. For the deals to work, they will need to be radically different to those made so far - more transparent, properly regulated, beneficial to local people and shorter. More important still, however, is for Africa to realise its own potential for food production, which would in the long-term negate the need for these deals.
The full article is here.
