Last week’s item on Foodprint NYC made me think of an article I stumbled upon some time ago. It deals with the topic of so-called agro-imperialism. Issues such as rising global food prices, growing populations and scarcity of water make financially wealthy but recource-poor nations in the Middle East and Asia feel uncomfortable about their food security. In order to attempt to ensure food security, a number of these countries decided to “outsource their food production to places where fields are cheap and abundant” by buying large pieces of arable land in Africa, mostly in regions that are “least touched by development”.

“Foreign investors (some governments, some private interests) are promising to construct infrastructure, bring new technologies, create jobs and boost the productivity of underused land so that it not only feeds overseas markets but also more Africans. It remains to be seen, however, whether local farmers and African citizens will reap any of the benefit of this agro-imperialism.”

Africa still contains a substantial amount of underused land. In many cases the land-buy process involves states such as China, India and the UAE, and is carried out completely off the radar. Looking at this impressive ‘IFPRI Landgrabbing’ map, one can conclude that some Western European countries are following in their wake, including Germany and the United Kingdom.

In his article in the New York Times, which the InfraNet Lab post refers to, Andrew Rice explains that Ethopia is one of the breeding places of resource imperialism. In its desire to attract foreign investors, the local government speaks of ‘virgin land’. At the same time of this influx of capital into African agriculture, in a period where a global food crisis becomes more and more manifest, four million of Ethopia’s inhabitants still depend on emergency food aid.