by Khadija Sharife
It has been called the ‘new Great Trek’ by South Africans who remember their history.
Presently, over 30 million hectares in almost 30 African countries have been auctioned to a host of corporations and governments, from China – housing one fifth of the world’s population on 8 per cent of the world’s arable land – to oil-rich, water-poor Gulf nations. The deals involving these concessions are often cloaked in secrecy but African Business has learnt that they are usually characterised by allowing free access to water, repatriation of profits, tax exemptions and the ability for investors to acquire land at no cost whatsoever, with little or no restriction on the volume of food exported or its intended use, in return for a loose promise to develop infrastructure and markets. However, the terms of the concessions vary from country to country and deal from deal. In some instances, the host country drives a hard bargain and in other cases, the investors call the shots.
As the debate over the whole question continues to rage on, the much-discussed Congo land-lease, granting 200,000 hectares to South African farmers with a further 10 million hectares in the balance, appears to mark a departure from the usual terms underpinning foreign acquisition of fertile land by multinationals. Not only has commercial agriculture on these concessions chiefly been earmarked for domestic use, thus generating food security, but good crop yields possess the potential to reduce outstanding debt in the Republic of the Congo from 70 per cent to 40 per cent of GDP within a year.
Describing the South African farmers, an official from ABSA AgriBusiness, a leader in the financing of the agricultural sector, stated, ‘They are capable of farming without government support, can compete against the best in the world and even with our scarce resources, they produce profitably.’
‘There are three main reasons we are in the Congo,’ stated Andre Botha, president of Agri Gauteng, a division of Agri SA. ‘The first is, of course, to diversify our businesses; the second is to assist local farmers to commercially develop their own land; the third reason is to assist the government of South Africa to fulfil the expectations of the world in stabilising the African continent through the exchange of skills and technology.’
Agri SA, a commercial farmers’ association, was initially contacted by the Congolese government in January 2009, with the latter seeking a strategic non-governmental organisation in the form of a professional farmers’ union, rather than a political state controlled entity.
The union, a federal organisation formed in 1904, is composed of 70,000 large and smallscale commercial farmers in South Africa. It actively assists members in farm development, corporate liaison, information technology development and transfer, trade, industry, water, land, economic and environmental affairs, as well as labour and training.
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