Foreign Investment In Agriculture Research Articles

Who Invests How Much in Agriculture in Low- and Middle-Income Countries? An Empirical Review

This article provides estimates of the relative size of on-farm investment in agriculture; foreign direct investment (FDI) in agriculture; government investments in agriculture; and official development assistance to agriculture. It finds that in a set of 76 low- and middle-income countries farmers are by far the largest investors in primary agriculture. On-farm investments are more than three times as large as all other sources of investment combined, with annual investment in on-farm agricultural capital stock exceeding government investment by more than 4 to 1, and other resource flows by a much larger margin. In spite of significant attention to the role of FDI, the article shows that the levels of FDI in primary agriculture are small, and that their increase has been overstated. The article concludes by recommending some areas for future research and what is needed in terms of data, as well as considering the policy implications of the findings.

Will Passive Protection Save Congo Forests?

Central Africa’s tropical forests are among the world’s largest carbon reserves. Historically, they have experienced low rates of deforestation. Pressures to clear land are increasing due to development of infrastructure and livelihoods, foreign investment in agriculture, and shifting land use management, particularly in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The DRC contains the greatest area of intact African forests. These store approximately 22 billion tons of carbon in aboveground live biomass, yet only 10% are protected. Can the status quo of passive protection — forest management that is low or nonexistent — ensure the preservation of this forest and its carbon? We have developed the SimCongo model to simulate changes in land cover and land use based on theorized policy scenarios from 2010 to 2050. Three scenarios were examined: the first (Historical Trends) assumes passive forest protection; the next (Conservation) posits active protection of forests and activation of the national REDD+ action plan, and the last (Agricultural Development) assumes increased agricultural activities in forested land with concomitant increased deforestation. SimCongo is a cellular automata model based on Bayesian statistical methods tailored for the DRC, built with the Dinamica-EGO platform. The model is parameterized and validated with deforestation observations from the past and runs the scenarios from 2010 through 2050 with a yearly time step. We estimate the Historical Trends trajectory will result in average emissions of 139 million t CO2 year-1 by the 2040s, a 15% increase over current emissions. The Conservation scenario would result in 58% less clearing than Historical Trends and would conserve carbon-dense forest and woodland savanna areas. The Agricultural Development scenario leads to emissions of 212 million t CO2 year-1 by the 2040s. These scenarios are heuristic examples of policy’s influence on forest conservation and carbon storage. Our results suggest that 1) passive protection of the DRC’s forest and woodland savanna is insufficient to reduce deforestation; and 2): enactment of a REDD+ plan or similar conservation measure is needed to actively protect Congo forests, their unique ecology, and their important role in the global carbon cycle.

Effects of foreign direct investment in African agriculture

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to review the key issues surrounding foreign direct investment (FDI) in agriculture, and examine the potential impacts of FDI in African agriculture. Design/methodology/approach – The dynamic Global Trade Analysis Project model (GDyn) is used to analyse the potential impacts of improvements in land productivity and FDI in Africa. Findings – The results illustrate that combined efforts to improve land productivity and growth in FDI could potentially increase Africa’s share in global agricultural output and exports, particularly with respect to oil seeds, sugar, and cotton. Originality/value – The authors employ a global economy-wide modelling framework to simulate the effects of growth in FDI in African agriculture.

Domestic and foreign direct investment in Ghanaian agriculture

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of foreign direct investment (FDI) into agriculture on domestic investment in agriculture. Design/methodology/approach – Time series data from 1976 to 2007 was fitted to a derived model. Findings – Foreign direct investment into agriculture crowd-in domestic investment into agriculture. Research limitations/implications – A targeted approach that will attract foreign direct investment into agriculture is required as to complement existing efforts at boosting domestic agricultural investment. Originality/value – Numerous papers investigated the relationship between foreign direct investment and domestic investment at the aggregate national and regional levels. However, the evidence for this relationship has been conflicting. That for agriculture is rare. For Ghana, a developing agrarian economy that has promoted foreign direct investment for some decades now, it is imperative to establish the relationship between foreign direct investments and domestic investment. Also, the estimation was based on a theoretically derived model.

우크라이나 농업투자사업의 경제성에 관한 연구

This study aims to analyzing economy of agricultural investment to the Ukraine based on survey and analysis of environment of agricultural investment to the Ukraine. The Ukraine had been used as a grain belt for Russia for some 60 years among CIS nations so that agricultural environment is excellent and capital investment on agricultural field is on the rise every year. Accordingly, agricultural investment to the Ukraine should be approached not only in economy but also in the dimension of diversification of foreign agricultural investment area and food security. And it is necessary to seek measures for both government and private body to make inroads into the country together.

Governing the Global Land Grab: What role for Gender in the Voluntary Guidelines and the Principles for Responsible Investment?

The heightened interest in large-scale foreign agricultural investment in regions with ‘unused’ arable land has triggered a great deal of international attention. Concerns about ‘land grabbing’ have initiated efforts at the global level to establish standards for ‘responsible investment’ and good governance. These initiatives warrant critical examination given the social, political, and economic inequalities to which they are designed to respond, yet the scholarship on these initiatives frequently fails to incorporate gendered analyses. This article argues that gendered analysis of the governance of land grabs not only belongs at the local level—where it continues to yield important insights into how gender inequality is manifested in various forms of local governance—but that it is sorely needed at the global level as well. As such, this article begins an assessment of these governance frameworks and how they consider local realities, with particular attention to gender-based inequalities.

Policy coherence and food security: The effects of OECD countries’ agricultural policies

There have been important changes to agricultural policies in many OECD countries over the past decade and the international spill-over effects of support and protection have diminished. Now would be a good time to eliminate remaining distortions and put in place more efficient alternatives, including social safety nets and tools to help farmers manage risk. This would lock in the benefits of reform and simultaneously address charges of policy incoherence. In the context of high food prices, new issues have emerged with potential implications for food security. They include export restrictions, the use of biofuel mandates, and the opportunities and threats presented by increased foreign investment in agriculture. On these issues, as well as in terms of conventional support mechanisms, policies in emerging economies (in particular the BRIICS) are increasingly important. A pro-active agenda for policy coherence would involve not just eliminating policies that distort trade, but also enacting positive measures to increase food availability, for example by raising agricultural productivity, using resources sustainably, and eliminating waste and over-consumption. Across countries, there are important gains to be realised from knowledge sharing, and from multilateral action to provide global public goods – not least smoother functioning of the multilateral trading system.

English

An inflation shock based scenario analysis of causal relations between foreign direct investment (FDI) in agriculture and agricultural output in Nigeria was conducted using data that spanned between 1960 and 2008. Augmented Dickey-Fuller test, Johansen co integration procedure, error correction model, granger causality test and impulse response were employed as methods of data analyses. The results revealed that no long run equilibrium relationship exists between FDI in agriculture and agricultural output in Nigeria both in the presence of inflation shock and in its absence. However, while short run causal influence flows from FDI in agriculture to agricultural output, no short run influence runs from the latter to the former with inflation playing negative role on the short run influence of FDI in agriculture on agricultural output. The persistent responses of both variables in opposite direction to exogenous shocks to the system consolidate the findings that no long run relationship exists between these variables. The study recommends that policy that encourages FDI in agriculture should be stemmed up with more attention paid to inflation control. Key words: Foreign direct investment (FDI) in agriculture, agricultural production, inflation shock, long run relationship, granger causality.

Africa’s Land Rush and the Embedded Neoliberal State: Foreign Agricultural Investment in Ethiopia and Mozambique

AbstractAs changes to traditional economic power relationships upend the global economy, there is a resurgent interest in Africa’s raw materials by an increasing number of states beyond the traditional post-colonial coterie. These states are not fundamentally altering Africa’s status as a small economic player supplying raw goods to the world. But the level of interest, the states involved, and the changing nature of Africa’s involvement are raising questions about the long-term benefits and consequences of this renewed interest. Of particular concern is the trend in scale and type of commercial agricultural projects where land deals are slowly consuming vast sections of Africa’s agricultural land for export crops. NGOs, a few academics and virtually any news story on the subject inevitably invoke the term neo-colonialism. Our argument, however, is that the neo-colonial thesis – as well as the embedded state and neoliberal state theses taken separately – fail to capture the complexity of African commercial agriculture, particularly in the cases of Ethiopia and Mozambique. Despite ample evidence of massive, opaque land deals, investments do not tend to be restricted in bi-lateral ways nor are the investing parties members of the traditional Western world. While the role of elites is similar to the embedded state thesis, deals are mediated via wider market relations and conditions and justified in neoliberal terms. We propose that a synthesis of these latter theoretical strands better captures both the character and outcomes of African land acquisitions in our two case studies, and Africa at large.

大規模海外農業投資による食農資源問題の先鋭化とアグロ・フード・レジームの再編

International food price shocks in 2007/8, 2011 and 2012 caused large-scale foreign investment in land for the purpose of fostering food security. Large-scale land acquisitions have occasionally left small landholders and their communities in crisis of survival, because they meant the loss of the lands that were their major method of livelihood. In Japan, there are few research papers on such acts of ‘land grabbing’. However, the current administration of Japan promotes foreign agricultural investment, and introduced the so-called ProSAVANA project in Northern Mozambique which created severe negative impact on local societies. This paper examines the general trends in global land acquisition, followed by the political background of ProSAVANA, which is closely related with the G8 New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition and African Agricultural Growth Corridor initiated at the World Economic Forum, and what is happening under ProSAVANA.The main purpose of the ProSAVANA project is to promote soybean production. If this purpose is fully realized, Mozambique can achieve the status of a major soybean exporting country. This change will reorganize agro-food regime in soybean, which means the movement of the new agro-food regime which integrates the whole process of the soybean supply chain by vertical division of labor in multinational agribusinesses and linkages with new agribusinesses in emerging countries like Brazil. Finally, I suggest some points to be discussed about large-scale land acquisition and raise the ethical question of the mission of the researcher who is engaged in studying such forms of land grabbing.

Land Policies and Labour Markets in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Law and Economics Analysis

This article examines foreign agricultural investment contracts and their potential to contribute to alleviating unemployment and underemployment particularly of young people in sub‐Saharan Africa. This investment trend has accelerated rapidly since the 2008 food crisis to over 56 million hectares. Law and economics methodologies are applied to analyse this phenomenon. The article outlines the labour market situation in sub‐Saharan Africa and investment policies in agriculture. Public choice theory is applied to understand why agricultural projects are producing unintended negative effects. This article also analyses signed contracts to evaluate whether they can improve the actual labour market situation. It found that it is not possible, from the rational theory viewpoint, that such instruments will contribute to the creation of new jobs for the local youth and promote development. It contends that effective national and international legal institutions need to be created to enforce social clauses with strong participation of local youth and their representatives.

Foreign Investment in Agriculture: Some Critical Contract Issues

Foreign Investment in Agriculture: Some Critical Contract Issues

Patterns of agrarian transformation in Ethiopia: State-mediated commercialisation and the ‘land grab’

Much of the literature on the ‘land grab’ has thus far focused on the international drivers of foreign agricultural investment, with far less attention paid to the roles of developing country states and domestic political economy in changing forms of agrarian production. This paper analyses how global and domestic processes combine to produce patterns of agrarian transformation in Ethiopia, one of the main targets of foreign agricultural investment. The paper presents a typology of changes in land use and examines in detail three case studies of investments in Ethiopia drawn from this typology. The paper concludes that the most dramatic changes are taking place in lowland, peripheral regions where large-scale, capital-intensive farms employing wage labour pose a serious risk to pastoralists whose ‘use’ of land is contested by the state. Although the government has been careful to avoid mass displacement of settled smallholders, there are also important changes taking place in highland areas, with the government encouraging investments that combine the resources of investors with the labour and land of smallholders. These investments have resulted in exposure to new forms of market risk.

New investment, old challenges. Land deals and the water constraint in African agriculture

Foreign investment in agricultural land acquisition in sub-Saharan Africa has been viewed primarily as driven by a set of linked ‘crises’: in financial capital markets, in security of energy and food supply, and in global environmental governance. This paper argues that a focus on the ‘buyers’ of land risks overlooking the dynamics that operate on the side of the land ‘sellers’. Accordingly, the first part of the paper argues that it is important to view the current ‘land grab’ as the latest stage in a longer historical process of competition for control of land and other natural resources by different ‘domestic’ economic and political actors within African countries. While such struggles are often characterised as the ‘state versus the peasantry’, with the state acting on behalf of ‘urban elites’, the paper argues that processes of accumulation and associated enclosure of natural resources need to be examined more critically in specific contexts if the role and impact of foreign capital investment are to be understood. The second part of the paper seeks to identify the ways in which questions of scale (in the sense of greater capital intensity) can be considered to be constraints to the development of African agriculture. Particularly, it considers the extent to which the production models most frequently mentioned in connection with foreign investment (large-scale mechanised farms and small-scale outgrower contract farming) respond to current productivity constraints. The paper argues that current debates about foreign investment in agricultural land underplay the importance of water resources needed to overcome production risks associated with irregular rainfall. Bringing the water dimension of land deals more clearly into focus is necessary if the scope for positive and negative impacts of new investment on existing land users is to be fully understood. The paper concludes by considering the implications of such challenges in the current context of foreign investment in agriculture in Africa.

‘Land grab’ as development strategy? The political economy of agricultural investment in Ethiopia

This paper examines the domestic political economy of so-called ‘land-grabbing’ in Ethiopia, assessing the motivations of the Ethiopian government, which has strongly promoted foreign agricultural investment. The paper draws on a unique set of federal and regional databases detailing foreign and domestic investments in Ethiopia to analyse the likely role investment will play in the Ethiopian economy and the areas which have been targeted for investment. The analysis identifies increased foreign exchange earnings as the main likely contribution of investment but in doing so highlights concerns for food security in Ethiopia, as the goal of national self-sufficiency has given way to a risky trade-based food security strategy. The paper also argues that the federal government's attempts to direct investment to sparsely-populated lowlands have important implications for the ethnic self-determination that is a key tenet of Ethiopia's federal system.

Land concentration and accumulation after redistributive reform in post-settler Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe's recent fast-track land reform was redistributive, but it retained significant enclaves of large-scale agro-industrial estates owned by transnational, domestic and state capital, despite unfulfilled popular and domestic elite demands for land. Such estates were encouraged by the state to produce agro-fuel (ethanol from sugar), sugar, tea, coffee, timber and citrus, with wildlife ranching for domestic and export markets, alongside expanded small food producers. This outcome reflects the unresolved contradictions of seeking autonomous development in the context of sanctions, domestic political polarisation and declining agricultural production, while promoting reintegration into broader world markets. Neoliberal policies replaced dirigisme by 2008 to promote stabilisation and agricultural recovery but with limited impact. Foreign agricultural investment in Zimbabwe is nonetheless atypical of the current neoliberal land grabbing in Africa, since Zimbabwe reversed past inequalities and retains some state autonomy, and residual land concentration remains contested.

African Land, Up for Grabs

Sheikh Saudi and Ethiopia, Arabia, Mohammed where spends Hussein he his was time born Ali shuttling Al in a Amoudi, village between 64 a years citizen Riyadh ago. of Sheikh Saudi A abia, spends his time shuttlin between Ri adh d Ethiopia, where he was born i a village 64 ye rs ago. The son of a Yemeni father and Ethiopian mother, Al Amoudi boasts an estimated net worth of $10 billion. He is the richest Ethiopian and, according to Forbes, the 64th richest man in the world. Fortyfive years ago, he emigrated to Saudi Arabia and built his fortune in oil refineries and the booming construction industry. But Al Amoudi never lost touch with his homeland. In fact, Ethiopian real-estate has become a key part of his burgeoning portfolio. In 2009, Al Amoudi's company, Saudi Star Agricultural Development, signed long-term leases for nearly 25,000 acres in the country's northeastern regional state, Gambella, to produce

International investments in Agriculture in Arab Countries: an overview and implications for policy

International investments in agriculture in the Arab region have increased considerably in recent years. This paper reviews foreign direct investment (FDI) in agriculture in the Arab region with an emphasis on Sudan, Egypt, and Morocco. The paper aims to (i) review past and current investment trends in the context of the unique characteristics of the region, including its food security challenges and resource constraints, and (ii) highlight some important policy issues to be addressed. Agriculture has traditionally received a very small share of international investments in the region (1–2% of total FDI), which largely focused on sectors other than primary agriculture. In the past few years, investments in agriculture have grown remarkably; particularly for resource-seeking investments, but information is incomplete as the changes are very rapid. Sudan is the primary destination for resource-seeking investments; Morocco and Egypt for market-seeking investments, mostly in food processing and fruit and vegetable production. Given the paucity of data, it is difficult to develop concrete policy recommendations. However, the analysis presented in this paper may be useful in guiding the development of FDI policies in the region, aimed at maximizing sustainable outcomes for both investors and host countries, with an emphasis on food security.

Backsliding Against Malnutrition

The Millennium Development Goals stated an ambition to cut severe poverty and hunger in half by the year 2015. The recent rise in staple food prices and global economic crisis make it clear that these goals will not be met and that recent gains in mitigating malnutrition are being erased. The number of malnourished people has increased to more than 1 billion, from approximately 800 million a few years ago. National responses have included restrictions on food exports and a rise in the practice of foreign investment in agriculture to ensure food security on the part of countries with limited land and/or water to feed their own populations. There are critical needs to increase production yet again and to protect the interests of the poor. The world's population will stabilize by mid-century but the quality of that half-century depends on political will, technological capacity, and commitment.

Determinants and performance index of foreign direct investment in China's agriculture

PurposeSince attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) to agriculture is now an important policy concern for the Chinese Government, it is necessary to develop benchmarks of the inward FDI performance. The purpose of this paper is to explore the determinants of FDI and evaluate the inward FDI performance in China's agriculture.Design/methodology/approachA multi‐variable regression model is conducted to examine the determinants of FDI in China's agriculture over the period from 1985 to 2006. In order to evaluate the inward FDI performance, the inward FDI performance index is developed at industrial level.FindingsThe results indicate that agricultural market size has a significant positive effect but agricultural import has a negative effect on FDI inflow to China's agriculture. The effect of agricultural export is positive but not statistically significant. It is stated that the orientation of FDI policy during China's agricultural opening process is still not clear, and the decrease of the share of fiscal expenditure is apparently not conducive to attract more FDI in China's agriculture. In addition, the performance index shows the inward FDI performance in China's agriculture is improving but not satisfactory compared to its market size.Originality/valueThe inward FDI performance index is tentatively used to evaluate the performance of FDI inflow to China's agriculture. The results of this paper have significant policy implications for the government to determine where to head in using FDI in China's agriculture in the future.