The Times (March 5): "In isolation, it looks trifling but we should look again at what governments are doing in agriculture. The rice shortage in Venezuela, threats of government intervention in farms in Argentina and a land grab by sovereign wealth funds in the Gulf tells us more about the future than Sir Fred Goodwin's pension.
Saudi enterprises are scouting the world; there have been missions to Brazil and Pakistan. The Bin Laden group is mulling over a plan to grow rice in Indonesia. In hot pursuit are the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Qatar. Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the President of the UAE, recently visited Kazakhstan in search of farmland and the Abu Dhabi fund for Development has bought vast tracts of Sudanese land for cultivation.
Libya has invested in farmland in Ukraine while Cambodia is hoping to do multibillion-dollar deals with Kuwait and Qatar. The Sudanese Government is marketing some 800,000 hectares and it is gaining a huge response in the Gulf states, which import 60 per cent of their food and would like to reduce their vulnerability to food price spikes.
In an investment late last year in Madagascar, a country where 600,000 depend on food aid, Daewoo, the Korean conglomerate, is leasing 1.3 million hectares of land to produce 4 million tonnes of corn for export. In Sudan, where the UN's World Food Programme is feeding millions of people, the irony of the Saudi farms is particularly bleak." Read more.
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