JT

Rising global interest in farmland - Worldbank article

Since the world economic crisis from 2008 prices for some agricultural products exploded and investing in farmland in developing countries was getting attractive. The article is based on the Worldbank report “Rising Global Interest in Farmland: Can it Yield Sustainable and Equitable Benefits?” It contains the research results about 14 countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia. There are examples of methodologies seen as effective for some of the countries. According to the article especially in Africa investments did not achieve their full potential in terms of productivity and poverty reduction because of:

• Weak land governance and a failure to recognize or protect local communities’ land rights;
• Lack of country capacity to process and manage large-scale investments;
• Investor proposals that were insufficiently elaborated or technically non-viable; and
• Lack of a development strategy to determine whether large-scale investment can be instrumental in helping the host country to achieve its development objectives, and if it is suitable, where and how investment can contribute to those objectives.

Some of the methodologies are:

• Securing local land rights, participatory mapping, and land use planning; and
• Ensuring compliance with environmental safeguards

These are only some of the aspects of the report. You can download the full report as a pdf file at the Worldbank website, www.worldbank.org/rural.

this is taken from my wordpress blog and linked under

salonofglobalchange.wordpress.com/2010/12/19/landgrabbing-the-worldbank-offers-help-to-developing-countries/