Sunil Jain: Landing an investment

Most have focused over countries like China buying up land overseas to grow crops to feed the home market — in actual fact, NGO Grain points out, increasingly investment funds are rushing to buy land (http://www.grain.org/articles/?id=55#sdfootnote2sym). In August 2009, the website says, the Government of Mauritius got a long term lease of 20,000 ha of land in Mozambique to produce rice for the Mauritian market but instead of keeping the lease with itself, it sub-leased the land to two companies, one from Singapore and one from Swaziland. The NGO has a list of over 120, mostly newly-created, equity funds and pension funds engaged in the business (it says the list is not exhaustive). It quotes a functionary of Altima One, created by the $3bn Altima Partners’ hedge fund, as saying “My boss wants to create the first Exxon Mobil of the farming sector”. You can view the development with fear and loathing, the way Grain does, or you can see it as the next big investment wave — either way, investment capital coming into farmland is going to be in the news for some time to come.