Youth finish work on an embankment to hold back floodwaters in Borini Sharifow, a small farming village in Jamame district, Somalia. Photo: Mohamed Jama/ Mercy Corps

"The African continent is going to be the golden continent of the period," raves a business leader at the 2011 World Economic Forum in Davos.

This sentiment is shared by economists, investors and world leaders around the globe, who are singing the praises of Africa's economic potential. And at long-last this optimism about Africa's economy may be warranted. Eight of the world's top 20 fastest-growing economies are African Countries. And the financial news and investing website The Street recently declared Africa to be the "hot new continent for trade and investment."

In some ways, the transition is already happening. Genetic research is finally delivering higher-yielding, more resilient so-called African crops, like sorghum and cassava, says to The Economist. And the BBC reported on a recently published book that suggests the continent could "feed itself in a generation" if top politicians genuinely commit to developing infrastructure, modernizing agriculture and implementing the use of genetically modified crops.

But alongside the excited buzz welcoming Africa’s new dawn, there are fears that a land rush could be more exploitative than beneficial. The New York Times article cites concerns that the scramble for African land threatens to become a series of “neocolonial land grabs that destroy villages, uproot tens of thousands of farmers and create a volatile mass of landless poor."

There are clear reasons for the urgency and location of the rush. Arable soil is a limited commodity in many parts of the world. Fears about food security and the cultivation of biofuels are ramping up demand for the earth’s last remaining stretches of fertile land — most of which are in Africa.

The World Bank estimates that up to 115 million acres of farmland are already being leased to foreign investors across the globe, reports the Christian Science Monitor. "As much as 90 percent of Africa is under customary tenure, which means it's held by the state on behalf of the community, who are then given the customary right to the land." In short, land can be seized at the whim of those in power.

The particular circumstances of these types of deals are unique, but the context in which they are negotiated is often similar. The landlord country is poor with a high rate of unemployment and underdeveloped infrastructure. But it has an abundance of productive farmland. Huge zones are leased to a corporation or government of a wealthier nation. The latter pays the former. The investor brings in state-of-the-art technologies and skills to develop infrastructure and ideally employ citizens of the landlord country. But what happens next is key, explains the Christian Science Monitor article. In many of these deals, most or all of the product is exported to the foreign investing country. Land and labor are exploited and neither domestic food security, nor growth are improved.

Africa certainly can’t afford this fate. In sub-Saharan Africa, nearly two-thirds of the population lives on less than $1.25 a day, and more than one-fourth is considered undernourished (pdf), according to the most recent U.N. Millennium Development Goals report.

If this is to be the continent’s long-awaited golden era, foreign investment and involvement will be essential. But the motives of the architects of these deals must be clear and the management carefully crafted. The New York Times quotes former U.N. security-general, Kofi Annan, who stresses the need to focus on food security in Africa, but also calls for sensitivity to Africa's colonial legacy.

The food security of the country concerned must be first and foremost in everybody’s mind ... Otherwise it is straightforward exploitation and it won’t work. We have seen a scramble for Africa before. I don’t think we want to see a second scramble of that kind.

At first glance, Africa’s prospects look good. But it would be a tragic lost opportunity if the continent’s bounty is exported, leaving its breadbasket empty.

Many African countries, like Madagascar pictured here, are increasingly leasing land to foreign firms, but critics argue the deals are exploitative. Photo: goukley (flickr)

A million hectares in Uganda. Some 690,000 hectares in Sudan. And 500,000 hectares in Tanzania. These are just a few of the numbers that have appeared on the bargaining table in the past year as foreign firms scramble for land leases in Africa.

The Independent takes a look at the phenomenon known as "land grabbing," or the recent trend of foreign governments and corporations leasing or purchasing large swaths of land in poorer countries to grow food or other crops for export back to their home country. The phenomenon is most prevalent in Africa, but leases have been sought elsewhere, including the Philippines and Pakistan.

[The sudden increase in "land grabbing"] has its roots in the food crisis of 2007/8, when prices of rice, wheat and other cereals skyrocketed across the world, triggering riots from Haiti to Senegal. The price spike also led food-growing countries to slap export tariffs on staple crops to minimize the amounts that left their countries. That tightened the supply still further, meaning food prices were driven up more by a situation of policy-created scarcity than by supply and demand.

This situation also made many rich countries that are reliant on massive food imports question one of the fundamentals of the global economy: the idea that every country should concentrate on its best products and then trade. Suddenly having unimaginable quantities of cash from oil was not enough to guarantee you all the food you needed. The oil sheikhs of the Gulf states found that food imports had doubled in cost over less than five years. In the future it might get even worse. You could no longer rely on regional and global markets, they concluded. The rush to grab land began.

Investors say they will bring needed infrastructure, technology and employment, but in some cases, these investments have been met with resistance. Riots erupted earlier this year in Madagascar, where almost half the children under age five don't get enough to eat. The riots were driven in part by the news that the government had given South Korean firm Daewoo a 99 year lease over 1.3 million hectares of land. On an area amounting to half the island's arable land, Daewoo planned to grow maize and palm oil solely for export to South Korea. The deal fell through when the riots forced the president, Marc Ravalomanana, out of office, BBC News reports.

Nevertheless, land grabbing is poised to continue at a rapid pace, according to The Independent:

The government of President Ravalomanana became the first in the world to be toppled because of what the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization recently described as "land grabbing." The Daewoo deal is only one of more than 100 land deals which have, over the past 12 months, seen massive tracts of cultivable farmland across the globe bought up by wealthy countries and international corporations. The phenomenon is accelerating at an alarming rate, with an area half the size of Europe's farmland targeted in just the past six months.

Critics question the truthfulness of the investors' promises. The head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Jacques Diouf, warned that land grabbing is simply neo-colonialism, and Africa will again be exploited for its resources while seeing little direct revenue.

The Independent offers an analogy from international development policy consultant Mark Weston for understanding the current nature of the leases and what makes them magnets for controversy:

Imagine if China, following a brief negotiation with a British government desperate for foreign cash after the collapse of the economy, bought up the whole of Wales, replaced most of its inhabitants with Chinese workers, turned the entire country into an enormous rice field, and sent all the rice produced there for the next 99 years back to China.

Imagine that neither the evicted Welsh nor the rest of the British public knew what they were getting in return for this, having to content themselves with vague promises that the new landlords would upgrade a few ports and roads and create jobs for local people.

Land grabbing is just one aspect of the current discussion about agricultural development in Africa. When U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Kenya earlier this month she voiced interest in Africa's agricultural potential: "More and more, the world will look to Africa to be its breadbasket, and I hope that when the world looks ... it is Africans and African farmers who will profit from becoming the world's breadbasket."