Whether large scale intervention is or is not likely to benefit African people is a sometimes circular argument and one that I am not anxious to join except to say that I generally favor the pro case.
My comment is really directed to how constraints to large scale intervention might be overcome. There are probably dozens of issues that local and foreign investors will task their due diligence team with addressing, principal amongst these will be sovereign risk issues and in particular the degree of security of tenure over both land holdings and water access.
The other, perhaps less well understood constraint is the cost of logistics. Vast continents like Africa, Russia, China, South America and Australia present immense logistical challenges when the proposed production area is thousands of kilometers from either the domestic population centers or the export points which at least in Africa are frequently in another country.
It is often the case that the potential success of a large scale land intervention is not really hindered by agronomic or sovereign risk factors but simply by the cost and difficulty of moving freight, logistics.
When we look at the costs and benefits of any particular project perhaps we should begin by analyzing possible solutions to this challenge first. When we assess benefit it is necessary to consider not just the benefit to the project itself but also to the region/country as a whole. Reliable, cheap transport is the key to opening up opportunities for everyone in the country, it lies at the very core of building supply chains and it is the absence of high quality, low cost supply chains that most disadvantages food producers whether in developed or developing countries.
Whether large scale intervention is or is not likely to benefit African people is a sometimes circular argument and one that I am not anxious to join except to say that I generally favor the pro case.
My comment is really directed to how constraints to large scale intervention might be overcome. There are probably dozens of issues that local and foreign investors will task their due diligence team with addressing, principal amongst these will be sovereign risk issues and in particular the degree of security of tenure over both land holdings and water access.
The other, perhaps less well understood constraint is the cost of logistics. Vast continents like Africa, Russia, China, South America and Australia present immense logistical challenges when the proposed production area is thousands of kilometers from either the domestic population centers or the export points which at least in Africa are frequently in another country.
It is often the case that the potential success of a large scale land intervention is not really hindered by agronomic or sovereign risk factors but simply by the cost and difficulty of moving freight, logistics.
When we look at the costs and benefits of any particular project perhaps we should begin by analyzing possible solutions to this challenge first. When we assess benefit it is necessary to consider not just the benefit to the project itself but also to the region/country as a whole. Reliable, cheap transport is the key to opening up opportunities for everyone in the country, it lies at the very core of building supply chains and it is the absence of high quality, low cost supply chains that most disadvantages food producers whether in developed or developing countries.