Mick Hartley

I haven't seen much about this, but it's surely an extraordinary development:

South Korean firm Daewoo has unveiled plans to plant corn on one million acres of land in Madagascar, to sharply cut its reliance on US imports.

Daewoo is leasing the vast tract of land – half the size of Belgium – for 99 years and hopes to produce 5 million tonnes of corn a year by 2023.

It will use South African expertise and local labour on the plantations.

Asian countries have been trying to ensure access to food supplies after grain prices soared earlier this year.

Daewoo will also grow palm oil on another 300,000 acres of land leased in Madagascar.

According to the Telegraph, that's about half the currently farmed land in the country – and Daewoo may not even have had to pay for it:

What the four Madagascar regional governments with which it has negotiated stand to gain are jobs, roads and experience of advanced agricultural techniques.

Well yes, but it's not going to do them much good without the land, is it? And what about the farmers who were working the land up till now? Presumably, without property rights, they won't exactly be retiring to the French Riviera with their compensation money. They'll be reduced to wage labour on what they'd regarded as their own land. Meanwhile the pressure will be increased on the remaining land: this on an island with a unique ecosystem, where the results of slash-and-burn agriculture from the increasing population is already threatening what little forest remains.

As the FT point out, this looks positively neo-colonial.