20101011
reuters

YAOUNDE (Reuters) - African governments should avoid rushing into big land lease deals with foreign investors or risk deepening poverty and ramping up social tensions, an official at the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Office said.

His comments follow an FAO study that looked at five countries in sub-Saharan Africa where at least 2.5 million hectares (6.2 million acres) of land have been allocated to large-scale investors since 2004.

These and other deals are raising the hackles of rights groups who argue that the 'land grab' trend is reducing access to food for some of the world's poorest people.

"Land has become a very visible and hot issue because many actors have realised that it is going to be scarce and a very valuable asset in the future," said Paul Mathieu, FAO's senior officer for climate, energy and tenure division.

"What is important is to make well-informed choices and not to rush quickly to allocate large tracts of land," he told Reuters in an interview last week after a regional briefing on land use.

Sub-Saharan governments eager to attract investment to spur economic activity have signed a flurry of land deals in recent years with resource-hungry investors, including from China, Brazil, and Malaysia.

Mathieu said research carried out by the FAO and its partners showed that some 2,492,684 hectares -- an area about the size of Luxembourg -- had been allocated in large deals between 2004 and 2009 in Ethiopia, Ghana, Mali, Madagascar and Sudan alone.

The largest single deal was 452,500 hectares for a biofuel project in Madagascar, he said.