It is an odd retirement hobby. Britain’s top soldier, the former commander of British Land Forces and the man who capped his military career by presiding over the funeral of the Queen Mother, has been planting crops in the African bush.
Not personally, you understand. But Sir Charles Redmond Watt has been mixing with Chinese billionaires, Saudi sheiks, Wall Street whizzkids and a motley array of British adventurers who agree with the financial guru George Soros that ‘farmland is one of the best investments of our time’. And for those wanting lots of land, nothing comes cheaper than a slice of Africa.
I have spent the past two years on the trail of these land grabbers, who have between them taken control of an area roughly ten times the size of Britain, most of it in Africa. And I discovered that Britain is the world’s biggest centre for private land grabbers. City financiers are the new imperialists, returning to colonies we walked away from half a century ago.
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But what I saw was small farmers being bumped off their land and replaced by big machines. As Graham Davies, of British investors Altima Partners, told a conference last year, the ‘vast majority of investors in Africa are focused on commercial Western agriculture, largely ignoring the continent’s 60 million small farmers who produce 80 per cent of its food’.
Instead, I’d like to see investors help those small farmers grow their businesses. All over Africa I found peasant farmers experimenting with new seeds, and selling products such as vegetables, honey and milk in the cities – or even green beans to British supermarkets. What they need is support, not an eviction notice. Full story...
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Not personally, you understand. But Sir Charles Redmond Watt has been mixing with Chinese billionaires, Saudi sheiks, Wall Street whizzkids and a motley array of British adventurers who agree with the financial guru George Soros that ‘farmland is one of the best investments of our time’. And for those wanting lots of land, nothing comes cheaper than a slice of Africa.
I have spent the past two years on the trail of these land grabbers, who have between them taken control of an area roughly ten times the size of Britain, most of it in Africa. And I discovered that Britain is the world’s biggest centre for private land grabbers. City financiers are the new imperialists, returning to colonies we walked away from half a century ago.
(...)
But what I saw was small farmers being bumped off their land and replaced by big machines. As Graham Davies, of British investors Altima Partners, told a conference last year, the ‘vast majority of investors in Africa are focused on commercial Western agriculture, largely ignoring the continent’s 60 million small farmers who produce 80 per cent of its food’.
Instead, I’d like to see investors help those small farmers grow their businesses. All over Africa I found peasant farmers experimenting with new seeds, and selling products such as vegetables, honey and milk in the cities – or even green beans to British supermarkets. What they need is support, not an eviction notice. Full story...
Related posts:
- Grabbing land in Africa and trying to justify it...
- Squeezing Africa dry: behind every land grab is a water grab...
- The global land grab...
- The Indian land grab in Africa...
- Africa is being stolen bit by bit for the rich...
- Chinese and Arabs are buying poor countries’ farms on a colossal scale...
- Farm evictions and farmer kidnappings continue across Zimbabwe...
- How China is transforming Africa! Excellent documentary...
- Ethiopians chased from homes as corporations go on land-grabbing spree...
- The rich go on a land-grabbing spree in poor countries...
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