Will Africa feed rich nations?

WAD RAWAH, Sudan — Africa's abundant natural resources long have invited foreign exploitation.

Over generations, the continent has been stripped of its gold and diamonds, then its oil. Rubber and ivory were plundered from Congo. Even Africa's people were exploited, captured and sold into slavery abroad.

Now foreigners are enjoined in a new scramble in Africa — for its food. Amid a global crisis that for a time this year doubled prices for wheat, corn, rice and other staples, some of the world's richest nations are coming to Africa to farm, hoping to turn the global epicenter of malnutrition into a breadbasket for themselves.

Lured by fertile land, cheap labor and untapped potential, oil-rich Persian Gulf countries such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, where deserts hinder food production, are snapping up farmland in underdeveloped African nations to grow crops for consumption back home.

"It's a perfect partnership," said Idriss Ashmaig, manager of the Sudan office for Hadco, a Saudi agricultural firm that made its first foreign foray with a $95 million deal to lease 25,000 acres near the Nile River north of Khartoum. "Here there is water, land and climate. All they need is the capital."

By next spring, Hadco hopes to be exporting wheat, vegetables and animal feed to Saudi Arabia.

The Emirates government recently signed a similar deal in Sudan for up to 70,000 acres south of Khartoum, the capital. Investors from Qatar are fattening sheep and chickens not far away. Egypt and Ethiopia are touting their agricultural potential, hoping to draw foreign interest.

The deals are bound to raise eyebrows, because countries targeted by the investors often are struggling to feed their own populations.

Although Sudan has thriving exports of cotton and gum arabic, it imports more than 1 million tons of wheat annually and has suffered recent deficits in another staple, sorghum. Regions in the south and west, including Darfur, are heavily reliant on international food aid, provided mostly by the United States.

Ethiopia, for example, is marketing its farmland to Saudi Arabia, yet the Horn of Africa nation has a history of famine and is suffering serious drought. Under such circumstances, foreign growers planning to export food might face protests, even riots, by hungry locals, experts said.

"It would be unimaginable for a foreign investor in Ethiopia now to simply ship out large amounts of grain," said Joachim von Braun, director of the Washington, D.C.-based International Food Policy Research Institute.

He stressed that foreign partnerships were likely to benefit everyone, by increasing worldwide food production. "We should not look at this trend with alarm. The more capital that finds its way into agriculture, the [bigger] the total pie."

Sudanese officials say the new deals will help, not exploit, their country by creating jobs, promoting commercialization and pumping much-needed investment into its agricultural industry.

In Sudan, like much of Africa, decades of neglect have driven down crop production per acre to just one-third the international average. Only 10 percent of Sudan's farmland is irrigated and only 20 percent of its arable ground is cultivated.

Nearby, in Kenya, Uganda and several other countries, an alliance led by former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan is taking a different approach — keeping agricultural products in the countries in which they are grown. It targets small farmers with better seeds, fertilizer and access to water to increase productivity.

That approach, by the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa with the support of large U.S. donors such as the Gates and Rockefeller foundations, aims for surplus produce to be sold primarily within the country or the region. Government officials say they see foreign investment as a means of jump-starting the sector, expanding total output and introducing cutting-edge technology.

To lure foreign dollars, Sudan eliminated duties on imports of agriculture-related goods, such as seed, fertilizer and tractors. Export taxes, once 30 percent, were removed. The government, which owns most of Sudan's land, is granting 99-year low-cost leases.

"The government is not interested in making money," said Salah Mohammed Taha, investment director at the Agriculture Ministry. "It's interested in developing the area."

Since the beginning of the year, he said, Sudan has leased nearly 2 million acres to foreign companies.

Investors with a longer history in Sudan say the country already has delivered impressive yields using new techniques that have driven up cotton and sorghum yields nearly threefold.

Officially, investors in Sudan are encouraged to assist communities by sharing irrigation systems, lending machinery or setting aside land for local farmers. But such benefits don't always materialize.

For generations, the green fields of Wad Rawah, south of Khartoum, were used by Ahmed Mohammed Abdalla's family to grow sorghum. When the Emirates-owned Zayed al Khair moved next door, his family lost the rights to more than 50 acres without compensation.

The foreign firm constructed a network of canals from the Nile for its crops, but it has refused to share the water.

"They took our land and gave us nothing," said Abdalla.

For investors, security and stability pose additional risks, analysts say. In the 1970s, Arab nations struck similar deals with Sudan, but most pulled out amid the country's worsening civil war and a shift in policy that nationalized some private ventures.

Sudan's political problems, including the Darfur conflict, U.S. economic sanctions and an International Criminal Court genocide prosecution, could similarly threaten the foreign partnerships, said University of Khartoum economics professor Ibrahim Sobahi.

Seattle Times staff contributed to this report.