Growth Green Agriculture

AGRICULTURAL INVESTMENTS REPORT

July 2013

Ghana VP calls on African leaders to invest in agriculture

Ghanaian Vice President Kwesi Amissah has called on African leaders to encourage investments in agriculture to meet the continents goals in food security and poverty reduction. An online statement from the countrys presidency quoted Amissah as making the call in Accra on Friday, July 19th. The statement said the vice president was speaking at the 5th Africa Agricultural Science Week and General Assembly of Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa. Amissah said the income levels of African nations will rise if leaders obey the call. Investing in agriculture will create employment, increase income levels of rural families and stimulate the local economies of African communities, he said. The vice president said that Ghana had made significant progress in reducing poverty and hunger through such investments. Our spending on agricultural research and development has increased reasonably and I think that the results of our commitments are being felt. Such commitments have led to increased food production, availability and affordability, he said. Amissah further said that Ghana had continued to promote policies that would encourage more participation of people in agriculture. (source: www.codewit.com)

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Romania to get 3bn in agricultural investment

The Romanian agricultural sector will benefit from three billion euros in investments this year, with 2.8 billion euros of it being from the European Union funds, Prime Minister Victor Ponta announced at a news conference on The National Plan for Strategic Investments and the Creation of Jobs. As regards the national programme aimed at re-building the irrigation system, the (agriculture) minister informed me that 100 million euros has already been assigned. Well invest around three billion euros, even more, in the agricultural sector this year, in platforms for collecting vegetables and fruit, investments in family farms, in the mutual fund for the support of the farming sector. I repeat that the agricultural production, this year, will probably exceed the 1.6 percent predicted annual growth, based on a good sound thinking weve had since last year and on the natures support, Ponta said at the Victoria Palace (the Govts offices). The prime minister had said on April 30 that he had consulted the latest European Commission estimates, which were positive and he had announced a more significant Romanian agricultural production than last year. source: http://actmedia.eu

Rwanda to seek private agricultural investment

Researchers met recently in the Rwandan capital Kigali to push forward proposals to create more incentives to attract private sector agricultural investments to ensure the sustainability of the agriculture sector.

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The Rwandan government expects to spend around half the 2013/14 budget on the second phase of the Economic Development and Poverty Eradication Strategy programme (EDPRS II). Under this strategy, government seeks to increase agricultural annual growth from 5.9 per cent to above 8.5 per cent. Agriculture remains the main income earner in Rwanda, employing around 90 percent of the entire labour force. However, while there is plenty of focus on agriculture , challenges remain. Various experts attending the discussions on public financing and expenditure in agriculture agreed that although the government has been increasing investment in agriculture over the years, much of the funds are from donor aid, which may not be sustainable. One of the challenges is to attract private investment in agriculture, because the sector is sometimes regarded as risky. Growth Green Agriculture is a specialist investment company solely investing in agriculture and farmland in emerging markets. A spokesman for Growth Green Agriculture said We are convinced that investing in agricultural land in emerging markets has the potential for sizable growth and solid profits. In the case of countries like Ghana and Rwanda, it is indeed appropriate for private individuals to invest in agriculture since the governments have put in place policies to guide agricultural production and processing. Delegates at the meeting in Kigali believe the government must come up with strategies that will attract investors in agriculture to further transform the sector. One of the incentives could lie in subsidies in form of tractors and agro-processing factories. The agro-processing factories are vital to prepare produce for export. This does not however, take away other challenges that discourage private individuals from investing in agriculture. Challenges of inadequate electricity, poor feeder roads network and lack of food stores in rural areas will need to be addressed while building on the modest progress already in place. (source: allafrica.com)

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Agricultural Investments in Ukraine supported by VP

First Vice Premier of Ukraine Serhiy Arbuzov, while taking on the duties of the prime minister during the latters vacation, has said that it is necessary to boost investment activity in agriculture. Investment activity in agriculture should be stirred up, he said, opening a cabinet meeting in Kyiv last week. He ordered Minister of Agricultural Policy and Food of Ukraine Mykola Prysiazhniuk to monitor the process of introducing and realizing pilot investment projects using long-term beneficial state loans. Arbuzov also drew the attention of the minister to the necessity to realize a program to increase the number of combines and other harvesters by the end of 2014, to 75,000 units. Modern machinery should be affordable for agricultural producers, he said. As reported, foreign investment in the farming sector of Ukraine this year could reach some $3 billion, compared to over $800 million in 2012, according to government estimates. (source: interfax)

Nigeria Attracts $8bn in Agricultural Investments

Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan has said that the agriculture sector attracted over $8 billion worth of investments in the last 12 months. The president disclosed this at the opening of a two-day summit tagged: Realising the Potential of African Agriculture, organised by the Rockefeller Foundation in Abuja.

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The summit, which was part of the programmes lined up for the centennial (100 years) celebration of the foundation, was attended by the Prime Minister of Togo, Kwesi Ahoomey-Zunu; the Coordinating Minister for the Economy and Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala; Minister of Agriculture, Dr. Akinwumi Adesina; as well as the ministers of finance and agriculture from about 20 African countries. The President said the transformation of the Nigerian agricultural sector was the focus of the entire transformation agenda of his administration, adding that: To drive our agriculture, we have ended the approach of agriculture as a development programme; we now take agriculture as a business. Private sector agricultural investments are expanding rapidly from sales by fertiliser companies, agriculture processors. In the last one year alone over $8 billion of private sector commitments have been made to the agricultural sector. We developed staple crops processing zones to attract the private sector to invest in rural areas to process and add value to all of our crops. This will reduce post-harvest losses and create jobs for our people. Revealing that over 1.5 million farmers had benefitted from the Electronic-Wallet System developed by his administration, the president expressed satisfaction that Nigeria was the first country to develop such a scheme in the continent. Farmers now receive their seeds and fertilisers via mobile phones in the first one year of this experiment and we ended four decades of corruption in our fertiliser sector, he said. According to him, cassava bread made with 20 per cent cassava and wheat flour now sells in the Nigerian market. This alone has saved Nigeria, about $1.5 billion in import bills on wheat, he added. The president underscored the urgent need for the country to move away from the monolithic oil economy and drive agriculture as a major income earner and for employment generation. Nigeria is known for oil, but today, many countries around the world have found oil. The recent discovery of crude oil and gas in the US and other parts of the world means that we must look elsewhere if we must continue to feed our people. With abundant land and water resources and a huge labour force, Nigeria has all it takes to use agriculture as its new frontier for growth. There is no reason why Nigeria should be a net food importing country, it should be a net food exporting country. This

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is true because the size of the country is big and the ecological zones are diverse, he declared. On her part, the President of Rockefeller Foundation, Dr. Judith Robin, commended the federal governments agricultural transformation programmes. She argued that the future of Africa depended on innovative framework and financing strategy in transforming the agriculture sector. (source: thisdaylive.com)

A Compelling Case for Agricultural Investment in Africa

In most parts of Africa, agriculture offers an attractive investment opportunity. Yet, according to a report in The Financial Times published on 16 September 2012, the challenges involved in investing in African farmland are often underestimated by investors who, expecting to make a quick profit, seem to have no qualms about buying up large tracts of land in Africa. According to the FT, citing an analysis by the International Institute for Environment and Development, one-third of global investments in agribusiness by private equity funds are located on the African continent. This preponderance can in part be explained by the huge amount of farmland available on the continent. Figures from Zrich-based advisory firm EBG Capital show that the sub-Saharan region of Africa alone offers 590 million hectares of cropland available for development. By comparison, the land available in the rest of the world is about 380 million hectares. Although impressive in scale, the amount of farmland offered is not the only attraction of Africas agricultural sector. Low land prices and other overheads involved in agriculture also appeal. In Mozambique, for example, the cost of farmland is a ninth of that in Russia while monthly wages are about a seventh. Africa, and the sub-Saharan region especially, is also rich in water resources 20 per cent more plentiful per inhabitant than in eastern Europe, considered a strong agricultural region, and almost three times more more plentiful than in Asia.

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There are however various challenges associated with successfully investing in Africas agribusiness sector, and most investors find that farmland investment in Africa is much more complex than generally expected. However, many African countries offer various tax breaks to foreign investors putting capital into their agricultural sector, and in the past two years more than a hundred deals have been made in African agriculture. (adapted from an article by invezz.com)

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