Foreign Land Acquisitions: Household Livelihood With Some Evidence on Nigeria

Background

Large scale land acquisition deals with acquisitions of several thousands of hectares of land for agricultural activities. This has become a common phenomenon in the recent times with demand rising from three major factors: food security for the citizens of the investing countries; energy security as a result of European Union’s energy policies of capping greenhouse gas emission and other climate change incidents and therefore the need to produce bio- fuels; and the financial returns. Sub Saharan Africa has abundant land supply which is cheap in nature compare to elsewhere in the world. The cheap nature of this land comes from the fact that their money is highly depreciated (Brown, 2013). The continent has the largest reserves of arable land in the world (Wouterse et al, 2011). The total land deals in Africa alone accounted for over 134 million hectares of land in 2012 (IRIN, 2012).

Africa has large labour force in agriculture with 80 million small scale farmers supplying 95% of African food needs (Sindayigaya, 2012). The people of Africa are specially noted for farming. More than half of the sub- Saharan Africa involve in farming and in countries such as Burundi, Uganda, Rwanda and Burkina Faso, it is as high as 40% - 50% of the population (Block, 2010). It accounts for 32% of the gross domestic product and 65% of the labour force. There is low productivity and this comes from declining real prices on world market for agricultural exports; and from protectionism in countries that are members of Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. African countries are plagued with low income earning activities and there is high need for investment that will create avenues for rapid growth.