The African Land Grab

2012-02-10 12:07

The fact that Africa is rich in natural resources has in the past been its own Achilles heel, we all know there's plenty of oil to be found in central and north Africa. Diamonds are a plenty with Sierra Leone and Guinea Bissau racking them up and Zimbabwe just recently jumped onto the bandwagon by finding large diamond pits. Then there's gold, platinum, Uranium and the list goes on.

Just the other day I came across a very interesting statistic regarding the percentage of arable land that has yet to be farmed in the world. Africa has 45% of this that has yet been touched (in terms of agriculutre). That's almost half of the available land on the planet that can be used to grow crops.

Why are we allowing these ‘cheaper’ products in? Trade pacts and all that foreign relations nonsense keeps our hands tied most of the time, but I disagree that South Africa (and even Africa) has to bow down to the first world countries and eastern powers, in terms of leverage we have a lot to offer but always pull the short straw?



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