The buying up of African lands has been going on for some time now. Slavoj Zizek has pointed out in his recent book – First as Tragedy, Then as Farce – that in November 2008 Daewoo Logistics of South Korea announced that it had just negotiated a 99-year lease for 3.2 million acres of farmland on Madagascar, amounting to about half of all arable land. Plans are to put three quarters of the land into corn production, while using the remaining quarter to produce palm oil, a key commodity in the biofuels market. Other companies from Europe have followed suit, notably Sun Biofuels of Britain which is planting biofuel crops in Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Mozambique.

The oil rich Persian Gulf states are also investing heavily in order to assure food imports to their largely arid countries. Although they are able to pay for food imports with their oil revenue, recent turmoil in world food markets has proven an incentive to secure their own supply.

On the African side of the equation starvation is an all too common problem. African farmers are unable to compete against the market prices and are driven to find wage paying jobs, either in the cities or in the transnational argo-business outfits. The ‘benefits’ of this arrangement for the Africans will come in the form of jobs and wages, which will help them buy the food they need to live, even if it is imported. Zizek is right to point out that, “The circle of postcolonial dependence is thus closed again, and food-dependency will only be exacerbated…. Are we thus not approaching a global state in which the potential scarcity of three basic material resources (oil, water, and food) will become the determining factor in international politics?”