Let me address another challenge that the Continent faces: offshore farming. This is the growing phenomenon of international farm investment, in which countries short of productive agricultural land, but rich in capital and agricultural technology, are acquiring farmland overseas for large-scale agriculture.
This may have been given a boost by the commodities boom and the weather-related surge in food prices which occurred during the crisis when some food-exporters applied export bans to keep domestic prices low, raising food security concerns in nervous importing countries, including ourselves here in Mauritius.