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Every day, a workforce of 1,000 locals pick, pack and load hundreds of tons of fresh produce onto waiting trucks, including 30 tons of tomatoes alone. After reaching the capital, Addis Ababa, the produce is flown to a handful of Middle Eastern cities, entirely bypassing Ethiopia, one of the hungriest places on the planet. The trip from vine to store shelf takes less than 24 hours. It’s the latest project by Saudi oil and mining billionaire, Sheikh Mohammed Al Amoudi. And it may be the future of farming.

The controversial trend has been dubbed “outsourcing’s third wave”—following manufacturing and information technology (IT) in the ’80s and ’90s. The high cost of installing irrigation systems, and importing fertilizers, combines and tractors is no deterrent. Defenders of the new projects say they’re bringing desperately needed new technologies, seeds and investment to Africa. But opponents see the trend as a “land grab” that is forcing poor farmers off their land, and benefiting only the governments inking the deals.

The new scramble for Africa was triggered by a convergence of events: surging demand for biofuels, rising consumption patterns in China and India and the 2008 global food crisis, when the price of corn and wheat tripled, almost overnight. Responding to sudden hyperinflation, rioting and panic buying, at least 30 countries, including Argentina, Vietnam, Brazil, Cambodia and India, banned or sharply reduced food exports. In short order, Japan and South Korea, who import 70 per cent of their grains, joined a parade of countries turning to Africa to lock in means of production beyond their borders.

Unfortunately, the power of these tools has been blunted. It has been blunted because science—which at its most basic is the careful and systematic study of the world around us, and the consistent testing of our ideas against reality—this wonderful and powerful process has been narrowed too often in discussions of food to mean technology. Technology is but one way to use science; it is only the tip of one particular tool that can be found in the powerful toolbox that is science.

Scientifically, these are two different things. We know that what is produced is not the same as how much actually goes to become food for people[1], but too often we forget this. Luckily, this is a place where the toolbox of science can help us, but only if we open it wider to use all of the tools—including social sciences like sociology, anthropology, ecological economics and political ecology.[2]

in India, as in many other places, this is tied to the legacies of monoculture, cash crops, and a lack of support for smallholder farmers, household equality, especially gender equality, and agrobiodiversity.[6]

Biofuels are conservatively estimated to have been responsible for at least 30 per cent of the global food price spike in 2008 that pushed 100 million people into poverty and drove some 30 million more into hunger, according to the report, Meals per gallon, released by the UK charity ActionAid in February 2010 [1]. The number of chronically hungry people now exceeds one billion.

If all global biofuels targets are to be met, food prices could rise by up to an additional 76 per cent by 2020 and starve an extra 600 million people.

While driving up food prices can create hunger, driving people off the land that they have traditionally cultivated deprives them of the last resort of growing their own food. This is happening all over the developing world. In Mozambique, farms are destroyed for industrial biofuels. Elisa Alimone Mongue, mother and farmer said: ‘I don't have a farm, I don't have a garden … the only land I have has been destroyed. We are just suffering with hunger … even if I go to look for another farm, they will just destroy it again.’

AGRA proposes exactly the kind of agriculture the panel of agricultural experts (from South Africa, Nigeria, Uganda, Morocco, Brazil, Mexico, Japan, China and more) rejected: Monoculture of one or two crops with the goal of increasing yields through the high use of fossil fuels, chemicals (fertilisers, pesticides) and biotechnology (patented genetically modified seeds).

As the demand for agrofuels seems to be insatiable, global corporations are noticing Africa for its extensive land masses, while not seeing the hungry. Calling Africa the ‘green OPEC’, they assert that 15 countries in Africa have a total combined land area greater than all of India ‘available’ for agrofuel production, not bothering to explain what ‘available land’ means in the context of a food deficit continent.[2]

the amount of plant material needed is massive. Lester Brown offers the comparison that the amount of grain required to fill the 90-litre petrol tank of a 4 × 4 vehicle once with maize ethanol could feed one person for a year. The grain it takes to fill the tank every two weeks over a year would feed 26 people.[3]