Reference

Handbook of Land and Water Grabs in Africa featured in The Guardian

'The rush of foreign investments in African farmland by "ecologically ignorant" pension groups, sovereign wealth funds and speculators will end in economic disaster and possibly even conflict.' - John Vidal, The Guardian

Launched at Stockholm World Water Week the Handbook of Land and Water Grabs in Africa is already creating an impact. Take a look at the Guardian website for an interview with editors Martin Keulertz and Tony Allen. The piece is a great background to the book – Martin and Tony make really interesting points about the potential social and environmental ill-effects of the recent acquisition of African farmland.

We've included some more details about the handbook below, and you can check out the full article on the Guardian website here.

The Handbook of Land and Water Grabs in Africa, from Routledge, is the first to address inward investment in land and its impact on water resources in Africa, where the amount of under-utilized land has attracted the attention of risk-taking investors. The successful implementation of investment strategies in African agriculture could determine the future of more than one billion people at risk from climate change, population growth and food insecurity.

Edited by Tony Allan, Professor Emeritus, King's College London and SOAS; Martin Keulertz, PhD researcher at King's College London; Suvi Sojamo, PhD researcher at Aalto University and Jeroen Warner, Assistant Professor, Wageningen University – the handbook offers a holistic analysis of land and water grabbing as well as addressing several major themes including politics, economics, environment and the history of land investments.

A diverse range of essays have been assembled:

Chinese engagement in African agriculture: fiction and fact - Deborah Bräutigam
The political economy of land and water grabs - David Zetland and Jennifer Möller-Gulland
Green and blue water dimensions of forign direct investment in biofuel and food production in West Africa - Fred Kizito, Timothy O. Williams, Matthew McCartney and Teklu Erkossa
Claiming (back) the land: the geopolitics of Egyptian and South African land and water grabs -Jeroen Warner, Antoinette Sebastian and Vanessa Empinotti.

Related Products

Handbook of Land and Water Grabs in Africa

Foreign direct investment and food and water security

Edited by John Anthony Allan, Martin Keulertz, Suvi Sojamo, Jeroen Warner

Series: Routledge International Handbooks

According to estimates by the International Land Coalition based at the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), 57 million hectares of land have been leased to foreign investors since 2007. Current research has focused on human rights issues related to inward investment in land but...

Published August 22nd 2012 by Routledge