It also has the largest “yield gap” on Earth: Although corn, wheat, and rice farmers in the U.S., China, and eurozone countries produce about three tons of grain per acre, farmers in sub-Saharan Africa average half a ton-roughly the same yield Roman farmers achieved on their wheat fields in a good year during the rule of Caesar. Most land deals have occurred in Africa, one of the few regions on the planet that still have millions of acres of fallow land and plentiful water available for irrigation. Since 2007 the near-record prices of corn, soybeans, wheat, and rice have set off a global land rush by corporate investors eager to lease or buy land in countries where acreage is cheap, governments are amenable, and property rights often ignored. She’s just one character in the biggest story in global agriculture: the unlikely quest to turn sub-Saharan Africa, historically one of the hungriest places on the planet, into a major new breadbasket for the world. A spokesman for Wanbao denied such allegations and stressed that it’s training local farmers to grow rice.Ĭhirime’s situation is hardly unique. Those who managed to get jobs on the giant farm are working seven days a week with no overtime pay. No one who lost their machamba has been compensated!” Local civil society groups say thousands lost their land and livelihoods to the Wanbao Africa Agricultural Development Company-all with the blessing of the Mozambican government, which has a history of neglecting local farmers’ rights to land in favor of large investments. “Just one day I found the tractor in my field plowing up everything. “No one even talked to me,” the 45-year-old Chirime says, her voice rising with anger.

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