TRENDS AND IMPACTS OF FOREIGN INVESTMENT IN DEVELOPING COUNTRY AGRICULTURE

MALI
Trends and impacts of foreign investment in
developing country agriculture
State of the Community of SaharaSahel States,
held in Bamako in May 2004, the then President
of Mali announced that 100 000 hectares
of irrigable land would be made available to
CENSAD in the Office du Niger area. The aim was
‘to help meet the target of food security for all
member countries’.
After several meetings of a steering committee
set up by the Malian Government, a project
document was prepared and submitted to
CENSAD, together with a draft agreement
(Ministry of Agriculture, 2005). The document
estimates the total cost of the programme at FCFA
312 600 000 000 (US$625 200 000), at an average
cost of FCFA 3 126 000 (US$6 252) per hectare.
Various sources suggest that, when the
report’s findings were presented to the following
CENSAD Summit, some Heads of State saw the
Malian proposal as a poisoned gift. For these
reasons, the CENSAD scheme did not go ahead,
though the project was taken up by a Libyan
company (Box 4).
Another development scheme involving a
regional integration organization has made more
progress compared to the CENSAD experience.
Following a similar logic to the failed CENSAD
scheme but taking account of lessons learned
through that experiment, the Malian Government
offered an area of 11 288 hectares to the UEMOA
under an agreement signed in April 2008, as part
of a wider regional programme to develop Office
du Niger land. The allocation covers two pieces of
land located within the hydraulic scheme of the
Sahel - Fala de Molodo canal: an area of 9 114
hectares in Kandiourou sector and an area of
2 174 hectares in Touraba sector.
The UEMOA project has three components:
Infrastructure development (hydroagricultural
schemes and private developers’
installations): the UEMOA project aims
at establishing farms of varying sizes for
nationals of the member countries;
Upgrading existing schemes, which involves
intensification of rice production, crop
diversification and support measures;
Programme organization and management
to ensure effective project implementation.
Under this component, UEMOA acts as
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contracting authority in developing the
plots that will subsequently be allocated to
private operators from the member states.
Under this arrangement, UEMOA will cover
the cost of the feasibility studies, together
with the construction costs of installing
the main irrigation and drainage networks
and the internal and external road systems;
while UEMOA nationals will cover costs for
the secondary and tertiary irrigation and
drainage networks, together with levelling
and preparing the plots, with pre-financing
from UEMOA.
The scheme is designed to be open to three
kinds of farmers: indigenous smallscale farmers,
who will be allocated small plots with a unit size
of between 4 and 5 hectares; private farmers
with adequate technical and financial capacity
to farm plots with a unit size of 10 or 20
hectares; and major private investors capable of
setting up agri-businesses, who can be allocated
blocks of between 30 and 60 hectares. Malian
beneficiaries may receive title deeds but nonnationals
will have to make do with longterm
leases. With around FCFA 19 million funding
from the European Union, the work started on
18 September 2010 and should in principle be
completed by the end of 2012.
Issuance of private land titles to individual
farmers is a key feature of the UEMOA scheme.
This idea was first introduced in the Office du
Niger area by another development scheme, the
Koumouna project, which was supported by the
World Bank.
The Koumouna project bears the name of the
place where the scheme is implemented. First
funded by the World Bank under the National
Rural Investment Programme (Programme
National d’Investissements Ruraux - PNIR) in
the early 2000s, the project is designed to test
the impact of granting title deeds to small- and
mediumscale farmers. The project covers an
area of approximately 830 hectares (reduced at
the end of the project to 444 hectares), which
were divided into 130 three-hectare lots and
a small number of larger lots. It is based on
the assumption that land titles and farmers’
participation in the investment will produce