Sunday 16 September 2012

Fund file: an African growth story | beyondbrics

The public debate about the ethics of investing in farmland is being ignored by serious investors who seem to have had no qualms about buying up large tracts of land in Africa, according to a report in Monday’s FTfm.

It could be that they were following the advice of Jeremy Grantham, co-founder of asset manager GMO , who recently recommended a 10 per cent strategic allocation to “things in the ground”. Or it could be that they simply thought it was cheap. Either way, 62 per cent of all large-scale land acquisitions since 2000 have occurred in Africa, according to the Land Matrix Partnership.

If investors had been thinking the land was cheap, some purchases might have been misguided.

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