A South Korean company is hoping to turn an undeveloped stretch of Madagascar into a maize-production centre, an official has said.
Daewoo Logistics envisions growing maize on 1-million hectares of land, mostly in the Indian Ocean island’s arid west, said Shin Dong-hyun, the Daewoo official in charge of the project.
Besides maize, the company also wants to plant palm oil on 299Â 879ha in rainy eastern Madagascar, Shin added.
He said Daewoo had secured a 99-year lease and was working out final details on rental fees and taxes with officials in Madagascar.
However, according to a recent report in the Financial Times, Daewoo ”said it expected to pay nothing to farm maize and palm oil” on the island.
”We hope we [can] launch the project as soon as possible,” Shin said.
South Korean business groups have expressed interest in investing once the deal is finalised, he said.
A manager at Daewoo, Hong Jong-wan, said: ”We want to plant corn there to ensure our food security. Food can be a weapon in this world. We can either export the harvests to other countries or ship them back to Korea in case of a food crisis.”
The project is estimated to cost $6-billion over the first 25 years.
Ultimately, the project is targeting production of 5,5-million tonnes of maize a year, although that could take 15 years to achieve, Shin said.
South Korea currently imports about 11-million tonnes of maize a year, he said, mostly from the United States.
Shin said the sparsely populated area on Madagascar’s west coast targeted for maize production lacks roads and irrigation facilities, which will need to be built. About 2Â 000ha may be planted initially, he said.
There is ”almost no infrastructure there now”, he said.
He added that the company had yet to finalise a sales plan for the maize it produced. He said it could end up being used as corn starch or animal feed in South Korea or exported to the Middle East, India and China.
Daewoo plans to bring in agricultural experts from South America and South Africa to work on the project. Labourers will mostly come from Madagascar, with a few from South Africa, he said.
The project could end up creating more than 70Â 000 jobs on the island.
”We’d like to contribute to Madagascar’s economic development,” he said.
Meanwhile, a European diplomat in Southern Africa commented that ”there will be very little direct benefits [for Madagascar]”, adding that ”extractive projects have very little spill-over to a broader industrialisation”.
”The deal Daewoo is negotiating with the Madagascan government looks positively neo-colonial and the Madagascan people stand to lose half their arable land, according to a Financial Times editorial.