Africa: Rush to acquire African farmland risks countries bearing costs of global resource scarcity, says study

The recent rush to acquire farmland in order to meet rising global demands for food and fuel is putting African countries at risk of bearing the social, economic, and environmental costs of global resource scarcity, says a new study by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR). Many of these costs threaten to arise from the rising direct competition between established land uses and plantation monoculture. At the local level, this can be manifested in environmental degradation, loss of access to socially and economically valuable land resources, and conflicts between subsistence and commercial agriculture.