Time to bring back the Colonial Office, eh what?
From the Daily Mail:
It is an odd retirement hobby.
Britain’s top soldier, the former commander of British Land Forces and
the man who capped his military career by presiding over the funeral of
the Queen Mother, has been planting crops in the African bush.
Not
personally, you understand. But Sir Charles Redmond Watt has been
mixing with Chinese billionaires, Saudi sheiks, Wall Street whizzkids
and a motley array of British adventurers who agree with the financial
guru George Soros that ‘farmland is one of the best investments of our
time’. And for those wanting lots of land, nothing comes cheaper than a
slice of Africa.
I have
spent the past two years on the trail of these land grabbers, who have
between them taken control of an area roughly ten times the size of
Britain, most of it in Africa. And I discovered that Britain is the
world’s biggest centre for private land grabbers. City financiers are
the new imperialists, returning to colonies we walked away from half a
century ago.
Harvest time: Huge tractors on a soya bean farm
in Brazil.
Farmland is now considered to be one of the best investments
of our time
Upon leaving the Army, Sir Charles,
who once commanded 125,000 military personnel, became chairman of a
shell company, Las Vegas-registered Kryptic Entertainment, which later
changed its name to Farm Lands of Guinea.
The
company, set up by British sheep farmer Mark Keegan, controls 250,000
acres of bush in the West African state of Guinea, bought on what it
describes as ‘extremely generous’ terms from the government there. It
will plant 8,000 acres of maize and soya this year.
Fellow
board member Nigel Woodhouse, a trustee of Labour peer Lord Melchett’s
Soil Association, told me one village handed over its land for ‘the
equivalent of £3’.
It
doesn’t sound much for a company that says it is ‘unlocking the riches
of an African agricultural treasure trove’, and which is on such good
terms with local leaders that it has also secured exclusive rights to
market a further 3.7 million acres of Guinea – an area roughly the size
of Yorkshire.
His job done,
Sir Charles resigned from the outfit last December. He declined to
comment on his African sojourn, but who can doubt that his prestige
helped clinch deals in the former French colony?
Many
of the big beasts of British business have joined the global land rush.
Sir Richard Branson, who famously bought two of the Virgin Islands in
the Caribbean, has now
Jim Slater, a notorious asset-stripper
from the Seventies, is growing genetically modified maize on Brazilian
prairie once owned by the father of racing driver Ayrton Senna. City
‘superwoman’ Nicola Horlick is investing the pension funds of Hampshire
and Merseyside councils in Brazilian farmland.
Meanwhile,
feted bond trader Guy Hands bought cattle stations three times bigger
than Wales from the estate of the legendary TV mogul Kerry Packer. And
Joe Lewis, the owner of Tottenham Hotspur, has invested a chunk of the
fortune he made betting against sterling two decades ago to buy a slab
of scenic Patagonia....MORE
