The UAE buys up farmland in Sudan. Abu Dhabi is to develop nearly 30,000 hectares of farmland in Sudan in the first step towards ensuring food security in the emirate. The move follows similar projects by Middle Eastern countries locking up land from Brazil to Pakistan and Thailand to guarantee supplies of cereals, meat and vegetables at a reasonable cost. Although the region is rich in oil, lack of rain makes large-scale food imports a necessity, and it has been hit by the global food shortage, with prices and inflation rising sharply. — The Guardian

Sudanese Government welcomes foreign investment. “Officials said it was too early to disclose the value of the deal. Only 16 per cent of the nearly 100 million hectares of land in Sudan has been used for farming, according to Sudanese officials. Crippled by poor infrastructure and technology, the government of Africa’s largest country is hoping to exploit this resource as a means of attracting investment.” — Wanderlust

British aid for Sudanese farmers. Dave Tennant, the driving force behind the Canadian Economic Development Assistance for Southern Sudan (CEDASS), is asking farmers to check their fields and behind their barns for old machinery that could help produce much needed food in Sudan. — The London Free Press

No easy solutions to global crisis. As with the North Koreans, our dependency on relatively cheap energy to run our industrialized agriculture and our smokestack industries is now mixing lethally with food shortages and the beginnings of climate overload, pushing us all toward the precipice. In the short term, we face a food crisis and an energy crisis. Over the longer term, this is certain to expand into a much larger climate crisis. No magic wand, whether biofuels, genetically modified organisms, or geo-engineering, can make the ogres disappear.” — Asia Times Online