Well, there is a land tenure law in southern Sudan thanks to the activities of foreign donors and of NGOs. There's an organization called Pact. Pact has been active in I'm not sure righting but certainly trying to observe whether the spirit and the law of the land tenure laws is being observed. In the south it's better than the north. My understanding is that the indigenous people are often permitted to remain on their farms after the agribusiness moves in, but they lose their major natural asset, which is their woodland, their plains, and their pastoral commons for grazing.
In contrast to the north, the government of southern Sudan is in the position to enact its own land laws, and has done so, to some extent, under the terms of the CPA., the comprehensive peace agreement. But what I hear from my friends—and this is only really what I hear and read from the reports they write in organizations like Pact, which is an NGO partially funded by CIDA—is they go out in the field and they ask, who is the agribusiness that has recently bought up all this land? Nobody knows. They say that every person they ask gives them a different answer. There is a complete lack of transparency in the south as well as in the north. So one suspects that there's money in it for the minister of agriculture and that they are wilfully overriding the spirit, at least, of the land tenure law, which is that the indigenous people should be able to carry on as before.
There's a lot of money involved. And, as I said before, it's a dilemma, because this agribusiness will be productive. On the other hand, it's mostly money for export. Now, that should trickle down to ordinary people, but it doesn't necessarily. And we have famine and food shortage, large-scale food shortage, existing side by side with large-scale agribusiness that is shipping the money out to countries with a lot of desert, in Saudi Arabia and so on. But it's not just Saudi Arabia. I think the Americans are in there--I know they are--and probably the Canadians as well. There's an enormous amount of money, with high risk, to be made from growing crops in one of the most fertile...and certainly the largest country in Africa. You see what the Egyptians have done along the Nile. The Sudanese have never taken advantage of that.
So that's the dilemma. Should we subcontract this to foreigners and put constraints on them? What do you do?