Why the world’s best agricultural land is increasingly owned by sovereign wealth funds

In September 2025, at the peak of the lean season, 21.2 million people — 45 percent of Sudan’s analyzed population — were at IPC Phase 3 or above. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification confirmed famine conditions in El Fasher, North Darfur, and Kadugli, South Kordofan, with 375,000 people in Phase 5 Catastrophe. In that same country, International Holding Company and Jenaan Investment — both UAE-linked — farm more than 50,000 hectares of Sudan’s most productive Nile-irrigated land. A partnership between IHC and Sudan’s DAL Group covers a further 162,000 hectares at Abu Hamad, connected by infrastructure built and operated by AD Ports Group on Sudan’s Red Sea coast. The crops move to the Gulf.

The war drove the famine. The conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces destroyed supply routes, collapsed agricultural production across conflict zones, and displaced millions. The structural question runs alongside that one, at a different timescale: when the conflict ends, what does Sudan’s agricultural landscape look like? Who controls it? And under what legal framework?

The investment that isn’t just an investment

Farmland performs. Since 1992, the NCREIF Farmland Property Index has returned an average of approximately 10 percent annually — outperforming most financial assets over multi-decade horizons, with lower volatility than equities and weak correlation to stock markets. Farmland tracks inflation directly because the asset produces commodities whose prices move with it. Endowments, pension funds, and private equity all figured this out after the 2008 financial crisis, when the decorrelation properties of real assets became suddenly visible. The investment case for farmland is straightforward and well-documented.

Saudi Arabia understood something else first. In 2007, the Saudi government issued Resolution 335, mandating a 12.5 percent annual reduction in the domestic wheat production quota until the program ceased entirely at the start of the 2015-16 market year. The reason was geological. Saudi Arabia had been growing wheat in the desert since the 1970s using fossil water from the Saq Aquifer — a non-rechargeable formation in the country’s northwest that underpinned the country’s irrigated wheat programme. Hydrological studies from the mid-2000s projected that the majority of Saq Aquifer reserves would be depleted within decades of peak extraction. Satellite imagery tells the story simply: circular pivot-irrigation fields appearing on the Najd plateau in the 1980s, expanding through the 1990s, then contracting and disappearing as the water ran out.

The decision to stop growing wheat at home was not a trade policy preference. It was a geological reckoning. The logical sequel — farming the food somewhere else, using someone else’s water — follows directly.

The fossil water problem

The Saq Aquifer in northwestern Saudi Arabia is non-rechargeable on any human timescale. So are the aquifers that supply the UAE and Qatar. "Virtual water" — the water embedded in imported food — was theorized by geographer Tony Allan in the early 1990s as a mechanism by which water-scarce Middle Eastern states had already been managing their deficits. They imported the water-intensive food instead of growing it at home. Farmland acquisition extends this logic: instead of buying the product of someone else's water, you buy the land the water irrigates — and you control what it grows.

King Abdullah launched the Saudi Agricultural Investment Abroad initiative as the domestic program wound down. The formulation that circulated widely through Gulf food-security discourse in the decade following 2008: sell hydrocarbons to buy carbohydrates. The Saq Aquifer problem is not uniquely Saudi. The UAE imports approximately 90 percent of its food. Qatar is structurally similar. Their farmland acquisition programs are not speculative — they are structurally mandated by the combination of desert geography, growing populations, and exhausted aquifers.

This is why the investment thesis and the food security thesis converge rather than compete. Both describe the same transaction. And that means the appetite is strategic, not speculative.

The buyers are governments

Private equity entered farmland. Hancock Agriculture, Westchester Group Investment Management, and Macquarie Agricultural Funds all manage institutional farmland portfolios. Pension funds including TIAA-CREF hold farmland as an asset class. University endowments do too. Foreign ownership of US farmland rose 85 percent between 2010 and 2023, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation. The trend is real and broad.

But sovereign wealth funds occupy a different category. A private equity fund answers to its limited partners; it wants returns. A sovereign wealth fund answers to a government; it wants returns and food security, and those two objectives are inseparable by design. The fund that buys Australian wheat farms is not managing a portfolio — it is managing a national supply chain. China’s COFCO offers a useful contrast: the state-owned enterprise acquired Noble Agri in 2016 and completed its Nidera acquisition in 2017 and now handles more than 100 million tonnes of grain annually, with its own terminal at the Port of Santos in Brazil. COFCO controls the flow — the trading infrastructure, the logistics, the shipping — without owning the fields. Owning the land itself — and with it, the permanent legal claim to what grows on it — is more consequential still.

The UAE operates through vehicles that are formally distinct but functionally sovereign. International Holding Company is controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the UAE’s national security adviser, through Royal Group’s majority stake. Jenaan Investment is a state-linked agribusiness. Together and separately, they have signed 56 land agreements — the first more than fifty years ago in Sudan — with 14 more currently in pipeline, according to data from BMI and the Land Matrix. Deals span Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Morocco, Namibia, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Uganda, and Tanzania. The 50,000-plus hectares in Sudan are active. The Abu Hamad project adds 162,000 more, linked to a new Red Sea port constructed and operated by AD Ports Group — the export infrastructure built into the acquisition from the beginning. ADQ, Abu Dhabi’s sovereign investment arm, committed up to $500 million for investment in Kenya’s priority sectors including food production, as part of a comprehensive economic partnership agreement concluded in 2024.

Saudi Arabia established SALIC — the Saudi Agricultural and Livestock Investment Company — in 2009 by Royal Decree, backed by the Public Investment Fund, with active overseas investment beginning in 2012. SALIC acquired Merredin Farms in Australia, which managed 211,000 hectares of agricultural land. It fully owns Continental Farmers Group in Ukraine, managing 195,000 hectares in the country’s west. It holds 75 percent of G3 Canada, a major grain trading and handling company. The King Abdullah Initiative signed 40 deals across 13 countries. SALIC reported importing 355,000 tonnes of wheat through its overseas investments.

Qatar faces near-total food import dependence, and has responded with its own food security investment programme through the QNFSP and QIA. Unlike the UAE’s and Saudi Arabia’s, Qatar’s agricultural land holdings abroad are not comprehensively catalogued in public databases — a reflection of both their scale and their opacity.

The distinction bears restating plainly. When a sovereign wealth fund buys land, a government owns that land. Agricultural decisions — what it grows, who it feeds, where it ships — are made by one state for another state’s benefit. The transaction is bilateral in form; in substance it cedes a portion of the host country’s capacity to determine what its own land produces and who eats the result.

What they’re really buying

When an Emirati company farms Nile-irrigated land in Sudan and ships the harvest to Abu Dhabi, it is not just importing food. One kilogram of wheat requires approximately 1,000 liters of water to produce. What moves to the Gulf with the grain is not only a commodity — it is a claim on Sudan’s water allocation.

Sudan’s Nile allocation stands at 18.5 billion cubic metres annually under the 1959 Nile Waters Agreement, a bilateral treaty between Sudan and Egypt negotiated without the participation of upstream states. That number is finite. Every cubic metre used to grow alfalfa for Gulf livestock is a cubic metre not used to grow sorghum for Sudanese families. The allocation was fixed sixty-seven years ago. The farmland operating against it was not.

Tony Allan theorized “virtual water” in the early 1990s while studying why Middle Eastern states had not gone to war over water scarcity. His answer: they had been quietly importing water in the form of food. Allan won the Stockholm Water Prize in 2008 for an insight that reframed food trade as water trade. Farmland acquisition takes this logic one step further. Importing the water-embedded product is passive arbitrage — you buy what someone else’s water grew. Owning the land the water irrigates is something different. It is a water right acquired through a land transaction, in a legal environment that treats the two as separate.

International water law is weaker than land tenure law. The UN Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses — negotiated in 1997, entered into force in August 2014 after 35 ratifications — has 42 state parties. Neither Sudan nor the UAE is among them. Controlling land with water access is not simply buying an agricultural asset. It is acquiring a water right by other means, in a jurisdiction where that right is ungoverned from two directions at once: the land tenure framework is weak, and the water framework is weaker still.

GRAIN’s 2024 analysis of UAE agricultural investments in Africa documents active and pipeline deals in Ethiopia, including in the Afar region, producing for Gulf export markets. WFP survey data from Afar’s pastoral zones recorded wasting rates above 19 percent among children under five — well above the emergency threshold — with malnutrition-driven hospital admissions running at levels WFP classified as emergency scale. The simultaneity — land acquired for export agriculture in regions of acute food insecurity — does not establish cause. It establishes context. The food grown on leased land does not move to hungry families in the region where it was grown; it moves to the Gulf. That is the point of the acquisition.

The Afar example is not the exception. It is the pattern that the acquisition model — productive land, water access, export infrastructure, legal protections for the investor — replicates across the continent. Sudan is where that pattern is most developed and most visibly strained, because Sudan is where the gap between what the land could feed and what it does feed has become, for now, catastrophic.

What the host country loses

Sudan was historically called “the Arab world’s breadbasket.” The designation was aspirational and partly geographic: the Nile Valley’s soil, the rainfall patterns of the south, the potential for irrigated agriculture at scale. The designation has not aged well. But the underlying resource endowment that generated it has not disappeared; it has been allocated.

The conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces is the proximate cause of the current famine. Supply routes were destroyed. Agricultural production in conflict zones collapsed. Millions were displaced. The IPC’s September 2025 figures reflect a crisis driven by war. That is the analysis, stated plainly.

The structural argument operates across a different timescale. The land that could support domestic sorghum and wheat production at scale is under long-term lease to foreign entities growing for export. The infrastructure — storage, logistics, port contracts — was built to move production to foreign markets. When the conflict ends and a government seeks to redirect that production toward domestic food security, it will not be redirecting farmland. It will be breaking contracts with entities that hold investor protections.

The "idle land" myth

Land targeted by foreign agricultural investors is routinely described in deal documents and government frameworks as "idle," "unused," or "under-utilised." This framing is almost always false: the land is under customary use, supporting pastoralism, shifting cultivation, or seasonal grazing that is invisible to government cadastral surveys. The World Bank's 2010 report "Rising Global Interest in Farmland" used "uncultivated land" language that civil society organizations including GRAIN and the Oakland Institute criticized for providing analytical cover for displacement. The myth is not merely rhetorical. It functions as the legal predicate for deals — if the land is "idle," the state can lease it without dispossessing anyone. The people who depended on it are simply not counted.

Foreign land acquisitions consistently target land under customary tenure — communities farming and grazing land for generations without formal legal title. A 2025 study published in the Journal of Rural Studies, examining Chinese agricultural investments in Tanzania and Zambia, found that subnational land tenure regimes play a prominent role in shaping where investments land, and that commercial farming was used predominantly on private leasehold land while contract farming operated on customary land — suggesting investors navigate tenure strategically. The pattern across African contexts is consistent: customary tenure holders have no standing in formal property law. When a state issues a long-term lease to a foreign investor over land under customary use, the claims of customary users are extinguished. They are not compensated in investor-state proceedings. They are not parties to any instrument.

The landscape doesn’t stay still. Export monoculture depletes soil faster than the subsistence polyculture it displaces — faster than any lease horizon accounts for. FAO documented that approximately 90 percent of rangelands and 80 percent of rainfed farmlands across the West African Sahel to northeast Ethiopia and Kenya are already affected by degradation. The land being acquired is, in many cases, land already compromised. The investor acquires a productive asset; the host country absorbs the degradation trajectory. The productive timeline and the deterioration timeline are not running in parallel — they are running in opposite directions, against the same land.

Once export infrastructure is built, a food crisis does not automatically redirect production. Redirecting it requires terminating or renegotiating contracts with entities that have rights under investment protection agreements. It requires replacing export-oriented storage with domestic distribution networks. It requires, in the case of port infrastructure built by a foreign sovereign entity, recovering control of facilities that were designed and funded as extraction infrastructure. None of this is impossible. All of it is legally expensive.

What the law says

The primary international instrument governing how states and investors should behave when farmland changes hands is the FAO Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security — the VGGT, adopted by the Committee on World Food Security in May 2012. The verdict is in the name. Voluntary. The VGGT creates no enforceable obligations. Supporters describe it as “increasingly accepted as a new international standard.” The FAO has said the key is implementation at the country level.

Consider what that means when the implementing country just signed a 99-year lease to a foreign sovereign fund. The instrument whose implementation the country is responsible for is the same instrument it just signed around. The VGGT is not a floor below which states cannot go. It is a document that states endorse and then proceed without.

No binding international law governs cross-border acquisition of agricultural land by state actors. The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007) is non-binding and covers only a subset of affected populations. ICESCR Article 11 — the right to adequate food — is binding on 173 state parties. Sudan is among them; the UAE has never ratified the Covenant. Even where it applies, Article 11 has no enforcement mechanism that overrides foreign investor property rights or compels food redirection during an emergency. A country facing famine cannot invoke Article 11 in any international forum to void a land lease or redirect export crops. There is no such forum.

The mechanism that has teeth runs in the opposite direction. Bilateral investment treaties and investor-state dispute settlement protect foreign investors against host government interference with their property and operations. The UNCTAD Investment Policy Hub records both a Sudan-UAE BIT dated 2001 and a second treaty dated 2011 — both listed as signed, neither confirmed as in force. But the investment proceeded regardless. This is revealing. The investor protection architecture is robust enough to operate without a confirmed BIT. Investors rely on contract-based protections: production agreements, long-term lease instruments, port infrastructure contracts with AD Ports Group. Any unilateral host-state action redirecting foreign-controlled production — ordering crops to be sold domestically, terminating a lease, seizing export infrastructure — would trigger binding international proceedings under ICSID or UNCITRAL rules.

What that means in practice: a government redirecting export crops to feed its own population can be sued before an international arbitral tribunal by the entity whose contract was disrupted. The proceedings take years. Damages run to hundreds of millions. The government must dedicate scarce legal resources to defending actions it took to feed its citizens. The investor has access to the same international system that produced the contract; the displaced smallholder farmers do not. The investor can sue. The starving cannot.

The right to permanent sovereignty over natural resources — established by UNGA Resolution 1803 in 1962 — has been argued to apply where land acquisitions “alienate territorial sovereignty.” Anna Jurkevics, writing in Political Theory in 2022, argued that large-scale land acquisition by foreign entities constitutes a de facto alienation of territorial sovereignty by obstructing the democratic governance of land: zoning, land use regulation, environmental stewardship — the practices through which a polity shapes its common home. The argument is sophisticated. UNGA resolutions are not binding. The principle has never been successfully invoked to void a land contract held by a foreign sovereign entity.

The asymmetry is documented and structural, not incidental. David Schneiderman’s Investment Law’s Alibis (Cambridge University Press, 2022) argues explicitly that the investment protection regime was constructed to serve capital-exporting state interests through mechanisms replicating colonial-era property protections. M. Sornarajah’s The International Law on Foreign Investment (4th edition, Cambridge University Press, 2017) documents the power asymmetry between capital-exporting and capital-importing states in treaty negotiation as a historical condition — the treaties were written by the states that benefited from them. The enforcement apparatus and the advisory apparatus were not built in parallel: one received legal architecture, institutional backing, and compulsory jurisdiction; the other received language. The gap between voluntary land tenure guidelines and binding investment protection is not a drafting oversight. It is a documented product of how the system was built and by whom.

Sudan’s war will end. The question of what kind of country emerges is primarily a question of the conflict’s resolution, of governance, of reconstruction — of whether the state that emerges has the capacity and the political coherence to function at all. But nested inside that question is a smaller, harder one. The agricultural land that Sudan’s recovery will require to feed its people is under long-term lease to entities whose contracts are protected by international arbitration. The export infrastructure that moves the harvest out of the country was built by a foreign sovereign. The only international instruments that speak to the rights of Sudan’s population over that land are explicitly advisory.

Sudan remains formally sovereign. International law says so. But what sovereignty means when the food grows under someone else’s flag and leaves on someone else’s ships — and there is no court where that contradiction can be resolved — is a question the formal system does not answer.

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Key Sources and References

IPC (Integrated Food Security Phase Classification). Sudan: Acute Food Insecurity Situation for September 2025 and Projections for October 2025–January 2026 and for February–May 2026. ipcinfo.org, 2025.

GRAIN. “From Land to Logistics: UAE’s Growing Power in the Global Food System.” grain.org, 2024.

NCREIF Farmland Property Index. National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries. ncreif.org.

Saudi Arabia, Government Resolution No. 335, November 2007.

SALIC (Saudi Agricultural and Livestock Investment Company). Portfolio page: salic.com. Holdings include Merredin Farms (Australia, 211,000 ha; reported divested to local WA farming interests in early 2025 — sale not officially confirmed), Continental Farmers Group (Ukraine, 195,000 ha), G3 Canada (75% stake). Founded by Royal Decree, 2009.

ADQ. “ADQ Establishes Finance and Investment Framework Agreement Worth Up to USD 500 Million to Invest in Priority Sectors of Kenya’s Economy.” adq.ae, 2024.

Allan, Tony. “Virtual Water: A Strategic Resource, Global Solutions to Regional Deficits.” Groundwater, 1998. Concept developed early 1990s; Allan awarded Stockholm Water Prize 2008.

Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses (UN Watercourses Convention). Adopted 1997, entered into force 17 August 2014 (35th ratification by Vietnam, May 2014). 42 state parties as of May 2026.

1959 Nile Waters Agreement (Agreement for the Full Utilization of the Nile Waters, Sudan and the United Arab Republic).

FAO. Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security (VGGT). Adopted by Committee on World Food Security, May 2012.

FAO. “Land and Environmental Degradation and Desertification in Africa.” Undated (FAO Africa desertification and land degradation documentation series).

ICESCR (International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights), Article 11 (Right to Adequate Food).

UNCTAD Investment Policy Hub. Sudan–United Arab Emirates BIT (2001) and Sudan–United Arab Emirates BIT (2011). Both listed as signed, not in force. investmentpolicy.unctad.org.

UNGA Resolution 1803 (XVII), “Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources,” 14 December 1962.

Yang Yuezhou. “Politics of Rural Land Acquisition in Africa: The Evidence from Chinese Agricultural Investments in Tanzania and Zambia.” Journal of Rural Studies, 2025. DOI: 10.1016/j.jrurstud.2025.103727.

Jurkevics, Anna. “Land Grabbing and the Perplexities of Territorial Sovereignty.” Political Theory, vol. 50, no. 1, 2022, pp. 32–58. DOI: 10.1177/00905917211008591.

Schneiderman, David. Investment Law’s Alibis: Colonialism, Imperialism, Debt and Development. Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Sornarajah, M. The International Law on Foreign Investment. 4th ed. Cambridge University Press, 2017.

World Bank. “Rising Global Interest in Farmland: Can It Yield Sustainable and Equitable Benefits?” 2010.

American Farm Bureau Federation. “Foreign Footprints: Trends in U.S. Agricultural Land Ownership.” fb.org, 2025. Foreign-held agricultural acreage rose 85% from 2010 to 2023.

Land Matrix Initiative. Global Observatory on Large-Scale Land Acquisitions. landmatrix.org.

WFP. Ethiopia Emergency Programme Reporting and SMART Nutrition Survey Data, Afar Region, 2024–2025. Wasting rate above 19% among children under five in Afar pastoral zones (emergency threshold: 15%); malnutrition-driven hospital admissions at emergency scale. wfp.org/countries/ethiopia.

COFCO International. Acquisitions: Noble Agri (completed March 2016), Nidera (full acquisition completed February 2017). Annual grain handling: approximately 108 million tonnes (2024). Port of Santos STS-11 terminal, 25-year concession. cofcointernational.com.