BACK TO THE LAND

The world's population is growing, so we must grow more food to feed ourselves. This means the value of good agricultural land will rise say land agents.

There is certainly no shortage of investment in farmland. The UAE government has purchased Pakistani farms and Chinese investors are buying African and South American land.

With bank lending hard to get, farmers need investors. In Argentina, which had a credit crunch ten years before the rest of the world, a novel scheme operates whereby foreign investors buy land from farmers who re-purchase it at a higher price over a period of time. The farmer uses investors' money to buy machinery and bring more land into cultivation.

Minimum investment in SCS Farmland, a fund operated by Argentine farming conglomerate, The Food, Water and Energy Company, is GBP12,000. It buys back investors' land through a series of annual payments over a five or ten year period. The fund's sales agent is British-based Worldwide Investments.