The Stockholm Internati-onal Water Institute (SIWI) has warned against the increasing leasing and buying of millions of hectares of farmlands in Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America for food and fuel production.
This land is being leased to private investors and sovereign wealth funds with no explicit legal agreement on how water will be used on these farmlands.
The World Bank has estimated that over 56 million hectares of land in Africa was leased in 2009 alone but other researches indicate that over 200 million hectares of land, which works out to roughly the size of western Europe, has already been leased out.