If the UN's International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) is correct, of the potential 800 million hectares of fertile land available for commercial crop production globally, 80 percent is located in Africa and Latin America. Land-rich malnourished nations like Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Sudan, were listed as countries holding the bulk of Africa's "under-utilized" resources.

The IFAD has also confirmed land as the next investment frontier: "Natural resources are at the heart of FDI flows to the continent.The perceived availability of land in Africa has attracted the attention of governments eager to ensure security of food and fuel supplies, and of investors eager to tap into global demand for food and fuel."

And for countries like Sudan, with an estimated 4 million hungry people in the south alone, land grabs tend to fall under the umbrella of "sustainable" green-tinted projects, such as Reduced Emissions From Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) and Clean Development Mechanisms (CDM) carbon offset initiatives.

Reforestation

In the South, for instance, 156,624 hectares of land has been purchased by Tree Farms Sudan Ltd., a subsidiary of Green Resources, Africa's largest forestation corporation. The company, whose core business is reforestation, carbon offsets and forest products , claims that the "project will result in about 15 million tons of carbon dioxide emission (tCO2e) reductions over the initial 30 years of implementation." 

They aim to "reforest" 23,000 hectares of "commercial forests (via potentially invasive teak and eucalyptus) in degraded grassland areas." According to the Norwegian company, "deforestation is driven by shifting cultivation," uncontrolled seasonal bush fires and overgrazing of livestock.

Green Resources has stated that the aim of the project is to sequester carbon, prevent continued GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions from deforestation and degradation, and promote environmental protection. This might bring much needed financial revenue to the region in question, Terekeke County, whose Commissioner Juma Ali Malu predicted substantial famine this year.

Overall, through projects in Tanzania, Uganda and Mozambique, the company projects $36 million in potential profits by 2020 from the sale of 6 million temporary certified emission reductions (tCERs), some of which have already been purchased by the Norwegian Government from Green Resource's Tanzania project.

Unlike Norway, the investor country, where such trees take 70 years to grow, in East Africa, it takes just 17 years. Sequestering carbon in East Africa certainly makes sense for major oil - and emissions, producing nations like Norway, eager to acquire 6 million carbon credits. But will it benefit Sudan?

Who benefits?

The case of Tanzania's Idete Forest CDM project, headed by Green Resources, is instructive: 11,600 hectares were leased from the government at $0.36 cents (2.3 Norwegian kroner) per hectare. Of this, 1,600 hectares of 8,000 hectares of plantable area have been developed as wood monocultures (pine, 40 percent and eucalyptus, 59 percent). The project is estimated to generate a potential 172,471 tCERs per annum and almost 2.6 million tCERs over two decades. Once again, degraded grasslands have been listed as the justifying factor, proving "additionality" - that sequestration from wood cash crops would not have occurred without the company's intervention, critical to satisfying Article 6 of the Kyoto Protocol's definition of CDM projects.

The company has already received critical Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification, at Tanzania's Uchindile and Mapanda projects, and expects the same of Idete. But though reforestation projects remain small pieces of the sustainability puzzle, not everyone agrees that it is a step forward.

"Wood plantations are not forests. They are monocultures that should not receive FSC certification," said Dr. Blessing Karumbidza, a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Economic Research on Innovation (IERI) and representative from civil society movement Timberwatch.

"Green Resources claimed that the acquired Idete land was degraded through fire, but unlike wood plantations where fire can destroy wood products, grasslands fires serve a very natural - and quick process of maintaining the ecosystem by removing dead herbaceous materials, recycling nutrients and other important factors," he said.

The deal itself was not negotiated in hard currency but Tanzanian shillings, subject to currency depreciation. Meanwhile, the land lease was reduced by more than 60 percent during the past decade following company complaints. This process, common in Africa, is known as "tax competition," creating supportive fiscal environments to investors.

Although CDM projects account for 20 percent of the $97 billion carbon market, largely based in the European Union (77 percent), Stanford University's Energy and Sustainable Program revealed between a "third and two-thirds" of CDM projects do not represent real carbon reductions.

Instead, CDM projects appear to exploit the underdeveloped status of developing regions such as Africa, contributing just 3 percent to global GHG emissions. Furthermore, by exporting the problem of "pollution," multinationals and developed governments are able to circumvent emissions reductions.

Jack Cogen, President of Natsource, recognized as the world's largest buyer of private carbon credit, said, "The carbon market doesn't care about sustainable development. All it cares about is the carbon price."

For drought-prone nations like Sudan, where, in the words of the UNEP, "one of the root causes of the conflict is access to natural resources," the greenness of CDMs may just represent "business as usual."

Only this time, in the name of the greater common good.