Designed to increase transparency, a new online database will be tracking large farmland purchases and publishing contracts formed between investors and governments.

 

OpenLandContracts.org, formed at Columbia University in New York and backed by the World Bank, has published details about 69 farmland deals involving sugar cane, oil palm plantations, soybeans, tea, biofuels, and other crops in Liberia, Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, Cambodia, Cameroon, South Sudan, and East Timor so far this year, and is targeting the publication of 100 deals by the end of the year.

 

Launched earlier this month, the organizers of the site hope that it will lead to more large land deals being made public.

 

"There is such a lack of transparency around these deals," Kaitlin Cordes, head of land and agriculture at Columbia’s Center on Sustainable Investment told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "Making contracts transparent can help individuals, communities and civil society monitor whether governments and investors are fulfilling their responsibilities." Adding, “If firms do not have to disclose details of their deals, they have less incentive to incorporate social investments such as environmental management, training and jobs for local people.”