While African governments proclaim their commitments to food self-sufficiency, behind the backs of their people they are signing an alarming number of deals with foreign investors that give these investors control over their countries’ most important agricultural lands, including rice lands...Take Mali for example...the government has embarked on a multimillion-dollar national rice initiative that is supposed to restore self-sufficiency...Why then has the government handed over an enormous tract of prime rice land to a Libyan investment fund and Chinese companies? ... [T]he project is going to push some local farmers off the land and compete directly with others for water from the Niger River, the most important source of irrigation for the Sahel-Sahara. [refers to Lonrho, CGC (joint venture Sinopec, China Geo-Engineering Corporation)]