Beyond state-supported schemes, policy distortions against agriculture, especially for export, and scant public investment in rural areas reduced private investors’ incentives so that most area expansion was by smallholders. Policy reforms of the 1990s allowed agricultural growth to accelerate and paved the way for renewed investor interest in the continent. Still, structural issues arising from long-standing neglect of technology, infrastructure, and institutions continued to contribute to disappointing performance of commercial cultivation of bulk commodities, where, in light of its land endowment, Africa should have a comparative advantage (World Bank 2009a). Past success with commercial agriculture was limited to traditional export crops such as cotton, cocoa, and coffee produced by smallholders, and more recently horticultural exports, by both small and large farms. Plantation crops such as sugarcane in Southern Africa -aided by preferential access to developed markets- and oil palm in West Africa also had some success. Although smallholder-based growth remains critical to achieve poverty-reduction in Africa (Diao _et al._ 2010), there is increasing recognition of the need to overcome market imperfections if smallholders are to play this role (Hazell _et al._ 2010). In the wake of market liberalization, multiple institutional challenges associated with effective service provision to smallholders remain and have, in many instances, not yet been addressed effectively (Dorward _et al._ 2009).

Recent land acquisitions in Africa attracted not only large amounts of media attention but were also quantitatively large; in fact compared annual rate of area expansion of some 1.8 million ha in the 19612007 period, demand in 2009 alone amounted to some 39.7 million hectares –greater than the total agricultural land in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland combined (Deininger _et al._ 2011). Data from six countries where reliable information could be gathered -often aggregated up from regional figures- highlight that the size of lands transferred recently is significantly above what was observed in the past. Total transfers in 2004-09, in millions of ha (table 2) amounted to 4.0 ha in Sudan, 2.7 in Mozambique, 1.2 in Ethiopia and 1.6 -mainly renegotiation of existing agreements- in Liberia.<sup>2</sup> The volume and nature of land transfers depends on policies; for example in Tanzania, where land rights are vested with villages, less than 50,000 ha were transferred to investors in the same time period. Virtually everywhere, local, rather than foreign investors, dominated. In most cases, expected job creation and net investment were either not recorded or very low. Often land was not fully used, as in Mozambique where a 2009 land audit found large shares of transferred land being either unused (34% of the total) or used in ways that did not comply with agreed investment plans (15%). Even if, as is the case

> 2 Comparison with figures on possibly available land in table 5 suggest that the land transferred accounts for 8.6%, 16.6%, and 25.4% of the total suitable non-forested non-protected area with a density of less than 25 inhabitants per km<sup>2</sup> for Sudan, Mozambique, and Ethiopia, respectively. 9