‘I bought their dream’: How a US company’s huge land deal in Senegal went bust

DAKAR, Senegal (AP) — Rusting pipes in a barren field and unpaid workers are what remain after a U.S. company promised to turn a huge piece of land in Senegal — about twice the size of Paris — into an agricultural project and create thousands of jobs.

In interviews with company officials and residents, The Associated Press explored one of the growing number of foreign investment projects targeting Africa, home to about 60% of the world’s remaining uncultivated arable land. Like this one, many fail, often far from public notice.

Internal company documents seen by the AP show how the plans, endorsed by the Senegalese government, for exporting animal feed to wealthy Gulf nations fell apart.

At first glance, the landscape of stark acacia trees on the edge of the Sahara Desert doesn’t hold much agricultural promise. But in an age of climate change, foreign investors are looking at this and other African landscapes.

The continent has seen a third of the world’s large-scale land acquisitions between 2000 and 2020, mostly for agriculture, according to researchers from the International Institute of Social Studies in the Netherlands.

But 23% of those deals have failed, after sometimes ambitious plans to feed the world.

Why target land on the edge of the Sahara Desert?

In 2021, the Senegalese village of Niéti Yone welcomed investors Frank Timis and Gora Seck from a U.S.-registered company, African Agriculture. Over cups of sweet green tea, the visitors promised to employ hundreds of locals and, one day, thousands.

Timis, originally from Romania, was the majority stakeholder. His companies have mined for gold, minerals and fossil fuels across West Africa.

Seck, a Senegalese mining investor, chaired an Italian company whose biofuel plans for the land parcel had failed. It sold the 50-year lease for 20,000 hectares to Timis for $7.9 million. Seck came on as president of African Agriculture’s Senegalese subsidiary and holds 4.8% of its shares.