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Robert E. Looney is professor of National Security Affairs, Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California. He has been a consultant to the governments of Iran, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Mexico, Panama, and Jamaica as well as the World Bank,International Labor Office, Inter-American Development Bank, Stanford Research Institute, Rand Organization, The International Monetary Fund, and various US government agencies.
Agrarian Mirage: Gulf Foreign Direct Investment in Pakistan’s Agricultural Sector
In the late 2000s, one rarely picked up a financial newspaper without seeing an announcement of Gulf investments in large tracts of Pakistani agricultural land. Today, however, there is little, if any evidence of a single foreign-financed agricultural project in Pakistan having come to fruition. This essay explores why.
“In the past week Iran’s president, Mahmud Ahmadinejad, has damned it as a ‘worthless piece of paper’ and China’s premier, Wen Jiabao, has moaned that it is causing his country ‘big pressure’. The dollar’s relentless decline—it hit a new low of $1.49 against the euro on November 21st—is prompting jibes from America’s critics, jangling investors’ nerves and giving policymakers headaches.”[1]
