'I bought their dream': How US firm's huge land deal went bust

RUSTING pipes in a barren field and unpaid workers are what remain after a US 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.

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Internal company documents seen by the Associated Press 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.

In 2021, the Senegalese village of Nieti Yone welcomed investors Frank Timis and Gora Seck from a US-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 $7.9m.

Seck came on as president of African Agriculture's Senegalese subsidiary and holds 4.8% of its shares.

Now the company wanted the community's approval.

The land was next to Senegal's largest freshwater lake, for which the company obtained water rights. African Agriculture planned to grow alfalfa and export it to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Both traditionally buy alfalfa from the US, but the amount of land in alfalfa production there has dropped by 38% in the past 20 years, largely due to drought caused by climate change, according to the US Department of Agriculture.