Increasing Agricultural Productivity:
Encouraging Foreign Direct Investments in the COMCEC Region
58
locations. Identifying each location’s agricultural investment climate assists governments and
policy-makers to develop sector-specific strategies to improve the investment climate and
attractiveness for agriculture. Measuring the quality and cost factors for potential locations can
result in an overview as presented below. This figure represents a plot of the overall quality
attractiveness of locations against the overall cost attractiveness for potential horticulture sites.
Figure 26: Comparison of Quality and Cost Conditions for Horticulture Investments
Source: FAO 2008
The best position for potential sites for horticulture FDI would be in the top right corner, where
the quality index scores highest combined with low operating cost rates. As illustrated in Figure
26, Mozambique and Uganda seem to perform the best as it scores high on quality and low on
operating costs. Countries such as Senegal need to address their high operating costs in order to
attract horticulture FDI whereas Mali has to develop its quality standards.
3.4 Challenges and Weaknesses of the Business Environment in the
COMCEC Region
Given the extraordinary differences among its 57 members, it is rather difficult to make any
general conclusions with respect to the business environment for sustaining FDI in agriculture
in the COMCEC Member Countries. COMCEC includes wealthy countries like the GCC members
and Brunei, upper-middle income countries like Turkey, Azerbaijan, Tunisia, and Malaysia, and
some of the world’s poorest countries such as Chad, Niger, and Sudan. It includes countries with
large populations like Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey, Bangladesh, and Egypt, and some, like Qatar,
the Comoros, and the Maldives, which are amongst the world’s smallest populations. There are
countries highly dependent on agriculture as an element of GDP and a source of employment
and others in which the agricultural sector is tiny by comparison with the economy as a whole.
There are COMCEC Member Countries that are net recipients of agricultural FDI and others that
are net outward investors. As it can be seen from the case studies presented, the business
environment does matter, in agriculture as in other sectors.
0
100
200
0 100 200
Quality Index (Average = 100)
Operating Cost Index (Average = 100)
Mozambique
Mali
Senegal
Uganda