Algeria: Farmers oust hapless investors from agricultural concession lands

Hundreds of investors across the national territory have been stripped of agricultural lands after long years of hard toil and millions of dinars of investment in the wake of complaints lodged before justice by the lands’ original owners on the basis of the law on land concession adopted in 2010.

The law number 19 issued in 1987 advocated and allowed profit-yielding investments by a third party of agricultural lands across the national territory in a bid to hike agricultural production nationwide  but the 2010 law came up and its provisions allowed the lands’ original owners to retrieve their plots of  land from the investors after garnering hefty dividends.

The land concession allowed the latter to give their lands over for a certain period of time to potential investors who brought with them the necessary technological means likely to achieve dumper crops and good harvests.

Previously, these plots of land were barren most of the time and their owners failed to make them productive because of a dire lack of financial and material resources.

But with the advent of the 2010 law, these once-impoverished peasants decided to get back their lands after receiving substantial loans and other incentives from the state institutions thus allowing them to buckle to the task and shore up their own agricultural output.

As a result, many hapless investors were ousted for good from these lands with no compensations thus forfeiting billions of centimes in dinars of investments as part of the implementation of the relevant law.