Lured by a new business model, wealthy nations flock to farmland in Ethiopia, locking in food supplies grown half a world away.

BAKO, ETHIOPIA, November 24 -- In recent months, the Ethiopian government began marketing abroad one of the hottest commodities in an increasingly crowded and hungry world: farmland.

"Why Attractive?" reads one glossy poster with photos of green fields and a map outlining swaths of the country available at bargain-basement prices. "Vast, fertile, irrigable land at low rent. Abundant water resources. Cheap labor. Warmest hospitality."

This impoverished and chronically food-insecure Horn of Africa nation is rapidly becoming one of the world's leading destinations for the booming business of land leasing, by which relatively rich countries and investment firms are securing 40-to-99-year contracts to farm vast tracts of land.

Increasingly, though, purely profit-seeking companies are snatching up land, making a simple, if somewhat grim, calculation. As one Saudi-backed businessman here put it, "The population of the world is increasing dramatically, so land and food supplies will be short, demand will be higher and prices will rise."

Read more here from Washington Post