WRI produced a report on the investment environment and safeguards applicable to large-scale agricultural investments in Uganda. Considerably less international attention has been focused on Uganda, where the government has a history of allocating land for large-scale agricultural production. For example, media reports indicate that a deal is underway to lease 840,000 ha in Uganda (2.2% of the countrys farmland) to Egypt for wheat and maize production to be shipped back (Sharma 2008). It has also been widely reported that the government has allowed large-scale farming operations in a number of protected areas, including Butamira Forest Reserve and several Forest Reserves on Bugala Island (Veit et al. 2008).

This paper aims to help decision-makers better understand the following topics:

1. The process through which investorswhether domestic or foreign, public or privateacquire agricultural land outside the protected estate2 in Uganda.
2. The social and environmental safeguards applicable by law that are applied to this process.
3. The social and environmental implications of actual recent large-scale land acquisitions and potential projects in areas of high risk for land acquisition because of their conservation value and suitability for biofuels production.