Advancing Fair Division in Overseas Farmland Investment via Shapley Value

Currently, a global hunger and malnutrition crisis is spreading throughout various regions worldwide. Overseas farmland investment endeavors to enhance regional food production through international cooperation but faces the challenge of ensuring a fair division. Our study develops a more equitable method: we have modeled overseas farmland investment as a cooperative game, reallocating benefits among host countries and investing countries. The application of our results to real data indicates that there is not only significant scope for improvement for host countries and overseas investors—which gain added benefits—but also a remarkable contribution made to rural development in terms of increased productivity. The cooperation to increase farmland yield through technology and capital transfer can be achieved in practice. In this context, transnational cooperations can provide additional benefits to participants, which can offer an important motivation for collaborators.