Tanzania has one of the fastest growing population in Africa, but its land reforms have stalled, hampering the East African nation’s ability to create jobs for its youth and feed its growing populace.

The country of about 53 million people, most of whom are below the age of 25 years, is expected to have nearly 300 million people by 2050 making it one of the most populated nations on earth.

“Today, Tanzania is 53 million people and they don’t really have the ability to keep up with the change. I think it’s a race against the clock,” Per Carstedt, executive chairman of Agro EcoEnergy, a Swedish company that has invested in Tanzania’s Southern Agricultural Corridor, told Voice of America.

“If you are not able to provide jobs and opportunities for [developing countries] in the future, it’s a ticking bomb,” Carstedt added.

Compared to its neighboring East Africa countries Tanzania has abundant land, but its state-owned land policy makes it one of the hardest for foreign investors to invest in.

Programs like the Southern Agricultural Corridor, sponsored by a food security alliance created by the G7 industrialized countries, are few and too little to make an impact on the unemployment rate in the country.

Conflict between large scale agribusiness investors and local small scale farmers are common.

In Razaba, a village in Tanzania’s Bagamoyo district, there is a standoff between another Swedish company that seek to create a large-scale sugar plantation and the locals over property compensations.

While the government says the Razaba conflict is a ‘special case’, there are other conflicts simmering between locals and foreign agribusiness investors over land that many see as communal and not available for ‘outsiders’.