Investors are grabbing up farm land around the world. In some cases, the land isn't being developed, making global food security a concern. Capital has flowed across borders and crop yields have leveled off, food-importing nations and private investors have been securing land abroad to use for agriculture. Nearly 200 private equity firms are expected to have almost $30 billion in private capital invested by 2015. Poor governments have embraced these deals, but their people are in danger of losing their sources of food. Two-thirds of foreign investors in developing countries expect to sell their harvests elsewhere. In 2008 in Sudan, the United Arab Emirates was growing sorghum, a staple of the Sudanese diet, to feed camels back home.
According to Oxfam, land equivalent to eight times the size of Britain was sold or leased worldwide in the last 10 years. In northern Mozambique, a Brazilian-Japanese venture plans to farm more than 54,000 square miles -- an area comparable to Pennsylvania and New Jersey combined -- for food exports. In 2009, a Libyan firm leased 386 square miles of land from Mali without consulting local communities that had long used it. In the Philippines, the government is so enthusiastic to promote agribusiness that it lets foreigners register partnerships with local investors as domestic corporations. In Cambodia 55 percent of arable land has been acquired by domestic and foreign agribusiness interests.
Investors typically promise to create local jobs and say that better farming technologies will produce higher crop yields and improve food security. A Swiss company promised local farmers 2,000 new jobs when it acquired a 50-year lease to grow biofuel crops on 154 square miles in Makeni, Sierra Leone; in the first three years, it produced only 50. Many investors, in fact, use their own labor force, not local workers, and few share their technology and expertise.
About 500 million sub-Saharan Africans rely on such communally held land, and land sales can be devastating, as in Mali. Access to food is often cut off, livelihoods are shattered and communities are uprooted. Some speculators just sit on high-value land they have acquired without cultivating it. In many traditional communities, this feels like a desecration, a violation of land's purpose and meaning. That kind of capitalist disregard can set the stage for pitched battles over land that investors see as uninhabited, but that local communities cherish as a source of food, water and medicine, or venerate as ancestral burial grounds.
Taken from here
The Guardian reports that thousands of Ethiopians are being relocated or have already fled as their land is sold off to foreign investors without their consent. The leasing of 600,000 hectares of prime farmland to Indian companies has led to intimidation, repression, detentions, rapes, beatings, environmental destruction, and the imprisonment of journalists and political objectors. Oxfam said that investors were deliberately targeting the weakest-governed countries to buy cheap land.
According to Oxfam, land equivalent to eight times the size of Britain was sold or leased worldwide in the last 10 years. In northern Mozambique, a Brazilian-Japanese venture plans to farm more than 54,000 square miles -- an area comparable to Pennsylvania and New Jersey combined -- for food exports. In 2009, a Libyan firm leased 386 square miles of land from Mali without consulting local communities that had long used it. In the Philippines, the government is so enthusiastic to promote agribusiness that it lets foreigners register partnerships with local investors as domestic corporations. In Cambodia 55 percent of arable land has been acquired by domestic and foreign agribusiness interests.
Investors typically promise to create local jobs and say that better farming technologies will produce higher crop yields and improve food security. A Swiss company promised local farmers 2,000 new jobs when it acquired a 50-year lease to grow biofuel crops on 154 square miles in Makeni, Sierra Leone; in the first three years, it produced only 50. Many investors, in fact, use their own labor force, not local workers, and few share their technology and expertise.
About 500 million sub-Saharan Africans rely on such communally held land, and land sales can be devastating, as in Mali. Access to food is often cut off, livelihoods are shattered and communities are uprooted. Some speculators just sit on high-value land they have acquired without cultivating it. In many traditional communities, this feels like a desecration, a violation of land's purpose and meaning. That kind of capitalist disregard can set the stage for pitched battles over land that investors see as uninhabited, but that local communities cherish as a source of food, water and medicine, or venerate as ancestral burial grounds.
Taken from here
The Guardian reports that thousands of Ethiopians are being relocated or have already fled as their land is sold off to foreign investors without their consent. The leasing of 600,000 hectares of prime farmland to Indian companies has led to intimidation, repression, detentions, rapes, beatings, environmental destruction, and the imprisonment of journalists and political objectors. Oxfam said that investors were deliberately targeting the weakest-governed countries to buy cheap land.
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