The rich are buying up poor countries. In recent years at least 500 million acres—an area nearly three times the size of Texas—has been sold, leased, or claimed globally.
It’s a familiar story in Cambodia, where land disputes have disrupted the lives and livelihoods of half a million people. Many of the affected are small-scale farmers who grow their own food. “Without land, they no longer have the means to provide themselves with the basic requirements for a decent life,” according to Naly Pilorge, director of the human rights group LICADHO. In the years since Cambodia’s wars, many villagers don’t bother to seek land titles until they want to sell, says LICADHO’s Vanna. And then it’s often too late—a wealthy investor has already eyed the property or even bought it without the villagers knowing. Locals can’t compete. In this environment, village farms become a “marketable commodity, available for external acquisition by those with the most money and lawyers,” according to the Oakland Institute, a California-based policy think tank.
This is a global humanitarian crisis. An unprecedented worldwide scramble for land—predominantly for agriculture—has spurred a new era in the “geopolitics of food scarcity,” according to Lester Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute. That scramble escalated dramatically with the 2008 economic crisis and subsequent rise in food prices. Countries that export food began to limit how much they would sell. Countries that import food “panicked,” Brown writes, and started buying up or leasing other countries’ cheap land on which to produce their own food. Hardest hit were poor countries like Cambodia, where the elite eat abundantly and the poor already struggle to feed themselves. Globally, the rush to turn small family farms into commercial enterprises isn’t aimed at feeding the needy, many policy experts say. As Oxfam reports, two-thirds of agricultural deals with foreign investors take place in chronically hungry countries.
There’s a big push for “big ag” in the developing world. But shifts toward mechanized agriculture with amped-up production “will not solve the problem: it will make it worse,” writes Olivier De Schutter, the U.N. specialist on the right to food. Large-scale investments in farmland do less to reduce poverty “than if access to land and water were improved for the local farming communities.”
Full story here
It’s a familiar story in Cambodia, where land disputes have disrupted the lives and livelihoods of half a million people. Many of the affected are small-scale farmers who grow their own food. “Without land, they no longer have the means to provide themselves with the basic requirements for a decent life,” according to Naly Pilorge, director of the human rights group LICADHO. In the years since Cambodia’s wars, many villagers don’t bother to seek land titles until they want to sell, says LICADHO’s Vanna. And then it’s often too late—a wealthy investor has already eyed the property or even bought it without the villagers knowing. Locals can’t compete. In this environment, village farms become a “marketable commodity, available for external acquisition by those with the most money and lawyers,” according to the Oakland Institute, a California-based policy think tank.
This is a global humanitarian crisis. An unprecedented worldwide scramble for land—predominantly for agriculture—has spurred a new era in the “geopolitics of food scarcity,” according to Lester Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute. That scramble escalated dramatically with the 2008 economic crisis and subsequent rise in food prices. Countries that export food began to limit how much they would sell. Countries that import food “panicked,” Brown writes, and started buying up or leasing other countries’ cheap land on which to produce their own food. Hardest hit were poor countries like Cambodia, where the elite eat abundantly and the poor already struggle to feed themselves. Globally, the rush to turn small family farms into commercial enterprises isn’t aimed at feeding the needy, many policy experts say. As Oxfam reports, two-thirds of agricultural deals with foreign investors take place in chronically hungry countries.
There’s a big push for “big ag” in the developing world. But shifts toward mechanized agriculture with amped-up production “will not solve the problem: it will make it worse,” writes Olivier De Schutter, the U.N. specialist on the right to food. Large-scale investments in farmland do less to reduce poverty “than if access to land and water were improved for the local farming communities.”
Full story here
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