The great global land grab

[ensho]

http://www.redpepper.org.uk/The-great-global-land-grab


The global food crisis has prompted various rich countries to start buying up land in the poorer world to secure their food supplies. As well as affecting domestic food supplies in the countries affected, Sue Branford says it could be a time bomb for the world’s ability to cope with climate change

News of another big land deal between a rich nation and a poor developing country is becoming a common occurrence. In August a group of Saudi investors said that they would be investing $1 billion in land in Africa for rice cultivation. They are calling it their ‘7x7x7 project’, since they are aiming to plant 700,000 hectares of land to produce seven million tonnes of rice in seven years. The land will be distributed over several countries: Mali, Senegal and maybe Sudan and Uganda.

A few weeks earlier South Korea acquired 700,000 hectares of land in Sudan, also for rice cultivation. India is funding a large group of private companies to buy 350,000 hectares in as-yet unspecified countries in Africa. A group of South African businessmen is negotiating an 8 million hectare deal in the Democratic Republic of Congo. And so it goes on. The United Nations believes that at least 30 million hectares (about 74 million acres, well over the size of the UK) were acquired by outside investors in the developing world during the first half of this year alone.

The land grab was indirectly spawned by the international financial crisis. It’s interesting to trace the investors’ train of thought because it says a lot about the kind of world we’re heading towards. Some two years ago many financial players – the investment houses that manage workers’ pensions, private equity funds, hedge funds, big grain traders and so on – saw that the sub-prime mortgage bubble was about to burst and moved money into the safer commodities market. Although there was no real shortage of food, food prices (especially of cereals, but also of dairy and meat) rose dramatically.

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Close on their heels in the ranking of the profiteers came the world’s largest grain traders. These companies played a role in artificially creating the food scare in the first place, so they made sure they were well placed to profit from it. Cargill, the world’s largest grain trader, reported an increase in profits in 2008 of nearly 70 per cent over 2007, a 157 per cent rise in profits since 2006. Profits for ADM, the world’s second largest grain trader, showed a lower rate of increase in 2008, partly because of its heavy investments in the sinking ethanol market, but the company’s profits were still more than 200 per cent higher than they were in 2006 (see tables, right).

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Other countries, such as South Korea, Egypt, Libya, Kuwait, India and Japan, have also decided for their own reasons that, faced with the prospect of a world shortage of food in the future, it makes sense to find reliable sources outside their own borders for at least part of their food supply. This is what is driving the current land grab, comparable in a way to the ‘scramble for Africa’ in the late 19th century. Huge areas of the world are being taken over by foreign powers, but they are no longer using military force – they are waving chequebooks, which in today’s world can be an even more powerful weapon.

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The day the food runs out

The day that the food starts to run out in the world may come far more quickly than most of us imagine. At present, there are more than a billion people going hungry even though there is no shortage of food. The very poor don’t eat enough because they don’t have enough money. The underlying problem is one of social inequality, of the highly skewed distribution of financial resources in the world.
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if we know what's good for us we will ramp up 'local' food supply

one tick of the clock left

[ixion]

1. yeah, because converting a few golf courses to gardens is simply

unimaginable. :eyes:

[izquierdista]

2. Too much money

The creation of money instead of wealth is at the bottom of all this. What's the difference, you ask? Wealth is tangible: buildings, manufactured goods, oil, grain, cotton, etc. Money is a concept. It can be created when a sleazy appraiser and a conniving mortgage broker loan far more than a house is worth so they can pocket a nice commission. They've created more money, but not by an increase in wealth. The end result is that the extra money inflates the value of goods and runs up the price of food, gasoline and other tangible goods.

If people were a little less concerned with money, maybe they could focus on creating a little wealth and their lives would be better.

[undergroundpanther]

3. social inequality

NO one should be allowed to have such excess that people go hungry when there is no food shortages.Why we tolerate such evils as rich people among us is beyond me.A sane society would say,There will be NO tolerance of rich people until all people have some,as in enough to live.Stuff like food,health care, shelter,community transport,safe water,and to live without being abused(this includes financial abuse too) are human rights.Money enables such selfishness and death. Not having enough money to eat IS abuse of human rights. I say,eat the fucking rich.Because they are killing people!

[Greyhound]

4. Never let a good crisis go to waste.

There was a book written in the early-mid 80s that predicted all of this. By pushing all the money up to the top we created vast reserves that had to go somewhere and it did. Now we have these gigantic, as in beyond human comprehension, pools of money that are ahead of the devaluation that can literally buy an entire market, and they have (see the commodities markets in OP).

Now, as devaluation catches up with the real economies (the crash) real assets can be bought up at fire-sale prices. The kool-aid drinkers that believe in the mythical free market also imagine that this is all happenstance. It isn't.
:kick: & R