Land acquired over past decade could have produced food for a billion people

[dipsydoodle]

International land investors and biofuel producers have taken over land around the world that could feed nearly 1bn people.

Analysis by Oxfam of several thousand land deals completed in the last decade shows that an area eight times the size of the UK has been left idle by speculators or is being used largely to grow biofuels for US or European vehicles.

In a report, published on Thursday, Oxfam says the global land rush is out of control and urges the World Bank to freeze its investments in large-scale land acquisitions to send a strong signal to global investors to stop "land grabs".

"More than 60% of investments in agricultural land by foreign investors between 2000 and 2010 were in developing countries with serious hunger problems. But two-thirds of those investors plan to export everything they produce on the land. Nearly 60% of the deals have been to grow crops that can be used for biofuels," says the report.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2012/oct/04/land-deals-preventing-food-production

[Control-Z]

1. I find myself repeating the same thing

on so many posts:

"This is so fucked up."

Seriously.

[fasttense]

2. It's just like the potato famine in Ireland.

While people were starving in the streets of Ireland, literally, Ireland was shipping lamb, pork and chicken to England. While the Irish were throwing up from eating their potato seed stock, wheat and other grains in mass quantities were being shipped out of Ireland to England.

The "free" market, neoliberal economics, at its best.

[bemildred]

3. +1. "I need to get all those goddamn peasants off my land! nt

[dipsydoodle]

5. The main tragedy of the potato famine

was that they simply didn't understand at that time that the blight had its affect only on the particular strain of potatoes they were growing. Use of alternative strains would've overcome the problem.

[fasttense]

6. Well I'm not so sure about it affecting only one strain.

Today that potato virus is in most potatoes. None that I know of are immune from it. And they think the potato virus which caused the famine originated in Mexico, though it's been a while since I studied the biology and history. Even if it was worse in one strain, it would have eventually spread to all strains, like it has today.

[dipsydoodle]

7. By coincidence this is from a few days back

Ancient potatoes hold key to Famine mystery

UK researchers have discovered that the potato blight that caused the Great Famine of 1845-48 was the same strain which caused a second outbreak some 30 years later.

The failure of the potato crop, a staple part of the Irish diet, resulted in the deaths of one million people through starvation and forced a million more to emigrate.

If the same information was available today, farmers and smallholders would be advised to harvest the crop, eat or sell it but not store any seed potatoes for planting the following year.

Instead, new blight-free seed potatoes would be sourced, eliminating the problem.

http://www.independent.ie/national-news/ancient-potatoes-hold-key-to-famine-mystery-3239580.html

What I'd written originally I'd learned in economics back in the early seventies - don't recall why the subject came up. The problem was that of perpetuating the same strain by replanting it.

[fasttense]

9. Good luck with that new blight-free potatoes.

I have grown all kinds of potatoes and if the plant gets stressed from the cold, the heat, the drought, Colorado potato beetle or other bug infestation then they get the blight. No strain I have raised is blight free. I must carefully pull out any plants that are showing the slightest deformity and carefully weed out all seed potatoes with the slightest bloch or misshape (and even then some potatoes grow with the blight). Look at the potatoes you buy in the grocery store, many of them have the blight.

The blight is everywhere today. But it's true you can grow one crop, if it has the blight, and it will do alright. It's the second crop that is devastating. So your article is saying that the poor Irish people could have gotten new seed potatoes from where exactly?

[tama]

8. Monoculture. Wisdom of putting all your eggs in same basket.

The more variety and biodiversity there is, the more strong the ecosystem is.

[tama]

4. Holy Cow!

On the positive side, driving and overall use of liquid fuels has been going down in OECD countries since 2008.

[Bill USA]

10. Largest buyers by country: India, China, U.S.

[font size="3"] Interesting. The World Bank said in a 2010 study, Policy Research Working Paper 5371, "Placing the 2006/08 Commodity Price Boom into Perspective", July 2010, that:

"Worldwide, biofuels account for only about 1.5% of the area under grains/oilseeds (cultivation)"[/font]



http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/IW3P/IB/2010/07/21/000158349_20100721110120/Rendered/PDF/WPS5371.pdf

[font size="3"](Page 12)
"...worldwide, biofuels account for only about 1.5 percent of the area under grains/oilseeds"

Here's a study done by the Land Matrix Partnership points out the largest buyer of land has been China and India, but with the U.S. (i.e. U.S. companies) coming in third. The Land Matrix is ".. partly financed by the internal resources of the partners organisations. The additional support of Oxfam, SDC, Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, BMZ and European Commission".

These 14 Countries Are Buying Incredible Amounts Of Foreign Land In Deals You Never Hear About

[dipsydoodle]

11. Your last link is far more comprehensive than the one I used.