Environment

Grabbing Land for Food

by Barbara McPherson | March 21, 2009 at 09:57 am

165 views | 16 Recommendations | 2 comments

Food security is a term that is coming into popular use. People are starting to realize that having a secure source of safe food for the population is essential. Some nations have taken steps to ensure that their populations will have a source of food and materials in the future. They have done it by leasing or buying land in poorer nations.

Nations Targetted: Uganda, Brazil, Cambodia, Sudan, Pakistan

Nations Participating in the Land Grab: China, South Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, India

A recent deal, involving S. Korean Daewoo Corp. brokered by the former president of Madagascar helped to bring about a change of leadership. It involved a 50 year lease on nearly half of the arable land of that nation.

Another deal brokered in Madagascar involves the Indian firm Varun. They are targetting nearly a million acres of rice growing land. Their plan is to export to India 20% of the rice crop to begin with and increasing the export amount to 60% in subsequent years.

There are environmental and social concerns over subsistence farmers losing access to farmland and common grazing lands. Environmental damage by intensive, industrial farming can have long lasting consequences.

One of the clear consequences of the global land grab is that workers, farmers and local communities will inevitably lose access to land for their food production. The very basis on which to build food sovereignty is simply being bartered away. And it is not only the questionable issue of giving foreigners control of domestic farmland but also the restructuring of the farming sector that this process entails. For these lands will be transformed from smallholdings or forests or whatever they may be into large industrial estates connected to far-off markets. Farmers will never be real farmers again, job or no job.

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Amy Judd

at 10:15 on March 21st, 2009

This is just not fair and should not be allowed - why should richer nations be able to just take from poorer ones, and how will those poorer ones feed themselves when they can't even farm their own land?

Barbara McPherson

at 08:45 on March 22nd, 2009

Well, we're talking massive operations, much like the banana companies in Central America used to have. Banana Republic is not a clothing store. The land holdings are so vast that the companies control the government. The workers must live on the operation and gradually become indentured. The environmental costs are huge as irregularities in the land are smoothed out so machinery can work more efficiently and chemical fertilizers and herbicides are applied to the land. Huge amounts of water are needed for these factory farms and it is obtained by sucking rivers or aquafirs dry. Many subsistence farmers who give up or lose their land are illiterate and have no where to go except the seething slums. Agricultural land is the new oil and the foreign control of it is the new colonialism.