Well, things are certainly hotting up in the “food wars.”

The biggest land grab in history?

HOW FOOD AND WATER ARE DRIVING A 21ST-CENTURY AFRICAN LAND GRAB

>>An Observer investigation reveals how rich countries faced by a global food shortage now farm an area double the size of the UK to guarantee supplies for their citizens>>

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/mar/07/food-water-africa-land-grab

>>"The foreign companies are arriving in large numbers, depriving people of land they have used for centuries. There is no consultation with the indigenous population. The deals are done secretly.* The only thing the local people see is people coming with lots of tractors to invade their lands.

"All the land round my family village of Illia has been taken over and is being cleared. People now have to work for an Indian company. Their land has been compulsorily taken and they have been given no compensation. People cannot believe what is happening. Thousands of people will be affected and people will go hungry.">>

*Doubtless the large transfers of funds to the leader’s Swiss bank account are also done secretly. This is Africa!

>>Leading the rush are international agribusinesses, investment banks, hedge funds, commodity traders, sovereign wealth funds as well as UK pension funds, foundations and individuals attracted by some of the world's cheapest land.>>

Wonder if we’ll see an African style Irish potato famine. There was enough food in Ireland at the time but it was being exported while the locals starved.

>>Meanwhile, the Saudi investment company Foras, backed by the Islamic Development Bank and wealthy Saudi investors, plans to spend $1bn buying land and growing 7m tonnes of rice for the Saudi market within seven years. The company says it is investigating buying land in Mali, Senegal, Sudan and Uganda. By turning to Africa to grow its staple crops, Saudi Arabia is not just acquiring Africa's land but is securing itself the equivalent of hundreds of millions of gallons of scarce water a year. Water, says the UN, will be the defining resource of the next 100 years.>>

Steven,

Yes, The World Bank as an agent of globalisation and Western corporate interests is still hard at it :

http://www.brettonwoodsproject.org/art-568890

Poirot

It’s not merely “Western” corporate interests.

As my previous post shows, Saudi Arabia is a major player.

So, of course, are China and India.

From my previously linked article

>>Indian companies, backed by government loans, have bought or leased hundreds of thousands of hectares in Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Senegal and Mozambique, where they are growing rice, sugar cane, maize and lentils to feed their domestic market.>>

>>…China has signed a contract with the Democratic Republic of Congo to grow 2.8m hectares of palm oil for biofuels….>

Egypt too is a player:

>>We met Tegenu Morku, …on his way to the region of Oromia in Ethiopia to find 500 hectares of land for a group of Egyptian investors. They planned to fatten cattle, grow cereals and spices and export as much as possible to Egypt. There had to be water available and he expected the price to be about 15 birr (75p) per hectare per year – less than a quarter of the cost of land in Egypt and a tenth of the price of land in Asia.>>

And this from Bloomberg:

FOREIGN INVESTORS INCREASE ‘LAND GRABS,’ HARMING POOR FARMERS, OXFAM SAYS

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-22/foreign-investor-land-grabs-harm-farmers-in-poorer-nations-oxfam-says.html

>>Foreign-investor purchases of farmland in poorer nations are displacing local populations and adding little to a country’s wealth, even as agricultural prices increase, according to Oxfam International.>>

>>As many as 227 million hectares (561 million acres) -- an area one and a half times the size of Alaska -- have been sold or leased since 2001, with most of the “land grabs” occurring in the past two years, Oxfam said in a report released today. With the consent of governments, weak legal codes allow the purchase of large tracts with no regard for residents or the environment, said Oxfam, which is based in Oxford, U.K.>>

I am afraid the locals don’t stand a chance. Nobody seems very concerned about “indigenous rights” or “human rights.”

IN AFRICA IT’S CORRUPTION THAT GREASES THE DEALS. ALL MOST AFRICAN LEADERS ARE INTERESTED IN IS WHO CAN MAKE THE BIGGEST PAY-OFFS.

Is this land grab all that bad. You can't roll it up and take it away.
Maybe use of the land can be greatly improved, and it adds up to export for the parent country. I can't see how it would be a backward step.

Steven,

Yes, well the greasy palms of corrupt African regimes are usually shaking hands with the IMF and the World Bank (check out Egypt's experience).
But I take your point that any country with challenges in food production and the means to jump into bed with a corrupt African regime will do so.

India is actually an interesting case in point. IMF and World Bank policies involved with the "Green Revolution" have been instrumental in the degradation and poisoning of the land and massive water depletion.
Structural adjustments instituted by governments in partnership with these organisations usually debase the environment and enrich corporate interests outside those countries and often leave the peasant populations worse off than before.

This is a really poorly organised article. It is hard to see what the main point is other than corporations are bad and unscientific practices are good. I would have found it much better if there had been a focus from a scientific approach about the various methods, rather than the “agroecology is good, everything else is bad” sort of argument.

The evidence provided in favour of agroecology is not about the measured benefits of agroecology, but consists of a whole host of ideological arguments: “mining companies are stealing agricultural land”, “plant breeding is being taken over by commercial interests”, “free trade is bad”, and so on. Somehow, we are expected to believe agroecology will fix these problems, without and data on how it performs.

The piece de resistance is the praise of biodynamic agriculture. An agricultural system based on astrology and homeopathy is supposed to be what we should aspire to? The authors must be joking. The fact that they would praise something as ridiculously silly as biodynamic agriculture shows how anti-science their thinking is.

Agroecology might be all well and good for those who have the financial backing to be weekend farmers, but it ain’t going to be feeding the world, unless we can find a way of getting rid of 70% of the population.