Peak Oil is You
Donate Bitcoins ;-) or Paypal :-)
Page added on April 11, 2014
Up for Grabs: Land and Food in a Hungry World
The president of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, warned that battles over water and food will erupt within the next five to ten years as a result of climate change. As he was talking of the risks of climate change, the UN announced that food prices had risen to their highest in almost a year.
[photo credit: Oakland Institute]
At about the same time as these announcements were happening, the Oakland Institute released a report on the World Bank and land grabs, stating that the World Bank was destroying traditional farming to support corporate land grabs (where corporations, individuals and governments buy or lease prime agricultural lands, often displacing poor and marginalized communities who have lived there for generations).
The Uptick on News on Food Security
It’s easy for some to dismiss talk of food shortages and insecurity as just more “chicken little warnings” that have been wrong in the past. But a look at recent news on food security should give people cause for concern.
Between 2011 and 2012, for instance, global production of grain fell 3 percent, largely as a result of droughts that hit corn production in the United States and wheat production in Australia, Russia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, according to the Earth Policy Institute.
Last week, an article from the Los Angeles Times reported that the challenge of feeding 1.3 billion people in a nation grappling with tainted food and polluted land is prompting Chinese companies to invest in farmland overseas. China has 20% of the world’s population and just 9% of its arable land, and it is looking to acquire fertile farmland in countries around the world (China is not alone; India, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are just some others doing the same).
Developing country governments are eager for foreign investments, and some have sold land for as little as fifty cents per hectare.
[image credit: www.foodfirst.org]
Pro-corporate Agenda
“The World Bank is facilitating land grabs and sowing poverty by putting the interests of foreign investors before those of locals,” said Anuradha Mittal, Executive Director of the Oakland Institute.
For example, due to policies driven by the World Bank, Sierra Leone has taken 20 percent of its arable land from rural populations and leased it to foreign sugar cane and palm oil producers. And in Liberia, British, Malaysian, and Indonesian palm-oil interests have secured long-term leases for over 1.5 million acres of land formerly held by local communities.
The Oakland Institute believes the World Bank’s strategy “still upholds a fundamentally pro-corporate agenda and a neoliberal vision of the economy.” Indeed, land grabs are just a continuation of the global trade agenda that benefits the rich over poor and looks like a modern form of colonialism.
The Climate Question
In the face of growing inequality and inequity around the world, and increasing severity of the impacts of climate change, the issue of land grabs is unsettling. The latest report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that global crop yields are beginning to decline (especially for wheat), raising doubts as to whether production could keep up with population growth.
“Climate change is acting as a brake. We need yields to grow to meet growing demand, but already climate change is slowing those yields,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton professor and an author of the report.
[image credit: ciat.cgiar.org/]
Promote Greater Rights
With the global population predicted to be over 9 billion people by 2050, and with that rise, an increase in land paved over for growing cities, the pressure to feed people will become a critical issue. There will be more and more pressure from developed countries to try and obtain food security for their own citizens.
Land rights and human rights must be strengthened and prioritized. And poor countries and small holder farmers need to be supported by multilateral organizations like the World Bank, not put at risk by policies that only serve rich governments, corporations and elite.
11 Comments on "Up for Grabs: Land and Food in a Hungry World"
Kenz300 on Fri, 11th Apr 2014 12:56 pm
Too many people and too few resources……
Years of Living Dangerously Premiere Full Episode – YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brvhCnYvxQQ
bobinget on Fri, 11th Apr 2014 3:13 pm
Note that Mali, Sudan and DRC (Democratic Republic Congo) are all currently either engaged in war or recently emerged from a serious conflict.
I watched Central America, (Nicaragua) the Caribbean, (Haiti) become the poorest two nations in the hemisphere because of this practice of proxy farming.
The sad facts are small farm holders are not really
subsistance for uncontrolled family growth.
Agrarian Nicaragua, made abortion illegal for poor women in a political deal with The Church.
noobtube on Fri, 11th Apr 2014 4:24 pm
Yet another example that Westerners are always screaming about African population, not because of any OVER-population nonsense, but simply to invade and destroy the land on which Africans live.
It won’t work, obviously. But, it does show the contempt and hatred the American-controlled system of exploitation has for the peoples of Africa.
Davy, Hermann, MO on Fri, 11th Apr 2014 4:41 pm
Anti-American PPI’S HERE TAKE NOTE. Food is as vital and influential as energy. Expect it to play a much bigger role in world bi-lateral trade deals and political relationships. BE CAREFUL China, your lust of destroying your American enemy will lead you to hunger and social collapse. ME peoples beware of attacking your great “Satan” The Satan that feeds you. Don’t expect these land grabs to go far. With populations in overshoot to carrying capacity in these countries the pressure will be on to renationalize these resources eventually. What will likely happen is investments will be made then the renationalization will take place leaving the country making the investment making in effect a donation.
noobtube on Fri, 11th Apr 2014 5:46 pm
It’s much better to do things the American way.
Enter a country screaming about Democracy.
Allow the people to vote in target country.
When target country votes for their own leader, the United States finances “rebels” to liberate the people from their own leader (see Nicaragua, the Congo, Vietnam, Libya, etc.).
Demonize them in the Western-controlled press, calling it regimes, unstable, oppressive, corrupt, and more recently, sponsors of terrorism.
If that fails impose sanctions.
Finally, if none of that works, invade the country, screaming about Democracy, freedom, and “liberating” the people.
You simply must love the American way!
DC on Fri, 11th Apr 2014 7:11 pm
Why are there so many ‘poor’, hungry people in Africa?
Because they have no means of providing for their own well-being. But why is that? Because uS\allied corporations install brutal dictatorships that support globalized uS corporate efforts to export Africa’s natural resources at below market rates to ‘western consumers’. ‘We’ drown them in fiat debt they can never repay-then use the IMF\WB to force selloffs of land\resources to ‘pay back’ the interest on the debt they ‘owe’. They are poor-because ‘we’ steal the very land and resources they need to survive. ‘We’ for our part, call this ‘progress’. Then the missionary-industrial complex comes along and makes weepy tear-jerker adds about how you can ‘feed’ an african for a dollar a day. What the adds, or the uSgov never propose, is that ‘we’ stop stealing their land and resources and give to them back to the people that actually you know..live there.
Kenz300 on Fri, 11th Apr 2014 9:51 pm
If you can not provide for yourself you can not provide for a child………….
Family planning services for all……
No one wants to see their child starve to death.
kervennic on Fri, 11th Apr 2014 11:25 pm
Always poison the white man before he poison you.
rollin on Fri, 11th Apr 2014 11:49 pm
Sad situation pushed by confused sociopathic governments that believe the dollar is more important than the land or the citizen.
At least the “land grabs” are still farms. Here in the developed world and in some developing nations, the farms are turned into towns and developments, just gone.
Now that is a sign of social collapse when you pave over your food sources.
Makati1 on Sat, 12th Apr 2014 2:23 am
America, the land of the once free, and home of the brave drone pilots. Buyer of slaves and now killer of their descendants. But this bad habit is the result of their European roots where no death is too many if you can plunder and get rich doing it.
The world is an interesting place these days. 317 million slaves with invisible collars reside in a once great land. Won by killing off the native owners long ago, plundered into ruin by the greedy European colonists, destined to fall by the same greedy wants of today’s inhabitants. Consumer of over 1/3 of the world’s resources, all bought with loans from the Chinese, Japanese, Russians, etc.
No, I don’t hate the Us. I hate what it has become. That it waves the torn, tattered, moth eaten flag of democracy as a shield for the death and destruction it has been spreading around the world for the last 100 years. I love the idea it once presented, but lost in the flood of greed unleashed in the late 1800s. I see it as a 3rd world country before my time passes. Too bad! It had it all and blew it.
Kenz300 on Sun, 13th Apr 2014 2:29 pm
The world adds 80 million more people to feed every year……
Endless population growth is not sustainable……..