The Land Grabbers: The New Fight over Who Owns the Earth
Fred Pearce
Language: English
Pages: 336
ISBN: 0807003417
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
“Raises complex and urgent issues.”—Booklist, starred review
How Wall Street, Chinese billionaires, oil sheiks, and agribusiness are buying up huge tracts of land in a hungry, crowded world.
An unprecedented land grab is taking place around the world. Fearing future food shortages or eager to profit from them, the world’s wealthiest and most acquisitive countries, corporations, and individuals have been buying and leasing vast tracts of land around the world. The scale is astounding: parcels the size of small countries are being gobbled up across the plains of Africa, the paddy fields of Southeast Asia, the jungles of South America, and the prairies of Eastern Europe. Veteran science writer Fred Pearce spent a year circling the globe to find out who was doing the buying, whose land was being taken over, and what the effect of these massive land deals seems to be.
The Land Grabbers is a first-of-its-kind exposé that reveals the scale and the human costs of the land grab, one of the most profound ethical, environmental, and economic issues facing the globalized world in the twenty-first century. The corporations, speculators, and governments scooping up land cheap in the developing world claim that industrial-scale farming will help local economies. But Pearce’s research reveals a far more troubling reality. While some mega-farms are ethically run, all too often poor farmers and cattle herders are evicted from ancestral lands or cut off from water sources. The good jobs promised by foreign capitalists and home governments alike fail to materialize. Hungry nations are being forced to export their food to the wealthy, and corporate potentates run fiefdoms oblivious to the country beyond their fences.
Pearce’s story is populated with larger-than-life characters, from financier George Soros and industry tycoon Richard Branson, to Gulf state sheikhs, Russian oligarchs, British barons, and Burmese generals. We discover why Goldman Sachs is buying up the Chinese poultry industry, what Lord Rothschild and a legendary 1970s asset-stripper are doing in the backwoods of Brazil, and what plans a Saudi oil billionaire has for Ethiopia. Along the way, Pearce introduces us to the people who actually live on, and live off of, the supposedly “empty” land that is being grabbed, from Cambodian peasants, victimized first by the Khmer Rouge and now by crony capitalism, to African pastoralists confined to ever-smaller tracts.
Over the next few decades, land grabbing may matter more, to more of the planet’s people, than even climate change. It will affect who eats and who does not, who gets richer and who gets poorer, and whether agrarian societies can exist outside corporate control. It is the new battle over who owns the planet.
From the Hardcover edition.
sell or lease their farms and commons from beneath their feet.” From Gambella to Mozambique, and South Sudan to Liberia, the great pastures and forests today are the only surviving places on the planet that “provide the scale of contiguous and intact estates sought by large-scale investors.” That is why they are under attack as never before. The current land rush, she says, “is a tipping point in the penetration of capital into agrarian societies.” We could be witnessing the beginning of the
thumb-shaped peninsula of desert sticking out into the Persian Gulf from Saudi Arabia. It is smaller than Connecticut, with a population about the same as Little Rock, Arkansas. It was a poverty-stricken community of pearl divers until the development of oil reserves in the 1950s. Then came the discovery, just offshore, of vast reserves of natural gas. Today, Qatar is the world’s largest exporter of natural gas (8.8 trillion cubic feet a year, for anyone who is counting). It is superrich even by
smallholders benefit because we hire and train them in new methods of farming,” Payne says. “Some will want to transfer those methods to their own plots.” Well, maybe in theory. But most of its activity is more prosaic than the PR. Its partners in Pretoria “have a lot of people of Afrikaner descent, people who were brought up on the land, very capable farmers, very tough,” Murrin told Reuters. Most of its current holdings are large established commercial farms in South Africa and its
will implement this vision out of Africa,” he says. He plans on having two and a half million acres of land under his plows in Africa—a third of them in Ethiopia and, he suggested in late 2011, another third in Tanzania. Karuturi promises to invest a billion dollars in the virgin fields of Gambella alone. Flash floods from the River Baro obliterated thousands of acres of the first corn harvest in late 2011, but his response was to bring in Dutch consultants to prevent a repetition. He means
the Trans-Chaco Highway from Mariscal Estigarribia are three isolated colonies occupied by German-speaking Mennonites. The Christian Anabaptist sect came to the Chaco more than eighty years ago, from scattered homes in Ukraine, Russia, Canada, and later Mexico. At the invitation of the Paraguayan president, they took over 140,000 acres of the most remote part of the Chaco, an area their own chroniclers described as a “green hell.” The Mennonites had been on the move for centuries, because