The great land grab

Faced with such circumstances it is perhaps understandable that many countries are seeking to outsource their food supplies by taking over farmland in other parts of the world.

Second, the current financial downturn has also forced the big end of town to search out safe havens and find new ways of delivering secure financial returns by investing in land for food and fuel production. Japanese and Arab corporations are currently the most involved in the overseas land grab. Many of Japan’s major conglomerates like Mitsubishi and Mitsui have been involved in large overseas land deals, buying into huge facilities in Latin America and elsewhere. But the list also includes many major European and US corporations including, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Lonrho and Morgan Stanley.

Defenders of the land grab argue that many poor countries will benefit by trading off land and labour for foreign investment and technology, both vital for developing their nation’s infrastructure. Others see the process as simply siphoning off food and profits to other countries and foreign elites, triggering more poverty, disadvantage and dispossession, and decreasing local access to critical food supplies.

If left unchecked land grabs could ultimately spell the end of many rural livelihoods and small-scale subsistence farming throughout the world and threaten millions with starvation.

But the land grab also illustrates other truths, in particular the way the global food crisis is exposing the fact that climate change, increasing soil depletion and loss of water resources, and falling crop yields will all bear down heavily on future world food supplies. What this may well mean is tighter markets, higher prices, pressure on farmlands, and for the developing world, more poverty and hunger.