Africa and Asia have accounted for 44 and 37 percent, respectively, of the total land grabbed since 2000. Nearly two-thirds of those acres are in Eastern Africa and Southeast Asia.
For many countries – especially in sub-Saharan Africa – the investors represent a potential to modernize their farming. About 79 percent of the land deals in Africa have been for agriculture.
It also represents an influx of money – especially as other funding seems to have eased up. Thirty percent of World Bank loans funded African agriculture in 1980; it dropped to 12 percent in 2010, according to Woodhouse's 2011 study.
And, while taking water that others need is a worry, investors could potentially drive improved water storage and distribution in regions that don’t have the money to make such improvements.
“Ultimately, the extent to which large land deals can generate real development, secure access to natural resources for all, and improve food security will depend on their terms and conditions,” said Jose Graziano da Silva, director of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, at a 2012 Cornell University conference.
With the world population steadily rising, the United Nations has said that food production needs to double by 2050. But not everyone agrees large-scale investment and industrial farming is the way to improve global water and food capacity.
Who’s buying?
Most international land deals involve a tangle of different corporations and partnerships. A handful of the purchasers are countries, but most are investment firms, biofuel producers or large-scale farming operations.
Closely mirroring the top water grabbers, the top five countries by amount of land purchased since 2000 were the United States, Malaysia, the United Kingdom, China and the United Arab Emirates, according to Land Matrix data.
U.S. companies have grabbed about 777 million acres since 2000. The largest acquisition by a U.S. company was a highly publicized 1,482,632-acre purchase in Sudan by Texas-based Nile Trading and Development.
The firm purchased the land for about $25,000, and attained the rights to do whatever it pleased with it – natural resource extraction, mining, subleasing or farming. At least some of the land is used for palm oil – an ingredient for biofuel.
Other large U.S. purchasers include BHP Billiton, a large mining company that owns 877,000 acres in Indonesia, a country known for untapped mining potential, and media magnate Ted Turner of AOL and CNN fame, who owns 111,000 acres in Argentina, although it’s unclear if anything is farmed there.
The U.S. companies did not return requests for comment.
Agricultural producer and investor Cargill, which is listed in the LandMatrix report as owning 775,000 acres in Brazil for soybean production, never owned the land, according to spokesman Pete Stoddart. Rather, the company received crops from farmers on the land. This, too, has stopped, he said, since Cargill joined a soy moratorium created in response to an anti-deforestation report by Greenpeace.
Stoddart said overseas investment by Cargill is done in sustainable ways that address food security and help local people and communities.
The full impact of the global land grabbing is not clear because information on the deals and their water usage is sparse, D’Odorico said.
“Sure, this could be a way to bring in capital or create jobs for those who can’t grow their own economy,” D’Odorico said. “But there isn’t evidence that proves that. Here [his study] is evidence that this could lead to lost natural ecosystems, and people losing land they’ve relied on and water they need.”
This article originally ran at Environmental Health News, a news source published by Environmental Health Sciences, a nonprofit media company.
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6 Comments
Add CommentThe practice is the same as it has been for the last 500 years or so.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is nothing new.Check out all the old western movies.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThat's how all those land barons of long ago got so wealthy and filthy rich by forcing out the smaller farmer and rancher.Now just about all their children and grandchildren are lawyers or politicians to day. Some even became members of congress to instruct future Presidents what their grand pappy and daddy wants them to do.
It should be unlawful for corporations to own land, only citizens or the state. Corporations can lease lands from the state or individuals. It is ridiculous that citizens cannot afford land in their own country because they have to compete with well funded foreign entities.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI don't think corporations have ever acquired multinational public natural resources anywhere near the extent that it's being done now. It's becoming clear that the new oil (constrained resource) will be water and nutrients. The global population is expected to increase from ~7 to ~9 billion people by 2050 - an increase only slightly less than the total population of 2.5 billion in 1950. That increase is greater than the total world population at any time in human history prior to 1900.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAgricultural production efficiency is heavily dependent on mechanization and the application of petroleum products, biofuel production generally competes with agricultural for production resources and consumes large amounts of water.
The smart money is betting on the continued depletion of water and food production resources - the power grab is on! Whoever controls land and water resources will exert powerful control in the global economy.
All that foreign ownership will mean squat when the people there need the land and water for their own survival.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisApparently these rich people and corporations have never heard of nationalization. They get to spend the money to develop and then the local govt. nationalizes it and gets all of the profit. Sounds great to me.
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