OVER
the last decade, as populations have grown, capital has flowed across
borders and crop yields have leveled off, food-importing nations and
private investors have been securing land abroad to use for
agriculture. Poor governments have embraced these deals, but their
people are in danger of losing their patrimony, not to mention their
sources of food.
According
to Oxfam,
land equivalent to eight times the size of Britain was sold or leased
worldwide in the last 10 years. In northern Mozambique, a
Brazilian-Japanese venture plans to farm more than 54,000 square
miles — an area comparable to Pennsylvania and New Jersey combined
— for food exports. In 2009, a Libyan firm leased 386 square miles
of land from Mali without consulting local communities that had long
used it. In the Philippines, the government is so enthusiastic to
promote agribusiness that it lets foreigners register partnerships
with local investors as domestic corporations.
The
commoditization of global agriculture has aggravated the
destabilizing effects of these large-scale land grabs. Investors
typically promise to create local jobs and say that better farming
technologies will produce higher crop yields and improve food
security.
However,
few of these benefits materialize. For example, as The Economist
reported, a Swiss company promised local farmers 2,000 new jobs when
it acquired a 50-year lease to grow biofuel crops on 154 square miles
in Makeni, Sierra Leone; in the first three years, it produced only
50.
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