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.
About Fred Pearce
Fred Pearce is an award-winning author and journalist based in London. He has reported on environment, science, and development issues from sixty-seven countries over the past twenty years. Environment consultant at New Scientist since 1992, he also writes regularly for the Guardian newspaper and Yale University’s prestigious e360 website. Pearce was voted UK Environment Journalist of the Year in 2001 and CGIAR agricultural research journalist of the year in 2002, and won a lifetime achievement award from the Association of British Science Writers in 2011. His many books include With Speed and Violence, Confessions of an Eco-Sinner, The Coming Population Crash, and When the Rivers Run Dry.
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Editorial Review
In this wide-ranging but efficient book, the author looks at how purchases by foreign investors of massive tracts of land in countries in Africa, South America, the former Soviet bloc and elsewhere have often caused local ruin. Impoverished residents of these countries, he writes, often lose their land, homes and livelihoods as they are evicted to make way for new projects. Most often those projects are massive industrial farms, with the majority of profits enriching foreign companies and their investors. Pearce is acclaimed for his keen environmental reporting in books about water shortages (When the Rivers Run Dry, 2006) and climate change (With Speed and Violence, 2007), and here he discusses environmental impact, particularly regarding projects in which water sources are diverted or forests are razed. More often the author focuses on financial and societal consequences, particularly for those at the bottom of the economic totem pole. These big-ticket investment deals often influence and distort governments and the law. In one section, he details how international investment agreements can create an environment in which “[e]ven if the locals are starving or parched with thirst, in law the rights of the foreign investor come first.” He also writes of how even well-meaning conservation groups’ efforts to create protected wildlife zones in some countries can have the side effect of uprooting local residents. Pearce paints a bleak picture, with many seemingly insurmountable problems, but he provides an important look at a problem rarely discussed in the mainstream media. – Kirkus Reviews
“The Land Grabbers: The New Fight Over Who Owns the Earth” by Fred Pearce
The Washington Post Book Review -August 4, 2012 (Excerpt)
Some historical developments are so diffuse, and so vast, that it’s hard for anyone to track them. For the past few years a handful of thinkers — including Lester R. Brown, president of the Washington-based Earth Policy Institute — have warned that some of the world’s wealthiest nations, corporations and individuals have been buying up real estate in the developing world to produce food and for other reasons. But now British environmental writer Fred Pearce has documented the myriad ways this global spending spree is transforming the planet and its inhabitants.
An environment consultant at the New Scientist magazine, Pearce has conducted an exhaustive survey of how this phenomenon has played out in places as disparate as the small village of Gambella, Ethiopia; the headquarters of a London investment fund; and the wild expanses of Patagonia. In many instances, the same story repeats itself in different venues: Corporations and entrepreneurs in well-off countries that are anxious about food supply or worried about the loss of wild lands buy up or otherwise move in on land in poor but potentially fertile countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Local villagers are often pushed aside in the process.
It’s obvious why investors are eyeing new opportunities for food production: With the world’s population at 7 billion and headed for more than 9 billion by 2050, there is a growing demand for food at the same time that overexploitation has depleted the world’s resources. Take Saudi Arabia, for example, where the government has spent $40 billion to create what Pearce calls “geometric oases” of wheat, fruit and dairy farms. The Saudis have almost drained their aquifers, which is why in 2010 they inked contracts to grow rice in Cambodia, Pakistan, the Philippines and Vietnam and now rank as the world’s second-largest rice importer. [Read the full article...]
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