Seized: The 2008 landgrab for food and financial security (new enclosures)

[Hannah Bell]

Land grabbing has been going on for centuries... Hardly a day goes by without reports in the press about struggles over land... In many countries, private investors are buying up huge areas to be run as natural parks or conservation areas. And wherever you look, the new biofuels industry, promoted as an answer to climate change, seems to rely on throwing people off their land.

Something more peculiar is going on now, though....There are two parallel agendas driving two kinds of land grabbers. But while their starting points may differ, the tracks eventually converge. The first track is food security. A number of countries which rely on food imports and are worried about tightening markets, while they do have cash to throw around, are seeking to outsource their domestic food production by gaining control of farms in other countries...Saudi Arabia, Japan, China, India, Korea, Libya and Egypt all fall into this basket...

The second track is financial returns. Given the current financial meltdown, all sorts of players in the finance and food industries – the investment houses that manage workers’ pensions, private equity funds looking for a fast turnover, hedge funds driven off the now collapsed derivatives market, grain traders seeking new strategies for growth – are turning to land, for both food and fuel production, as a new source of profit. Land itself is not a typical investment for a lot of these transnational firms...

Where these tracks come together is that in both cases it is the private sector that will be in control. In the drive for food security, governments are the ones taking the lead through a public policy agenda... But there is no room to be fooled. While public officials negotiate and make the deals for the “food security” land grab contracts, the private sector is explicitly expected to take over and deliver. So whichever of the two tracks you look at, they point in one direction: foreign private corporations getting new forms of control over farmland to produce food not for the local communities but for someone else. Did someone say colonialism was a thing of the past?

The underlying contempt that all of this shows for open markets and free trade, so much lauded by Western advisers over the last four decades, is glaring. Another fundamental issue is that workers, farmers and local communities will inevitably lose access to land for local food production...what happens over the long term when you grant control over your country’s farmland to foreign nations and investors?

http://www.grain.org/briefings/?id=212

[HillbillyBob]

1. Answer to that

Famine and Starvation for the locals, likely serfdom or slavery..