Global Land Grab Transparency

categories: Community Development, Distribution, Farm Economics, Policy

Published June 04, 2009 @ 11:59AM PT

Countries with limited agricultural land have been buying up the farm land of poorer countries as a hedge against future need. These contracts are going to start getting more attention:

... GRAIN is launching today a new website that offers the most comprehensive information tool on the global land grab for outsourced food production: http://farmlandgrab.org.

This new site is an improved version of the site initiated by GRAIN last year, which provides an open, up-to-date and easy to search library of over 800 articles, interviews and reports on farm land grabs around the world published since the outbreak of the food crisis in 2008.

The global trend to buy up or lease farmlands abroad as a strategy to secure basic food supplies, or simply to get rich, is not slowing down -- it is getting worse. The scale is becoming more apparent now, with researchers counting some 20 million hectares of good cropland already signed off to foreign investors, or soon to be, worldwide. More countries and corporations are getting involved, from Sri Lanka to Congo or Hyundai to Varun. Farmers' organisations, human rights groups and other social movements are agitating against this obscene approach to feeding their countries, while at least one government – the Ravalomanana regime in Madagascar -- has been brought down because of its involvement in such a deal. ...

The site will have wiki-like features, respect the anonymity of whistleblowing contributors who don't want to be identified, and attempt to bring as much information about these deals as possible into the public domain.

Recent postings to the site include a report on statements by an EU official comparing the trend to a neocolonialism that may harm poorer countries and this one examining farm land outsourcing in Africa, with a focus on Saudi Arabia's purchases.

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Author

Natasha is an amateur eater with severe snarkolepsy and a c. 2002 blogging habit. She had a fabulous time studying ecological agriculture and policy at The Evergreen State College, and even did her homework while writing at various times for pacificviews.org, boomantribune.com, and mydd.com.