Danielle
Nierenberg of the online Food Tank is troubled by the amount of farmland
foreigners are buying, mainly to set up modern large-scale farms devoted to
exporting.
She writes
today that “ when governments and private firms invest in or purchase large
tracts of land in other countries . . .
it can have serious environmental and social consequences.
“Investors claim that land grabs can help
alleviate the world food crisis by tapping into a country’s ‘unused’
agricultural potential, but such investments often do more harm than good,
disrupting traditional land use and leaving half a billion family farmers
vulnerable to exploitation.”
According to the Land Matrix, approximately 130 million hectares of
land has been bought or is involved in impending land
deals over the last 15 years.
She writes that “in South Sudan, the
country with the most transnational land acquisitions, land has been sold for
as little as US$0.025 cents per hectare.”
The country is, however, been engaged in
a civil war that comes and goes.
Approximately 60 percent of the food grown on acquired lands
is intended for export instead of feeding local communities, according to Oxfam
America.
Nearly
two-thirds of land grabs occur in countries with serious food security
problems, she writes.
For example, in
the Nacala Corridor of Mozambique, the Prosavana land grab will acquire 14 million
hectares of land, displacing upwards of 500,000 people who already cultivate
the area.
According to The World Food Programme,
about one-third of Mozambique’s 24.5 million
inhabitants are malnourished and 500,000 children ages six to 23 months are
undernourished.
On her blog, Nierenberg lists
organizations that are lobbying on this issue.
