In a report
using sensational and critical language, the Worldwatch Institute is drawing attention
to the amount of land investors are buying around the world.
Since 2000,
more than 36 million hectares---- an area about the
size of Japan---- has been
purchased or leased by foreign entities, mostly for agricultural use. Today,
nearly 15 million hectares more is under negotiation (www.worldwatch.org) , the organization says
today.
"Farmland is lost or degraded on every continent, while 'land grabbing'---- the purchase or lease of
agricultural land by foreign interests---- has
emerged as a threat to food security in several countries," writes Gary
Gardner, contributing author of the Worldwatch Institute's State of the
World 2015: Confronting Hidden Threats to Sustainability.
About half of grabbed land is intended exclusively for use in
agriculture, while another 25 percent is intended for a mix of agricultural and
other uses, the institute says on its website today.
The land that is not used for agriculture is often used for forestry, it
says.
“Land grabbing has surged since 2005 in response to a food price crisis
and the growing demand for biofuels in the United States and the European
Union. Droughts in the U.S., Argentina, and Australia, has further driven
interest in land overseas.
"Today, the FAO reports that essentially no additional suitable
[agricultural] land remains in a belt around much of the middle of the
planet," writes Gardner.
As a result, the institute says, “the largest grabbers of land are often
countries that need additional resources to meet growing demands.”
More than half of the land is in Africa, especially in water-rich
countries such as the Congo. Asia comes second at six million hectares, mainly
from Indonesia.
The largest area acquired from a single country is in Papua New Guinea,
with nearly four million hectares, which is more than eight per cent of the
country's total land cover, either sold or leased out.
The largest investor country is the U.S. whose investors have acquired
about seven million hectares worldwide. Malaysia comes in a distant second,
with slightly more than 3.5 million hectares acquired.
The institute also notes that about 20 per cent of aquifers are being
pumped faster than they can be recharged by rains, that other farmlands are
being lost to salinization and erosion and that climate change is projected to
take out up to another two per cent of current farmland every 10 years.
