Man must eat
US investment management company BlackRock, for example, has established a $200 million agriculture fund, and has earmarked $30 million for the acquisition of farmland. Renaissance Capital, a Russian investment company, has acquired more than 100,000 hectares in Ukraine. Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs have invested their money in pig breeding operations and chicken farms in China, investments that include the legal rights to farmland.
Food is becoming the new oil. Worldwide grain reserves dropped to a historic low at the beginning of 2008, and the ensuing price explosion marked a turning point, just as the oil crisis did in the 1970s. There were bread riots around the world, and 25 countries, including some of the biggest grain exporters, imposed restrictions on food exports.
Then came the second crisis of 2008, the economic crisis. Two fears – the fear of hunger and the fear of uncertainty – converged, triggering what some are already calling a second generation of colonialism.
…Audinet, the IFAD expert, knows the risks. “The way these agreements are structured can harm the country and the farmers in the long term, robbing them of their most important asset: land.” Olivier De Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, warns: “Because the countries in Africa are competing for investors, they are undercutting each other.” Some contracts, says De Schutter, are barely three pages long – for hundreds of thousands of hectares of land. These types of agreements stipulate what products are to be cultivated, the location and the purchase or lease price, but they include no environmental standards. They also lack the necessary investment regulations and the stipulation that jobs must be created, says De Schutter.</em>
Frightening stuff, for several reasons. First, an additional two billion people? As this article shows, we can’t feed the ones we have now- and displacing families and existing rural agriculture so that a massive corporation can grow food for export to those who can afford it, that’s only a win for the bottom line, not humanity.
Secondly, these megafarms aren’t the garden patch beside the road that Norman Rockwell painted. No, these are tightly controlled laboratories of chemicals, pumping toxins into the water and air, sucking the nutrients out of the soil and replacing them with patented formulas to increase yield and resist bugs, while loading up the “food” with additives that may well be unleashing who knows what sort of genetic mutations into our systems. These massive farms focus on a concentrated number of products- a few strains of corn, a single type of soybean- all designed for maximum profit to the shareholders. By reducing the natural diversity of a region, you run the risk of having the entire crop wiped out by a hardy virus or predator. Or sabotage.
If a handful of corporations ultimately control the food of the planet, they control the planet.
