Analysis
Africa: 'Land Rush' as Threats to Food Security
Intensify
16 May, 2010 | By Mae-Wan Ho
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This 'land rush' was triggered by the demand for biofuels, and
accelerated [2] with the financial and food crisis of 2007/8 (see [3]
Financing World Hunger, SiS 46).
Government policies promoting biofuels are based on the mistaken
belief that fuels made from plants are 'carbon neutral', in that burning
them would simply release the carbon dioxide fixed by photosynthesis
and would not increase greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The
European Union is aiming for 10 per cent of its transport to run on
biofuels by 2020 [4] (Europe Unveils 2020 Plan for Reducing C
Emissions, SiS 37). George W. Bush, for his part, proposed to cure the
US' 'addiction to oil' by increasing the federal budget 22 per cent for
research into clean fuel technologies including biofuels as substitutes for
oil to power the country's cars [5] (Biofuels for Oil Addicts, SiS 30).
The hope is to replace more than 70 per cent of oil imports from
'unstable parts of the world' - the Middle East - by 2025.
Meanwhile, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization
(FAO) helpfully identified immense areas of 'spare land' in developing
countries that could be used for planting 'bio-energy' crops to be turned
into biofuels. The World Bank's recent report on the 2008 commodities
price hike includes a diagram entitled [6] 'The stock of unused but
potentially arable land is enormous', depicting more than 700 million
hectares of 'unused' land in sub-Saharan Africa, and more than 800
million hectares in Latin America and the Caribbean.
CORPORATE FARMING FOR THE RICH
International agribusinesses, investment banks, hedge funds,
commodity traders, sovereign wealth funds, UK pension funds,
foundations and 'individuals have been snapping up some of the world's
cheapest land, in Sudan, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Malawi, Ethiopia,
Congo, Zambia, Uganda, Madagascar, Zimbabwe, Mali, Sierra Leone,
Ghana and elsewhere. Ethiopia alone has approved 815 foreign-financed
agricultural projects since 2007. Any land investors can't buy is leased
for about $1 per year per hectare. In many cases, the contracts have led
to evictions, civil unrest and complaints of 'land grabbing', John Vidal
reports in UK's Guardian [1].
Nyikaw Ochalla, an indigenous Anuak from the Gambella region of
Ethiopia now living in Britain but in regular contact with farmers in his
region, told Vidal [1]: 'All of the land in the Gambella region is utilised.
Each community has and looks after its own territory and the rivers and
farmlands within it. It is a myth propagated by the government and
investors to say that there is waste land or land that is not utilised in
Gambella.
'The foreign companies are arriving in large numbers, depriving people
of land they have used for centuries. There is no consultation with the
indigenous population. The deals are done secretly. The only thing the
local people see is people coming with lots of tractors to invade their
lands. People cannot believe what is happening. Thousands of people
will be affected and people will go hungry.'
Indian companies, backed by government loans, have bought or leased
hundreds of thousands of hectares in Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar,
Senegal and Mozambique, where they are growing rice, sugar cane,
maize and lentils to feed their domestic market.
The Ethiopian government denied the deals were causing hunger and
said that the land deals were attracting hundreds of millions of dollars of
foreign investment and tens of thousands of jobs. A spokesman said
that Ethiopia has 74 million hectares of fertile land, only 15 per cent of
which is currently in use. Of the remaining land, only 3 to 4 per cent is
offered to foreign investors.
Local government officers in Ethiopia said that foreign companies were
not being charged for water, and in Awassa, the al-Amouni farm set up
by Saudi billionaire businessman, Ethiopian-born Sheikh Modhammed al-
Amoudi, uses as much water a year as 100,000 Ethiopians.
Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern emirate states, Qatar, Kuwait and
Abu Dhabi, are thought to be the biggest buyers of African land. In
2008, Saudi Arabia, one of the Middle East's largest wheat-growers,
announced it was to reduce domestic cereal production by 12 per cent a
year to conserve water. The government earmarked US$5 billion to
provide loans at preferential rates to Saudi companies to invest in
countries with strong agricultural potential.
Saudi Arabia is also leasing land from other countries such as Pakistan
[7], already water-stressed and water-depleted. Ayesha Siddiqa, a
strategic and political analyst said the idea is for individual landowners
to lease to investors, opening the door to large-scale corporate farming.
'Big landowners who are now renting out their land to small farmers
will throw them out and put it up to the highest foreign bidder,' she
said, predicting that small landholders with 5-10 acres would be bought
out, and 'landlessness and rural poverty will increase.'
INCREASING HUNGER AND LANDLESSNESS
Land grab has indeed intensified since the 2007/8 food commodity price
crisis. The international not-for-profit organisation GRAIN produced a
comprehensive report warning that [2]: 'If left unchecked, this global
land grab could spell the end of small-scale farming and rural
livelihoods.'
The Asian Peasant Coalition (APC), with 15 million members in 26
peasant organisations and six other supporting non-government
organisations from Bangladesh, India, Malaysia, Nepal, Philippines, Sri
Lanka and Pakistan, launched an Asia-wide protest against the global
land grab in July 2009.[8] It said that 'state terrorism' and a widespread
land grab in poor Asian countries took place at the height of the
financial crisis.
The APC represents farmers, landless peasants, dalits, forest peoples,
indigenous people, agricultural workers, herders, pastoralists, and the
women and youths across these sectors.[9]
Approximately 365 million people in Asia derive their livelihoods from
land, but, landlessness in Asia is worsening at an alarming rate over past
decade, owing to [8] 'the greater degree of integration of Asian
countries with the global market, and increasing demands for land by
big corporate interests.' Landlessness among Asian peasants is very
high: 49.6 per cent in Bangladesh, 22 per cent in India, 10 per cent in
Nepal and almost 75 per cent in Pakistan and the Philippines, and the
trend is growing, according to Danilo Ramos, APC secretary general.
LAND GRAB ENCOURAGED BY GOVERNMENTS AND THE
WORLD BANK
More than 100 cases of land grab have been compiled by GRAIN. 'Land
grabbers' are driven by two different agendas, but they eventually
converge.
The first agenda is food security. A number of countries that rely on
food imports see outsourcing food production in foreign land as a long-
term strategy to feed their own people cost-effectively, instead of
having to pay the high prices in the world commodity markets. Saudi
Arabia, Japan, China, India, Korea, Libya and Egypt fall into this
category. Foreign governments are buying up farmland in countries like
Sudan, Cambodia and the Philippines that depend on food aid delivered
by the UN World Food Programme.
The second agenda is financial return, in particular, as the result of the
financial meltdown of the housing and stock markets in 2007/8,
investment fund managers have been turning to food and agricultural
commodities and derivatives [3]; and coincidentally, agricultural land
and produce are also seen as good sources of revenue.
Where these tracks come together [2] is that in both cases it is the
private sector that will be in control. In the drive for food security,
governments take the lead through a public policy agenda. But while
public officials negotiate and make the deals for land contracts, the
private sector is explicitly expected - and even encouraged - to take
over. It is effectively a 'new colonialism' by transnational corporations.
China, for example, has been remarkably self-sufficient in food, though
at a cost of using so much fertiliser that its soils are ruined, and its
waterways putrid with pollution [10, 11] (China's Soils Ruined by
Overuse of Chemical Fertilisers, China's Pollution Census Triggers
Green Five-Year Plan, SiS 46). The Chinese government has been
gradually outsourcing its food production well before the global food
crisis. Some 30 agricultural cooperation deals have been sealed to give
Chinese firms access to foreign farmland in exchange for Chinese
technologies, training and infrastructure development funds, not only in
Asia but also all over Africa.
'From Kazakhstan to Queensland, and from Mozambique to the
Philippines, a steady and familiar process is under way, with Chinese
companies leasing or buying up land, setting up large farms, flying in
farmers, scientists and extension workers, and getting down to the
work of crop production,' GRAIN reports [2]. Most of China's
offshore farming is dedicated to rice, soybean, and maize, along with
biofuel crops like sugarcane, cassava or sorghum.
The Gulf States - Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the
United Arab Emirates - have neither the water nor the soil to produce
food. But they have plenty of oil and money. Because they depend on
food imported mainly from Europe, and their currencies are pegged to
the US dollar, the simultaneous rise in food prices on the world market
and the fall in the US dollar have boosted their import bill from US$8
billion to US$20 billion within the past five years. Given that water is
already in short supply, the Saudi government decided to stop growing
wheat, their main staple, by 2016, and instead to grow it elsewhere and
ship it back.
The United Arab Emirates, similarly, under the aegis of the Gulf
Cooperation Council (GCC), banded together with Bahrain and the other
Gulf nations to formulate a collective strategy of outsourcing food
production, particularly to Islamic countries, where they will supply
capital and oil contracts in exchange for guarantees that their
corporations will have access to farmland and export the produce back
home. The most heavily targeted states are Sudan and Pakistan,
followed by a number of south-east Asian countries - Burma,
Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam - as well
as Turkey, Kazakhstan, Uganda, Ukraine, Georgia, Brazil and so on.
Within food industry circles, Japanese and Arab trading and processing
corporations are the most involved.
Japanese firms already own 12 million hectares of farmland abroad for
the production of food and fodder crops, some of that in China, where
in 2006, Asahi, Itochu and Sumitomo began leasing hundreds of
hectares of farmland for organic food production for the Chinese and
Korean markets. In 2007, Asahi expanded to develop the first Japanese
dairy farm in China. A year later, in September 2008, Asahi took
advantage of the melamine milk tragedy to launch its first liquid milk
product at a 50 per cent mark-up.
Japanese firms have also targeted Brazil. In late 2007, Mitsui bought
100,000 hectares of Brazilian farmland for soybean production.
The finance industry is getting in on the act. Throughout 2008, an army
of investment houses, private equity funds, hedge funds and the like
have been targeting farmlands throughout the world [2], with the World
Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development
'greasing the way for this investment flow' and 'persuading'
governments to change land ownership laws to ease the transactions.
As a result, land prices have started to climb.
Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs have taken control of China's
livestock industry: Its biggest piggeries, poultry farms and meat
processing plants, including rights to the farmland. New York-based
BlackRock Inc, one of the world's largest money managers with nearly
US$1.5 trillion on its books, set up a US$200 million agricultural hedge
fund, of which US$30 million will be used to acquire farmland around
the world. Morgan Stanley, which nearly joined the queue for a US
Treasury Department bail-out, bought 40,000 hectares of farmland in
the Ukraine, where Renaissance Capital, a Russian investment house has
acquired rights to 300,000 hectares. Meanwhile, Black Earth Farming, a
Swedish investment group, acquired control of 331,000 hectares of
farmland in the black earth region of Russia, where Alpcot-Agro,
another Swedish investment firm, also bought rights to 128,000
hectares. Landkom, the British investment group, bought 100,000
hectares of agricultural land in Ukraine and vows to expand to 350,000
hecatres by 2011. All these land acquisitions are for producing grains,
oils, meat and dairy for those in the world market who can pay.
WORLD FOOD CRISIS WORSENS
Not surprisingly, the food crisis worsens for the poor. At the end of
2009, over one billion of the world's population are critically hungry,
with 24,000 dying of hunger each day, more than half of them children.
The United Nations Food Programme faces a budget shortfall of
US$4.1 billion [12, 13]. Food prices have remained high despite the
economic downturn, and extreme weather patterns affecting production
are causing more hunger.
Many commentators rightly blame the deregulated financial speculation
in the global agricultural commodities markets for precipitating the
2007/8 world food crisis [3], and the ensuing land grab has almost
certainly made it worse.
However, other more serious, longer term threats to food security are in
danger of being overlooked, which no amount of land grab can insure
any country or individuals against.
Veteran world watcher Lester Brown reminds us that many past
civilizations collapsed on account of shrinking food supplies, and we
may well meet the same fate from [14] 'our failure to deal with the
environmental trends that are undermining world food economy - most
importantly failing water tables, eroding soils, and rising temperatures.'
CURRENT FOOD SYSTEM COLLAPSING FROM
UNSUSTAINABLE INDUSTRIAL AGRICULTURAL PRACTICES
Our agriculture and food system has been showing signs of collapse
[14, 15], with world grain yields falling to meet demand most years
since 2000, and reserves reached their lowest in 50 years. Growth in
yields has slowed despite record amounts of fertilisers being applied
[16]. In the major croplands of the world - China, India and US, which
contain half the world's population - industrial farming practices have
severely depleted underground water, dried out rivers and lakes, eroded
topsoil, and decimated wild life with fertiliser and pesticide run-offs.
Most alarming is the recent disappearance of bees and other pollinators
(see [17] Mystery of Disappearing Honeybees and other articles in the
series, SiS 34).
At the same time, world oil production has passed its peak [18] (Oil
Running Out, SiS 25) with the peak of natural gas not far behind.[19]
Conventional industrial agriculture is heavily dependent on fossil fuels
(especially in the manufacture of N fertilisers), as well as water.
CLIMATE CHANGE WILL SLASH PRODUCTIVITY
In addition, climate change has emerged as a major threat to agricultural
productivity. Direct field monitoring showed that crop yields fell 10 per
cent for each degree Celsius rise in night-time temperature during the
growing season. [20] The International Food Policy Research Institute
predicts that wheat yields in developing countries will drop 30 per cent
by 2050, while irrigated rice yields will drop 15 per cent.[21] Climate
change may hit the developing world harder, but the developed world is
not immune. Increasing frequencies of drought, flood, and storm
associated with climate change will devastate crops and livestock, and
spells of extreme heat are also damaging as plants will start to
deteriorate at about 32 degrees Celsius. The yields of corn, soybean and
cotton could fall by 30 to 46 per cent under the slowest warming
scenario, or 63 to 82 per cent under the fastest warming scenario.
FUEL VERSUS FOOD
The scramble for biofuels by developed nations was a major factor in
precipitating the 2007/8 food crisis [3] and the ensuing 'land grab', as
described here. Policies supporting biofuels such as those of the EU and
US are grossly misguided.
The US imported 19.5 million barrels of petroleum a day in 2008, which
made up 57 per cent of its total consumption.[22] In 2008, 9 billion
gallons of ethanol were produced from 33 per cent of the corn harvest
subsidised at US$6-7 billion, to supply just 1.3 per cent of the country's
oil consumption. It takes 1,700 gallons of water to produce one gallon
of ethanol.[23] Even if all 341 Mt of corn in the US were to be
converted into ethanol, it would provide only 5 per cent of the total oil
consumption in the country, leaving nothing for livestock feed or food.
[24]
The US is a major exporter of corn accounting for over 60 per cent of
the world's export. Globally, the scramble for ethanol from corn and
sugarcane and biodiesel from soybean, oilseeds, oil palm and jatropha
resulted in accelerated deforestation (with large CO2 emissions) as well
as forced evictions [25, 26] (Food Without Fossil Fuels Now, SiS 42)
and land grab.
Biofuels from crops not only jeopardise food production; they are highly
unsustainable, requiring huge inputs of fertilisers and pesticides as well
as water, depleting soil fertility, accelerating soil erosion and generating
a great deal of polluting wastes. A realistic energy accounting shows
that all biofuels except one require more energy input in fossil fuels than
the energy in the biofuel product. In other words, they have net
negative energy returns and hence result in more CO2 emissions than
just using the fossil fuels.[24] The energy returns for the major biofuels
are: Corn ethanol -46 per cent, switchgrass -68 per cent; soybean
biodiesel -63 per cent; and rapeseed biodiesel -58 per cent. Even palm
oil produced in Thailand has a -8 per cent net energy return. The only
exception is ethanol from sugarcane in Brazil, with a positive energy
return of 128 percent [27], though it is still unsustainable in other
respects.
GMOS DEFINITELY NOT THE ANSWER
Are genetically modified (GM) crops desperately needed for feeding the
world and saving the climate as proponents claim? A three-year
assessment by 400 scientists, policymakers and non-government
organisation representatives - IAASTD (International Assessment of
Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development)
[28] - concluded that GM crops are at best irrelevant for food security
and poverty alleviation, and small scale agro-ecological farming is the
way ahead [29] (GM-Free Organic Agriculture to Feed the World, SiS
38).
GM crops are actually much worse than the high input green revolution
varieties they replace, as documented by the large dossier of evidence
we have accumulated over the years [30, 31] (The Case for A GM-Free
Sustainable World, GM Science Exposed, ISIS publications). They
require more fertilisers, more pesticides, more water, but yield less. GM
crops are less resilient to environmental stresses, pests and diseases and
hence highly vulnerable to climate change. But they cost more because
of the corporate monopoly developed around gene patenting [32] US
Farmers Oppose 'Big Ag' in Anti-Trust Hearing (SiS 46). After 15 years
of allowing GM varieties to take over its major crops, the United States
is facing ecological meltdown [33] (GM Crops Facing Meltdown in the
USA, SiS 46). The same has happened with the introduction of GM
cotton in India, where, in addition, it has accelerated farm suicides by
increasing farmers' indebtedness [34] (Farmer Suicides and Bt Cotton
Nightmare Unfolding in India, SiS 45). Above all, genetic modification
introduces specific hazards as I have indicated for more than ten years
[35] (Genetic Engineering Dream or Nightmare, ISIS publication).
Many scientists now acknowledge those hazards, some having done
their own studies to find out [36] (GM is Dangerous and Futile, SiS 40).
There is no alternative to addressing the serious long-term threats to
food security other than a decisive and comprehensive shift worldwide
to organic agriculture and localized food and energy systems (see [37,
38] Food Futures Now: *Organic *Sustainable *Fossil Fuel Free, Green
Energies - 100% Renewable by 2050, ISIS/TWN publications).
Dr Mae-Wan Ho is a geneticist and the director of The Institute of
Science in Society. This article first appeared in ISIS Report (28/04/10),
which is published by the Institute of Science in Society. A fully
referenced version of the report is posted on the ISIS members' website.
Africa: 'Land Rush' as Threats to Food Security
Intensify
16 May, 2010 | By Mae-Wan Ho
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- In the past three years,
foreign governments and
investment companies have
been buying or leasing vast
tracts of farmland in Africa
and elsewhere for producing
biofuels or food for their own
use.[1]
This 'land rush' was triggered by the demand for biofuels, and
accelerated [2] with the financial and food crisis of 2007/8 (see [3]
Financing World Hunger, SiS 46).
Government policies promoting biofuels are based on the mistaken
belief that fuels made from plants are 'carbon neutral', in that burning
them would simply release the carbon dioxide fixed by photosynthesis
and would not increase greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The
European Union is aiming for 10 per cent of its transport to run on
biofuels by 2020 [4] (Europe Unveils 2020 Plan for Reducing C
Emissions, SiS 37). George W. Bush, for his part, proposed to cure the
US' 'addiction to oil' by increasing the federal budget 22 per cent for
research into clean fuel technologies including biofuels as substitutes for
oil to power the country's cars [5] (Biofuels for Oil Addicts, SiS 30).
The hope is to replace more than 70 per cent of oil imports from
'unstable parts of the world' - the Middle East - by 2025.
Meanwhile, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization
(FAO) helpfully identified immense areas of 'spare land' in developing
countries that could be used for planting 'bio-energy' crops to be turned
into biofuels. The World Bank's recent report on the 2008 commodities
price hike includes a diagram entitled [6] 'The stock of unused but
potentially arable land is enormous', depicting more than 700 million
hectares of 'unused' land in sub-Saharan Africa, and more than 800
million hectares in Latin America and the Caribbean.
CORPORATE FARMING FOR THE RICH
International agribusinesses, investment banks, hedge funds,
commodity traders, sovereign wealth funds, UK pension funds,
foundations and 'individuals have been snapping up some of the world's
cheapest land, in Sudan, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Malawi, Ethiopia,
Congo, Zambia, Uganda, Madagascar, Zimbabwe, Mali, Sierra Leone,
Ghana and elsewhere. Ethiopia alone has approved 815 foreign-financed
agricultural projects since 2007. Any land investors can't buy is leased
for about $1 per year per hectare. In many cases, the contracts have led
to evictions, civil unrest and complaints of 'land grabbing', John Vidal
reports in UK's Guardian [1].
Nyikaw Ochalla, an indigenous Anuak from the Gambella region of
Ethiopia now living in Britain but in regular contact with farmers in his
region, told Vidal [1]: 'All of the land in the Gambella region is utilised.
Each community has and looks after its own territory and the rivers and
farmlands within it. It is a myth propagated by the government and
investors to say that there is waste land or land that is not utilised in
Gambella.
'The foreign companies are arriving in large numbers, depriving people
of land they have used for centuries. There is no consultation with the
indigenous population. The deals are done secretly. The only thing the
local people see is people coming with lots of tractors to invade their
lands. People cannot believe what is happening. Thousands of people
will be affected and people will go hungry.'
Indian companies, backed by government loans, have bought or leased
hundreds of thousands of hectares in Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar,
Senegal and Mozambique, where they are growing rice, sugar cane,
maize and lentils to feed their domestic market.
The Ethiopian government denied the deals were causing hunger and
said that the land deals were attracting hundreds of millions of dollars of
foreign investment and tens of thousands of jobs. A spokesman said
that Ethiopia has 74 million hectares of fertile land, only 15 per cent of
which is currently in use. Of the remaining land, only 3 to 4 per cent is
offered to foreign investors.
Local government officers in Ethiopia said that foreign companies were
not being charged for water, and in Awassa, the al-Amouni farm set up
by Saudi billionaire businessman, Ethiopian-born Sheikh Modhammed al-
Amoudi, uses as much water a year as 100,000 Ethiopians.
Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern emirate states, Qatar, Kuwait and
Abu Dhabi, are thought to be the biggest buyers of African land. In
2008, Saudi Arabia, one of the Middle East's largest wheat-growers,
announced it was to reduce domestic cereal production by 12 per cent a
year to conserve water. The government earmarked US$5 billion to
provide loans at preferential rates to Saudi companies to invest in
countries with strong agricultural potential.
Saudi Arabia is also leasing land from other countries such as Pakistan
[7], already water-stressed and water-depleted. Ayesha Siddiqa, a
strategic and political analyst said the idea is for individual landowners
to lease to investors, opening the door to large-scale corporate farming.
'Big landowners who are now renting out their land to small farmers
will throw them out and put it up to the highest foreign bidder,' she
said, predicting that small landholders with 5-10 acres would be bought
out, and 'landlessness and rural poverty will increase.'
INCREASING HUNGER AND LANDLESSNESS
Land grab has indeed intensified since the 2007/8 food commodity price
crisis. The international not-for-profit organisation GRAIN produced a
comprehensive report warning that [2]: 'If left unchecked, this global
land grab could spell the end of small-scale farming and rural
livelihoods.'
The Asian Peasant Coalition (APC), with 15 million members in 26
peasant organisations and six other supporting non-government
organisations from Bangladesh, India, Malaysia, Nepal, Philippines, Sri
Lanka and Pakistan, launched an Asia-wide protest against the global
land grab in July 2009.[8] It said that 'state terrorism' and a widespread
land grab in poor Asian countries took place at the height of the
financial crisis.
The APC represents farmers, landless peasants, dalits, forest peoples,
indigenous people, agricultural workers, herders, pastoralists, and the
women and youths across these sectors.[9]
Approximately 365 million people in Asia derive their livelihoods from
land, but, landlessness in Asia is worsening at an alarming rate over past
decade, owing to [8] 'the greater degree of integration of Asian
countries with the global market, and increasing demands for land by
big corporate interests.' Landlessness among Asian peasants is very
high: 49.6 per cent in Bangladesh, 22 per cent in India, 10 per cent in
Nepal and almost 75 per cent in Pakistan and the Philippines, and the
trend is growing, according to Danilo Ramos, APC secretary general.
LAND GRAB ENCOURAGED BY GOVERNMENTS AND THE
WORLD BANK
More than 100 cases of land grab have been compiled by GRAIN. 'Land
grabbers' are driven by two different agendas, but they eventually
converge.
The first agenda is food security. A number of countries that rely on
food imports see outsourcing food production in foreign land as a long-
term strategy to feed their own people cost-effectively, instead of
having to pay the high prices in the world commodity markets. Saudi
Arabia, Japan, China, India, Korea, Libya and Egypt fall into this
category. Foreign governments are buying up farmland in countries like
Sudan, Cambodia and the Philippines that depend on food aid delivered
by the UN World Food Programme.
The second agenda is financial return, in particular, as the result of the
financial meltdown of the housing and stock markets in 2007/8,
investment fund managers have been turning to food and agricultural
commodities and derivatives [3]; and coincidentally, agricultural land
and produce are also seen as good sources of revenue.
Where these tracks come together [2] is that in both cases it is the
private sector that will be in control. In the drive for food security,
governments take the lead through a public policy agenda. But while
public officials negotiate and make the deals for land contracts, the
private sector is explicitly expected - and even encouraged - to take
over. It is effectively a 'new colonialism' by transnational corporations.
China, for example, has been remarkably self-sufficient in food, though
at a cost of using so much fertiliser that its soils are ruined, and its
waterways putrid with pollution [10, 11] (China's Soils Ruined by
Overuse of Chemical Fertilisers, China's Pollution Census Triggers
Green Five-Year Plan, SiS 46). The Chinese government has been
gradually outsourcing its food production well before the global food
crisis. Some 30 agricultural cooperation deals have been sealed to give
Chinese firms access to foreign farmland in exchange for Chinese
technologies, training and infrastructure development funds, not only in
Asia but also all over Africa.
'From Kazakhstan to Queensland, and from Mozambique to the
Philippines, a steady and familiar process is under way, with Chinese
companies leasing or buying up land, setting up large farms, flying in
farmers, scientists and extension workers, and getting down to the
work of crop production,' GRAIN reports [2]. Most of China's
offshore farming is dedicated to rice, soybean, and maize, along with
biofuel crops like sugarcane, cassava or sorghum.
The Gulf States - Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the
United Arab Emirates - have neither the water nor the soil to produce
food. But they have plenty of oil and money. Because they depend on
food imported mainly from Europe, and their currencies are pegged to
the US dollar, the simultaneous rise in food prices on the world market
and the fall in the US dollar have boosted their import bill from US$8
billion to US$20 billion within the past five years. Given that water is
already in short supply, the Saudi government decided to stop growing
wheat, their main staple, by 2016, and instead to grow it elsewhere and
ship it back.
The United Arab Emirates, similarly, under the aegis of the Gulf
Cooperation Council (GCC), banded together with Bahrain and the other
Gulf nations to formulate a collective strategy of outsourcing food
production, particularly to Islamic countries, where they will supply
capital and oil contracts in exchange for guarantees that their
corporations will have access to farmland and export the produce back
home. The most heavily targeted states are Sudan and Pakistan,
followed by a number of south-east Asian countries - Burma,
Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam - as well
as Turkey, Kazakhstan, Uganda, Ukraine, Georgia, Brazil and so on.
Within food industry circles, Japanese and Arab trading and processing
corporations are the most involved.
Japanese firms already own 12 million hectares of farmland abroad for
the production of food and fodder crops, some of that in China, where
in 2006, Asahi, Itochu and Sumitomo began leasing hundreds of
hectares of farmland for organic food production for the Chinese and
Korean markets. In 2007, Asahi expanded to develop the first Japanese
dairy farm in China. A year later, in September 2008, Asahi took
advantage of the melamine milk tragedy to launch its first liquid milk
product at a 50 per cent mark-up.
Japanese firms have also targeted Brazil. In late 2007, Mitsui bought
100,000 hectares of Brazilian farmland for soybean production.
The finance industry is getting in on the act. Throughout 2008, an army
of investment houses, private equity funds, hedge funds and the like
have been targeting farmlands throughout the world [2], with the World
Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development
'greasing the way for this investment flow' and 'persuading'
governments to change land ownership laws to ease the transactions.
As a result, land prices have started to climb.
Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs have taken control of China's
livestock industry: Its biggest piggeries, poultry farms and meat
processing plants, including rights to the farmland. New York-based
BlackRock Inc, one of the world's largest money managers with nearly
US$1.5 trillion on its books, set up a US$200 million agricultural hedge
fund, of which US$30 million will be used to acquire farmland around
the world. Morgan Stanley, which nearly joined the queue for a US
Treasury Department bail-out, bought 40,000 hectares of farmland in
the Ukraine, where Renaissance Capital, a Russian investment house has
acquired rights to 300,000 hectares. Meanwhile, Black Earth Farming, a
Swedish investment group, acquired control of 331,000 hectares of
farmland in the black earth region of Russia, where Alpcot-Agro,
another Swedish investment firm, also bought rights to 128,000
hectares. Landkom, the British investment group, bought 100,000
hectares of agricultural land in Ukraine and vows to expand to 350,000
hecatres by 2011. All these land acquisitions are for producing grains,
oils, meat and dairy for those in the world market who can pay.
WORLD FOOD CRISIS WORSENS
Not surprisingly, the food crisis worsens for the poor. At the end of
2009, over one billion of the world's population are critically hungry,
with 24,000 dying of hunger each day, more than half of them children.
The United Nations Food Programme faces a budget shortfall of
US$4.1 billion [12, 13]. Food prices have remained high despite the
economic downturn, and extreme weather patterns affecting production
are causing more hunger.
Many commentators rightly blame the deregulated financial speculation
in the global agricultural commodities markets for precipitating the
2007/8 world food crisis [3], and the ensuing land grab has almost
certainly made it worse.
However, other more serious, longer term threats to food security are in
danger of being overlooked, which no amount of land grab can insure
any country or individuals against.
Veteran world watcher Lester Brown reminds us that many past
civilizations collapsed on account of shrinking food supplies, and we
may well meet the same fate from [14] 'our failure to deal with the
environmental trends that are undermining world food economy - most
importantly failing water tables, eroding soils, and rising temperatures.'
CURRENT FOOD SYSTEM COLLAPSING FROM
UNSUSTAINABLE INDUSTRIAL AGRICULTURAL PRACTICES
Our agriculture and food system has been showing signs of collapse
[14, 15], with world grain yields falling to meet demand most years
since 2000, and reserves reached their lowest in 50 years. Growth in
yields has slowed despite record amounts of fertilisers being applied
[16]. In the major croplands of the world - China, India and US, which
contain half the world's population - industrial farming practices have
severely depleted underground water, dried out rivers and lakes, eroded
topsoil, and decimated wild life with fertiliser and pesticide run-offs.
Most alarming is the recent disappearance of bees and other pollinators
(see [17] Mystery of Disappearing Honeybees and other articles in the
series, SiS 34).
At the same time, world oil production has passed its peak [18] (Oil
Running Out, SiS 25) with the peak of natural gas not far behind.[19]
Conventional industrial agriculture is heavily dependent on fossil fuels
(especially in the manufacture of N fertilisers), as well as water.
CLIMATE CHANGE WILL SLASH PRODUCTIVITY
In addition, climate change has emerged as a major threat to agricultural
productivity. Direct field monitoring showed that crop yields fell 10 per
cent for each degree Celsius rise in night-time temperature during the
growing season. [20] The International Food Policy Research Institute
predicts that wheat yields in developing countries will drop 30 per cent
by 2050, while irrigated rice yields will drop 15 per cent.[21] Climate
change may hit the developing world harder, but the developed world is
not immune. Increasing frequencies of drought, flood, and storm
associated with climate change will devastate crops and livestock, and
spells of extreme heat are also damaging as plants will start to
deteriorate at about 32 degrees Celsius. The yields of corn, soybean and
cotton could fall by 30 to 46 per cent under the slowest warming
scenario, or 63 to 82 per cent under the fastest warming scenario.
FUEL VERSUS FOOD
The scramble for biofuels by developed nations was a major factor in
precipitating the 2007/8 food crisis [3] and the ensuing 'land grab', as
described here. Policies supporting biofuels such as those of the EU and
US are grossly misguided.
The US imported 19.5 million barrels of petroleum a day in 2008, which
made up 57 per cent of its total consumption.[22] In 2008, 9 billion
gallons of ethanol were produced from 33 per cent of the corn harvest
subsidised at US$6-7 billion, to supply just 1.3 per cent of the country's
oil consumption. It takes 1,700 gallons of water to produce one gallon
of ethanol.[23] Even if all 341 Mt of corn in the US were to be
converted into ethanol, it would provide only 5 per cent of the total oil
consumption in the country, leaving nothing for livestock feed or food.
[24]
The US is a major exporter of corn accounting for over 60 per cent of
the world's export. Globally, the scramble for ethanol from corn and
sugarcane and biodiesel from soybean, oilseeds, oil palm and jatropha
resulted in accelerated deforestation (with large CO2 emissions) as well
as forced evictions [25, 26] (Food Without Fossil Fuels Now, SiS 42)
and land grab.
Biofuels from crops not only jeopardise food production; they are highly
unsustainable, requiring huge inputs of fertilisers and pesticides as well
as water, depleting soil fertility, accelerating soil erosion and generating
a great deal of polluting wastes. A realistic energy accounting shows
that all biofuels except one require more energy input in fossil fuels than
the energy in the biofuel product. In other words, they have net
negative energy returns and hence result in more CO2 emissions than
just using the fossil fuels.[24] The energy returns for the major biofuels
are: Corn ethanol -46 per cent, switchgrass -68 per cent; soybean
biodiesel -63 per cent; and rapeseed biodiesel -58 per cent. Even palm
oil produced in Thailand has a -8 per cent net energy return. The only
exception is ethanol from sugarcane in Brazil, with a positive energy
return of 128 percent [27], though it is still unsustainable in other
respects.
GMOS DEFINITELY NOT THE ANSWER
Are genetically modified (GM) crops desperately needed for feeding the
world and saving the climate as proponents claim? A three-year
assessment by 400 scientists, policymakers and non-government
organisation representatives - IAASTD (International Assessment of
Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development)
[28] - concluded that GM crops are at best irrelevant for food security
and poverty alleviation, and small scale agro-ecological farming is the
way ahead [29] (GM-Free Organic Agriculture to Feed the World, SiS
38).
GM crops are actually much worse than the high input green revolution
varieties they replace, as documented by the large dossier of evidence
we have accumulated over the years [30, 31] (The Case for A GM-Free
Sustainable World, GM Science Exposed, ISIS publications). They
require more fertilisers, more pesticides, more water, but yield less. GM
crops are less resilient to environmental stresses, pests and diseases and
hence highly vulnerable to climate change. But they cost more because
of the corporate monopoly developed around gene patenting [32] US
Farmers Oppose 'Big Ag' in Anti-Trust Hearing (SiS 46). After 15 years
of allowing GM varieties to take over its major crops, the United States
is facing ecological meltdown [33] (GM Crops Facing Meltdown in the
USA, SiS 46). The same has happened with the introduction of GM
cotton in India, where, in addition, it has accelerated farm suicides by
increasing farmers' indebtedness [34] (Farmer Suicides and Bt Cotton
Nightmare Unfolding in India, SiS 45). Above all, genetic modification
introduces specific hazards as I have indicated for more than ten years
[35] (Genetic Engineering Dream or Nightmare, ISIS publication).
Many scientists now acknowledge those hazards, some having done
their own studies to find out [36] (GM is Dangerous and Futile, SiS 40).
There is no alternative to addressing the serious long-term threats to
food security other than a decisive and comprehensive shift worldwide
to organic agriculture and localized food and energy systems (see [37,
38] Food Futures Now: *Organic *Sustainable *Fossil Fuel Free, Green
Energies - 100% Renewable by 2050, ISIS/TWN publications).
Dr Mae-Wan Ho is a geneticist and the director of The Institute of
Science in Society. This article first appeared in ISIS Report (28/04/10),
which is published by the Institute of Science in Society. A fully
referenced version of the report is posted on the ISIS members' website.
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