“Raises complex and urgent
issues.”—Booklist, starred review How Wall
Street, Chinese billionaires, oil sheiks, and
agribusiness are buying up huge tracts of land in a
hungry, crowded world. An unprecedented land grab
is taking place around the world. Fearing future food
shortages or eager to profit from them, the world’s
wealthiest and most acquisitive countries, corporations,
and individuals have been buying and leasing vast tracts
of land around the world. The scale is astounding:
parcels the size of small countries are being gobbled up
across the plains of Africa, the paddy fields of
Southeast Asia, the jungles of South America, and the
prairies of Eastern Europe. Veteran science writer Fred
Pearce spent a year circling the globe to find out who
was doing the buying, whose land was being taken over,
and what the effect of these massive land deals seems to
be. The Land Grabbers is a
first-of-its-kind exposé that reveals the scale and the
human costs of the land grab, one of the most profound
ethical, environmental, and economic issues facing the
globalized world in the twenty-first century. The
corporations, speculators, and governments scooping up
land cheap in the developing world claim that
industrial-scale farming will help local economies. But
Pearce’s research reveals a far more troubling reality.
While some mega-farms are ethically run, all too often
poor farmers and cattle herders are evicted from
ancestral lands or cut off from water sources. The good
jobs promised by foreign capitalists and home
governments alike fail to materialize. Hungry nations
are being forced to export their food to the wealthy,
and corporate potentates run fiefdoms oblivious to the
country beyond their fences. Pearce’s
story is populated with larger-than-life characters,
from financier George Soros and industry tycoon Richard
Branson, to Gulf state sheikhs, Russian oligarchs,
British barons, and Burmese generals. We discover why
Goldman Sachs is buying up the Chinese poultry industry,
what Lord Rothschild and a legendary 1970s
asset-stripper are doing in the backwoods of Brazil, and
what plans a Saudi oil billionaire has for Ethiopia.
Along the way, Pearce introduces us to the people who
actually live on, and live off of, the supposedly
“empty” land that is being grabbed, from Cambodian
peasants, victimized first by the Khmer Rouge and now by
crony capitalism, to African pastoralists confined to
ever-smaller tracts. Over the next
few decades, land grabbing may matter more, to more of
the planet’s people, than even climate change. It will
affect who eats and who does not, who gets richer and
who gets poorer, and whether agrarian societies can
exist outside corporate control. It is the new battle
over who owns the planet. From the Hardcover
edition.
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