Just a few thousand hectares of your land, please
"Buy land, they're not making it anymore", Mark Twain famously urged his audience. These words have been the motto of the markets for agricultural land for a long time, and they describe the mindset of the active land buyers across the developing world.
During the last decade, agricultural land (mostly across Africa and South-East Asia) roughly ( Read more... )
During the last decade, agricultural land (mostly across Africa and South-East Asia) roughly ( Read more... )
The same is valid for rampant soil erosion, and chronic drought in some regions, and extreme climatic phenomena in other regions that could potentially have a long-term impact on the food production in entire regions of the world.
What's worse, according to what I've been digging into, that "rampant soil erosion . . . chronic drought . . . and extreme climatic phenomena" are probably the direct result of the type of agriculture these lessees wish to pursue. In other words, taking "fallow" land (with biota-rich soil), stripping from it the natural processes that make it biota-rich (herbivore and predator relationship) and instead mining that biota for food production, then shipping the resulting food elsewhere will exacerbate the already piss-poor conditions in these countries, while allowing the food-receiving countries an extended period free of food worries.
By contrast, allowing those food worries to grow more urgent might just spark some action toward restoring their own local food security, perhaps by restoring their ecosystems ravaged by ancient colonial powers like the Romans (who stripped Egypt and Lebanon of their forests and laid waste to much of the Balkans in search of precious metals to help fund the continued agricultural exploitation of other countries).
David Graeber said it best: Money is just a way to move resources from where they are to somewhere else.
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