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The Landgrabbers (2012)

by Fred Pearce(Favorite Author)

3.65 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

190581173X (ISBN13: 9781905811731)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Bantam Press

review 1: One of the experts quoted in this book states that we have 20 years to deliver 40% more food, or the "perfect storm" --climate change, rising world populations, disintegrating ecosystems and land and water shortages will trigger a global food crisis that could see hundreds of millions starve. This book explores many of the land grabs by countries unable to grow enough of their own food (like Saudi Arabia) and by the very rich to exploit natural resources. Indigenous people are often trucked off their own tribal lands with no compensation, and corrupt govt. officials make deals that offer great improvements that never get built in exchange for huge tracts of land. There are a few success stories scattered throughout the book, but it's a pretty depressing view of the futu... morere, especially for Africa.
review 2: Fred Pearce (2012) The Landgrabbers: The new fight over who owns the Earth. London: Transworld.This is a good book full of references for anyone interested in global conflict between agribusinesses and small family farmers. What David Harvey’s (2003) New Imperialism terms ‘accumulation by dispossession’ features the protagonists that Fred Pearce calls The Landgrabbers. In Britain Pearce is often read in The Guardian and the Times Higher Educational supplement. He notes that landgrabbing is dominated by hedge funds, anonymous institutional investors, and pension funds with trillions to invest (p.119). We should not forget sovereign funds from Mideast countries fearful of food embargoes, and now knowing that their once vast aquifers are too diminished to continue wheat or dairy farming. (Peak Water, anyone?!) Cash rich investors have increased global food commodity investments from roughly $30 billion to $300b from 2003 to 2010, driven by the bursting of the digital and housing ballons.The last third of book reads like an annotated list of landgrabs. But that’s no bad thing, as these seem well researched, and retrievable with its useful index. Some of us wil appreciate that Pearce closes the book reiterating Paul Collier’s (2008) book The Bottom Billion. Although Collier correctly excoriates the Bush administration for its wasteful subsidies of ethanol programmes, Pearce (like Aal, Jarosz & Thompson 2009 before him) counters Collier’s claim that what Africa needs is big farms of GM crops (see pp.343-346. Pearce compares this grandiose vision (unfortunately shared by the Gates Foundation in AGRA) to Lenin’s disruption of the Kulaks in the early 20th century, and predicts Collier’s prescription would result in more hunger in Africa. Pearce extols smallholder farming in Africa and lambasts structural adjustment programmes (SAPs, by IMF and World Bank) which stopped African governments’ ag extension programmes, and the sort of subsidies which have seen recent success in Malawi and Ghana (on Malawi see: Marie Javdani. 2012, IJAS; Ghana: Imogen Bellwood-Howard, UCL, from our RGS-IBG Edinburgh 2012 sesh).Fred Pearce’s Landgrabbers evokes Upton Sinclair’s (1906) The Jungle. It reminds me also of Thomas Pynchon’s (1963) V (railing against European dismemberment of Africa in the 1898 Fashoda Incident). less

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