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seosan08
Joined: 10 Oct 2008
Location: Korea
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 Posted: Sat Nov 22, 2008 6:29 pm Post subject: Rich Buying Up Farm Land In Poor Nations |
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It's not just Korean's buying Madagascar!
Rich countries launch great land grab to safeguard food supply
� States and companies target developing nations
� Small farmers at risk from industrial-scale deals
Julian Borger, diplomatic editor
The Guardian
November 22 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/nov/22/food-biofuels-land-grab
Rich governments and corporations are triggering alarm for the poor as they buy up the rights to millions of hectares of agricultural land in developing countries in an effort to secure their own long-term food supplies.
The head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, Jacques Diouf, has warned that the controversial rise in land deals could create a form of "neo-colonialism", with poor states producing food for the rich at the expense of their own hungry people.
Rising food prices have already set off a second "scramble for Africa". This week, the South Korean firm Daewoo Logistics announced plans to buy a 99-year lease on a million hectares in Madagascar. Its aim is to grow 5m tonnes of corn a year by 2023, and produce palm oil from a further lease of 120,000 hectares (296,000 acres), relying on a largely South African workforce. Production would be mainly earmarked for South Korea, which wants to lessen dependence on imports.
"These deals can be purely commercial ventures on one level, but sitting behind it is often a food security imperative backed by a government," said Carl Atkin, a consultant at Bidwells Agribusiness, a Cambridge firm helping to arrange some of the big international land deals.
Madagascar's government said that an environmental impact assessment would have to be carried out before the Daewoo deal could be approved, but it welcomed the investment. The massive lease is the largest so far in an accelerating number of land deals that have been arranged since the surge in food prices late last year.
"In the context of arable land sales, this is unprecedented," Atkin said. "We're used to seeing 100,000-hectare sales. This is more than 10 times as much."
At a food security summit in Rome, in June, there was agreement to channel more investment and development aid to African farmers to help them respond to higher prices by producing more. But governments and corporations in some cash-rich but land-poor states, mostly in the Middle East, have opted not to wait for world markets to respond and are trying to guarantee their own long-term access to food by buying up land in poorer countries.
According to diplomats, the Saudi Binladin Group is planning an investment in Indonesia to grow basmati rice, while tens of thousands of hectares in Pakistan have been sold to Abu Dhabi investors.
Arab investors, including the Abu Dhabi Fund for Development, have also bought direct stakes in Sudanese agriculture. The president of the UEA, Khalifa bin Zayed, has said his country was considering large-scale agricultural projects in Kazakhstan to ensure a stable food supply.
Even China, which has plenty of land but is now getting short of water as it pursues breakneck industrialisation, has begun to explore land deals in south-east Asia. Laos, meanwhile, has signed away between 2m-3m hectares, or 15% of its viable farmland. Libya has secured 250,000 hectares of Ukrainian farmland, and Egypt is believed to want similar access. Kuwait and Qatar have been chasing deals for prime tracts of Cambodia rice fields.
Eager buyers generally have been welcomed by sellers in developing world governments desperate for capital in a recession. Madagascar's land reform minister said revenue would go to infrastructure and development in flood-prone areas.
Sudan is trying to attract investors for almost 900,000 hectares of its land, and the Ethiopian prime minister, Meles Zenawi, has been courting would-be Saudi investors.
"If this was a negotiation between equals, it could be a good thing. It could bring investment, stable prices and predictability to the market," said Duncan Green, Oxfam's head of research. "But the problem is, [in] this scramble for soil I don't see any place for the small farmers."
Alex Evans, at the Centre on International Cooperation, at New York University, said: "The small farmers are losing out already. People without solid title are likely to be turfed off the land."
Details of land deals have been kept secret so it is unknown whether they have built-in safeguards for local populations.
Steve Wiggins, a rural development expert at the Overseas Development Institute, said: "There are very few economies of scale in most agriculture above the level of family farm because managing [the] labour is extremely difficult." Investors might also have to contend with hostility. "If I was a political-risk adviser to [investors] I'd say 'you are taking a very big risk'. Land is an extremely sensitive thing. This could go horribly wrong if you don't learn the lessons of history." |
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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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| Posted: Sat Nov 22, 2008 7:07 pm Post subject: |
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| People need to stop stuffing themselves with meat, and eat meat just on special occasions (like Sunday lunch). If richer nations didn't consume such enormous quantities of livestock, there'd be a lot more land to go around for everyone. Vegetarians require just a fraction of the land that meateaters do. |
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Paji eh Wong
Joined: 03 Jun 2003
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| Posted: Sat Nov 22, 2008 7:22 pm Post subject: |
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| Vegetarians require just a fraction of the land that meateaters do. |
Can you quantify that? |
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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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| Posted: Sat Nov 22, 2008 8:10 pm Post subject: |
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You could do your own research. A quick google brought up a few websites. This one seems to explain it well enough.
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"The world must create five billions vegans in the next several decades, or triple its total farm output without using more land."
Dennis Avery, Director of the Centre for Global Food Issues . [1] |
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What's the problem?
The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) estimates that around 840 million people are undernourished. That's roughly 14% of the human population. On average, around 25,000 people die every day from hunger-related causes. Each year 6 million children under the age of 5 die as a result of hunger and malnutrition - this is roughly equivalent to all the under-5s in France and Italy combined. [2] With the world's population expected to increase from 6 billion to 9 billion by 2050, one of the most urgent questions we now face is how we, as a species, will feed ourselves in the 21st century.
Land availability is one of the main constraints on food production. The earth has only a limited area of viable agricultural land, so how this land is used is central to our ability to feed the world. At the moment, the problem is not lack of food - it is widely agreed that enough food is produced worldwide to feed a global population of 8-10 billion people - but lack of availability. Poverty, powerlessness, war, corruption and greed all conspire to prevent equal access to food, and there are no simple solutions to the problem. However, Western lifestyles - and diet in particular - can play a large part in depriving the world's poor of much needed food.
"In this era of global abundance, why does the word continue to tolerate the daily hunger and deprivation of more than 800 million people?"
Jacques Diouf, Director-General, UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. [3] |
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The Livestock Connection
World livestock production exceeds 21 billion animals each year. The earth's livestock population is more then three and a half times its human population. [4]
In all, the raising of livestock takes up more than two-thirds of agricultural land, and one third of the total land area. [5] This is apparently justifiable because by eating the foods that humans can't digest and by processing these into meat, milk and eggs, farmed animals provide us with an extra, much-needed food source. Or so the livestock industry would like you to believe. In fact, livestock are increasingly being fed with grains and cereals that could have been directly consumed by humans or were grown on land that could have been used to grow food rather than feed. The developing world's undernourished millions are now in direct competition with the developed world's livestock - and they are losing.
In 1900 just over 10% of the total grain grown worldwide was fed to animals; by 1950 this figure had risen to over 20%; by the late 1990s it stood at around 45%. Over 60% of US grain is fed to livestock. [6]
This use of the world's grain harvest would be acceptable in terms of world food production if it were not for the fact that meat and dairy production is a notoriously inefficient use of energy. All animals use the energy they get from food to move around, keep warm and perform their day to day bodily functions. This means that only a percentage of the energy that farmed animals obtain from plant foods is converted into meat or dairy products. Estimates of efficiency levels vary, but in a recent study [7], Professor Vaclav Smil of the University of Manitoba, Canada, calculated that beef cattle raised on feedlots may convert as little as 2.5% of their gross feed energy into food for human consumption. Estimated conversion of protein was only a little more efficient, with less than 5% of the protein in feed being converted to edible animal protein. These figures are especially damning since the diet of cattle at the feedlot consists largely of human-edible grains.
Feedlot-raised beef is an extreme example, being the least feed-efficient animal product, but even the most efficient - milk - represents a waste of precious agricultural land. Prof Smil calculates that the most efficient dairy cows convert between 55 and 67% of their gross feed energy into milk food energy.
Efficiency can also be measured in terms of the land required per calorie of food obtained. When Gerbens-Leenes et al. [8] examined land use for all food eaten in the Netherlands, they found that beef required the most land per kilogram and vegetables required the least. The figures they obtained can be easily converted to land required for one person's energy needs for a year by multiplying 3000 kcal (a day's energy) by 365 days to obtain annual calorie needs (1,095,000 kcal) and dividing this by the calories per kilogram. The figures obtained are summarised in table 1:
Food Land per kg (m2) Calories per kilogram Land per person per year (m2)
Beef 20.9 2800 8173
Pork 8.9 3760 2592
Eggs 3.5 1600 2395
Milk 1.2 640 2053
Fruit 0.5 400 1369
Vegetables 0.3 250 1314
Potatoes 0.2 800 274
On the basis of these figures, a vegan diet can meet calorie and protein needs from just 300 square metres using mainly potatoes. A more varied diet with plenty of fruit and vegetables, grains and legumes would take about 700 square metres. Replacing a third of the calories in this diet with calories from milk and eggs would double the land requirements and a typical European omnivorous diet would require five times the amount of land required for a varied vegan diet.
In looking at land use for animal products this research makes the very favourable assumption that by-products of plant food production used in animal agriculture do not require any land. For example, soybean land is assigned 100% to human soy oil consumption with no land use attributed to the oil cakes used for meat and dairy production. This stacks the odds in favour of animal foods, so the figures in this paper are all the more compelling as to the higher land demands of animal farming.
GHOST ACRES
Most of the land wasted on growing feed for livestock is in developing countries, where food is most scarce. Europe, for example, imports 70% of its protein for animal feed, causing a European Parliament report to state that 'Eurpoe can feed its people but not its [farm] animals.' [9] Friends of the Earth have calculated that the UK imported 4.1 million hectares of other people's land in 1996 [10].
"In Brazil alone, the equivalent of 5.6 million acres of land is used to grow soya beans for animals in Europe. These 'ghost acres' belie the so-called efficiency of hi-tech agriculture..." Tim Lang of the Centre for Food Policy. [11]
This land contributes to developing world malnutrition by driving impoverished populations to grow cash crops for animal feed, rather than food for themselves. Intensive monoculture crop production causes soils to suffer nutrient depletion and thus pushes economically vulnerable populations further away from sustainable agricultural systems. |
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Put out to pasture
Although grain-dependent industrial agriculture is the fastest growing type of animal production, not all farmed animals are raised in this way. Much of the world's livestock is still raised on pasture. Worldwide, livestock use roughly 3.4 billion hectares of grazing land.
Proponents of animal agriculture point out that most pastureland is wholly unsuitable for growing grain to feed for humans. They argue that by converting grass, and other plants that are indigestible to humans, into energy and protein for human consumption, livestock provide a valuable addition to our food resources. The reality is that land currently used to graze cattle and other ruminants is almost invariably suitable for growing trees - such a use would not only provide a good source of land-efficient, health-giving fruit and nuts, but would also have many environmental benefits.
Quite simply, we do not have enough land to feed everyone on an animal-based diet. So while 840 million people do not have enough food to live normal lives, we continue to waste two-thirds of agricultural land by obtaining only a small fraction of its potential calorific value.
Obviously access to food is an extremely complex issue and there are no easy answers. However, the fact remains that the world's population is increasing and viable agricultural land is diminishing. If we are to avoid future global food scarcity we must find sustainable ways of using our natural resource base. Industrial livestock production is unsustainable and unjustifiable. |
http://www.vegansociety.com/environment/land/
Last edited by Big_Bird on Sat Nov 22, 2008 8:29 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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BS.Dos.
Joined: 29 Mar 2007
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Ilsanman
Joined: 15 Aug 2003
Location: Bucheon, Korea
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| Posted: Sat Nov 22, 2008 10:16 pm Post subject: |
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It takes roughly 30 kg of feed to produce 3 kg of meat.
| Paji eh Wong wrote: |
| Quote: |
| Vegetarians require just a fraction of the land that meateaters do. |
Can you quantify that? |
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bacasper
Joined: 26 Mar 2007
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| Posted: Sun Nov 23, 2008 2:16 am Post subject: |
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| Ilsanman wrote: |
| It takes roughly 30 kg of feed to produce 3 kg of meat. |
That's right. So if people stopped eating meat, there would be 10 times as much food to go around. |
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khyber
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Location: Compunction Junction
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| Posted: Sun Nov 23, 2008 2:13 pm Post subject: |
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| Farmland occupies, and encroaches upon the habitats of many game animals. If there were fewer farms, we could have more game animals and then more meat! Problem solved! |
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laogaiguk
Joined: 06 Dec 2005
Location: somewhere in Korea
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| Posted: Sun Nov 23, 2008 2:39 pm Post subject: |
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| khyber wrote: |
| Farmland occupies, and encroaches upon the habitats of many game animals. If there were fewer farms, we could have more game animals and then more meat! Problem solved! |
 I like that! |
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canuckistan
Mod Team
Joined: 17 Jun 2003
Location: Training future GS competitors.....
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| Posted: Sun Nov 23, 2008 6:11 pm Post subject: |
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| bacasper wrote: |
| Ilsanman wrote: |
| It takes roughly 30 kg of feed to produce 3 kg of meat. |
That's right. So if people stopped eating meat, there would be 10 times as much food to go around. |
OK true, but as far as sustainable living goes for some people eating meat is a more efficient way of getting required protein to sustain a body than trying to grow it/find it from plants.
Some climates are not suitable for growing or even finding the melange of plants needed to complete the amino acid combination which = protein, for example-- legumes and rice.
Rice takes a pile of water, and not everyone can afford to buy the imported plant food(s), let alone meat. Raising animals for protein is the often their best option. |
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Jandar
Joined: 11 Jun 2008
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| Posted: Sun Nov 23, 2008 6:40 pm Post subject: |
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| The amount of protein in grain and vegetables is inadequate in a pound for pound discussion. |
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mindmetoo
Joined: 02 Feb 2004
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| Posted: Sun Nov 23, 2008 7:15 pm Post subject: |
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| Big_Bird wrote: |
| People need to stop stuffing themselves with meat, and eat meat just on special occasions (like Sunday lunch). If richer nations didn't consume such enormous quantities of livestock, there'd be a lot more land to go around for everyone. Vegetarians require just a fraction of the land that meateaters do. |
People only need to pay for the food they can afford. |
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