by Fred Pearce
For food prices and the Arab Spring, see “Egypt and Tunisia: Rocked by the Global Food Crisis,” http://www.newscientist.com (2011), and “Global Warming and Arab Spring” in Survival 53, pp. 11–17, http://www.iiss.org (2011).
Chapter 4: South Sudan
Jarch is at http://www.jarchcapital.com. Heilberg is discussed in Rolling Stone’s “Will Global Warming, Overpopulation, Floods, Droughts and Food Riots Make This Man Rich?” http://news.haverford.edu/blogs/ourschool/files/2010/06/Capitalists-of-Chaos-Mckenzie-Funk.pdf (2010). His Fortune quote is in “Betting the Farm” (June 2009); see also “South Sudan Looking into US Land Deal,” http://af.reuters.com (2009). Read more about the Mayom mayhem in “Bul Community in Diaspora Challenge the Wisdom of Abysmal SPLM Leadership in Unity State,” http://allafrica.com (2011). See also “The Scramble for the South,” Africa Confidential 52, no. 7 (2011): 8.
I discussed Nile Trading with Eugene Douglas and quote from his unpublished correspondence with Oxfam and others. Meet his team at http://kinyeti.com. See also “Mokaya Payam Leaders Reject 600,000Ha Land Lease,” http://www.gurtong.net (2011). I also spoke with David Deng, author of The New Frontier, at http://www.npaid.org, and of “Land Belongs to the Community: Demystifying the Global Land Grab in Southern Sudan” at the Brighton conference. You can hear the BBC 2011 report at http://audioprospector.appspot.com/.
Al Ain’s mystery Boma enterprise emerged in “An Odd Deal over Land,” http://www.economist.com (2009); also see “Al Ain Zoo Makes Room for Luxury,” http://www.thenational.ae (2010). The Canadians are at http://www.cedas.org and Green Resources at http://www.greenresources.no. Citadel Capital’s activities are detailed in “Egyptian Companies Look Beyond Borders,” http://www.ft.com (2010).
Chapter 5: Yala Swamp, Kenya
I visited Dominion Farm in February 2011 and interviewed Burgess both before and after the visit. I thank him as well as Leonard Oriaro and Chris Owalla. See www.dominion-farms.org and http://dominionfarmskenya.blogspot.com. NGO writing on the farm includes “Yala Swamp—A Living Museum of Biodiversity,” at http://www.culturalsurvival.org, and “Land Grabbing in Kenya and Mozambique,” http://www.fian.org (2010). Kenya Wetlands Forum’s “Rapid Assessment of the Yala Swamp Wetlands,” is at http://www.kenyawetlandsforum.org (2006). The Darwin Initiative draft conservation plan, “Yala Swamp Important Bird Area Conservation Management Plan,” is at http://darwin.defra.gov.uk/ (2009).
See also “Dominion Farms Chief Fears for His Life,” http://www.menafn.com (2011) and “Obasanjo Leads Prospective American Investors to Taraba,” http://www.vanguardngr.com (2011).
Chapter 6: Liberia
I visited Liberia in November 2010. “Timber, Taylor, Soldier Spy,” is at http://www.globalwitness.org (2005). See also SAMFU Foundation’s “Plunder: the Silent Destruction of Liberia’s Rainforest,” http://www.forestsmonitor.org (2000); “Conflict Timber and Liberia’s War,” http://www.etfrn.org/etfrn/newsletter/news4344/articles/2_2_Blundell.pdf (2005); and “How a Tyrant’s Logs of War Bring Terror to West Africa,” at http://www.guardian.co.uk (2001). For Mr. Gus see “New Trial for Dutch ‘Arms Smuggler,’” http://news.bbc.co.uk (2010).
See Time magazine’s “Rebuilding Liberia,” at http://www.time.com (2009). Liberia’s EU deal was signed in 2011 (http://www.efi.int/files/attachments/euflegt/efi_liberia_press_release_-_en_-_final.pdf). Problems with new logging licenses are discussed in “The Hunter’s Whistle,” 2009, http://www.illegal-logging.info (2009).
Firestone is here: http://www.firestonenaturalrubber.com, and some of its critics here: http://www.stopfirestone.org/history.shtml. Read more in “The Heavy Load,” http://www.laborrights.org (2009) and A Critical Examination of Firestone’s Operations in Liberia by Tarnue Johnson (AuthorHouse, 2010). Goll’s Town is discussed in “Understanding Diversity: A Study of Livelihoods and Forest Landscapes in Liberia,” http://iucn.org (2009). LAC’s history can be found in “Human Rights in Liberia’s Rubber Plantations: Tapping into the Future,” http://unmil.org (2006). For Buchanan Renewables, see http://www.buchananrenewables.com.
Gbalin is showcased in “Building Business as a Way Out of Poverty for Women in Liberia,” http://www.oxfam.org.uk. The Libyans are exposed in “Libyan Funded Agriculture Project Vanished,” http://www.liberiawebs.com (2011). Green Advocates is at http://www.greenadvocates.org. Brownell’s “Land Grabbing and Land Reform in the New Liberia” (2007) is at http://www.pacweb.org. See also Liz Alden Wily’s “Whose Land Is It?” http://www.rightsandresources.org (2008).
Chapter 7: Palm Bay, Liberia
I visited EPO at Palm Bay in November 2010. See also http://www.epoil.co.uk. Sime Darby’s troubles appear in “Grim Prospects for Sime Darby in Bomi,” http://www.liberianobserver.com, and “Halt Sime Darby Plantation Expansion,” http://allafrica.com (both 2011). See also “Recycling the Past: Rehabilitation of Congo’s Colonial Palm and Rubber Plantations,” http://news.mongabay.com (2006), and “Oil Palm in Africa: Past, Present and Future Scenarios,” http://wrm.org.uy (2010).
The Blattners are discussed at http://www.gbedrc.com and in “Kinshasa Journal: Getting Rich in Zaire: An American, 33, Tells How,” http://www.nytimes.com (1989). The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil is at http://www.rspo.org/. For new African arrivals, see “Olam Invests US$1.5b in Gabon,” http://www.channelnewsasia.com (2010); “The Plunder of Africa Continues,” http://www.wrm.org.uy/bulletin/158/Africa.html (2010); “Congo: un agro-industriel malaisien va investir 300 millions de dollars,” http://www.afp.com (2010); “Chinese Agribusiness Company in DR Congo to Offer Thousands of Jobs for Locals,” http://www.xinhuanet.com (2009); and “A Huge Oil Palm Plantation Puts African Rainforests at Risk,” http://e360.yale.edu (2011). Sierra Leone’s 2010 pitch to investors, “Sl Sugar Investment Opportunity 150210,” is at http://www.slideshare.net/. Feronia is at http://www.feronia.com.
Chapter 8: London, England
Emergent and Envest both had a critique from the Oakland Institute in its Understanding Land Investment Deals in Africa, http://media.oaklandinstitute.org (2011). See also http://www.emvest.com and https://www.emergentasset.com. Payne’s Kondratiev cycles are described in “African Land Fund: Breaking New Ground in Africa,” a presentation she gave on December 3, 2009. See also the company’s website and Murrin’s book, Breaking the Code of History (Apollo Analysis, 2011).
See “McKinsey on Africa: A Continent on the Move,” http://www.mckinseyonsociety.com (2010). Rothschild is profiled in “Lunch with the FT: Jacob Rothschild,” http://www.ft.com (2010). For Bramdean, see http://www.bramdean.com and “Horlick and Tchenguiz Do Battle,” http://www.guardian.co.uk (2009). The Wall Street Journal on private equity in 2010 is at http://farmlandgrab.org/16790. Greenleaf is at http://www.greenleaf-global.com; Agricapital’s promises can be viewed at http://www.agricapital.info; and GreenWorld is at http://www.greenworldbvi.com.
Nigel Woodhouse discussed Farm Lands of Guinea with me. See also “Investment in Farm Lands of Guinea Inc,” http://investegate.info, and company profiles at http://www.hotstocked.com/, as well as “Pension Funds: Key Players in the Global Farmland Grab,” http://www.grain.org (2011). TIAA-CREF’s investment is analyzed at http://farmlandgrab.org/14063 (2010). For SilverStreet, see http://www.silverstreetcapital.com and “SilverStreet Raises $198m from PKA and OPIC,” at http://www.privateequityafrica.com (2010).
Standard Bank’s “Financing Land Investment in Africa” (April 8, 2011) is summarized in “Investors Must Tread Carefully in New Rush for Land in Africa, Warns Standard Bank,” at http://www.afribiz.info/. You can read about the groundnut project under “Tanganyika Groundnut Scheme” on Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org.
Chapter 9: Ukraine
Spinks is spotlighted in the Wall Street Journal’s “Richard Spinks of Landkom Snaps Up Ukraine Plots to Cash In on High Crop Prices,” http://farmlandgrab.org (2008), and in Farmers’ Weekly, “Farming in Ukraine,” http://www.fwi.co.uk (2007). Landkom i
s at http://www.landkom.net and its 2011 crisis is covered in “Poor Rapeseed Crop Sends Landkom Shares Plunging” at http://www.agrimoney.com.
For more on land grabs in Ukraine, see Mark Rachkevych’s articles in the Kyiv Post, for instance, “Agribusiness Giants May Become Kings of Farming,” http://www.farmlandgrab.org (2011), and “Investing in Ukraine: Top 10 Picks of 2010,” http://www.farmlandgrab.org (2010). For Beigbeder, see “Agrogeneration exploitera plus de 100.000 hectares de terre d’ici 2012,” http://www.farmlandgrab.org (2010). The Maharishi is discussed in “Organic Agriculture Venture Set Decades Backward by Pinchuk’s Fund” at http://www.investukraine.net.
Oane Visser and Max Spoor’s “Land Grabbing in Post-Soviet Eurasia” appears in the Journal of Peasant Studies 38 (2011): 299–323. Trigon Agri is at http://www.trigonagri.com. I wrote about Greenfield in “Biofuels Could Clean Up Chernobyl Badlands,” http://www.newscientist.com (2009). Mettetal is discussed in “Ukraine, Russia Grain Export Curbs Deter Investors,” http://www.usubc.org (2011), Tleubayev in “The New Gold Rush,” http://farmindustrynews.com (2008), and Rozinov in “Ivolga Puts World’s Biggest Farm Up for Sale,” http://www.telegraph.co.uk (2011).
For Black Earth Farming, see http://blackearthfarming.com and Richard Ferguson’s “Agriculture: Global Emerging Markets” at http://farmlandgrab.org. Orlov is profiled in “Russia’s Collective Farms: Hot Capitalist Property,” http://www.nytimes.com (2008) and “Agriculture: The Battle to Bring More Land into Production,” http://www.ft.com (2008). Alpcot Agro is at http://www.alpcotagro.com.
Chapter 10: Western Bahia, Brazil
I traveled to Western Bahia in March 2011 with Conservation International; thanks to Gabriela Michelotti and her colleagues. For agribusiness in the cerrado, see the AgBrasil website, http://www.agbrazil.com, and Richard Ferguson’s “Agriculture: Global Emerging Markets” at http://farmlandgrab.org. For soy, Cargill, and the Amazon, see “Eating Up the Amazon,” www.greenpeace.org (2006), and “Agrarian Structure, Foreign Land Ownership and Land Value in Brazil,” presented by Sergio Sauer at the Brighton conference. Also see “The Great Brazilian Land Grab,” http://www.forbes.com (2005); “The Miracle of the Cerrado,” http://www.economist.com (2010); and “How Brazil Outfarmed the American Farmer,” http://money.cnn.com (2008). Laura Graham’s “The Tractor Invasion” is at http://www.culturalsurvival.org (2009). Maggi is quoted in “Relentless Foe of the Amazon Jungle: Soybeans,” http://www.nytimes.com (2003).
Agrifirma is at http://agrifirma-brazil.com. See “Soros-Backed Adecoagro Raises $314 Million in IPO,” http://www.bloomberg.com (2011), and http://www.adecoagro.com.br. Levinsohn is analyzed at “Farm Bang Collects Labor and Environmental Crimes,” http://www.reporterbrasil.com.br. Also see “Conservation in Brazil: The Forgotten Ecosystem,” http://www.nature.com (2005), and “Brazil Loosens Restrictions on Amazon Land Use,” http://www.guardian.co.uk (2011).
Mitsui is at http://www.mitsui.com; for more information, see “Mitsui to Boost Brazil Soya Exports” on Bloomberg, http://www.bloomberg.com (2011). “Chongqing Grain Group to Build an Industrial Complex in Brazil” can be found on the Invest In website, http://www.investin.com.cn (2011), and “China Will Invest USD 10 Billion in Soybean Production in Brazil” at http://en.mercopress.com (2011).
Chapter 11: Chaco, Paraguay
I visited Paraguay in March 2011 with Roger Wilson from World Land Trust (http://www.worldlandtrust.org) and the staff of Guyra Paraguay (http://www.guyra.org.py). (See my article “Battle of the Chaco: Who Will Win the Wilderness?” in New Scientist, http://www.newscientist.com, 2011.) More information is available at “The Green Hell Becomes Home: Mennonites in Paraguay,” http://www.anabaptistwiki.org, and “Paraguay Mennonites Find Success a Mixed Blessing,” http://www.nytimes.com (2003). The Filadelfia museum is at www.faunaparaguay.com/jakobunger.html.
“The Case of the Ayoreo,” can be found at http://www.iwgia.org (2010); the New Tribes Mission is at http://usa.ntm.org. Land reclamation is discussed in the “Chaco 2010 Programme Report,” http://www.cwslac.org. I wrote about Yaguarete Pora in “Brazilian Beef Barons Are Greenwashing to Preserve Their Place on Your Plate,” http://www.guardian.co.uk (2010). And see “Ranchers Caught Red-handed from Space,” http://www.survivalinternational.org (2011).
Access “What Are the Moonies Up To?” at http://www.thetablet.co.uk and “Paraguay and the Moonies—A Town Owned by a Cult Seeks Liberation” at http://www.economist.com (2005). Scimitar Oryx is at http://www.scimitarpartners.com; Fric’s story is detailed in “Alberto Vojtech Fric—Part I: The Story of a Czech Adventurer and Ethnologist Who Brought a South American Indian to Prague,” http://www.radio.cz (2010). For Casaccia’s 2009 London presentation “Deforestation in the Paraguayan Chaco,” see http://www.sas.ac.uk/750.html.
Chapter 12: Latin America
The rout of the Vestey Group is described in “Lord Spam to Lose Venezuelan Farm,” http://www.telegraph.co.uk (2010). The story of United Fruit is related in Peter Chapman’s Jungle Capitalists (Canongate, 2006) and at http://www.unitedfruit.org. The State Department’s 2010 report on Guatemala is International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, http://www.state.gov/. See also “Ranchers and Drug Barons Threaten Rain Forest,” http://www.nytimes.com (2010).
“The Process of Land Concentration in Peru” is at http://www.landcoalition.org (2011). Bolivia’s Santa Cruz problem is discussed in Mackey’s “Legitimating Foreignization in Bolivia” from the Brighton conference, and “Bolivia: Un millón de hectáreas de tierra en manos de extranjeros, según Tierra,” is at http://farmlandgrab.org (2011). See Ballve’s “Territory by Dispossession: Decentralization, Statehood and the Narco Land-Grab in Colombia” from the Brighton conference, and his “The Dark Side of Plan Colombia,” in the Nation, http://www.thenation.com (2009). Also, “Multinational Invades Sovereign Afro-Colombian Territory,” http://colombiareports.com (2011).
Chapter 13: Patagonia
Doug Tompkins is profiled in “Welcome to My World,” http://www.guardian.co.uk (2009) and “Back to Nature in Patagonia,” http://www.ft.com (2010). To read more about the Tompkins’s trusts, see http://www.theconservationlandtrust.org and http://www.conservacionpatagonica.org. Their volcano is described in “Eruption in the Back Yard” at http://www.thecleanestline.com. Also see the “FARN Report: Benetton—Mapuche case,” http://www.farn.org.ar (2006), and Benetton’s response, “Benetton’s Position Regarding Claims by the Native Argentinean Population (Mapuche),” at http://press.benettongroup.com/; and “Leleque Museum: Even Mapuche History Appropriated by Benetton” at http://www.mapuche-nation.org.
For overviews of Patagonia, see “The End of the World Is for Sale,” http://www.atimes.com (2010); “Mapuche: Inhabitable Land Dwindles,” http://www.unpo.org (2007); “Warren Adams: Searching for Profits and Saving Patagonia,” http://management.fortune.cnn.com (2011); and Adams’s site, http://patagoniasur.com. Paulson’s role is discussed in “Treasury Nominee Hank Paulson Needs to Answer Some Questions,” http://www.humanevents.com (2006).
Chapter 14: Australia
AAC’s sale is described in “Iffco’s Investment Down Under Shows Vision,” http://farmlandgrab.org/2914 (2009) and “Cowboys Won’t Beef Up Their Stake in AACo,” http://www.theaustralian.com.au (2011). Packer is remembered in a Times obituary at http://www.timesonline.co.uk (2005). His legacy can be found at http://www.terrafirma.com/cpc.html. See also “MP Evans Stokes Australia-US Rivalry in Beef,” http://www.agrimoney.com (2010), and http://www.mpevans.co.uk. “Nicole Kidman’s Family Revealed to Be One of the World’s Largest Landowners,” is at http://www.dailymail.co.uk (2011). For information on Sara Henderson, see http://www.bulloriver.com.
The changing outlook for Australian ranches is seen in three stories: “Pastoral Holdings Remain a Family Affair,” http://farmlandgrab.org (2010), “Australia Should Look to Its Foods Security,” www.smh.com.au (2010), and “Foreign Ownership of Aussie Land: The Peril of Selling the
Farm,” www.crikey.com.au (2011). Hassad is featured in “Qatar Land Grab Angers Bush,” http://www.theage.com.au (2011). For more information, see “Investments Pour In from Far and Wide,” http://www.smh.com.au (2011); “That’s What You Call Trying on a New Hat,” http://www.businessweek.com (2005); and “Chinese Company Push for Western Australia Farmland,” http://fw.farmonline.com.au (2011).
For New Zealand, see the Crafar saga at “Crafar Farm Decision Drags On,” http://www.stuff.co.nz (2011). Greentree and Nicoletti are discussed at “Grain Barons Eye Paddock to Plate,” http://www.countryman.com.au (2009). And you can read about the benign green grab in “The Nature Conservancy and Partners Acquire Fish River Station in Northern Australia,” http://www.nature.org (2011).
Chapter 15: Sumatra, Indonesia
I visited Sumatra in late 2007 (see “Bog Barons: Indonesia’s Carbon Catastrophe,” at http://www.newscientist.com). My hosts were WWF’s Yumiko Uryu, Afdhal Mahyuddin from Eyes on the Forest, and APRIL’s Neil Franklin. APRIL is at http://www.aprilasia.com; APP is at http://www.asiapulppaper.com.
“Eka Tjipta Widjaja, Indonesia’s Richest Man,” is at http://www.thejakartaglobe.com (2011); APP’s strategy is dissected in “A Forest Falls in Cambodia,” http://www.atimes.com (2005). His rival, Sukanto Tanoto, is at http://www.sukantotanoto.net and in Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/. Read more about Arara Abadi in “Without Remedy: Human Rights Abuse and Indonesia’s Pulp and Paper Industry,” http://www.hrw.org (2003), and “Indonesia: Investigate Forcible Destruction of Homes by the Police in Riau,” http://www.amnesty.org (2008).
