FT.com / Global Economy - World Bank warns on ‘farmland grab’ trend

Got to love it the rich destroy the economy through poor investment and profit making schemes inflating a massive housing bubble in the the US.  Bubble bursts, financial industry gets bailed out by Governments all over the globe.  The poor and working class all over the globe get crushed under the weight of a recession.  Economy begins to grow again--corporate profits skyrocket though big business is strategically refusing to reinvest and create new jobs with their accumulation of capital.

 

Then the icing on the cake. The rich swoop in and buy up land at a price level that can only be called theft--exploiting the poor, small business owners and working class families all over the globe.  Forget Ayn Rand la la land and Republican revisionist history. That's the history of capitalism, that's how our system works[sic] and has worked since the beginning. 

 

That's why you should vote so that government passes economic policies that trickle up through a thriving economy rather than accumulate at the top as the rest of us drown.

 

Financial Times:

Investors in farmland are targeting countries with weak laws, buying arable land on the cheap and failing to deliver on promises of jobs and investments, according to the draft of a report by the World Bank.

“Investor interest is focused on countries with weak land governance,” the draft said. Although deals promised jobs and infrastructure, “investors failed to follow through on their investments plans, in some cases after inflicting serious damage on the local resource base”.

In addition, “the level of formal payments required was low”, making speculation a key motive for purchases. “Payments for land are often waived ... and large investors often pay lower taxes than smallholders ... or none at all.”

The report, The Global Land Rush: Can it yield sustainable and equitable benefits?’ is the broadest study yet of the so-called “farmland grab”, in which countries invest in overseas land to boost their food security, or investors – who are mostly locals – buy arable land. The “farmland grab” trend gained notoriety after an attempt in 2008 by South Korea’s Daewoo Logistics to secure a large chunk of land in Madagascar for a very low price and vague promises of investment. The deal contributed to a coup d’état in the African country.

The draft was leaked to the Financial Times by a person who said they wanted to prevent the World Bank releasing the report in the middle of the summer holiday period.

The Washington-based body said the report was a work in progress and revisions were being made. “When it is released in August, we believe it will contribute much-needed data and other information to this complex subject.”

The World Bank advocated in its draft the launch of a Land Transparency Initiative modelled on the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative, which commits governments, mainly in developing countries, to disclose revenues from oil and mining groups to improve transparency on the deals. Critics noted that eight years after its launch, only Liberia, Timor-Leste and Azerbaijan, were full members of the EITI. But the draft said: “By establishing a consistent format for reporting on land acquisition and monitoring [the] process over time, it could provide access to information sorely missing.”

Posted via email from Jim Nichols