From: Judy Miriga

Folks,

Africa is not alone and it is time the world wake up and save a worisome situation. This is unacceptable.

Judy Miriga
Diaspora Spokesperson
Executive Director
Confederation Council Foundation for Africa Inc.,
USA
http://socioeconomicforum50.blogspot.com

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The food price crisis of 2007–8 was a public relations disaster for the World Bank. Just months before prices hit their peak, the Bank was still telling governments that food self-sufficiency was a foolish goal. But then the governments of some major food exporting countries, worried about the needs of their people, began to close their borders. Food prices spiked and riots flared, from Yaoundé to Mexico City, in countries that had followed the Bank’s advice about the efficiency of global markets and the perils of supporting local agriculture. With countries like Malaysia bartering for food, and the number of hungry people and the profits of the grain trade’s giants at all time highs, who could trust the Bank any longer?

At the height of the food crisis, a global farmland grab erupted. All the foreign investment that the Bank had for decades promised would be the nemesis of poverty and food insecurity was now flooding into countries all over the planet. But the glaring predicament for the Bank was that the money was chasing farmland occupied by peasants and pastoralists, to produce food crops for export from countries already coping with severe food insecurity. It was hard to spin this as a solution to the food crisis, espcially when the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation’s Director General, Jacques Diouf, had already warned of “neocolonialism”, and even The Economist was calling it a “land grab”.

WHO’S BEHIND THE land grabing ?

A look at some of the people pursuing or supporting large farmland grabs around the world

GRAIN, 2012

Link: http://www.grain.org/attachments/2606/download

The World Bank Group

“It’s like the California gold rush. The initial investors are not the most savory characters in the world.” – World Bank’s former Agribusiness Team Leader John Lamb speaking in 2010 about the global land grab.

Profiles of some of the people pursuing or supporting large farmland grabs around the world

Jean-Claude Gandur, Addax (Switzerland)

Jose Minaya, TIAA-CREF

(US)
Sai Ramakrishna Karuturi, Karuturi Global

(India)
Calvin Burgess, Dominion Farms

(US)
C “Siva” Sivasankaran, Siva Group

[ . . . ]

Read or d/l the report
http://www.grain.org/attachments/2606/download