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Updated Monday, January 5, 2009 10:51 am TWN, By Sarah Stewart, AFP

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Global trends may be spurring 'land grab' in poorer countries

KUALA LUMPUR -- Resource-hungry nations are snapping up huge tracts of agricultural land in poor Asian nations, in what activists say is a “land grab” that will worsen poverty and malnutrition.

Global trends including high prices for oil and commodities, the biofuels boom, and now the sweeping downturn, are spurring import-reliant countries to take action to protect their sources of food.

China and South Korea, which are both short on arable land, and Middle Eastern nations flush with petrodollars, are driving the trend to sign up rights to swathes of territory in Asia and Africa.

“Today's food and financial crises have, in tandem, triggered a new global land grab,” the Spain-based agricultural rights group Grain said in a recent report.

It said that some deals were targeted at boosting food security by producing crops that would be sent back home for consumption, while others were to establish money-making plantations like palm oil and rubber.

“As a result of both trends, fertile agricultural land is being swiftly privatized and consolidated by foreign companies in some of the world's poorest and hungriest countries,” it said.

In one of the biggest deals, South Korea's Daewoo Logistics said in November it would invest about US$6 billion to develop 3.2 million acres (1.3 million hectares) in Madagascar — almost half the size of Belgium.

Daewoo plans to produce four million tons of corn and 500,000 tons of palm oil a year, most of which will be shipped out of impoverished Madagascar — where the World Food Program still provides food relief.

“We will build everything from ports and railways to markets on a barren and untouched area,” said Shin Dong-Hyun, general manager of the WFP's financing and strategic planning department.

Although commodity prices have fallen from their highs earlier this year, resource-poor and heavily populated countries are still concerned about securing long-term supplies.

Walden Bello, from Bangkok-based advocacy group Focus on the Global South, said the looming global recession is not likely to halt the trend which he fears will worsen the lot of landless peasants.

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