Posted on 05/23/2009 2:36:41 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
Outsourcing's third wave
May 21st 2009
From The Economist print edition
Rich food importers are acquiring vast tracts of poor countries' farmland. Is this beneficial foreign investment or neocolonialism?
Click to enlargeEARLY this year, the king of Saudi Arabia held a ceremony to receive a batch of rice, part of the first crop to be produced under something called the King Abdullah initiative for Saudi agricultural investment abroad. It had been grown in Ethiopia, where a group of Saudi investors is spending $100m to raise wheat, barley and rice on land leased to them by the government. The investors are exempt from tax in the first few years and may export the entire crop back home. Meanwhile, the World Food Programme (WFP) is spending almost the same amount as the investors ($116m) providing 230,000 tonnes of food aid between 2007 and 2011 to the 4.6m Ethiopians it thinks are threatened by hunger and malnutrition.
The Saudi programme is an example of a powerful but contentious trend sweeping the poor world: countries that export capital but import food are outsourcing farm production to countries that need capital but have land to spare. Instead of buying food on world markets, governments and politically influential companies buy or lease farmland abroad, grow the crops there and ship them back.
(Excerpt) Read more at economist.com ...
Ping!
That’s likely to work well.
The Irish Potato famine is an example of when it works to the benefit of the country which owns the land.
Despots like Mugabe and/or Chavez will take this land back and the food that it produces too.
Case in point: Zimbabwe.
The old “Get Whitey” ploy.
Irrigation is key. I really and truely think that if any third world nations governments actually cared about thier people, that my ideas would only give good ideas.
Thank God I aint that dumb, I’ll not waste my time, and whenever my tax dollars go to the bottomless pit of third world poverty, I cringe, I mean really, some of these ELITIST people make me sick. Even if it were not my money, my disdain for them would still be monumental.
Any world leader that has everything, while the poor have nothing, needs to be voted out (overthrown) at the very least.
Centralized control of food production can only lead to a bad result. Dependency upon a large bureaucracy for food? No thanks.
The family food garden is already making a strong comeback. Decentralization of resources will be the individual, libertarian and anti-globalist response to this kind of mentality. Watch for it in energy production (small biofuel farms, even small nuke plants) and economies (local currencies and barter systems will start to crop up).
A hidden threat is dependency on a food source that is not genetically diverse. Everybody plants the same hybrid wheat, corn, rice, etc. and when some new disease strikes that hybrid, that food system collapses.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.