Land grabbing hurts the world’s poor more than climate change, Fred Pearce argues
A version of this article originally appeared in The Observer.
30 May 2012
Investigative journalist and author Fred Pearce has a new book out this week: The Land Grabbers: The New Fight Over Who Owns the Earth,
which explores “how Wall Street, Chinese billionaires, oil sheiks, and
agribusiness are buying up huge tracts of land in a hungry, crowded
world.” Here he answers questions about the book and his long career
reporting on environmental challenges.
Q. What inspired you to write The Land Grabbers?
A. Over the last few years, I became aware of
this hidden revolution taking place around the world: the buying up of
vast swaths of land by foreign entities from beneath its occupiers.
Soaring grain prices in 2007/2008 led to countries such as Saudi Arabia
and South Korea worrying about their national food security and buying
up overseas land. Then speculators and investors started piling in on
the back of that. The net result is that poor farmers and cattle herders
across the world are being thrown off their land. Land grabbing is
having more of an impact on the lives of poor people than climate
change. No one has put together the global picture of land grabbing so I
wanted to take a closer look.
Q. How much land has been grabbed?
A. No one really knows. A lot of reported
deals never happen and a lot of the largest are done secretly. Oxfam
says more than 2 million square kilometers [772,204 square miles] in the
last decade have been grabbed, two-thirds of them in Africa. That’s
like Spain, France, Britain, Italy, and Germany put together.
Q. Who’s doing the grabbing?
A. A vast and colorful cast of characters:
Gulf sheikhdoms, jumpy governments worried about food security, Chinese
state corporations, Wall Street speculators, Russian oligarchs,
Gaddafi’s henchmen among many. Also some big conservation funds. Most
likely your pension fund has a slice of the action too.
Q. How did you research the book?
A. I’m an old-fashioned reporter — I want to
go see. So I’d read about a big land deal in the papers and go to find
what was going on. I traveled to 10 or so countries where the most
egregious grabbing is taking place: the savannah of Brazil, the forests
of Indonesia, the inner Niger delta of Mali.
Q. Some governments bend over backwards for the grabbers …
A. If you drive into one region of Tanzania
your mobile phone beeps with a text welcoming you to the United Arab
Emirates (UAE). A major general in the UAE army has bought exclusive
hunting rights to a 400,000-hectare [988,422-acre] national park there.
There are stories of them using spotlights off vehicles at night to
shoot leopards with AK-47s and burning the bush to beat the game towards
the guns. And the Tanzanian government’s elite paramilitary unit keeps
the Masai families off the land.
Q. Who’s losing out?
A. Wherever I went, people were being moved
off with little or no regard for their historic or cultural rights. The
grabbers want big spaces — 50,000 hectares [123,553 acres] — and you can
only get that if you take commonly owned ancestral lands. They come in
and put in an airstrip and a compound and roads and canals and the
villagers are told to go to the nearest town and they lose absolutely
everything.
Q. You wrote the first popular book on climate change, Turning Up the Heat, in 1989. How’s that story going?
A. We have political consensus; the clean
energy technology is there; it’s in our interests environmentally and
economically; smart corporations can make a profit from the change; and
we have shown with the banking crisis that if there’s a trillion-dollar
price tag, we can pay it. But still nothing. If we can fix the banking
system, then why not the climate system? It’s governments that lack the
balls.
Q. What about the theory that what the West does is irrelevant, what with the Eastern economies growing so rapidly?
A. Well, the Chinese have an environmental
movement. There’s huge concern about local pollution — smog, kids with
high levels of lead from smelters, chronic poisoning, and so on. It’s
like Eastern Europe before the Berlin Wall came down — environmentalism
was how political space was developed. It was the channel by which you
could attack the political system. It wasn’t directly attacking the
state or the Communist party but it was a damn good way of coming in the
side door.
Q. In 2006, you wrote The Last Generation, a book about tipping points rapidly speeding up climate change.
A. There’s huge concern about this.
Historically, climate change does not happen in a gradual way, we have
periods of stability and then a lurch. Over the last few years, we’ve
been losing dramatically more Arctic sea ice in the summer than was
predicted. There are concerns that the monsoons could switch off as a
result of current changes in the Atlantic and that warming could cause
methane to bubble out of the melting Siberian permafrost, which would
then speed up warming even more. So things could get out of control much
quicker than predictions suggest.
Q. What makes a good science writer?
A. Some see themselves as part of the
scientific priesthood, but you should be independent, like a political
correspondent looking at politicians. This got me into trouble
over “Climategate.” There was some disturbing stuff in terms of people
taking shortcuts, trying to ensure that rival scientists didn’t get
their stuff published, colluding against freedom of information
requests. It didn’t undermine the climate change science but it deserved
the light of day. A lot of people didn’t like me writing it up.
Q. In Confessions of an Eco-Sinner, you traced your own environmental footprint. Did you change your lifestyle after that?
A. Not a great deal, I have to admit. My
house leaks energy and in my work I fly a huge amount, which means my
carbon footprint is sky-high. My wife is still a better recycler than I
am.
Q. But the journey made you think as much about your social footprint as your environmental one?
A. It made me realize there’s a kind of green
imperialism where we are just screwing up a lot of lives for uncertain
benefit and a sense of personal virtue. For example, the carbon
footprint of flying green beans from Kenya is no greater than that of
growing them in a hothouse in the Netherlands. And there is huge benefit
attached to the farmer. How dare I decide that I want to penalize them
to make myself feel a little bit better?
Q. What’s the least green thing a person can do?
A. Well, drinking Fiji Water, which has been shipped around the world from the South Pacific, doesn’t make much sense. It rains here too.
Q. Most of the stories you cover seem full of pessimism.
A. I’m interested in the life-support systems
of the planet and they can be in peril without us knowing it. Take the
ozone layer. Once scientists found that chlorine-based refrigerator
chemicals were causing the problem we responded quickly and basically we
only just caught it in time. Scientists say we might easily have used
bromine-based chemicals in refrigerators instead, in which case we would
have destroyed the ozone layer before we realized the problem.
Q. Does all this keep you up at night?
A. No. You can plan for the future, but you can’t predict it.
Read an excerpt from The Land Grabbers.
Source: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?shva=1#inbox/137a1012ce649071
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