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Hunger, Food Security, and the African Land Grab

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2013

Richard Schiffman
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Abstract

If you were organizing dinner parties for the world, you would need to put out 219,000 more place settings every night than you had the night before. That is how fast the Earth's population is growing. But global agricultural production is currently failing to keep pace. A June 2012 report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) sees trouble looming ahead, warning that “land and water resources are now much more stressed than in the past and are becoming scarcer.”

Type
Essay
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 27 , Issue 3 , Fall 2013 , pp. 239 - 249
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2013 

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References

NOTES

1 Lester Brown, “The Great Food Crisis of 2011,” Foreign Policy, January 10, 2011, www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/01/10/the_great_food_crisis_of_2011.

2 Alister Doyle, “‘Peak farmland’ is here, crop area to diminish: study,” Reuters, December 17, 2012, www.reuters.com/article/2012/12/17/us-crops-idUSBRE8BG0QH20121217.

3 Brown, “Great Food Crisis.”

4 Brandon Kiem, “Speculation Blamed for Global Food Price Weirdness,” Wired online, March 6, 2012, www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/03/speculation-food-prices/.

5 Michael Greenberger, “Closing Wall Street's Commodity and Swaps Betting Parlors: Legal Remedies to Combat Needlessly Gambling up the Price of Crude Oil Beyond What Market Fundamentals Dictate,” George Washington Law Review 81, no. 3 (April 2013), www.gwlr.org/2013/04/30/greenberger/.

6 World Development Movement, “What is the Problem?” www.wdm.org.uk/stop-bankers-betting-food/what-problem.

7 World Development Movement, The great hunger lottery – How banking speculation causes food crises (July 2010), www.wdm.org.uk/food-speculation/great-hunger-lottery.

8 Kiem, “Speculation Blamed for Global Food Price Weirdness.”

9 Survival International, “US food giant Bunge accused over biofuel ‘tainted with Indian blood,’” November, 14, 2012, farmlandgrab.org/post/view/21314.

10 Goklany, Indur M., “Could Biofuel Policies Increase Death and Disease in Developing Countries?,” Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons 16, no. 1 (Spring 2011)Google Scholar, www.jpands.org/vol16no1/goklany.pdf.

11 Ibid.

12 Jun Borras, Ian Scoones, and David Hughes, “Small-scale farmers increasingly at risk from ‘global land grabbing,’” Poverty Matters (blog), Guardian, April 15, 2011, www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/apr/15/risks-over-increasing-global-land-deals.

13 Food and Agriculture Organization, The State of Food Insecurity in the World: Economic Growth Is Necessary But Not Sufficient to Accelerate Reduction of Hunger and Malnutrition (Rome: FAO, 2012), p. 8.

14 Nicole Winfield, Associated Press, “UN says world hungry not 1 billion after all,” Seattle Times, October 9, 2012, seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2019380903_apeuunworldhunger.html.

15 Curtis Petzoldt and Abby Seaman, “Climate Change Effects on Insects and Pathogens,” climateandfarming.org (Climate Change and Northeast Agriculture project), January 2012, www.climateandfarming.org/pdfs/FactSheets/III.2Insects.Pathogens.pdf.

16 U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), “U.S. Drought 2012: Farm and Food Impacts,” January 2013, www.ers.usda.gov/topics/in-the-news/us-drought-2012-farm-and-food-impacts.aspx.

17 Justin Gillis, “A Warming Planet Struggles to Feed Itself,” New York Times, June 4, 2011, www.nytimes.com/2011/06/05/science/earth/05harvest.html?_r=1&hp.

18 Brown, “Great Food Crisis.”

19 Maria Godoy, “Can Riots Be Predicted? Experts Watch Food Prices,” The Salt (blog), NPR, October 2, 2012, www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/09/20/161501075/high-food-prices-forcast-more-global-riots-ahead-researchers-say.

20 Damien McElroy, “Protest at the great African land grab,” Telegraph, October 4, 2012, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/liberia/9584931/Protest-at-the-great-African-land-grab.html.

21 GRAIN, “Slideshow: Who's behind the land grabs?,” October 16, 2012, www.grain.org/article/entries/4576-slideshow-who-s-behind-the-land-grabs.

22 Borras, Scoones, and Hughes, “Small-scale farmers increasingly at risk,” April 15, 2011.

23 Ibid.

24 GRAIN, “The G8 and land grabs in Africa,” March 11, 2013, www.grain.org/article/entries/4663-the-g8-and-land-grabs-in-africa.

25 FAO, “About the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure,” May 11, 2012, www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/142587/icode/.

26 “Civil Society Organisation Land Net Malawi,” International Land Coalition, www.landcoalition.org/organizations/land-net-malawi.

27 Participants of the Regional Civil Society Consultation for Africa (Brazzaville, April 21–22, 2012), “Final Declaration of Civil Society Organizations,” kofic.s3.amazonaws.com/126/2251/African-Civil-Society-Declaration.pdf.

28 Mark Rowe, “A new colonial carve-up?,” Geographical Magazine, August 2011, www.geographical.co.uk/Magazine/Dossiers/Land_grabs_-_Aug_11.html?

29 Human Rights Watch, “‘Waiting Here for Death’: Forced Displacement and ‘Villagization’ in Ethiopia's Gambella Region" (United States: Human Rights Watch, 2012), p. 2.

30 Ibid., p. 4.

31 John Vidal, “How food and water are driving a 21st-century African land grab,” Guardian, March 6, 2010, www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/mar/07/food-water-africa-land-grab.

32 Ibid., p. 2.

33 “African Land Interest Is Opportunity and Threat,” Business Report, May 24, 2010, www.iol.co.za/business/opinion/african-land-interest-is-opportunity-and-threat-1.699042#.UgO4kdKOQYs.

34 Human Rights Watch, “Waiting Here for Death,” p. 4.

35 Ibid.

36 McElroy, “Protest at the great African land grab.”

37 GRAIN, “Brazilian Megaproject in Mozambique Set to Displace Millions of Peasants,” November 29, 2012, www.grain.org/article/entries/4626-brazilian-megaproject-in-mozambique-set-to-displace-millions-of-peasants.

38 GRAIN et al., “Interview with GRAIN on the ProSavana project,” December 14, 2012, www.grain.org/article/entries/4633-interview-with-grain-on-the-prosavana-project.

39 World Food Programme, “Fortifying Fight Against Malnutrition In Mozambique,” March 26, 2012, www.wfp.org/node/3528/3942/209087.

40 GRAIN, “The G8 and land grabs in Africa,” March, 11, 2013.

41 Oakland and Polaris Institutes, “Land grabs leave Africa thirsty,” on the GRAIN website, February 15, 2012, www.grain.org/bulletin_board/entries/4478-land-grabs-leave-africa-thirsty.

42 Suma Chakrabarti and José Graziano da Silva, “Hungry for Investment,” Wall Street Journal, September 6, 2012, online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443686004577633080190871456.html.

43 Rowe, “A new colonial carve-up?,” August 2011.

44 LVC, GRAIN et al., “Why are the FAO and the EBRD promoting the destruction of peasant and family farming?, September 14 2012, www.grain.org/article/entries/4572-why-are-the-fao-and-the-ebrd-promoting-the-destruction-of-peasant-and-family-farming.

45 UNAC, Via Campesina Africa, and GRAIN, “Brazilian megaproject in Mozambique set to displace millions of peasants,” November 29, 2012, www.grain.org/article/entries/4626-brazilian-megaproject-in-mozambique-set-to-displace-millions-of-peasants.

46 McElroy, “Protest at the great African land grab.”