Lemmer's Rogue Report - The view sucks, but at least the food is good.
Buried under the news coverage of the dead and the destruction, The Guardian reported on Ethiopia selling “vast fertile swaths to international companies”. No caved-in schools. No blood trickling out of rubble. No sun burnt tourists feeling bad about their cheeseburgers because they can see mobs lynching looters, and families mourning crushed children. Just farms, crops and ground changing hands. But the story is part of a growing trend that could leave millions starving.
Of course, Ethiopia isn’t giving this land away for free. Karturi is paying roughly £6 per hectare per year. For its Luxemburg-sized farm, that’s roughly £1.8 million a year. Not exactly the £173 million needed at present, yet Karturi has said that most of the farm’s produce will be sold domestically. The company had better be prepared to sell cheap: the minimum wage in Ethiopia is 39p a day. A lucky 20,000 people will earn 49p by working on the Luxemburg farm owned by Karturi, a company that makes over £60 million in annual profit.
Karturi is just part of a growing trend to buy prime arable land in developing countries. The president of the Democratic Republic of Congo has offered to lease 10 million hectares to South Africa; Egypt plans to grow wheat and corn on 840,000 hectares in Uganda; and the Sudanese government has leased 1.5 million hectares of prime farmland to the Gulf States, Egypt and South Korea for 99 years. Paradoxically, Sudan is also the world's largest recipient of foreign aid, with 5.6 million of its citizens dependent on food deliveries.
By now, you probably want some violence – dramatic pictures instead of wheat rustling in the African breeze. How about a Pakistani soldier having his head caved in by a starving rioter? Pakistan has announced plans to deploy 100,000 members of its security forces to protect foreign-owned fields. Philippe Heilberg is certainly looking forward to this merry scene. Heilberg is a former Wall Street investor and is now head of Jarch Capital, and he is currently hoping to lease thousands of hectares of arable land in Sudan… as in the war torn, impoverished, war-crime infested Sudan? Yes, but that’s not stopping Heilberg: “When food becomes scarce, the investor needs a weak state that does not force him to abide by the rules”, Heilberg told journalists last year. Heilberg is gaining his land through a deal with Paulino Matip, a former warlord accused of war crimes such as allowing child soldiers in his militia, although Heilberg would prefer the term “deputy army chief”.
Sometimes a change of word can make the world a much nicer place. There is “talk about "food insecurity ", "food scarcity", "food insufficiency", "food deprivation", "severe food shortages", "chronic dietary deficiency", "endemic malnutrition" and so on just to avoid using the "F" word – famine, a report by a professor of political science, CSU San Bernardino, claimed last week in the Huffington Post. But sometimes the very thing you’re trying to brush aside speaks up: “Just because we are poor it doesn’t make us less human”, one Karturi employee said regarding his low wages. Just because there is no great Hollywood style event, and just because there are no graphic pictures of ruined cities and broken bodies, should famine be easier to stomach?
