17 Oct Who's behind the land grabs?

Every day there are new stories of companies buying up farmlands. Malaysian palm oil giants buying up lands for plantations in West Africa. Wall Street bankers taking over cattle ranches in Brazil. Saudi businessmen signing land deals in the Philippines. The result is that a small number of people are taking over more and more of the world’s farmlands, and the water that goes with it, leaving everyone else with less, or none at all. As the world plunges deeper into a food crisis, these new farmland lords will hold sway over who gets to eat and who doesn’t and who profits and who perishes within the food system. To help pull back the curtain on the land grabbers, GRAIN has pieced together a slide show that tells a little about some of those who have been most actively pursuing or supporting farmland grabs.
The slide show and a text version can be viewed or downloaded here: http://www.grain.org/e/4576