No tanks. Zero planes, soldiers and guns. The neo-colonialism of the Third Millennium (copyright FAO) is the conquest of new lands for use on board comfortable tractors. Shed blood to annex a piece of Africa, Asia or South America no longer needed. Today - to get up its flag - is there an easier way: buy it. The Third World, brought to its knees by the vagaries of agricultural tariffs and prices of raw materials, it is sold. And the richest countries (but not only) - aware that in a few years soil and water resources are more valuable than oil - are already lining up to grab nations in the balance. This
risiko on the skin of the poorest areas of the planet is open to all. They move governments, corporations, sovereign wealth funds and even individuals. Heilberg Philippe, a former banker on Wall Street and today's number one Jarc Capital (the company behind which there are many men of ex-CIA and U.S. State Department), was given two weeks ago, 400 thousand hectares of fertile fields in Sudan along the banks of the Nile.
A maxi-farm as big as the whole Dubai. Seller: Matip Gabriel, the son of Paulino, the warlord who controls the tip from years of gun these areas. Madagascar has "rented" to Daewoo to 99 years 1.3 million hectares, an area greater than that of Belgium and equal 50% of the arable land in Madagascar. Here, the South Korean tractors cultivate corn and palm oil to be allocated to domestic consumption of Seoul. "The trade agreement is only apparently - says Carl Atkins of Agribusiness Bidwell, a consulting firm that deals with these types of transactions - is actually sponsored by the government of South Korea in the name of the strategic interests of national food security ' .
"We are facing a phenomenon that we can not categorize the voice of neo-colonialism," he warned a number of FAO Jacques Diouf thinking about 70% of people in Madagascar live below the poverty line . But stop the wind with your fingers is impossible. China - a country where the water (very low) that is already like gold - got their hands on from 2007 to the sound of renminbi by buying hundreds of thousands of hectares in the Philippines, Sudan and Kazakhstan. Libya has traded a little 'barrels of its crude in order to win the rights to a piece of Ukraine. Fifteen Saudi investors have put $ 4 billion to develop 500 thousand hectares in Indonesia. Objective: Basmati rice plant and then be re-exported to Arabia.
The problem of FAO and non-governmental organizations - alarmed by the dramatic impact on the millions of people now these lands cultivated field - is that the victims of neo-capitalism, starved of capital and investment, are the first to put his head under the guillotine. Cambodia, Indonesia enticed by the agreements, is selling large parts of the country. "We want to collect 3 billion - said proud Suos Yara, undersecretary for economic cooperation in Phnom Penh - We have developed contacts with Kuwait and Qatar." That the sand deserts of them manage to get just oil. Same music in Ethiopia: "The auction is open to our fields, we need technology and money," announced Prime Minister Meles Zenawi in Addis Ababa. To accelerate this
suk, who is redrawing the map of the world without firing a single bullet, was the speculative bubble on the prices of food commodities in 2008. The problem, say sociologists, is simple. World population is growing by leaps and bounds while the arable land are more or less the same. In 1960 every human being had available 4,300 square feet on the planet for subsistence food. Today we are down to 2,200 and in 2030 our "living space" will be only 1,800 square meters. Other than dependence on oil, "Broadening the land available to its citizens is increasingly becoming a strategic priority for the governments that are able to look farther," says Atkins. Those who can not (or can not afford to do so) instead of selling.
among other things, experts say, could only get worse. "The next emergency is called water - says Chiara Tonelli, professor of genetics at the University of Milan and Advisor of Advisory Group on Nutrition of the EU - 70% water is used today for agriculture and changing the habits of the world's vegetable-meat diet (to produce a kilo of rice it takes a thousand liters of water to a kilo of meat 45 thousand) will exacerbate this problem. Which is why those who can go to buy and consume the water of others. " China is the most striking example: in Beijing is known for its arable land. But the chronic lack of springs and rivers has convinced the government for some years to take the careful policy of acquiring land abroad (from Cuba to Mexico, Australia to Russia to Uganda and Tanzania) which allowed to raise the red flag on almost 3 million hectares around the world.
The problem is clear (and older): The most powerful and richest countries in the future will fill your belly at the expense of poorer ones. Offering in exchange for little more than a mess of pottage. But what can be done to curb this phenomenon? FAO, grappling with a billion people who suffer from hunger (a number that is growing rather than decrease), proposed to initiate a plan for emergency aid for agriculture in less developed countries not to force them to hang the sign " Sale "on their land. Too bad that the big names in the financial crisis the G-8 will not even find the money to remedy the chasms open their creative financing.
Science has the recipe: if the land can not expand, explain pragmatically in universities, you can try to make them more. "Today 30% of agricultural production is lost to diseases like stress and lack of water - said Tonelli - a huge sum. You manage to make plants more resistant to drought or recover the marginal land for cultivation to discourage the affordability of land for shopping abroad. " A perhaps more effective market response to the appeals of the FAO. The scientific knowledge to arrive at these results, inter alia, through the sequencing of genomes, there are already. But the resistance to genetic modification, the drop in research funding and the lengthy process of approval does not authorize us to hope for a rapid solution to the food needs of the scientific world.
The way is narrow and therefore it is in this subtle ridge plunging everyone from governments to finance as buccaneers Heilberg. Agriculture? I do not understand anything - he admitted a number of Jarc, former manager of the stricken insurer AIG, after shopping in Sudan - I just know that this is fertile ground in an unstable area. And when the situation is quiet, with demand for these assets as there is around the world, we will big business. " No remorse for having negotiated with a warlord. "I know that Paulino has killed many people - has confessed to the Financial Times - but has to defend his people."
Pecunia non olet, money has no smell. "I have every day under the noses of the world map to go to new opportunities - Heilberg concludes - and I'm already looking to Darfur." The neo-colonialism - a fine art - even now unable to fight its wars in the armies of others.
Ettore Livin, La Repubblica, January 31, 2009
0 comments:
Post a Comment