Promise?

Note
President Obama holds a note from his personal assistant Reggie Love as he speaks during a town hall meeting on health insurance at a high school in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
[EWEL SAMAD / AFP / Getty]

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More seriously… Spiegel has a two parter (each part is just a page) on rich investors in various countries buying up, long term leasing farm land across the globe… Think catnip put up a report from one of the UK papers last week…

Part 1 The new colonialism

[E]very crisis has its winners. A group of them is sitting in the Stuyvesant Room at the Marriott Hotel in New York. The conference room, where the shades are drawn and the lights are dimmed, is filled with men from Iowa, Sao Paulo and Sydney — corn farmers, big landowners and fund managers. Each of them has paid $1,995 (€1,395) to attend Global AgInvesting 2009, the first investors’ conference on the emerging worldwide market in farmland.

…

According to most prognoses, there could be 9.1 billion people living on earth in 2050, about two billion more than today. In the coming 20 years alone, worldwide demand for food is expected to rise by 50 percent. “These are pessimistic prospects,” says the OECD man. He looks serious and even a little sad, as he describes the future of the world.

But for the audience in the Stuyvesant Room, mostly men and a handful of women, all of this is good news and the mood is buoyant. How could it be any different? After all, hunger is their business. The combination of more people and less land makes food a safe investment, with annual returns of 20 to 30 percent, rare in the current economic climate.

…

Susan Payne, a red-haired British woman, is the CEO of the largest land fund in southern Africa, which currently includes 150,000 hectares (370,000 acres), mainly in South Africa, Zambia and Mozambique. Payne hopes to raise half a billion euros from investors. She talks about fighting hunger, but the headings on her PowerPoint slides, embellished with photos of soybean fields at sunset, tell a different story. One such heading refers to “Africa — the last frontier for finding alpha.” The word alpha signifies an investment for which the return is greater than the risk. Africa is alpha country.  snip

A cotton farmer in Burkino Faso. To boost harvests and achieve annual returns of 20 percent or more, foreign landowners must operate their farms on an industrial scale. When the soil becomes depleted after a few years, many investors simply move on. Land is so cheap that they are not forced to value sustainable farming practices. [AFP]

Part 2 The investor needs a weak state

“When food becomes scarce, the investor needs a weak state that does not force him to abide by any rules,” says Philippe Heilberg, an American businessman. A state that permits grain exports despite famines at home, that is consumed by corruption or deeply in debt, ruled by a dictatorship, racked by civil war, or sends millions of workers abroad and is dependent on these workers receiving visas and jobs.

Heilberg has found such a nation: South Sudan, which is in fact a pre-nation, autonomous but not independent. The 44-year-old American, son of a coffee merchant and the founder of the investment firm Jarch Capital, is now the largest land leaseholder in South Sudan, where he leases 400,000 hectares of prime farmland in Mayom County.

The mere mention of the words South Sudan conjures up images of civil war, refugees and famine, not of a place where one would consider growing tomatoes. But Heilberg raves that his project will be more beneficial to people than the UN, and that he will create jobs and produce food. And he is adamant that Paulino Matip, from whom he has leased the land for 50 years, not be referred to as a warlord, but as a “former warlord” or “deputy army chief.” Heilberg neglects to mention that the rebels led by Matip are suspected of having committed war crimes.

Ah, war crimes… but then we have too .. committed war crimes I mean.  Brothers in arms.

Solving the problem means developing new land, which is only available in Africa, Asia and South America. – Part 1

Not hard to figure out we don’t care the least little bit who starves in the countries themselves …  Who starves now and starves tomorrow – ’til the land renews…

Probably part of the plan… less visible destruction than invasion – war – occupation.  And, bonus! – the multi-national investor class takes care of it for us.

So simple it is brilliant!