“Productive agricultural land with water on site, will be very valuable in the future.”
September 15th, 2010Via: Telegraph:
The neo-colonial rush for global farmland has gone exponential since the food scare of 2007-2008.
Last week’s long-delayed report by the World Bank suggests that purchases in developing countries rose to 45m hectares in 2009, a ten-fold jump from levels of the last decade. Two thirds have been in Africa, where institutions offer weak defence.
As is by now well-known, sovereign wealth funds from the Mid-East, as well as state-entities from China, the Pacific Rim, and even India are trying to lock up chunks of the world’s future food supply. Western agribusiness is trying to beat them to it. Western funds – many listed on London’s AIM exchange – are in turn trying to beat them. The NGO GRAIN, and farmlandgrab.com, have both documented the stampede in detail.
Hedge funds that struck rich ‘shorting’ US sub-prime have rotated into the next great play of our era: ‘long’ soil. “Productive agricultural land with water on site, will be very valuable in the future. And I’ve put a good amount of money into that,” said Michael Burry, star of ‘The Big Short’.
Research Credit: Lagavulin
FYI the site is farmlandgrab.org, not com as is in the article…