VATIC ALERT: Slideshow: Who's behind the Massive Global Farm land grabs?

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Vatic Note:  There are major land grabs, specifically farm lands, going on all over the globe.  Instead of conducting war with weapons that are traditional, instead they simply used money as a WMD and bought up all the usable farm land that we depend on to grow our food. 

That means they will control our food which is a basic necessity and thus eventually they will be fought over between Israel and each country involved.  I have added addition VN: below within the text, so this above will be very short instead. 

Please read and you decide. 


Slideshow: Who's behind the land grabs?
http://www.grain.org/article/entries/4576-slideshow-who-s-behind-the-land-grabs
By Admin,  Grain dot Org,  October 16, 2014

A slide show about some of the people pursuing or supporting large farmland grabs around the world

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 latest dataset on land grabs claims that 10 million hectares of land have been grabbed by foreign companies on average every year since 2007.   (VN: that is a total of 70 million hectares of food control on a massive scale.  We see what they have done to our food since this all started and I say, "NO MORE".  They are poisoning us with it and harming the natural cycle of these animals.... abuse creates poisons in the animals which then affects them as "meat" for us.  It truly has to stop and its ony one example that needs to be addressed, water and air are the other issues.)

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.

The global farmland grab is only happening because people are pursuing it. The number of land grabbers is small, in contrast with the high number of people displaced by their actions. They are mostly men, often with experience working with agribusiness companies or banks. Some of them sit at high-levels of government and intergovernmental agencies, and sometimes at the highest levels. They operate out of the big financial centres of the world and often get together at farmland investor meetings, whether in Singapore, Zanzibar or New York City.

We think it might help the debate over land grabs to pull back the curtain a little on who these people are. So we've pieced together a slide show that tells about some of those who have been actively pursuing or supporting farmland grabs. It's an emblematic set of land grabbers, not a comprehensive one. Knowing who's invovled can also help us in pressuring the land grabbers to stop. Each landgrabber profile indicates who his or her friends are and provides resources for those who want further information or to pursue actions.
Download the slideshow in PDF (5.6 MB) or a text version in PDF (713 KB).

(For a previous profile of people grabbing land in Africa, see Meet the millionaires and billionaires suddenly buying tons of land in Africa, by Courtney Comstock, published by Business Insider, based on research by the Oakland Institute.)

V.N. - Here is just one example of such a millionaire and his impact on the local African community he ravished. Following this example is a list of  profiles and info on the globally advancing fascist corporations doing the same thing all over the world.  You can read about each one of them, since they are all linked with summaries like this one below of Gandur.

Jean-Claude Gandur

"I don’t feel guilty of doing anything immoral”

(Switzerland) Owner of Addax Bioenergy

In April 2012, farmers in Sierra Leone gathered for an assembly of communities affected by large-scale foreign land investments. Many participants came to speak about a 10,000-ha sugar-cane project operated by Addax Bioenergy, an ethanol company owned by Swiss billionaire Jean-Claude Gandur. "We’ve been evicted from our farmland without compensation," said Zainab Sesay, a woman farmer from the project area. "Now I don’t have a farm. Starvation is killing people. We have to buy rice to survive because we don't grow our own now," said Zainab Kamara, another farmer displaced by the Addax project.

In his Geneva headquarters, surrounded by his impressive collection of art and antiquities, Gandur tells a different story. He explains to reporters that his project complies with the social and environmental standards set by the African Development Bank, the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation and the European Union. Indeed, over half of the company's project costs are met by development banks. "That’s why I don’t feel guilty of doing anything immoral," says Gandur.

Gandur built his fortune, estimated at US$2 billion, trading commodities and buying up oil concessions in Nigeria and other African countries. In 2009, he sold his interests in the oil business and turned his attention to the continent's farmlands. Fuel is still his focus, but now it’s ethanol, not petroleum.
For his first big project, Gandur selected Sierra Leone, a war-ravaged country where malnutrition affects one third of the population.

It's a controversial spot to grow sugar cane for the production of ethanol for export. Not only has the company's takeover of 10,000 ha of "fertile and well-watered" land and forest displaced local food production, it's also taking away access to water for farmers living downstream. The company's sugar-cane plantation will use 26% of Sierra Leone's largest river flow during the driest months, February to April.

Gandur says that his ethanol project, due to become fully operational in 2013, is "a good way to bring back agriculture in Africa." But good for whom? (VN: damn good question.)

The Swiss group Brot für Alle carried out a basic analysis of the company's numbers and found that Addax would take home an annual return of US$53 million, about 98% of the value added by the project. The company's 2,000 or so low-paid workers would get only 2% of the value, while the landowners who leased their land to the company would receive a mere 0.2% of the value added. All told, says Brot für Alle, the project will provide less than US$1 per month to each person affected by the project.


Friends of Gandur:
Swedish Development Fund (Swedfund): In December 2011, Addax Bionergy announced that Swedfund had become a major shareholder of its mother company, the Addax & Oryx Group.

Netherlands Development Finance Company (FMO): Along with the African Development Bank and several other development banks, FMO provides debt financing to Addax Bioenergy and is a major shareholder in its mother company, the Addax & Oryx Group.
Going Further:

• Action for Large-scale Land Acquisition Transparency (ALLAT), a network of civil society organisations and landowner and user associations in Sierra Leone, created to monitor land investments throughout the country and to sensitize communities (allat@greenscenery.org)
• Brot für Alle's report "Land grabbing: the dark side of 'sustainable' investments"

Profiles of some of the people pursuing or supporting large farmland grabs around the world
Jean-Claude Gandur (Switzerland)
Jose Minaya (US)
Sai Ramakrishna Karuturi (India)
Calvin Burgess (US)
C "Siva" Sivasankaran (India)
Neil Crowder (UK)
Michael Barton (UK)
Meles Zenawi (Ethiopia)
Eduardo Elsztain (Argentina)
Susan Payne (Canada)
Dr. Hatim Mukhtar (Saudi Arabia)
Theo De Jager (South Africa)
The World Bank Group
Antonio L. Tiu (Philippines)
Hou Weigui (China)

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