The problem with this is... yes this helps the rich ( Top 20% who makes over $10 a day). This very system is raping the poor. Poor countries must sell the very grain that they grow to companies like monsanto then buy it back at a much higher price or as a state they will be completely cut out of the world markets. You get chocolate on top of your Ice Cream made by Nestle who is killing over a million children in the 3 world every year by manipulating mothers in to using their baby formula with bad water supplies. To top it off an American will have a big fat piece of beef flesh that is the biggest cause of global warming due to the energy consumption to produce industrial meat products. Or, we instead have some sea food from an industry that is striping all life from the seas. There will be no Game fish in the ocean by the year 2050. The seas will be like a desert devoid of all large fish. I don't see this as simple.
I hate to give you even more bad news to look at...and you are likely familiar with many of these stories from other sources, but the
Oakland Institute is probably the only agency in the U.S. which is trying to draw attention to the land grabs and chaos created in Third World (primarily Africa) by foreign corporations and national governments, buying cheap land and forcing locals out of their homes. Some quick facts:
56 million – total hectares of land (nearly the size of France) acquired in the developing world by international governments and investors since 2008.
70% of the population – in sub-Saharan Africa lives on their traditional lands that, because of colonial heritage, are classified as state lands in independent Africa. This is why governments believe that they can give away their land without consultation or legal redress.
And,
as this article points out, they have different, but often interwoven motivations; so the modern plantation owners who want to raise cash crops do not criticize the foreign governments, such as China and Saudi Arabia, who are buying up millions of acres in already famine-threatened Africa. They refuse to criticize each other, much like competing corporations, so very little light is shone on this travesty in Western media:
According to Mittal, there are three kinds of investors: food-insecure nations, private equity funds seeking to take advantage of cheap land prices, and agribusiness corporations. Each has a slightly different motivation. Oil-rich nations like Saudi Arabia, where water and arable land are scarce, are seeking to insulate themselves from price fluctuations in global commodity markets by producing their own beef, corn, and sugar for import. Private equity funds based in financial centers like New York and London are seeking profitable returns on investments. Large agribusiness corporations — growing food, fibers, or biofuels — are also lured by profits, and bring the farming know-how to many deals.
Multinational corporations want more coffee, chocolate, biofuels, and other lucrative crops for their markets; China's water tables are in decline from their own agriculture already, so they are buying up Africa and South Asia to grow grain to turn into beef for their consumers who want more meat in their diet; and Saudi Arabia (which had been self-sufficient in grain production) suddenly realized that most of their irrigation water was coming from a fossil aquifer (underground source that is not replenished), so they are shutting down their agriculture at home, and creating modern plantations in Sudan and Ethiopia....all while a clueless West disparagingly remarks about why these people can't provide for themselves and need their charity! What good is your charity when it has come at the price of destroying the livelihoods of people who live half way around the world, out of sight and out of mind?
If the Oakland Institute had access to something more than fringe media in the U.S., I'd like to believe that the average American would rather shut down these foreign land grabs that are causing starvation, war and deprivation in the poorest nations, even if it raised beef prices, or the price of coffee or biofuels, but I'm not so sure that most who profess their Christian values wear those values anywhere but on their sleeves, where they can conveniently wipe them in the faces of others who they want to look down on!
