STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
UN Warns Against 'Land Grabbing'
By Staff News & Analysis - March 26, 2012

Foreign buying of farms explosive … Paris – Is it investment? Or a land grab? Within a few years, acquisition of foreign farmland has become an issue with plenty of explosive potential for the environment and security. Priming it is a rush by China, India, South Korea and Gulf petro-economies to snap up land abroad to secure their food supplies. Western countries are following suit in a bid to meet their targets for biofuels. According to a respected monitor called the Land Matrix Project, 203 million ha of land were transferred to foreign control from 2000 to 2010, either through purchase or long-term lease. To put this figure into perspective: that is eight times the size of Britain. Africa, led by Ethiopia, Liberia, Mozambique and Sudan, accounted for 66% of the transfers, and Asia 14%. But who is buying land where – and what they are doing with it – may never be fully answered, for many transactions are never publicly announced. – SAPA

Dominant Social Theme: Gee, if we don't know who's buying land, it will be more difficult to regulate them.

Free-Market Analysis: On the surface it sound reasonable, that the UN would sound the warning on private land purchases, given they are occurring in the poorest of countries and can deprive farmers of land to grow food. This is called "land grabbing."

But nothing the UN does is aimed at protecting poor people, in our view. The overriding mandate of the UN is world government and any policy that enhances world government is a good one – from the point of view of the powers-that-be – and anything that works against it is a bad one.

Thus, we would be apt to label this as yet another sub-dominant social theme. These memes are tools used by the power elite to frighten Western middle classes, especially, into giving up power and wealth to globalist facilities like the UN.

These are facilities set up by the elites, especially what would seem to be dynastic families that apparently control central banks and are using this control to continually work towards a one-world order. Here's some more from the article:

Paul Mathieu, an expert with the UN's Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), said the craze peaked in 2008 or 2009 on the back of the world food crisis and has probably drifted down a little since then. But over the long term, demand will remain high, buoyed by the world's surging population, higher prices for fossil fuels and spiraling demand for food, he said.

And from corruption to environmental abuse, there are plenty of other things to worry about too … In a 2010 report, the World Bank looked at 14 countries and discovered that actual farming had begun on only 21% of the land in the deals.

Intertwined with the emotional question of land tenure is how water is used for these big deals. The UN's Fourth World Water Development Report, published two weeks ago, describes this as a very big unknown …

In an interview with AFP last December on the sidelines of the UN climate talks in Durban, Minister Tina Joemat-Pettersson blasted land acquisition as "a new form of colonisation". She cited the new country of South Sudan, where she said 40% of the farmland had been sold to foreign interests ….

Seeking to address such issues, the FAO's Committee on World Food Security (CFS) last month agreed on guidelines for land acquisition … And African countries will need time and resources to beef up their administration of land, moving from rights that often are customary, informal or even undocumented to formalised rights that can be enforced in a fair judicial system.

"These are transitions that took a century in western Europe. In some African countries, it will have to be done in 20, 25 years, with all these risks in attendance," he said.

We can see many memes being presented in this article, from scarcity memes (water shortages) to the dangers of private property generally. One of the most obvious of them is that the idea of private property is itself dangerous.

We would tend to think this is likely the real impetus behind the emergent meme of "land grabbing." The UN and its backers, the elite dynastic families that want to create world government, use mercantilism, the conflation of private interests with public policy to exercise behind-the-scenes control.

We can see, even in this article, the enunciated goal is to move from private acquisitions of land to a more transparent modality that features "formalized rights that can be enforced in a fair judicial system."

We did some fact checking of the article and could not even find a website presenting the "Land Matrix Project." It's not listed in Wikipedia, either.

Perhaps it exists, or perhaps it is yet another made-up entity – similar to the authoritative studies cited by the UN regarding global warming that proved, eventually, not to exist. They were simply newspaper and magazine reports speculating on climate change without facts, yet they were cited as authoritative.

This article makes a lot of seeming speculative statements about land-grabbing before providing the usual solution, which would be the formation of evermore formalized state justice, supervised no doubt by the UN.

There are other issues, as well, that have to do with whether land can be owned and how it is to be administered. In the modern era, thanks to what we call the Internet Reformation, many of these ideas have re-emerged, especially those pushed by Henry George in the 1800s in the US. Here's something from Wikipedia on George:

Henry George is best known for his argument that the economic rent of land should be shared by society rather than being owned privately. The clearest statement of this view is found in "Progress and Poverty:" "We must make land common property."

By taxing land values, society could recapture the value of its common inheritance, and eliminate the need for taxes on productive activity. George believed that this would provide disincentives toward land speculation, but would continue to incentivize development, as landlords would not suffer tax penalties for any industry or edifice constructed on their land.

Modern-day environmentalists have agreed with the idea of the earth as the common property of humanity – and some have endorsed the idea of ecological tax reform, including substantial taxes or fees on pollution as a replacement for "command and control" regulation.

There is nothing wrong with groups of people holding land communally. The problems arise when such occurrences are mandated and legislated. There is a big difference between voluntarism and dirigisme.

After Thoughts

If we look closely, we can see the idea that land is communal property is being positioned as a justification for many other potential regulatory interferences. Once the communal nature of land is recognized within the context of the modern state, every kind of globalist facility from environmentalism to world justice is easily put into play.

Posted in STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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