The Land Grabbers: The New Fight Over Who Owns the Earth - Softcover

Pearce, Fred

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807003417 ISBN 13: 9780807003411

Publisher: Beacon Press, 2013

Synopsis

The Land Grabbers "Raises complex and urgent issues."--"Booklist," starred review How Wall Street, Chinese billionaires, oil sheiks, and agribusiness are buying up huge tracts of land in a hungry, crowded world.An unprecedented land grab is taking place around the world. Fearing future food shortages or eager to profit from them, the world's wealthiest and most acquisitive countries, corporations, and individuals have been buying and leasing vast tracts of land around the world. The scale is astounding: parcels the size of small countries are being gobbled up across the plains of Africa, the paddy fields of Southeast Asia, the jungles of South America, and the prairies of Ea...

About this title

Review

"Pearce may be the only person to visit all the critical frontlines worldwide, and his brilliant reporting makes the abstraction real. Probably the most important environmental book anyone could read right now."--Timothy Searchinger, fellow, German Marshall Fund; research scholar, Princeton University

"Compelling and well-researched ... Dissects the modern rush to acquire land for production, investment, speculation or preservation."--Wendy Wolford, Nature

"Raises complex and urgent issues."--Booklist, starred review

"A thorough and enlightening exposé."--Conservation

"A well-researched, informative and accessible look at important economic and agricultural issues."--Kirkus Reviews

"This is just what the world has been waiting for--a detailed overview of the land grabs that are the principal manifestation of a new geopolitics of food."--Lester R. Brown, President of Earth Policy Institute and author of World on the Edge

"The remarkable Fred Pearce has done it again: in The Land Grabbers he opens up vastly important new terrain few of us have even noticed. When the rich and powerful start buying up the planet's fundamental resources--land and water--from the poor and vulnerable, we'd all better notice."--James Gustave Speth, author of The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability

"Wherever on this earth poor villagers, agribusiness magnates, ignorant or corrupt governments, petrodollars, commodity traders and hungry multitudes come together, Fred Pearce is at the nexus, brilliantly reporting on the biggest swindle of the 21st century. With the modern landgrab, the enclosure movement has attained planetary proportions and Pearce is without peer in describing the dire consequences of this ongoing human and environmental disaster."--Susan George, author, Hijacking America, board president, the Transnational Institute

"In The Land Grabbers, Pearce has produced a powerful piece of journalism that illuminates how the drive for expanded food production is transfomring the planet. anyone who cares where her next meal is coming from should read it."-Washington Post

Book Description

How City financiers, Chinese billionaires, oil sheikhs and agribusiness are buying up our hungry, crowded world. Brilliant, trail-blazing reportage.

About this edition

• Publisher: Beacon Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0807003417
• ISBN 13: 9780807003411
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336