• The New Geopolitics of Food - By Lester R. Brown | Foreign Policy
    http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/25/the_new_geopolitics_of_food

    the world is losing its ability to soften the effect of shortages. In response to previous price surges, the United States, the world’s largest grain producer, was effectively able to steer the world away from potential catastrophe. (...) We can’t do that anymore; the safety cushion is gone.
    That’s why the food crisis of 2011 is for real, and why it may bring with it yet more bread riots cum political revolutions. What if the upheavals that greeted dictators Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, and Muammar al-Qaddafi in Libya (a country that imports 90 percent of its grain) are not the end of the story, but the beginning of it?

    #alimentation #spéculation #sécurité_alimentaire #cdp

    • lecture recommandée !

      Most of these land acquisitions are in #Africa, where some governments lease cropland for less than $1 per acre per year. Among the principal destinations were #Ethiopia and #Sudan, countries where millions of people are being sustained with food from the U.N. World Food Program. That the governments of these two countries are willing to sell land to foreign interests when their own people are hungry is a sad commentary on their leadership.

      By the end of 2009, hundreds of land acquisition deals had been negotiated, some of them exceeding a million acres. A 2010 World Bank analysis of these “land grabs” reported that a total of nearly 140 million acres were involved — an area that exceeds the cropland devoted to corn and wheat combined in the United States. Such acquisitions also typically involve #water rights, meaning that land grabs potentially affect all downstream countries as well. Any water extracted from the upper Nile River basin to irrigate crops in Ethiopia or Sudan, for instance, will now not reach #Egypt, upending the delicate water politics of the Nile by adding new countries with which Egypt must negotiate.