GRAIN | Harvard’s land grabs in Brazil are a disaster for communities and a warning to speculators
▻https://grain.org/e/6456
In an eight year period following the 2008 crisis, Harvard poured over US$1 billion into amassing a global portfolio of farmlands, covering nearly 1 million hectares across the United States, Brazil, Eastern Europe, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia. Harvard’s farmland strategy took it deep into some of the most conflictual places on the planet when it comes to land and the environment.
Brazil was Harvard’s preferred target. It established three offshore structures, operating through three different Brazilian agribusiness operators, to buy Brazilian farmland. By 2016, these three structures had amassed over 40 rural properties covering approximately 405,000 hectares, an area twice the size of all the farmland in the US state of Massachusetts (see Box 1: The structure of Harvard’s Brazilian farmland operations).