How World Leaders Are Scrambling to Secure Food in The Shadows
A journalist and a film maker walk into a bar…. Sorry, a different story. A journalist and a film maker who produced a 2022 documentary/expose called The Grab are interviewed. The information contained in the documentary is summarized (the documentary is not available as a torrent, nor elsewhere, so still pay-per-view). The claims are not “beyond belief” as is now common on all forms of media (includes some being published in the science journal Nature).
I have been aware that those with vastly more money than they can spend (on mega yachts/homes/planes etc.), have to invest it. Buying land, including water and mineral rights, has been growing in popularity this century. I used to live in Arizona and was aware of land grabbing by non-America individuals, corporations, and governments with water rights to aquafers attached to the Colorado River.
European’s and southwest Asians (e.g. OPEC) buy land/water/mineral resources in Africa, etc. and China Inc./U.S. money is buying the world. With global warming, Russia will be the world’s bread and beef basket, and U.S. cowboys are hired to teach Russians to become cowboys as Russian rangelands expand. Nothing new (news) here folks.
What is new to me is connecting all the dots to tell a geopolitical narrative that the dots support. So, if “thinking global” is one of your hobbies, the following video and AI generated (and human corrected) transcript may be a higher than average information to misinformation — disinformation offering.
Originally aired on June 25, 2024
Source: Amanpour and Company features conversations with leaders and decision makers. Featuring conversations with global leaders and decision makers on the issues affecting the world today, Amanpour and Company adds to the long tradition of public affairs programming that has been a hallmark of public media for decades.
Meanwhile, the pace of planetary destruction has not slowed.
The Interviewed: Journalist Nate Halverson is part of The Center for Investigative Reporting who was joined by film maker Gabriela Cowperthwaite to “document” The Grab film about the global land/water/resource acquisitions by the moneyed (Governmental organizations/Ngo-non-profit Organizations including religious/Media/Education/Legal/Business/Individuals or GNOMELBIs as distinctions between them are a distraction).
Do you need to vet sources? Do you need a hole in your head big enough for your brains to fall out?
Facts cited tend to check out. Spin and interpretation, Right/Left/Middle —the GNOMELBI serving are biased as is all media content from tavern talk, social (e.g. Quora, Medium), mainstream, to top science journals. The Gaian system is not biased.
And as the talking heads likely did more than read cue cards, click links above. Don’t consider, much less share, any memes without considering/providing context, e.g. Gaza.
All claims are to reconsider continuously, especially the ones your brain manufactures all the livelong day.
That “world leaders are scrambling” is a story. Moneyed players in the world socioeconomic-political system, i.e. everyone who knows what money is and likely has some, are scrambling to consume a planet for the taking as their ancestors (memetic and genetic) going back 75k years have been. You won’t hear this story on PBS, WSJ, FOX, CNN, at Davos or the UN (or classrooms and you wouldn’t believe it if you did).
Why? You. We products of modern techno-industrial (MTI) society don’t want to know. Human domesticants of NIMH would rather believe than know — and my typing it doesn’t make it so. Knowing that you don’t want to know is knowable, and will change how your MTIed brain works. Read the tea leaves of evidence, i.e. ‘listen to Nature’, the nature of things.
“People would rather believe than know.”
― Edward O. Wilson
PBS provides a transcript, but it is in all capital letters, i.e. low quality/minimally human corrected if at all. Sentences do end in periods and some commas are used, so better than auto-generated YouTube transcripts. A mostly corrected (no doubt I missed a few) Otter AI transcript is readable:
Transcript AI Summary
The conversation revolves around the growing concern over food and water scarcity and its potential impact on geopolitics. Participants highlight the lack of proper knowledge or consent in the acquisition of food and water resources by powerful entities, and emphasize the significance of understanding the geopolitics of food and water scarcity. Speakers also share personal experiences of reporting on these issues, including detention, and note how the importance of food and water has risen to the level where reporting on these issues can lead to consequences.
Food and water security as geopolitical tools.
- Journalist Nate Halverson and director Gabriela Cowperthwaite discuss their documentary “The Grab” which explores how food and water scarcity could lead to geopolitical conflicts.
- The film examines how private military corporations and governments are attempting to control these vital resources, leading to potential conflicts and uprisings.
- Speaker 6 asks about the common thread between reports on Smithfield Foods and Arizona Water, with Speaker 4 explaining how China’s government is buying up food and water supplies globally to meet growing demand from the middle class.
- Speaker 4 shares another example of this trend, with Saudi Arabia’s largest dairy company buying 15 square miles of desert in Arizona to grow hay for dairy cows in Riyadh.
Food and water security in Africa and the role of multinational corporations.
- Investors exploit water scarcity in Zambia, leaving local communities without access to resources.
- Speaker 3: National security threat reported on food and water in Africa.
- Eric Prince’s private equity firm is investing in African land for farming, despite government and powerful entity backing.
US farmland ownership, food security, and geopolitics.
- Speaker 6: Russia invading Ukraine over grain and beef control.
- Speaker 5: Russia’s control of beef and grain geopolitical asset.
- Speaker 6: US companies buy farmland abroad, lease it to other countries or companies.
- Companies based in the US also purchase farmland in other countries, focusing on water-rich areas to sell crops to water-poor areas.
Keywords
water, farmland, world, russia, nate, land, food, reports, cowboys, china, happening, buy, grow, purchased, feed, company, africa, climate change, smithfield foods, reporting
Transcript
Intro 0:00
In a world full of unrest, fears are mounting around access to our [?] most vital resources, food and water [no more ejaculations, promise — you supply your own facepalming interjections]. The Grab is a documentary that chronicles the way some countries are attempting to control these global resources. Here’s a clip from the trailer.
Speaker 1 0:15
All that is become much more powerful than the oil. How do you think that’s going to end?
Speaker 2 0:22
And it’s not just China, not just Russia. This is Wall Street, big money leasing land to foreign countries. I thought maybe there might be more to it than that. Turns out. There was. I mean, it’s like a who’s who it’s like the MVPs of the mercenary world.
Gabriela Cowperthwaite 0:39
What if there’s an uprising?
Speaker 2 0:40
That’s why we call it private military corporations.
Gabriela Cowperthwaite 0:43
One of the most notorious mercenaries on the planet, you have 1000s of his emails.
Speaker 2 0:49 Correct.
Intro 0:49
The journalist and director behind the film Nate Halverson and Gabriela Cowperthwaite join Hari Sreenivasan to discuss whether the fight over our most precious commodities could lead to the next major geopolitical conflict.
Interviewer 1:04
Christian, thanks. Nate Halverson, Gabriela Cowperthwaite, thank you both for joining us. You have a new film out called The Grab. And it is about how food and water are going to affect the geopolitics of everything going forward. Before we get into our conversation, I want to set up this clip here. For that, let’s take a look at the trailer.
Speaker 4 1:22
Every century is characterized by key commodity. And food is a very obvious and central way to wield power. They came across this classified cable telling companies to go overseas and buy up food and water resources. And a lot of this is happening in the shadows quietly.
Interviewer 1:43
In may give us this kind of 30,000 foot view if you can, I mean, you’ve been following different kind of pulling a different threads of this story for a decade. Now, what, how did you put it together in this this longer arc?
Nate Halverson 1:56
Yeah, that’s right. When I first started looking at this, I didn’t have a strong understanding of what was going on that we had moved almost into this new epoch in the 21st century, where food and water almost becoming what oil was in the 20th century, where intelligence community’s defense departments, were all looking at food and water security as a top line national security issue. And they had elevated these issues, to begin to wonder how are they going to be able to feed their populations going forward? But also how does food and water now become a geopolitical tool? Going into the 21st century as these resources grow? You know, increasingly scarce?
Interviewer 2:39
So Gabriela, you know, from the outset, if somebody says, Yeah, you know, there’s gonna be a big geopolitical impact of food and water. How is there a good narrative arc mean that the filmmaking is a very different process, sometimes than just the reporting that Nate and his colleagues were doing?
Gabriela Cowperthwaite 2:56
Yeah, it’s pretty labyrinthian. I think that I’m learning about Nate’s initial reporting. And kind of, you know, he had started reporting out a few of these stories and really like the China’s Smithfield story, Arizona Water story. And those I kind of saw as portals of entry to this much bigger issue, which was really essentially that powerful entities are grabbing up the final resources that are left out from underneath us, and largely without us knowing it. And that felt jaw dropping to me. When when reported out, all the different iterations felt kind of connected, but felt very important.
Interviewer 3:35
Nate, our audience, it’s not familiar with the reports that you did on smithfield foods and how basically the Chinese government was and then Chinese National Bank was backing a purchase of Smithfield Foods, which is responsible for about one in every four pigs in the United States. Right? Or the Arizona Water story. What are these different ideas have in common?
Nate Halverson 3:57
Yeah, I mean, that Smithfield Foods story was when China’s largest meat company Shuang Wei, effectively purchased one in four American pigs with the financial backing and also at the Directorate of the Chinese government, it was part of their five year plan to go overseas and to buy up food and water supplies. Because China no longer has enough water to grow enough food to meet their growing demand, which is really a demand driven by the growing middle class. You know, people become wealthier, they want to eat more meat, and meet just requires more water to grow more food to, to produce. And so we saw this, this reached by China across the world, including in the United States. And so after I did that story, I began wondering like, okay, is this just a one off? Is is China the sole example of this trend? And it turns out, definitely not. One of the other stories that I found was that this the Saudi or the largest dairy company in the Middle East, which is in Riyadh had gotten into the Arizona desert and bought essentially 15 square miles of wily coyote kind of swirl cactus like desert, and was pumping the water up to grow hay, to send that back to Riyadh to feed the dairy cows there. And it’s an unregulated part of Arizona, which meant that means that if you buy the land, you effectively can pump up as much of that water as you want. And that’s what we were seeing where, you know, people in Arizona in these local communities didn’t realize that there was this global now, grab for their water, what they did see was that their own domestic wells in their homes were beginning to go dry. And that’s sort of the trend we’re not just seeing in Arizona, or in the US, but we’re beginning to see all around the world.
Interviewer 5:46
Why is Zambia kind of an example of what’s happening in Africa? Why go there? I mean, we’ve had conversations on this program before about land rights. And what’s happening, there is a microcosm of what might be happening in other parts of Africa or other parts of the world.
Nate Halverson 6:00
It has water, it’s arable, and it’s inexpensive. And so it is a prime place to be able to go in and create value for people that are investing in farmland, and to be able to export crops to other wealthier countries. And it’s not that Zambia isn’t a country of laws, it is it’s actually the judicial system there is it’s highly regarded. Nonetheless, when you are living in a remote area, you don’t speak, you know, the predominant government language of the government. And you don’t have access to justice. If you don’t have money to hire an attorney to get to Lusaka to go to court, you effectively then have no justice. And that’s what we saw. And you know, was that folks that they didn’t know their rights, they didn’t know how to access the rights, and they didn’t, frankly, have the money to access their rights. So it becomes an opportunity for others.
Interviewer 6:57
There’s a scene when you mentioned Zambia, you all tried to go there. And you’re detained at the airport. I’m not giving too much away. But your names are on a list. You’re not welcome.
Nate Halverson 7:09
Right there, smack dab on it was all of our names and passport numbers. They were definitely waiting for us.
Speaker 2 7:33
What’s going on now, Nate?
Nate Halverson 7:39 We’re getting kicked out. Apparently intelligence, because we’re reporting is a national security threat.
Interviewer 7:47
I guess what happened to how you were thinking about the reporting date?
Nate Halverson 7:52
Yeah, I mean, I think the big takeaway is when you go to a country, and you land there to report on essentially farming on food and water, and you’re immediately detained and put into a detention so and you see your your names and passport numbers up on like the police blotter, you realize that food and water have really risen to that level that when you show up to report on them, you get detained. And I think that is a key takeaway of how we’re shifting into the 21st century with regards to the importance of food and water.
Interviewer 8:26
Nate, when you were looking into how Africa is kind of this, well, fertile ground for both food and water for these multinational corporations, as well, as you know, groups that you don’t expect. I mean, an interesting name comes up. And that’s Eric Prince, and most people are familiar with Eric Prince is the head of Blackwater Securities, had, you know, basically, we’re doing contracts with the US government in Iraq and Afghanistan. What is he? What’s the role that he is playing in this or was playing in this?
Nate Halverson 8:58
Yeah, that’s right. I mean, it kind of started for me personally, as I was reading World Bank reports, UN reports. And they were basically they say that 50 to 60% of the arable land left in the world that could feed the growing global population is in Africa. And so I began thinking, Okay, I’m seeing what’s happening in Arizona, in the US and elsewhere. What does that look like and African who’s doing it? And I’d actually seen Eric Prince go on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, and say that he had started a private equity company that was going to be investing in land in Africa, for farmland, and one thing led to another and we got a lot of information on on what Eric Prince was doing there. And who he was sort of financially supporting, but government and powerful entities were backing him to go into Africa to buy up land, to be able to export food to wealthier countries.
Interviewer 9:56
Did you try to reach out to them or do you have to say?
Nate Halverson 9:59
I did I tried to reach out to him multiple times. It was always no comment. I went to their offices. One of his offices in Hong Kong, email, the spokespeople? Always, unfortunately, no comment.
Interviewer 10:12
There’s a section in the film, where you start talking about, really how climate change is going to affect the planet. And what are some of the unintended sort of opportunities, I guess that climate change presents, and you have this map of basically sections of glaciers thawing and Russia and how it could essentially become a new Iowa. And it was a very interesting scene where I had no idea that Russia was importing American cowboys.
Cowboy 10:40
You know, my, my wife seen an ad on the internet. And as a joke, she thought it’d be funny as hell. So she put my resume in. And I was getting ready to watch Sunday football in Valentine, Nebraska. And the Skype thing come over the computer and I hollered at her honey, she kind of got panicky and said you need to talk to him. It’s about a job. And so I answered it, and 30 minutes later, I was hired. Pretty much my wife don’t didn’t think that was very funny after, after all that, you know, because now we’re packing up and going to Russia. Oh, here we go. Here we go. You guys ready to give him some air? Oh, he’s tapped out boys.
Interviewer 11:27
Why were they doing that?
Nate Halverson 11:29
Yeah, that’s right. You know, I think here in the US, the idea of climate change can be contentious. You know, some people are skeptic. But what I can tell you is that President Putin isn’t, you know, he’s basically said that climate change is happening, and it means that they’re gonna have to buy less furs, and we’re gonna be able to grow more food. And the reason it happens is as things warm up, they get more growing season days, which just means that they can grow more crops more variety, farther up north on more land, and they have a tremendous amount of water. And Putin has said that he sees that as a geopolitical asset, that basically, they’re going to be able to feed the world. And by feeding the world, they’re going to be able to use that as a tool to help have other countries see things the way they see them. And so one of the ways to do that was to import American Cowboys to begin helping Russia to build up the world’s largest cattle herd to be able to feed beef to other countries. And so we found these spur wearing leather chap wearing cowboys from New Mexico, Montana, Nebraska, in the middle of nowhere, Russia, training up Russians to become cowboys.
Interviewer 12:41
Gabriela, one of the things that was interesting watching the film is, we are all now very familiar with the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. But in some of the footage that you have had found that there was essentially a canal in Crimea that I bet the bulk of the people watching this documentary had never even heard about much less thought about and, and really even the footage of drone strikes or missile strikes, on grain silos in Ukraine, how essentially food is one of the targets of this war and can couldn’t be one of the big reasons why this invasion even happened.
Gabriela Cowperthwaite 13:23
Yeah, they do say the world sort of, has deemed Ukraine is one of the final bread baskets, a country that’s going to be feeding the world and feeding a lot of poverty stricken nations as well. So really being able to rely on that country. As a, you know, a planet is something that we’ve all kind of assumed would be something that you know, this this place is going to be intact. No one’s ever going to touch that. The idea that this and this stems just directly from, you know, the Russian cowboys and the beef but, you know, if Russia is able to control beef, and can also control grain, you can you can see that this, this, there’s no there’s no better example of of a grab, you know, when you think about it that way, but you know, everything that Nate is saying about the geopolitics of what Russia is doing bore out in this one story.
Interviewer 14:19
So it’s not just foreign countries, or companies that are coming in and buying property and farmland in the US there are US companies or ones based in the US that are also using this land or leasing it out to other countries or companies.
Speaker 3 14:37
China does not have enough water to feed its population. The reason that they are such large food importers is that they are importing food as a proxy for water. So our way is basically buying farmland and we want to make sure that we’re focusing on areas that are water rich, and soul here that can sell crops to areas that are water poor. So in 2018, we purchased a firearm in southwest Arkansas, that is 25,000 acres in size. And to put that in perspective, that is close to two times the size of Manhattan.
Interviewer 15:15
What’s the state of play or the landscape, if you will, across the country in how this ownership works? And whether these resources of water or food can be exported?
Nate Halverson 15:29
Yeah, that’s right. And there is a federal law that requires foreign ownerships to register when purchasing farmland but my understanding is the compliance isn’t that great. And there are there are states that have some restrictions on how foreign ownership can can own land it for instance, Iowa has some restrictions on it. But also there is just there’s a lot of questions around who ultimately owns a company that can make it very difficult to understand at the end of the day, whose money is it that’s buying that farmland and so I think there’s an increasing interest on the national level on state levels, you know, to understand who is purchasing the land, and we’re seeing we’re seeing some we’re seeing some push from lawmakers in that regard.
Interviewer 16:16
Gabriela, what surprised you when you made this film?
Gabriela Cowperthwaite 16:21
I was blown away that there is no national water policy. Nate reported this out that there’s not a that’s not only not a national water policy, there’s no national water strategy. What what does it mean to protect us and think about water in much more of a similar way that China and Russia do, which is mean that you’re playing a long game, right there in the 21st century, thinking about burgeoning populations, and what to do there to feed them. While we in our water laws are 19th century some of them are in from the 19th century literally. So trying to build consensus over what we do with what we have left. Seems a no brainer, but we are not, we’re not there yet.
Interviewer 17:09
Nate Halverson and Gabriela Cowperthwaite the film is called The Grab, and you can find it on most online streaming platforms. Thank you both for joining us.
Gabriela Cowperthwaite 17:16
Thank you so much for having us.
Nate Halverson 17:18
Thanks so much.