Why should the world turn away from huge, monocropped factory farms? Pick the reason you like best. Massive agro-industry uses lots of oil and fossil-fuel-based fertilizer. Small farmers are displaced – often forcibly or illegally – to create massive plantations, contributing, for example, to Colombia’s huge crisis of literally millions displaced from their land. Crop variety makes better use of land. And eating locally from your farmer’s market, instead of foods shipped halfway around the world, just tastes better.

With all these reasons why eating local should – indeed, must – be the food of the future, I’m very concerned to read a spate of articles revealing that, in the wake of the recent food price crisis, a number of nations and big investors are buying up big swaths of land in the global South, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, for their own private farms. How huge? One deal was for one third of Madagascar (although that fell through, after local resistance felled the government).

As this article points out, such plantations are an unwelcome step back to the past:

By August of last year, the size, number, and speed of these exchanges had grown so great that Jacques Diouf, the director general of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Association, warned that the situation risked creating a “neo-colonial” system  — a reference to the grim sort of imperialism that began with the Dutch East India Company in 1602 and continued until the demise of the so-called Banana Republics in the late 20th century….

And this article notes that one big private leaser of land (in southern Sudan) is a former AIG exec.

The world should keep an eye on these land grabs.

Elizabeth Palmberg is an assistant editor of Sojourners.