The Global Farms Race: Land Grabs, Agricultural Investment, and the Scramble for Food Security is now available.

In anticipation of The Global Farms Race's release, co-author Michael Kugelman spoke to Ed Saltzburg at the Security & Sustainability Forum about how the book came to be:
“It goes back to around 2008, which is, as you know, when the world was caught in the grip of a global food crisis. And I started hearing, very isolated at the time, reports about countries and private investors going overseas, specifically to the developing world, and, essentially, leasing up farmland, or buying it up, for reasons of food security back home, in a  context of investors who have profit-making motives —and I thought that was very striking. So I tried to probe it a bit more, tried to get a bit more information, and then I found that it really was indeed happening with not much information on it. The contracts governing these deals were very hard to get a hold of, and they were very opaque, but did exist.”
how countries can achieve long-term land solutions:
“By working with the governments of the day, you’re not looking at a very sustainable situation because in much of the developing world there is a lot of political volatility. Leaders come and go whereas the people themselves, the local communities, they’re the ones that’re there. They’re not going anywhere. If you want to have a long-term sustainable investment, particularly one that’s stable and not volatile, you want to work with these local communities; you want to actually sit down with them and hash out a mutually agreeable contract that works for all sides.”
and why the average American (like you) should care about agricultural investment:
“We’re talking about a food security issue here, which is very global. If this trend continues, which I imagine it will, you’re going to have a case where increasingly more and more food is being taken off the global food market because countries, instead of buying food on the market, are essentially growing it on their own. That can have a major impact on commodity prices. And, of course, commodity prices are what determine the food price, they can spark them. So, even America, hundreds of miles away from where these deals are happening, can still be indirectly affected by the potential impact on food cost. There already is talk now about another food crisis in the works; and given that this land acquisition trend really took off after the previous one, there’s good reason to think that if we have another food crisis, then this trend will only intensify.”
Find out more about Michael Kugelman and Susan L. Levenstein's new book by listening to the entire podcast here.