Last year, over a period of nine months, Cambodian state security forces staged a brutal crackdown against protesting journalists, human rights activists, and monks. Many were harassed, some were jailed, and several were killed. These people were not protesting about politics. Rather, they were rallying against land takeovers by private investors. In Cambodia, a whopping 55 percent of all arable land has been acquired by agribusiness interests, both domestic and foreign.
Over the last few years, international media outlets and civil society have highlighted how private investors and capital-rich national governments are acquiring vast swaths of farmland overseas. Such narratives tend to focus on the frenzied fight for farmland in Africa—from the 1.3 million hectares that a South Korean corporation acquired in a short-lived deal with Madagascar in 2009, to the more recent farming investments of India’s Karuturi Group in the impoverished, conflict-riven state of Gambella in Ethiopia.
This attention is certainly warranted. The majority of land secured in these deals has been in Africa, and six of the ten largest announced deals (including a Brazilian scheme to farm 6 million hectares in Mozambique) are in this region.
Read more at The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs