Leading environmental journalist Fred Pearce believes an unprecedented land grab is taking place around the world in anticipation of future food shortages by people eager to profit from them.
Pearce will give a talk at the College of Atlantic’s Gates Community Center in Bar Harbor, Maine, on Friday, March 1 at 7 p.m. His talk is entitled, “The Land Grabbers: the new fight over who owns the Earth.”
The world’s wealthiest and most acquisitive countries, corporations, and individuals have been buying and leasing vast tracts of land throughout the world, Pearce will tell the audience.
In his talk, Pearce takes listeners across the globe to explore how Wall Street, Chinese billionaires, oil sheikhs, and agribusinesses are buying up huge tracts of land in a hungry, crowded world.
He visits board rooms and forest clearings, trading houses and farmers’ fields. He finds that water is often as important as land for the new imperialists. This resource rush of the 21st century — happening on a massive scale — will determine whether millions of Africans remain landowners or become laborers for foreign agribusiness. It may decide whether a future world can be fed, or whether it will starve.
Pearce is a freelance author and journalist based in London. He has been the environment consultant of New Scientist magazine since 1992, reporting from 67 countries. He also writes regularly for the Yale e360 web site in the United States, and the United Kingdom’s Guardian newspaper.
Recent commissions include National Geographic and the Washington Post. Pearce won a lifetime achievement award for his journalism from the Association of British Science Writers in 2011, and was voted UK Environment Journalist of the Year in 2001.
His recent books include The Land Grabbers, The Coming Population Crash, When the Rivers Run Dry, and Confessions of an Eco Sinner. To research The Land Grabbers, Pearce spent a year circling the globe to find out who was doing the buying, whose land was being taken over, and what the effect of these massive land deals seems to be.
According to the Washington Post, “Pearce has produced a powerful piece of journalism that illuminates how the drive for expanded food production is transforming the planet. Anyone who cares where her next meal is coming from should read it.”
For more information, please contact Ken Cline at kcline@coa.edu or 207-288-5015.
