Why Corporations, Emerging Powers and Petro-States Ar Snapping Up Huge Chunks of Land

That exponential process will only be intensified by the biofuels some of these lands will be used to grow, which is a particularly shameless insult. Rather than use the 2.8 million hectares China bought from the Congo -- or the tens of thousands of hectares the U.K. bought from Ethiopia, Mozambique and Tanzania, and so on -- to feed the hungry, those investor nations will use them to grow food for our cars. What biofuels will do is make a few outsider nations very rich at the expense of a great many locals who could use the land to feed themselves.

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The serious questions worth asking arise after the ink has dried on its secretive contracts: What happens when global warming really takes hold and starving locals get tired of watching their homegrown food and fuel leave their borders? Whose army will enforce these contracts, once they are rendered moot by uprisings and internecine warfare?

The answer is: the same thing that's happening already, just on a much, much larger scale.

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"Investors are looking at this as scarce land and water in a world of increasing scarcity," Woodall argued, "which is one reason they are pursuing it so actively. They're bringing the plantation mentality to the 21st century and driving people off their land. This is crazy stuff. If the deals that people know about are as big as North Dakota, what does that say about the deals they don't know about?"

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