Land Grabbing

Part of the Human Rights Arts and Film Festival…

Urgent and outrageous, ‘Land Grabbing’, shows us both sides of the contentious issue of land ‘acquisitions’. Beautifully filmed, we journey from Romania, Cambodia, Ethiopia and Indonesia, hearing from investors, international agro-businesses to farmers and land users in hunger-stricken countries. The spike in market demand for food and bio-fuel after the GFC in 2008 sparked a rush in land deals securing access and profits to important resources like palm oil, soybeans and sugar cane. As the world’s farmland becomes scarcer and more valuable, the consequence of land grabbing is a lesson in neocolonialism, impacting climate, biodiversity and indigenous people, dispossessed, intimidated and denied control and value of their lands.