By Flann O’Brien
No one serious really believes in the old 20th century myth of the good journalist. I know personally that a career in wordsmithing is low status and low paid - assuming you could find a remunerated position at all in the new age of LLM chatbots spitting out as much text as you want in seconds for a small subscription cost. Equivalent to a lower brow version of the art industry of the renaissance world, modern print requires patrons who will subsidise the cost of information or news repackaged into entertainment.
The merchant and industrial class have mostly reneged on this responsibility especially since groups domestic and foreign, like the Saudis, have a proven track record of going to great lengths to hit any non state media mogul who print anything that is contrary to their interests. So the documentary The Grab can safely be watched as a repackaged set of opinions belonging to some part of the US elite class that either are part of, or connected to parts of the US government. (Note that I am not American).
The documentary starts with a Nate Halverson who is, in this economy, somehow an investigative journalist. Nate tells us that 'someone' told him to look into the Chinese takeover of Smithfield foods in 2013. Somehow he already had the view at that time that Chinese companies abroad operate under the orders of the Chinese government, which although true, really wasn't a widely held opinion until recently even in open economies like Australia that have seen Chinese capital buying up their assets for much longer. Given a magic budget to somehow travel across the world from The Zambia to China, Nate and his team investigate the foreign actors buying up agricultural assets across the world.
As a digression, this topic is very reminiscent of the Peak Oil content that was very popular around 2011 and the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crash, best seen in movies like Quantum Of Solace. It has long been a view of the western elite that there is a Malthusian reality that they would prefer unfold into a conclusion that causes them no inconvenience. The main content in the documentary is a claim that agriculturally constrained and overpopulated mid income countries who have the money are hoarding international agricultural assets to maintain their fragile social fabric.
The documentary continues to detail how the Saudi government owns 15 miles squared in Arizona that produces fodder hay to feed dairy and beef cattle back in Saudi Arabia. This is a de facto export of water from the US to the middle east. Almost as flavour, the Russians are thrown into the mix with a section of the documentary claiming that the companies that inherited the remains of the collective farms in Russia imported American cowboys to teach Russians how to keep cattle. Later in the documentary the documentary claims also that the Arab spring was caused by Putin blocking grain exports in 2011, which is a novel view considering Google put popups on Ahmed's computer that told him to overthrow his local government, which might have had more to do with those events. The documentary also claims that the Ukrainians cutting off water supplies to Crimea in 2014 was part of the impetus for the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, framing the conflict as a Mad Max style water war. The Russians also supposedly hauled away grain and aimed to take over assets like silos in order to further monopolise the world grain trade.
Another mercenary, former or not, is documented in the film. Erik Prince of Blackwater fame is supposedly moving Africans off land so wealthy buyers can utilise it, and we are told that for some reason there is plentiful underutilised land in Africa that could be developed into productive agricultural farms. There is no land rights in Africa and it is mostly all up for grabs if you have the necessary force, Nate and Co somehow have thousands of Erik Prince's emails which have some based content such as his lieutenants emailing Prince about how in Africa the diseases and violence that keep life expectancy at 40 is the natural Darwinistic order. To be fair Africans eat well for free in Europe, so what use is red dirt to them when such options exist? The journalists also worry that Erik Prince knows about them and may seek to hack their computers, so they rip out the wifi antenna in their laptop and glue their ethernet port so they can airlock away their research material from Prince's hands. They also interview a former Executive Outcomes operative, but the focus on mercenaries is just flavour that depicts white operatives doing the dirty work of the Saudis and Chinese.
The film wraps up by making throwaway points about how small family farms produce eighty percent of the worlds food so they deserve more protection in the areas of land rights and water access. But what is most interesting is that this film production at multiple moments claims to have US intelligence contacts and this documentary is elite opinion. No mention is never made about how many companies like Tyson foods in the US and ABP in Europe has gone to great lengths to damage family farming. US and especially European governments have also made great efforts to damage family farming with mountains of regulations and in the case of the Netherlands and Ireland direct sabotage.
In some ways this documentary is out of date with its malthusianism, as nowadays population crash is more the hotly debated view. Being that as it may, if they expect more social and state conflict over resources then this should be a signal for you to also anticipate this in the future. A title to a million acres of prime American cattle range, or Zimbabwean soybean fields, is all well and good, until Uncle Sam comes knocking.
"The documentary continues to detail how the Saudi government owns 15 miles squared in Arizona that produces fodder hay to feed dairy and beef cattle back in Saudi Arabia. This is a de facto export of water from the US to the middle east." Apparently they've never heard of the hydrological cycle. Water transported from one region to another, whether contained within food or not, will always return to the original region as precipitation. However there can be exhaustion of underground reservoirs of water tapped for agricultural, industrial and residential use. It doesn't matter if the end-use is local or distant, it's the over-utilization.
Great write up.