"While state ownership of the lands might sound great to some of us, if we look a bit more closely at state budgets, we will see that no state has the resources to manage these lands- a single forest or range fire would send state officials scrambling to sell them off. Who would buy them? China would almost certainly be first in line. Chinese investors have just purchased 5 percent of all the arable land in the Ukraine, to help feed their insatiable population of 1.344 billion people and rising. The Chinese are also investing heavily in Canada’s “undervalued” farmlands in Alberta and Saskatchewan, despite laws (as we have in Iowa and other Midwestern states) to prevent foreign nations from acquiring lands critical to national food security. Perhaps the Chinese will be outbid by the Saudis, who are buying up land and associated water all over the world right now."
Posted on: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 15:18:23 +0000
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