Global Land Grabbing and the Expansion of Foreign Agricultural and Resource Control in the late 2000s
- Kejsi Kajo
- Sep 19
- 8 min read
The global food shortage of 2008 — driven by climate change, spiking oil prices, and a rising global population — inspired leading international investors and private firms to secure long-term rights to fertile and resourceful farmland in economically vulnerable regions with stable climates so that they could capitalize on impending production declines.
In "Agriculture and Food in Crisis: Conflict, Resistance, and Renewal", Fred Magdoff and Brian Tokar stated that the worldwide crisis, which caused hunger, poverty, riots, and political instability to over thirty developing countries, "served as an opportunity for corporate and multilateral financial institutions to deepen their control and management of the global food system".
The analytical collection of essays, published in 2010, asserted that "Land is now the desired commodity, to the detriment of local populations who depend on the land for their own food consumption". "In Africa they are calling it the land grab," the environmental authors wrote, "or the new colonialism".
Environmental journalist McKenzie Funk also reported on the "growing wave of capitalists" who were rushing to corner the shrinking market of the world's farmland in an effort to exploit the global food insecurity, documented in a 2010 Rolling Stone article titled "Will Global Warming, Overpopulation, Floods, Droughts and Food Riots Make This Man Rich".
Funk wrote that international investors, who were "stepping away from the paper world to make commodities plays", believed that "those who control the food will control the world". They were "betting" that population growth and climate change, "with its accompanying droughts and desertification and flooding", would "make food as valuable as water".
Wall Street trader Phil Heilberg, "one of the highest-paid guys on Wall Street", who transitioned from high-profile trading to acquiring land in developing countries in 1999 because "the mundane [bored him]", leased one million acres of farmland in the " war-ravaged savanna" of South Sudan in 2009, "making him one of the largest private landholders in Africa".
Human rights activists, rival businessmen, and European journalists described his landholding agreement as “the most scandalous case yet” and “one of the shadiest deals of all”. Heilberg, who insisted that there is "no asset more tangible than land", collaborated with "the thugs, strongmen and warlords who [held] the chips in places like Sudan", where the farmland was "incredibly fertile and safe from drought".
“This is Africa,” the self-proclaimed "libertarian" and "virtuous capitalist" said. “The whole place is like one big mafia. I’m like a mafia head. That’s the way it works”.
The million-acre lease was approved by former Deputy Commander-in-Chief of South Sudan’s army, Gen. Paulino Matip, whose privately commanded troops had torched villages, sexually assaulted women, executed men, and forcibly displaced thousands of civilians from their home to "make way for oil drilling" in the 1990s, according to the Human Rights Watch. The atrocities were "part of one of the longest-running wars in Africa", a civil conflict between "Sudan’s Muslim north and the mostly Christian and animist south", which "formally ended" in 2005, granting South Sudan semi-autonomy.
Heilberg hoped to obtain an additional million acres of farmland in South Sudan, "close to the border with Ethiopia", and was "banking" on Matip to "come out on top in the semiautonomous south’s struggle for full independence" so that he could "secure his land deal". The political risk was "too great for most investors to bear", but not for Heilberg, who had "befriended Darfuri rebels in London, oil-bunkering militants in Nigeria and ethnic separatists in Somalia and Ethiopia, looking to cash in on any commodity — petroleum, uranium, whatever - that might come his way in the wake of independence".
Heilberg's plans to "double his holdings" in the then "largest country in Africa, and 10thlargest on the planet, crisscrossed by rivers, dotted with swamps" required official approval from South Sudan's president and minister of agriculture, following a newly implemented domestic law, which restricted foreign land ownership. Funk wrote that their signatures were "mostly for show" since the general had already committed the land to Heilberg.
Heilberg revealed that once he acquired the formal signed documents for the "million-acre lease", he intended to cultivate the farmland and "sell crops locally before selling internationally" since there was "certainly a domestic market for it": Sudan was "in the midst of a long-running famine, and aid groups [were] willing to pay top dollar for food".
“Listen, I want to control that ground,” he comments. “I don't want someone saying, ‘Thank you for your investment, now get out. I want a country that’s weaker". Funk claimed that the former Wall Street trader would not disclose a few "other documents he wants signed", which the journalist assumed would give Heilberg "rights to the region’s uranium and zinc".
Although it would take years "before the first seeds [could] be planted", Heilberg was thinking of establishing a joint venture with Israeli partners for the crop production of the land because they had "experience in Africa". He added that he enjoyed the irony of "bringing in Israelis to farm what some consider Arab land".
"A private security firm mercenaries - they want to come and train the troops. Even the Israelis, they want to sell weapons and training. They want to know if I'll speak to the general on their behalf", Heilberg stated. Funk alleged that Matip, who did not seem as concerned with the signatures as the mercenaries, agreed to consult with them.
However, a few months later, the general's home was attacked with a tank, and he declared South Sudan's president "partly responsible". The environmental journalist wrote that "Heilberg’s bet — on chaos — is beginning, at last, to play out in the streets". Heilberg addressed the power struggle,
"It’s going to be a free-for-all for about a week. Mass hysteria. Juba burned to the ground. Khartoum burned to the ground. Then we'll look around and see who's still standing. They'll form a new government. A period of chaos isn't a bad thing. It'll release that tension. You can't escape the physics".
Matip passed away in 2012, following a prolonged illness. There is limited publicly available information confirming whether "the biggest deal of [Heilberg's] life" was ever finalized. His land lease agreement of 2009, "a tract nearly the size of Delaware", is the only transaction that has been corroborated by official sources.
Heilberg, who believed in "the effects, not the causes" of climate change, was also interested in "mineral-rich Greenland". He had "heard" that the Nordic countries did not "seem to mind being taxed to death". "Maybe we can have Greenland," Heilberg said, "there's a lot of land there”.
Funk mentions "one of the most aggressive climate investors", Jim Slater, who had made multi-million-dollar investments in Greenland, where he "made annual profits of 66 percent on uranium and molybdenum". Slater, who co-founded of the agricultural firm Agrifirma, had recently "spent $20 million to buy or option 170,000 acres and survey another 6 million" in Brazil, insisting that the Brazilian agriculture would be "protected from the ravages of climate change" because the country had "about 15 percent of the world’s recoverable water supply".
In a 2012 exposé, "The Land Grabbers: The New Fight Over Who Owns the Earth", Fred Pearce documented that Agrifirma, an "agricultural empire", was "assembled by Lord Rothschild, the head of the world-famous banking family". Pearce wrote that Rothschild and Slater "were betting their profits from a successful speculation in gold and uranium on Brazilian agriculture".
"Will Global Warming, Overpopulation, Floods, Droughts and Food Riots Make This Man Rich" reported on an anonymous Wall Street banker, who disclosed the nature of his firm's transactions in Russia and Ukraine, where formerly state-owned farmland was redistributed to the local communities between the late 1990s and the early 2000s. The banker stated that many of the fairly new local landowners could not afford to cultivate the land and would often exchange "thousands of hectares for a bottle of vodka and, like, two months of grain". "It was basically a big rip-off of peasants", he concluded.
Carl Atkin, former head of agribusiness research at Bidwells, a British real estate enterprise, said that the "black soil" in Russia and Ukraine was "some of the best soil in the world". He suggested that "Higher-latitude countries", such as Canada, Kazakhstan, Romania, Russia, and Ukraine, were becoming "more productive, not less, as the climate heats up".
Atkin, who had just returned from Ukraine, shared that Bidwells had been "parceling" in Romania for five years, which he explained was "a plot-by-plot approach to the land grab". He noted that "a hectare of black earth in Romania is a fifth of the price of a hectare in England".
Pearce, who referred to Ukraine as "the breadbasket of Europe", claimed that the Ukranian government banned "outright sale of farmland to foreigners", but there had been rumors that leading Ukranian politicians were "secretly sanctioning black market sales of former state farms". Many of them were "big landowners" who would have to "explain how they obtained some land in huge amounts" if the "deals became public".
A 2025 press article titled "Global Land Grab Highlights Global Inequality", FIAN International, an international NGO for "The Right To Food and Nutrition", claimed that the "accumulation of vast amounts of land by a small group of global corporate landowners is fueling inequality and accelerating the climate crisis".
FIAN International's comprehensive report from the same year, "Lords of the Land: Transnational Landowners, Inequality and the Case for Redistribution", stated that "land grabs in various forms have doubled land prices globally since 2008", "placing enormous strain on rural people and communities". Large-scale land deals and the rising global inequality might not be "isolated phenomena, but the result of systemic trends rooted in capitalism and state policies".
The study asserted that land grabbing has "both immediate impacts and longer-term consequences for communities and ecosystems", "leading to dispossession and violence against marginalized people as well as deforestation, pollution and contamination, and biodiversity loss". The international land trend "threatens the ability of local people to exercise their right to self-determination" and "food sovereignty".
