George Soros and Other Investors Are Buying Farmland as Global Food Prices Soar; 50 Million Farmers Had Land Stolen by the Chinese Regime

Why is George Soros Selling Gold and Buying Farmland?

August 14, 2011

NaturalNews.com - Food prices are skyrocketing all across the globe, and there's no end in sight. The United Nations says food inflation is currently at 30% a year, and the fast-eroding value of the dollar is causing food prices to appear even higher (in contrast to a weakening currency). As the dollar drops in value, due to runaway money printing at the Federal Reserve, the cost to import foods from other nations looks to double in just the next two years -- and possibly every two years thereafter.

That's probably why investors around the globe are flocking to farmland as the new growth industry.

"Investors are pouring into farmland in the U.S. and parts of Europe, Latin America and Africa as global food prices soar," reports Bloomberg magazine.

"A fund controlled by George Soros, the billionaire hedge-fund manager, owns 23.4 percent of South American farmland venture Adecoagro SA."

Jim Rogers is also quoted in the same story, saying,

"I have frequently told people that one of the best investments in the world will be farmland."

That's because demand for food is accelerating even as radical climate changes, a loss of fossil water supplies, and the failure of genetically engineered crops is actually reducing food yields around the globe. Ceres Partners, which invests in farmland, has produced astonishing 16 percent annual returns since its launch in 2008. And this is during a depressed economy when most other industries are showing losses.

Why growing and storing your own food can be a goldmine

All this means we can count on three things happening in the years ahead:

Prediction #1: Food supplies will become more scarce.

Prediction #2: Food prices will double over the next 2-3 years, and then probably double again in another 2-3 years.

Prediction #3: When food prices are 400% of today's levels, backyard farming or gardening pays off big in terms of real dollar savings.

In other words, as food prices skyrocket, it becomes increasingly more financially viable to grow your own food (or store it now while prices are low).

I'm listing some resources below where you can learn more about growing your own food or storing high-density superfoods right now, but in the mean time, I'd like you to start considering the idea of starting your own garden in the spring.

You can't grow gold. You can't print your own currency (unless you're the Fed). But you CAN grow something more valuable than gold and money: Food!

Lessons from post World War II Taiwan and why food is more valuable than gold

I lived in Taiwan for two years, and I've had the opportunity to talk with people there who lived through the post World War II recovery. During the war, of course, Taiwan was occupied by the imperialist Japanese empire, and Taiwan existed in a state of military occupation (with perpetual martial law).

After the war ended and the Japanese left, Taiwan bootstrapped its own government into power under Chiang Kai-shek. The old Taiwan currency was immediately printed in large quantities by the Taiwan government leading to a runaway inflation scenario for what is now called the "old Taiwan dollar." Very quickly, however, the government launched a new currency called the New Taiwan dollar (NT$). By 1949, the old Taiwan dollar was being exchanged for the New Taiwan dollar (NT$) at a ratio of 40,000 to 1. (Yep. You had $40,000 and now it's worth a buck...).

During those years after WWII, if you wanted to rent an apartment, buy a house or find a place to live, cash was worthless and even GOLD wasn't considered very useful. The only thing that represented real wealth was FOOD. If you had food, you could trade it for anything: an automobile, a home, tools, clothing or even land. If you didn't have food, you were bankrupt; regardless of how much cash or gold you had.

A chicken that could lay eggs was worth more than an ounce of gold!

You can't eat gold, folks. And you can't eat silver. Everybody has to eat to stay alive, and that means everybody needs a constant stream of food just to keep breathing. That's why investing in food makes so much sense.

And by "investing in food," I mean any or all of the following:

• Investing in storable food that you can save on the shelf and keep for future use or barter.


• Investing in your own gardening skills so that you have the know-how to produce food when needed.


• Investing in non-hybrid garden seeds so that you have the genetic blueprints to grow food that can propagate itself generation after generation.


• Investing in farmland -- especially farmland with water -- that offers the fertility and climate to produce food.


• Investing in educational courses that teach you how to create food through a variety of methods: Wildcrafting, gardening, sprouting and so on.

Free resources

We have many FREE resources available on NaturalNews.com and NaturalNews.TV that help teach you how to grow your own food. Check out the following for starters:

Videos:

Growing Organic Tomatoes
http://naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=36940...

See the entire channel of The Raw Food Muscle at:
http://naturalnews.tv/Browse.asp?me...

Edible Forest Gardening - Garden Mound
http://naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=FA6B4...

See the entire channel of Living Libations at:
http://naturalnews.tv/Browse.asp?me...

Sustainable agriculture: Interview with Farmer Brad
http://naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=E5E67...

Click here for other resources

Fifty Million Farmers Had Land Stolen by the Chinese Regime

The Epoch Times
August 14, 2011

Between 40 and 50 million Chinese farmers have lost their farmland since Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms began in the late 1970s, according to a recent report from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). The number is increasing at a rate of three million farmers per year, and will reach 110 million around 2030.

The report, titled, China Urban Development Report of 2011 and published by the Institute for Urban and Environmental Studies of CASS, states that large areas of farmland have been and are being expropriated as China’s industrialization and urbanization accelerates.

According to the directive “national land use planning” published by the Ministry of Land and Resources in October 2008, from 2000 to 2030, over 8.6 million acres of farmland will be expropriated and over 100 million farmers will lose their land.

The report also states that, while farmland is being lost, there is a serious trend of urban land being insufficiently utilized. According to the “national land use planning” directive, there are about 657,000 acres of unused land in China. This leads to the conclusion that the scale of land expropriation is greater than the actual need.

Regarding the farmers who lost their farmland, the official news website Red Net of Hunan Province reported a survey of 132 households on the issue on March 29. It stated that 97 percent of farmers are not satisfied with the compensation. The standard compensation rate to the farmer for commercial land use is about US$20,000 to US$35,000 per acre. But this farmland is often situated in a newly developed urban area, which could fetch over 10 times its current value.

The Director of the State Council’s Development Research Center, Han Jun, said in 2003 that since the start of economic reforms until 2003, the Chinese regime has taken US$312.8 billion from farmers by expropriating farmland at a low price and then reselling it at a high price.

The Red Net survey also stated that 85.61 percent of farmers do not have any kind of social security and insurance and that only 12 percent have medical insurance. When asked what they fear the most, 15.91 percent said not having medical insurance, 27.27 percent said retirement insurance and 75 percent feared unemployment.

The farmers who lost their land have no stable jobs and income. After losing their ownership, rights to use and derive an income from their farmland, they have no financial security.

Xu Zhiyong, a faculty member at the Beijing Post and Telecommunications University, told China Youth Daily:

“The dispute arising from farmland expropriation is not a regional problem. It exists in almost every big and small city, county and township.”

According to statistics given in the CASS report, among the farmers who appeal to higher authorities for help, 60 percent of the appeals are related to the farmland, and 30 percent are related to land expropriation.

Among farmers who lost their land, 60 percent of them said that they are in a state of economic hardship, and 81 percent are worried about their future livelihoods.

According to a random sample of 2,942 farmers who lost their land, the National Bureau of Statistics of China found that there are only 2.7 percent who received employment after expropriation; 24.8 percent went out to look for work on their own; 27.3 percent have opened a small business; and 20 percent stays at home, unemployed.

Sometimes, those who have had their land taken from them have responded violently.

In May a series of explosions hit Fuzhou City, Jiangxi Province, after Qian Mingqi, 52, failed to obtain redress for land that was expropriated but for which he was never properly compensated. After a decade of unsuccessfully attempting to get proper compensation (he says his losses were up to two million yuan, or around US$300,000), he set up a Sina Weibo account documenting his final thoughts, and proceeded to make fertilizer bombs. He said that he was left with no choice.

“I wanted to take genuine action to get rid of the bad guys for the people,” Qian said.

He was killed in one of the blasts.

In other cases people have climbed atop their house roofs and set themselves on fire. In yet other cases people have used violence against the gangs of thugs that are hired by local officials to carry out the eviction and demolition work that is often involved in land expropriation.

Read the original Chinese article.

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