Green rice fields in Bali, Indonesia
Large-scale land acquisitions by foreign investors, intended to improve global food security, had little to no benefit, increasing crop production in some areas while simultaneously threatening local food security in others, according to researchers who studied their effects.
The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and led by the University of Notre Dame, combined satellite imagery with agricultural surveys as well as household dietary datasets of 160 large-scale land acquisitions across four continents between 2005 and 2015. It is the first comprehensive global analysis of the impact of the land acquisitions of its kind.