How World Leaders are Scrambling to Secure Food in the Shadows

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: In a world full of unrest, fears are mounting around access to our most vital resources, food and water. “The Grab” is a documentary that chronicles the way some countries are attempting to control these global resources. Here’s a clip from the trailer.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Food has become much more powerful than oil.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: How do you think that’s going to end?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And it’s not just China, not just Russia. This is Wall Street, big money, it’s leasing land to foreign countries.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I thought maybe there might be more to it than that. It turns out, there was.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I mean, it’s like a who’s who. It’s like the MVPs of the mercenary world.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: What if there’s an uprising?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, that’s where we come in.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Private military corporations.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: One of the most notorious mercenaries on the planet. You have thousands of his e-mails?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Correct.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: That there was a piece of paper.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Right there was all of our names and passport numbers. They were definitely waiting for us.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is the part of the story that makes us think that all of our communications are hacked.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You just take and take and take, and pretty soon they’re anything to take.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: When you don’t have enough food, money is useless.

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AMANPOUR: The journalist and director behind the film, Nate Halvorsen and Gabriela Cowperthwaite, joined Hari Sreenivasan to discuss whether the fight over our most precious commodities could lead to the next major geopolitical conflict.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Christiane, thanks. Nate Halverson and Gabriela Cowperthwaite, thank you both for joining us. You have a new film out called “The Grab,” and it is about how food and water are going to affect the geopolitics of everything going forward. Before we get into our conversation, I want to set up this clip here for the — let’s take a look at the trailer.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Every century is characterized by a key commodity.

MOLLY JAHN, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: And food is a very obvious and central way to wield power.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I came across this classified cable telling companies to go overseas and buy up food and water resources. And a lot of this, it’s

happening in the shadows. Quietly.

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SREENIVASAN: Nate, give us this kind of 30,000-foot view, if you can. I mean, you’ve been following different — kind of pulling a different thread of this story for a decade now. What — how did you put it together in this longer arc?

NATE HALVERSON, INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST, “THE GRAB” AND SENIOR REPORTER, THE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING: Yes, that’s right. When I first started looking at this, I didn’t have a strong understanding of what was going on that we had moved almost into this new epoch in the 21st century where food and water are almost becoming what oil was in the 20th century, where intelligence communities, defense departments were all looking at food and water security as a top line national security issue. And they had elevated these issues to begin to wonder, how are they going to be able to feed their populations going forward? But also, how does food and water now become a geopolitical tool going into the 21st century as these resources grow, you know, increasingly scarce.

SREENIVASAN: So, Gabriela, you know, from the outset, if somebody says, yes, you know, there’s going to be a big geopolitical impact of food and water, how is there a good narrative arc? I mean, the filmmaking is a very different process sometimes than just the reporting that Nate and his colleagues were doing.

GABRIELA COWPERTHWAITE, DIRECTOR, “THE GRAB”: Yes, it’s pretty labyrinthian. I think that learning about Nate’s initial reporting and kind of, you know, he had started reporting out a few of these stories and really like the China Smithfield story, Arizona water story. And those I kind of saw as portals of entry to this much bigger issue which was really essentially that powerful entities are grabbing up the final resources that are left out from underneath us and largely without us knowing it. And that felt jaw dropping to me, when reported out all the different iterations felt kind of connected, but felt very important.

SREENIVASAN: Nate, for our audience that’s not familiar with the reports that you did on Smithfield Foods and how basically the Chinese government was — and the Chinese National Bank was backing a purchase of Smithfield Foods, which is responsible for, what, one in every four pigs in the United States, right, or the Arizona water story, but what are these different ideas have in common?

HALVERSON: Yes, I mean, that Smithfield food story was when China’s largest meat company, Shuanghui, effectively purchased one in four American pigs with the financial backing and also at the directorate of the Chinese government. It was part of their five-year plan to go overseas and to buy up food and water supplies because China no longer has enough water to grow enough food to meet their growing demand, which is really a demand driven by their growing middle class. You know, people become wealthier. They want to eat more meat, and meat just requires more water to grow more food to produce. And so, we saw this reach by China across the world, including in the United States. And so, after I did that story, I began wondering like, OK, is this just a one office? Is China the sole example of this trend? And it turns out, definitely not. One of the other stories that I found was that the Saudi — the largest dairy company in the Middle East, which is in Riyadh, had gone into the Arizona desert and bought essentially 15 square miles of, you know, wily coyote kind of saguaro cactus like desert and was pumping the water up to grow hay to send that back to Riyadh to feed the dairy cows there. And it’s an unregulated part of Arizona, which meant — that means that if you buy the land, you effectively can pump up as much of that water as you want. And that’s what we were seeing where, you know, people in Arizona, in these local communities, didn’t realize that there was this global now grab for their water. What they did see was that their own domestic wells in their homes were beginning to go dry. And that’s sort of the trend we’re not just seeing in Arizona or in the U.S., but we’re beginning to see all around the world.

SREENIVASAN: Nate, why is Zambia kind of an example of what’s happening in Africa? Why go there? I mean, we’ve had conversations on this program before about land rights and — but what’s happening there is a microcosm of what might be happening in other parts of Africa or other parts of the world?

HALVERSON: It has water, it’s arable, and it’s inexpensive. And so, it is a prime place to be able to go in and create value for people that are investing in farmland and to be able to export crops to other wealthier countries. And it’s not that Zambia isn’t a country of laws, it is. It’s actually the judicial system there is highly regarded. Nonetheless, when you are living in a remote area, you don’t speak, you know, the predominant government language of the government, you don’t have access to justice. If you don’t have money to hire an attorney, to get to Lusaka, to go to court, you effectively then have no justice. And that’s what we saw and, you know, was that folks that they didn’t know their rights, they didn’t know how to access their rights, and they didn’t, frankly, have the money to access their rights. So, it becomes an opportunity for others.

SREENIVASAN: There’s a scene when you mention Zambia, you all try to go there, and you’re detained at the airport. I’m not giving too much away, but your names are on a list. You’re not welcome.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Right there. Smack dab on it was all of our names and passport numbers. They were definitely waiting for us.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: What’s going on now, Nate?

HALVERSON: We’re getting kicked out. Apparently, intelligence says our reporting is a national security threat. This is what we’ve been told.

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SREENIVASAN: I guess what happened to how you were thinking about the reporting, Nate?

HALVERSON: Yes. I mean, I think the big takeaway is when you go to a country and you land there to report on essentially farming on food and water and you’re immediately detained and put into a detention cell and you see your names and passport numbers up on like the police blotter, you realize that food and water have really risen to that level that when you show up to report on them, you get detained. And I think that is a key take away of how we’re shifting into the 21st century with regards to the importance of food and water.

SREENIVASAN: Nate, when you were looking into how, you know, Africa is kind of this, well, fertile ground for both food and water for these multinational corporations as well as, you know, groups that you don’t expect. I mean, an interesting name comes up, and that’s Erik Prince. And most people are familiar with Eric Prince is the head of Blackwater Securities that had, you know, basically were doing contracts for the U.S. government in Iraq and Afghanistan. What is he — what’s the role that he is playing in this or was playing in this?

HALVERSON: Yes, that’s right. I mean, it kind of started for me personally as I was reading World Bank reports, U.N. reports, and they were based — they say that 50 to 60 percent of the arable land left in the world that could feed the growing global population is in Africa. And so, I began thinking, OK, I’m seeing what’s happening in Arizona and the U.S. and elsewhere. What does that look like in Africa and who’s doing it? And I’d actually seen Erik Prince go on Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” and say that he had started a private equity company that was going to be investing in land in Africa for farmland. And one thing led to another, and we got a lot of information on what Erik Prince was doing there and who he was sort of financially supporting, what government and powerful entities were backing him to go into Africa to buy up land to be able to export food to wealthier countries.

SREENIVASAN: Did you try to reach out to him? What did he have to say?

HALVERSON: I did. I tried to reach out to him multiple times. It was always no comment. I went to their offices, one of his offices in Hong Kong, e-mailed the spokespeople, always, unfortunately, no comment.

SREENIVASAN: There’s a section in the film where you start talking about, really, how climate change is going to affect the planet and what are some of the unintended sort of opportunities, I guess, that climate change presents and you have this map of basically sections of glaciers thawing in Russia and that — how it could essentially become a new Iowa. And there was a very interesting scene where I had no idea that Russia was importing American cowboys.

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TODD LEWIS, THEN RANCH MANAGER: You know, my wife seen an ad on the internet. And as a joke, she thought it’d be funny as hell, so she put my resume in. And I was getting ready to watch Sunday football in Valentine, Nebraska, and the Skype thing come over the computer and I hollered at her, honey, she kind of got panicky and said, you need to talk to him. It’s about a job. And so, I answered it. And 30 minutes later, I was hired. Pretty much. My wife don’t — didn’t think that was very funny after all that, you know, because now we’re packing up and going to Russia. Oh, here we go. Here we go. You guys better give him some air. Oh, he’s tapped out boys.

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SREENIVASAN: Why were they doing that?

HALVERSON: Yes, that’s right. You know, I think here in the U.S., the idea of climate change can be contentious. You know, some people are skeptic, but what I can tell you is that President Putin isn’t. You know, he’s basically said that climate change is happening and it means that they’re going to have to buy less furs and are going to be able to grow more food. And the reason it happens is as things warm up, they get more growing season days, which just means that they can grow more crops, more variety, farther up north on more land they have a tremendous amount of water. And Putin has said that he sees that as a geopolitical asset that basically they’re going to be able to feed the world. And by feeding the world, they’re going to be able to use that as a tool to help — have other countries see things the way they see them. And so, one of the ways to do that was to import American cowboys to begin helping Russia to build up the world’s largest cattle herd to be able to feed beef to other countries. And so, we found this spur wearing, leather chap wearing cowboys from New Mexico, Montana, Nebraska, in the middle of nowhere, Russia, training up Russians to become cowboys.

SREENIVASAN: Gabriela, one of the things that was interesting watching the film is, you know, we are all now very familiar with the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, but in some of the footage that you have — had found, you know, that there was essentially a canal in Crimea that I bet the bulk of the people watching this documentary had never even heard about, much less thought about. And really, even the footage of drone strikes or missile strikes on grain silos in Ukraine, how essentially food is one of the targets of this war and can — could be one of the big reasons why this invasion even happened.

COWPERTHWAITE: Yes, they do say the world sort of has deemed Ukraine as one of the final breadbaskets, a country that’s going to be feeding the world and feeding a lot of poverty-stricken nations as well. So, really being able to rely on that country as a — you know, a planet is something that we’ve all kind of assumed would be something that, you know, this place is going to be intact. No one’s ever going to touch that. The idea that this — and this stems just directly from, you know, the Russian cowboys and the beef. But, you know, if Russia is able to control beef and can also control grain, you can see that this — there’s no better example of a grab, you know, when you think about it that way. But, you know, everything that data saying about the geopolitics of what Russia is doing bore out in this one story.

SREENIVASAN: So, it’s not just foreign countries or companies that are coming in and buying property and farmland in the U.S., there are U.S. companies or ones based in the U.S. that are also using this land or leasing it out to other countries or companies.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Trying to just not have enough water to feed its population. The reason that they are such large food importers is that they are importing food is a proxy for water. So, our way is basically buying farmland and we want to make sure that we’re focusing on areas that are water rich and sell — you know, that can sell crops to areas that are water poor. So, in 2018, we purchased a farm in Southwest Arkansas that is 25,000 acres in size, and to put that in perspective, that is close to two times the size of Manhattan.

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SREENIVASAN: What’s the state of play or the landscape, if you will, across the country in how this ownership works and whether these resources of water or food can be exported?

HALVERSON: Yes, that’s right. And there is a federal law that requires foreign ownerships to register when purchasing farmland. But my understanding is the compliance isn’t that great. And there are states that have some restrictions on how foreign ownership can own land. And for instance, Iowa has some restrictions on it. But also, there is just — there is a lot of questions around who ultimately owns a company that can make it very difficult to understand, at the end of the day, whose money is it that’s buying that farmland? And so, I think there’s an increasing interest on the national level on state levels, you know, to understand who is purchasing the land. And we’re seeing some push from lawmakers in that regard.

SREENIVASAN: Gabriela, what surprised you when you made this film?

COWPERTHWAITE: I was blown away that there is no national water policy. Nate reported this out, that there’s not only not a national water policy, there’s no national water strategy. What does it mean to protect us and think about water in much more of a similar way that China and Russia do, which is, I mean, that you’re playing the long game, right? They’re in the 21st century, thinking about burgeoning populations and what to do there to feed them. While we and our water laws are 19th century. Some of them are from the 19th century, literally. So, trying to build consensus over what we do with what we have left seems a no brainer, but we are not — we’re not there yet.

SREENIVASAN: Nate Halverson and Gabriela Cowperthwaite, the film is called “The Grab,” and you can find it on most online streaming platforms. Thank you both for joining us.

COWPERTHWAITE: Thank you so much for having us.

HALVERSON: Thanks so much.