04/21/11 Heartless Rye Brook Resident Plans Corporate Farmland Grabs As African Children Starve

Illusions Of Grandeur: If You Give Joe "The Harvard Educated Fool" Carvin A Million Bucks To Run Rye Town Park He Can't Turn A Profit, But He Is Ready To Lead The Rush For Control Over Overseas Farmland

"My boss wants to create the first Exxon Mobil of the farming sector," said Joseph Carvin of Altima Partners' One World Agriculture Fund to a gathering of global farmland investors in New York in June 2009

With all the talk about "food security," and with a news report that a South Korean corporation Deawoo leased half of Madagascar's land.

It may not be evident to a lot of people that the lead actors in today's global land grab for overseas food production are not countries or governments but corporations.

So much attention has been focused on the involvement of states, like Saudi Arabia, China or South Korea. But the reality is that while governments are facilitating the deals, private companies like Joe Carvin's Altima Partners are the ones getting control of the land.

And Joe Carvin's interests are simply not the same as those of governments or the poor people who live in those countries.

Joe Carvin's private-sector involvement in the global land grab basically amounts to traditional agribusiness or plantation companies, like Unilever or Dole, simply expanding the contract farming model of yesterday.

In fact, Altima Partners, with little to no experience in farming, has emerged as a crucial corporate player. So much so that the very phrase "investing in agriculture", today's mantra of development bureaucrats, should not be understood as automatically meaning public funds. It is more and more becoming the business of ... big business.

The Role Of Finance Capital: Blame Rye Town Supervisor Joseph Carvin If Your Grocery Bill Goes Up

Joe Carvin has secretly been taking over farmlands around the world for offshore food production. From what Roundup Media has gathered, the role of Altima Partners -- investment funds and companies -- is truly significant.

Joe Carvin is not siting in his huge Rye Brook house and taking up agriculture to solve world hunger or eliminate rural poverty.

From Rich To Richer: Carvin Wants Profit And Doesn't Care Who Get's Hurt

The world has changed in ways that now make it possible for Altima Partners to make big money from farmland.

From the heartless investor Joe Carvins' perspective, global food needs are guaranteed to grow, keeping food prices up for those who control the farmland.

Joe Carvin is convinced that he can go into Africa, Asia, Latin America and the former Soviet bloc to consolidate holdings and transform below-potential farms into large-scale agribusiness operations.

Altima Partners goal is to generate revenue streams both from the harvests and from the land itself, whose value they expect to go up.

Carvin's One World Agriculture Fund's pace and extent of their farmland appetite is remarkable

Billions of dollars are going into farmland acquisitions for a growing number of "get rich quick" schemes. And some of those dollars are hard-earned retirement savings of teachers, civil servants and factory workers right here in the United States and from other European Countries.

This means that a lot of ordinary citizens are unaware that they have a financial stake in Joe Carvins plans of world food domination.

This also means that Altima Partners is leading a new, powerful lobby of corporate interests that is coming together, which wants favourable conditions to facilitate and protect their farmland investments.

Joe Carvin and the other hedge fund pirates want to tear down burdensome land laws that prevent foreign ownership, remove host-country restrictions on food exports and get around any regulations on genetically modified organisms.

For this, we can be sure that they will be their hedge fund wealth to push their agendas around the globe through free trade agreements, bilateral investment treaties and donor conditionalities.

Joe Carvin's Plan: Exporting Food Insecurity

Given the heavy role of Altima Partners in today's land grabs, it is clear that Joe Carvin is not interested in the kind of agriculture that will bringing the world food self reliance.

With hunger rising faster than population growth, it will not likely do much for food security, either.

Altima Partner's land grabs are basically "exporting food insecurity". Joe Carvin is all about answering some people's needs - for maize or money - by taking food production resources away from others.

Carvin is basically planing on going into poor countries, deplete the soils of biological life and nutrients through intensive farming, pull out after a number of years and leave the local communities with "a desert".

Entire communities have been dispossessed of their lands for the benefit of foreign hedge fund pirates.

Altima Partners Devious Plan Is Downright Dangerous

From the United Nations headquarters in New York to the corridors of European capitals, everyone is talking about making these deals "win-win". All we need to do, the thinking goes, is agree on a few parameters to moralise and discipline these land grab deals, so that they actually serve local communities, without scaring investors off. The World Bank even wants to create a global certification scheme and audit bureau for what could become "sustainable land grabbing", along the lines of what's been tried with oil palm, forestry or other extractive industries.

Before jumping on the bandwagon of "win-win", it would be wise to ask "With whom? Who are the investors? What are their interests?"

It is hard to believe that, with so much money on the line, with so much accumulated social experience in dealing with mass land concessions and conversions in the past, whether from mining or plantations, and given the central role of the finance and agribusiness industries here, that Joe Carvin and Altima Partners would suddenly play fair.

Just as hard to believe is that governments or international agencies would suddenly be able to hold these hedge fund pirates to account.

"Some companies are interested in buying agricultural land for sugar cane and then selling it on the international markets. It's business, nothing more" Sharad Pawar, India's Minister of Agriculture

Making Altima Partners investments work is simply not the right starting point. Supporting small farmers efforts for real food sovereignty is.

Those are two highly polarised agendas and it would be mistaken to pass off one for the other. It is crucial to look more closely at who the investors like Joe Carvin are and what they really want.

But it is even more important to put the search for solutions to the food crisis on its proper footing.

Maybe Rye City, Rye Brook And Port Chester Taxpayers Have To Make Up A Rye Town Park Deficit, Because The Supervisor Is Preoccupied With Grabbing Third World Farmland From Poor Peasants.

PLEASE SEE:

04/13/11 Rye Mayor Doug French And Joe Sack Have Had Enough Of Rye Town Supervisor Joe Carvin's Mismanagement

City Of Rye Claims It Was Blindsided By The Carvin Administration


Rye Town Park Prepares For Possible Rye City Audit At April 26th Budget Showdown


Problems at Rye Town Park came to a head several months ago when a projected annual deficit of around $40,000 in September swelled to more than $140,000 in December during the three months when the park was basically closed.

That amount included more than $50,000 in unemployment insurance. Mayor French maintained that kind of last minute “surprise” made balancing a budget unpredictable, and he and Joe Sack, a Rye City Council and Rye Town Park Commission member, insisted that kind of inaccurate financial forecasting had to be addressed before they would vote on the $1 million-plus budget for the upcoming season.......

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