Peter Singer, Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, is Founder of the nonprofit organization The Life You Can Save. His books include
Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics, The Ethics of What We Eat (with Jim Mason), Rethinking Life and Death, The Point of View of the Universe, co-authored with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, The Most Good You Can Do, Famine, Affluence, and Morality, One World Now, Ethics in the Real World, Why Vegan?, and Utilitarianism: A Very Short Introduction, also with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek. In April 2021, W.W. Norton published his new edition of Apuleius’s The Golden Ass. In 2013, he was named the world's third "most influential contemporary thinker" by the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute.
MELBOURNE – Should rich countries – or investors based there – be buying agricultural land in developing countries? That question is raised in Transnational Land Deals for Agriculture in the Global South, a report issued last year by the Land Matrix Partnership, a consortium of European research institutes and nongovernmental organizations.
The report shows that since 2000, investors or state bodies in rich or emerging countries have bought more than 83 million hectares (more than 200 million acres) of agricultural land in poorer developing countries. This amounts to 1.7% of the world’s agricultural land.
Most of these purchases have been made in Africa, with two-thirds taking place in countries where hunger is widespread and institutions for establishing formal land ownership are often weak. The purchases in Africa alone amount to an area of agricultural land the size of Kenya.
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