Book details

192 Pages
Publication date: September 2015
Imprint: ecoWing
Kurt Langbein

Landgrab

The Global Hunt for Farmland

Fertile soil and cheap labor: unbeatable conditions of production for big companies. Demand is high, and the poor rural population is quickly expropriated.

Kurt Langbein shows the alarming results of this modern form of colonialism. Oil spills, ruthless production processes, inhumane working conditions in factories, overfished seas – for a long time, humankind and the environment have been paying the price for the continually increasing needs of a globalized society. Fueled by the need for ever more new and lucrative business sectors, there is a global hunt for fertile soil.

Around the globe, increasingly powerful investors keep buying more and more farmland. As a result, the remaining living space for the rural population dwindles drastically. The far-reaching consequences of this hunt seem difficult to understand from the outside. Not only does Kurt Langbein expose them, he also confronts us with the question of what price we are ultimately willing to pay for our consumer society and how much of our humanity we want to sacrifice for it.

Author

Kurt Langbein

Kurt Langbein was born in Budapest in 1953 and studied Sociology in Vienna. From 1979 until 1989, he was editor for TV reportages at the ORF, and head of the science desk at the news magazine profil from 1989 until 1992. Since 1992, he has been managing partner at the production company Langbein & Partner Media. Among others, he has authored the bestselling works “Bitter Pills” – one of the most successful non-fiction titles in the German language with 2.7 million sold copies – and “Six Feet Above – On Life with Cancer”, in which he writes about his personal fight with cancer. In 2013, Kurt Langbein was awarded the Axel-Corti-Prize for his dedicated and critical TV reports.