"People don't forget when their land has been taken from them."

I was asked to look at why a Chinese company had effectively purchased one in four American pigs and whether or not the Chinese government was behind the deal. I was able to show that yes, in fact, the Chinese government had heavily supported the deal. It was part of their global strategic initiative.

That just lends itself to the next question. Why? It's –  why is this happening? And then, who is it benefiting? Who is being impacted? What is currently being done about it? And, what could be done about it that would perhaps give people a feeling that there was a better result for everyone? 

And it was that “why” that began driving me deeper into this issue where China – like other countries – were beginning to get concerned about their ability to feed their own populations. 

They’re going out across the world to buy up food resources to make sure they have enough. And it was oftentimes happening not in wealthy, powerful countries like the U.S., but in countries where the populations are far more vulnerable.

There were three things that I lost sleep over. Number one was the human impact. I had travelled to areas where I saw what was happening to people, and then I would leave those areas. The people who I had talked to weren't able to leave those areas. There is just this feeling of seeing another human trapped in a really terrible situation and a bit of a feeling of helplessness outside of my role as a journalist to share information about what other people are enduring or experiencing or how the system is working. 

Number two, I think it was sometimes my own security – just knowing that the people we were reporting on were powerful and wealthy and might not want us reporting on it. And so, you just kind of wake up sometimes thinking about that.

This is not in order of importance. But the third thing is the overall trendlines for what this could mean for a huge percentage of the global population – and what the world is that is currently being created, and what it would look like in 10, 20, 30, 40 years. It starts to look a little dystopian, at least according to the information I was looking at. It was coming from the U.S. intelligence community and the Department of Defense, as well as folks that had been looking at it longer in the NGO or academic settings. 

Time and time again, whether I was talking to folks in the U.S. Department of Defense or U.S. intelligence community or folks from the World Economic Forum or Wall Street traders – across the board – what I kept hearing was this is one of the biggest issues facing people on the planet. 

The larger general population or public just didn't seem to know about these massive trends that were occurring. As a journalist, I really viewed it as my role to get that information out to a large audience.

I think you can look across the world, especially in certain regions like Latin America, and you see people fighting against large dispossessions. Often either political or corporate interests are moving people off their land because that land has value for others.

The people standing up against those who would grab the land are being harassed, physically harmed, and sometimes murdered. It's something the world needs to know. There is a lot of harm that is befalling communities around the world as there is a push for global agricultural expansion.

There are those within the U.S. government who see those trend lines pushing to a point that they begin to destabilise regions of the world, both on a very hyper-local level, and then increasingly, national levels. Because people can only endure so much until they say, “Enough.” 

Anyone who's listening to [or reading] this can just think about it on their own personal level. How long do you go seeing your children not have access to food? Or how long do you go seeing others come in and take what was once yours – what once you used to feed your family, to have health, now in the hands of others, before you begin to think that that's just not an acceptable situation and begin to contemplate what means you might have to fight back?

That sort of puts forward justifying violence.  I don't mean that. I am just saying that this is how others are looking at it.

I talked to the human rights attorney, Brigadier Siachitema, who is defending people across Africa. You know, he's always quick to tell communities to not revert to violence. There is a legal process. I think the challenge for a lot of communities is accessing that justice.

We're talking about generational wealth and we're talking about people having the ability to create their own destinies. 

These are folks that are on the land, they have their cultures, and their customs, and their way of living. They also have the ability to pass on all of that to their children. Those are then stable communities that are self-sustaining. 

When people come in and begin tinkering with that by taking parts of their land or moving them off their land, they're further destabilising the planet. I think we all see what is happening around the world where there are ongoing fights and clashes. People say, “I wish I could solve those.” 

Well, one way to solve them is to never let them take root in the first place. And [land] is often the root cause of conflicts that can linger for centuries. And so, by helping people hold on what is theirs today, you are helping to prevent future conflict that could brew for, in some cases, literally centuries.

 As Brig says in the documentary, people just don't forget when their land and their culture has been taken from them. 

Number one is just information disparity. Communities often see the consequences of what's happening, but they don't understand where it comes from and that it's happening to others all around the world. 

I reported on Arizona and how a large Saudi farm had gone out to the desert and was pumping the aquifers and the local communities’ wells were increasingly running low, were going dry.

They didn't know exactly what was happening and they didn't know that it was happening because another country had effectively pumped its aquifers nearly dry. And so that country was going around the world to do the same thing in other areas. 

Giving [local communities in Arizona] the framework to understand that larger trend definitely empowered people. I think the same is true when I went to Africa and worked with folks in Zambia and I was able to show them what was the root cause of this.

When you understand that this is all interconnected, and it's part of this larger trend, it gives you the framework of both comprehension, but also the framework of resolve to begin working towards finding solutions. 

And secondly, as Earthrend Cousins say said – the former executive director of the World Food Programme –  there is a sense of disconnect from power that these communities feel. [They feel like] these things are just happening to them and they don't have the ability to stop them.

Whether they're vulnerable because they don't have access to the legal system or whether they're vulnerable because they just don't have the financial resources –  this is a commonality that a lot of people experience. 

As a journalist, I just believe in the process of sharing information with people. I believe in that information helping to drive the general public to demand solutions when they see a very clear and present problem emerging. 

We have such incredible people all around the world, incredibly tenacious, incredibly smart, incredibly moral, and incredibly ethical.  And I think when a big issue emerges, people can stand up and push back against the trend line that is currently unravelling. Therein lies the hope, right? 

I've been able to meet incredible people along the way. I often herald Brig, the attorney from Zambia as one such person. But there were a lot of folks around Brig in those communities who were championing him coming in and not rolling over and not giving in.

There is a lot of hardship and there's a lot of heartache when looking at these stories, but there's also this incredible vitality of human strength. And I think that's what needs to be cherished, and held onto, and loved, and encouraged, and supported, and reported on. In addition to the heartbreaking challenges that often unfold around these issues.

Land for me personally is probably why I'm here.

I'm of Scandinavian ancestry. There was a lot of land pressure in what were then very poor countries of Norway and Sweden, where my ancestors left under conditions of hunger. And they came out to land here in the United States that had been cleared by the federal and local officials of the Lakota people and the Ojibwe.

And they settled on that land. It was from that land that then generations of farmers, my great grandparents, my grandparents, all were raised and were able to use that land, that farmland, to send my mom to college and my dad to college -- both of them being the first in their families to go to college. It was that generational wealth of the farmland that they were on that created the wealth of the middle class that both of my parents enjoy.

They were then able to send me to college. And so I can only imagine what would have happened if somebody had come along and had moved my great grandparents or my grandparents off of that land and then left them on the side of the road destitute. Would  my parents have gone to a university? I don't think so. Would I, then, have been on track to be where I am? Seems unlikely.

It certainly would have been a different track. And I certainly would have grown up hearing angry stories about the person who came and took their land. Land has a lot of meaning to me as somebody who is a descendant of farmers. The land is my ancestry.