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Some richer countries with too little land to grow food are buying or leasing land in poorer countries to produce food that will be exported back to the investor's country. South Korea bought 700,000 hectares in Sudan, Saudi Arabia 500,000 hectares in Tanzania, and 80 Indian firms bought 350,000 hectares in Africa.

African countries such as Nigeria have turned from food exporters to food importers. Before oil was discovered in the 1970s, Nigeria had large farms and plantations that produced food for export. Today, 90 percent of Nigeria's food and fiber is produced on small subsistence farms, and most rice and wheat is imported.

Nigeria's government often attempted to jump start food production by subsidizing the creation of large farms, an effort that largely failed. Today, World Bank and government funds aim to make small farmers more efficient with better roads and transportation infrastructure. Over half of the 98 million hectares of arable land are not farmed, and less than 10 percent of the three million hectares that could be irrigated are. http://pulitzergateway.org/food-insecurity/)

Dole-DBCP. Suits filed by banana workers in Central America and Africa claiming to have become sterile because Dole Food used the pesticide dibromochloropropane (DBCP) to control nematodes on its banana plantations may unravel because of a June 2009 ruling that lead attorney Juan Dominguez was at the heart of a fraud, soliciting workers to sue Dole, Dow Chemical and AMVAC Chemical. Dominguez, found to have recruited clients who never worked on banana plantations, may be disbarred.

DBCP was used on banana farms in the developing world until at least 1979, two years after it was linked to sperm damage in US factory workers who produced the chemical. Dole, which stopped using DBCP in 1980, argues that infrequent exposure to open-air diffusion of DBCP did not cause sterility. In 1979, Sandinistas took control of the Nicaraguan government, Dole's employment records were destroyed.

In November 2007, a Los Angeles jury awarded $5.7 million to six Nicaraguan men (Tellez vs. Dole), and a Florida judge is considering whether Dole and four other banana firms should pay $97 million awarded to 151 plaintiffs by a court in Nicaragua in 2005. Nicaraguan courts have awarded more than $2 billion to thousands of peasants with DBCP claims since 2001.

The Nicaraguan government in 2001 allowed anyone exposed to DBCP on a banana farm with a lab report showing he is sterile to collect damages; courts were ordered to fast-track DBCP claims. Evidence is limited to eight days, after which the court has three days to decide the case. Defendants are required to deposit money in a trust fund in order to defend themselves; most do not.

Until the Nicaraguan law was enacted in 2001, US firms kept suits against them out of US courts and stalled in the Nicaraguan system. The fast-track 2001 law encouraged multinational corporations to shift the cases against them to US courts. US personal injury lawyers advertised for clients in Chinandega, Nicaragua-- more workers came forward claiming to have been made sterile because of DBCP usage on Dole plantations than were ever employed there. Some 250 suits against Dole over DBCP usage were pending in Nicaragua in summer 2009.

Dole, a privately held firm with revenue of $7.6 billion in 2008 that was founded in 1851, was taken private by David Murdock in 2003, who owns all the current stock. Murdock, with a net worth of $4.4 billion in 2008, ranked eighth on the Forbes list of richest Americans in 2008. Dole has $1.5 billion in debt, and stock sales would allow some of this debt to be repaid. Dole is the leading US seller of fresh fruits and vegetables including bananas, pineapples and fresh-cut salads.

The workers' suits have been filed under the federal Alien Torts Act, which allows defendants to be held accountable in US courts for their actions abroad. A Alien Torts suit filed by seven Guatemalan unionists against Del Monte Fresh and its Guatemalan subsidiary was dismissed in August 2009 by a US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, upholding a federal district court's earlier dismissal of the suit, saying it should be heard in Guatemala.

Leaders of the SITRABI union, which represents plantation workers in Guatemala, received asylum in the US. In 1999, during bargaining with banana subsidiary Bandegua, some 918 workers were fired. A local security group that included the mayor of Morales forced union leaders to denounce their union on the radio, after which they fled to the US; they filed suit in 2001. The courts ruled that the union leaders could sue Del Monte in Guatemala without having to return to testify there.

Wal-Mart. The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in July 2009 rejected a suit filed by workers employed by firms producing goods for Wal-Mart in Bangladesh, China, Indonesia, Nicaragua, and Swaziland that alleged Wal-Mart was jointly liable for violations of national labor laws committed by suppliers. Wal-Mart has contracts with its suppliers requiring them to obey local labor laws, and the workers argued that these supplier contracts created a duty on Wal-Mart to monitor suppliers and correct violations of local labor laws. A lower court rejected the workers' suits, and the Appeals court upheld the dismissal.

Wal-Mart developed a code of conduct for its foreign suppliers, and in 1992 began incorporating the labor standards into contracts with them, with monitoring done by Wal-Mart or third parties. The foreign workers alleged that a combination of low prices, short deadlines, and ineffective monitoring led to widespread violations of local labor laws. They sued Wal-Mart in US courts in 2005, alleging that Wal-Mart's supplier contracts made Wal-Mart a joint employer with its suppliers, and that Wal-Mart was unjustly enriched when suppliers violated labor laws.

The legal argument turned on whether Wal-Mart's contracts allowed Wal-Mart to monitor its suppliers' compliance with labor laws or required Wal-Mart to conduct such monitoring. Both courts found that the contracts allowed rather than required monitoring of supplier compliance, so that Wal-Mart was not a joint employer.

Chocolate. Cacao, the raw ingredient for chocolate, is grown primarily in Africa. About 15,000 tons a year, one percent of world production, is grown in Venezuela, and it commands premium prices. However, the cacao is produced on plantations in and near nature reserves, leaving owners vulnerable to squatters and inspections by the populist government.

The global price of sugar rose in summer 2009 to $0.22 a pound, up over 70 percent since the beginning of the year. The use of half of Brazil's sugar cane to make ethanol and drought in number two sugar producer India were blamed for the sharp rise in sugar prices.

US candy and food makers appealed to the federal government to permit more foreign sugar to be imported; a maximum 1.3 million metric tons a year can be imported duty free, plus another 1.3 million metric tons from Mexico. However, the US consumes about 10 million metric tons of sugar a year.

Fish. A study prepared for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimated that half of the world's fish and shellfish were produced through aquaculture at the end of 2009, up from less than 10 percent in 1970. Almost two-thirds of the world's farmed fish and shellfish is produced in China.

Major issues with fish farming include feed and disease. Up to a third of the wild fish caught are used to provide feed for fish farms. Aquaculture is very efficient using only two-thirds of a kilogram of wild fish to produce 1 kilogram of farmed fish, but catching ever-larger quantities of smaller wild fish to feed to fish on farms could threaten global stocks of fish and seabirds. Fish farms use antibiotics to deal with disease, but some fish as well as parasites can escape and affect wild stocks.

Iraq. Iraq was self-sufficient in major foodstuffs in the 1980s, and produced about 75 percent of the world's dates. However, food production has shrunk, and date production fell by half to 281,000 tons in 2008, less than Egypt, Iran and Saudi Arabia in part because the Trade Ministry, which buys most Iraqi farm products, sometimes sets very low prices.

Dates are valued for their ability to stay fresh without refrigeration, as a source of nutrition, and for uses as varied as making alcohol and desserts and feeding farm animals. Iraqi date palm trees normally produce about 150 pounds of dates a year; in 2009, yields are expected to average less than 50 pounds a tree.

Argentina. Argentina, famous for grass-fed beef, is increasingly fattening cattle in feed lots. A third of the 15 million cows expected to be slaughtered in 2009 were fattened in feed lots as more pampa ranchland is converted to corn and soybean production.

Juliet Eilperin, "Farm-Fresh Fish," Washington Post, September 20, 2009. Steve Stecklow, "Fraud by Trial Lawyers Taints Wave of Pesticide Lawsuits," Wall Street Journal, August 18, 2009. Victoria Kim and Alan Zarembo, "Pesticide cases could be upended," Los Angeles Times, July 12, 2009.