In his latest book, The Land Grabbers, Fred Pearce investigates the "new colonialism", which, he says, is having more of an impact on the lives of poor people than climate change. The book conducts an expose of the murky deals made by oligarchs, sheikhs and agribusiness corporations to empty commonly owned ancestral lands around the world of the peasant farmers, herders or hunting tribes living on them, with no regard for those people's historic or cultural rights.
The veteran environmental writer has spent the past two years investigating this global epidemic, travelling across the 10 countries where the most egregious grabbing is taking place – the savannah of Brazil, the forests of Indonesia, the inner Niger delta of Mali – collecting the stories of people whose lives have been destroyed. The book follows the trail from boardrooms and ministries to the extreme conservationists buying up Patagonia, City speculators using money from our pension funds, and Gulf oil sheikhdoms worried about food security.
Want to know more about this unprecedented corporate privatisation and enclosure of the world's common ancestral lands? Who is doing most of the grabbing? Will the hundreds of thousands of dispossessed people find justice? Is there such a thing as "responsible" land grabbing?
Fred will be joining us from 1-2pm on Wednesday to discuss land grabbing and his new book. Whatever your questions, just post them in the comments below.
• Fred Pearce's The Landgrabbers is published by Eden Project Books on 24 May
