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When farmers sell their land to developers or agribusiness they usually get outta town with a big grin and a bulging wallet and live happily ever after in some seaside/golfing community in Florida.
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The guy I knew in Quincy died of cancer in the 1980s.
If you are a farmer using commercial fertilizers and not regularly
testing your land for heavy metal contamination, that seems to
me to be taking a big risk.
And outside the US, sheesh, these underdeveloped countries do not
even have regulations on toxic waste control. I can see a corporation
getting "a good deal on fertilizer", dumping it on a few hundred square
miles of bananas or coffee or cocoa or copra or whatever, then simply
putting the land up for sale when they realize from the dropping harvests
that the "good deal on fertilizer" was only a good deal for the industrial
and power plant and mining corporations using it avoid toxic waste
disposal costs.
Forestry may have a come a long way in the last 30 years, but having
corporations responsible for most of the world's food supply does not
seem anything like safe to me. It is their short term world view that
is the problem: anything they do is ok as long as the truth does not
come out until after the next quarterly report.
Take these underdeveloped countries where starvation is a chronic
problem: why would a corporate agricultural enterprise even plant
if the people are not going to have money to pay for the produce?
Only to export it elsewhere. That is not going to do much for the
starving peasants. Where there is still a substantial proportion of
small farmers who own their own farmland, they are going to plant
just to have the stuff to eat themselves. If any of the neighbors in
the towns have some money to buy their excess production, great.