The growth of this trend has been sudden and unprecedented. Since 2004, nearly 10,000 square miles of land across Ethiopia, Ghana, Madagascar, Mali and Sudan has been leased to overseas investors; in the first half of 2009, an area equivalent in size to all the arable land in Europe was leased across the world to investors from developed world economies. New deals are occuring every week: in the last few days there have been agreements between Nigeria and Thailand over rice production, and talks between Saudi Arabia and African nations to develop farmland, to add to Saudi’s multimillion investments in the Philippines.

Companies at the forefront of this property land-grab include the US asset management company BlackRock, who have earmarked US $30 million for the acquisition of farmland in areas from Sub-Saharan Africa to the UK, and banking giants Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs, who have invested in both pig breeding operations and chicken farms in China. And it’s not just individual companies fronting up capital: the Indian government is giving financial incentives to empower 80 companies such as Karuturi Agro Products Plc to buy land in Ethiopia and other African countries. So far these companies have invested £1.5bn - and this trend looks set to continue as Africa is said to have 807m hectares of cultivable land, of which just 197m is currently being cultivated.

In the July 2008 newsletter of the Canadian private equity firm Ag Capital, Reza Vishkai of Insight Investment claimed ‘the single best recession hedge of the next 10 or 15 years is an investment in farmland’, echoing wider financial opinion, and petro-dollar rich nations like Qatar have been quick to wade into the field on the basis of such advice. Developing nations have been only too happy to oblige them: Ethiopia’s prime minister Meles Zenawi has expressed his government’s eagerness to give access to hundreds of thousands of hectares of farmland in the lowlands to Saudi Arabian investors, whilst Turkish Agriculture and Rural Affairs Minister Mehdi Eker said: “Choose and take what you want.”

Perhaps the most widely reported example is the now-bankrupt Korean conglomerate Daewoo Logistics, who agreed to lease arable land from the government of Madagascar in November 2008. Daewoo intended to use the land to farm corn and palm oil for export to the Republic of Korea, where 95% of non-rice foodstuffs are imported, and concerns about food security and sudden price rises are high.

However, the Daewoo deal, worth multiple billions of dollars for a 99 year lease on an enormous 1.3m hectares of land, is now regarded as a case study in the volatility of such investments. Predictably, the proposed deal provoked widespread anger in Madagascar, where citizens see their land as the sacred property of their ancestors. The deal came to a sticky end when the government of Madagascan president Marc Ravolomana was ousted in March 2009 in a coup led by the military-backed Andry Rajolina. Upon claiming leadership of the country, Rajolina stated, “In the [Madagascan] constitution, it is stipulated that Madagascar’s land is neither for sale or for rent, so the agreement with Daewoo is cancelled.”

“Many Malagasy felt that the land deal was another instance of the government thinking of Madagascar as a private business,” Madagascan citizen journalist Lova Rokotomalala tells me. “More than anything, it was the perception that the government tried to sneak in the land deal without posting any basic information and objectives before hand that really got the population outraged.”

So what is happening here? Why are developing nations like Madagascar so willing to sell the treasured arable land of their ancestors to foreigners, leaving themselves open to destabilising accusations that they are inviting ‘neo-colonialism’? Moreover, why are foreign companies so willing to risk big money on these exotic, politically sensitive ventures?

In short, the answer is that many developing economies desperately need an influx of capital to ease crippling public debts, and are betting foreign ownership of their land will bring with it jobs, technological and infrastructural development (in the form of fertilisers, agricultural tools and an investment in transport) and a transfer of labour skills to modernise their agricultural industry. For investing companies, the potential rewards are simply enormous: large ownership stakes in economies that will likely to see real growth in the coming decades, as the over-leveraged developed world falters and food demand increases.

On the face of it, this trend appears to be a ‘win-win’: large-scale capital investment in poor African and Asian nations could massively improve agricultural productivity, and help to feed selling countries’ famine-hit populations, while easing the food security fears of developed nations. In the process, it is argued, large multinational corporations will be able bring food to poverty stricken populations in a manner that development agencies can only dream of. The World Bank, for one, has endorsed this vision, stating that investment in agriculture is the best way for wealthier nations to contribute to developing world economies.

However, uplifting as the sales pitch may sound, the experience of Daewoo Logistics in Madagascar suggests this positive theory does not always play out in reality, and that locals are unimpressed with the proposed benefits.

In Sudan, the Darfur crisis has left the World Food Programme struggling to feed 5.6 million refugees – suggesting the country might not be the ideal place to grow food for foreigners. Yet this week the Sudanese minister for investment, Salman Suliman Alsafi, announced that he expected an investment of US $6 to 7 billion in the country in 2010, highlighting agriculture as being the chief area of interest. Even assuming the best of intentions, it seems churlish to expect foreign corporations to serve two masters equally; were they to do so, there would likely be over-fertilisation and deforestation of the farmland that could cause long-term damage, but it seems more likely they would concentrate on more profitable markets in the world’s wealthier nations.

“If there is a real world shortage of food in the future – and there may well be – it is difficult to imagine that a wealthy nation, like Saudi Arabia, that has leased or bought land in a poor country in Africa, such as Sudan, will put the food needs of the local population before the food needs of its own population in the case of an emergency,” explains Sue Branford from ‘Grain’, an organisation supporting small farmers.

In many cases, the legal ownership rights of selling governments are also questionable. During the Communist rule of Ethiopia in the 1980s, farmers lost their land to the Mengistu dictatorship; when the regime was overthrown, their land was privatised and sold to the Ethiopian-born Saudi citizen Al Amoudi, who is the 43^rd richest person in the world according to Forbes magazine. The farmers maintain that the land is still theirs though.

Then there is the tension between foreign companies and locals.

Joachim Von Braun, Director General of the International Food Policy Research, tells me: “Investors can make these deals politically acceptable if they inform local communities beforehand, include them into planning and treat them as investment partners… this can be done sustainably, when local communities are trained, supported by extension, and transparent, fair and sound contract arrangements are done.”

However, this is frequently not the case. In Kenya, the US agricultural giant Dominion Farms reportedly flooded the land of one farmer after he refused to sell his land at a rate of US $60 per property, and lent on the local police force to harass him (Dominion deny abuses of power took place). In Laos the market for land sales is chaotic and deregulated: land can be sold by both local and national legislatures, but ownership information is not collated in one place. This has caused utter confusion, with multiple investors claiming rights to each other’s farmland. Amid the madness, Laosian farmers, who have no land ownership rights under their country’s law, are seeing logging companies move in on land they have farmed for many years, and their livelihoods disappearing as foreign contractors are brought in to replace them.

While Von Braun’s sunny view on land leases can become a reality, the tensions caused by the international sale of domestic arable land is prompting local farmers to create their own agricultural initiatives, in order to protect themselves from the vagaries of such policies. Take Madagascan scientist Andriankoto Ratozamanana, whose innovative social agriculture business Megaseeds aims to empower African farmers by helping them to increase the yield on existing farmland by 400% per hectare through careful water use, organic fertilisers and selective mechanisation. Megaseeds then makes money by taking a share of the extra profits accrued.

Workers’ cooperative schemes also appear to be taking off. Author Andrew Rice recently wrote in The New York Times of his discovery of an Ethiopian scheme in which farmers working small plots were able to export their produce of green beans to the Netherlands.

Compared to the massive land concessions to foreign companies, this might seem like small beer - and it is. However, many are hopeful that a mass accumulation of similarly small-scale enterprises could have a powerful impact, swinging the balance of power back towards local agricultural producers. Local entrepreneurs need credit for such ventures though, and ironically, much of this is coming from abroad, via microfinancing networks.

‘Microloans’, small loans offered to poverty-stricken locals to spur entrepreneurship, are growing in popularity. The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) says that 75% of its funded projects involve providing financial services to poor people via rural banks and savings associations, with Western institutions heavily encouraged to invest in microfinance initiatives. IFAD has established 200 microfinance institutions, offering services that have directly issued microloans to more than 800,000 developing world entrepreneurs.

While critics have argued the microcredit movement has merely succeeded in privatising anti-poverty programmes, it is often a more benevolent form of investment than that made by large profit-driven companies from abroad. The emergence of new web based lending platforms such as Kiva.org and Lendforpeace.org, which connect small-scale investors with micro-entrepreneurs, suggests the true potential of digital microcredit has not been tapped yet. Even more encouraging is United Prosperity, an Internet microcredit organisation that maximises the money received by borrowers by using lenders’ investments as guarantees at local banks. With the guaranteed investment, borrowing entrepreneurs are able to claim higher value loans from their local bank, allowing them to obtain a credit history that might subsequently help them borrow more money for future ventures.

Of course, these innovations are no panacea for the mass redistribution of developing world farmland to foreign commercial interests. But assuming the trend for this type of foreign investment in developing economies continues, it seems likely that similar small-scale agricultural initiatives will grow exponentially along with political unrest, at least until foreign companies are prepared to swallow the less profitable pill of supplying their new hosts’ demand for food.

Illustration: Verity Keniger

Most ideas on display in this public space are based on transport; the renewable energy technology sector is mostly ignored. Given that much of the investment coming out of Copenhagen will be in renewables, it’s strange that more emphasis isn’t given to the development of solar and wind power technology here – explaining their increasing efficiency and the extent to which they can replace fossil fuels. But Hopenhagen Live is about fun, and getting ordinary people engaged with climate change – showcasing green transportation is more exciting, and much easier to relate to than Siemens’ development of Smart Grid technology. Smart Grid is therefore given only one small panel in one small cabin, despite being something that the U.S. will invest $4 Billion of stimulus package money in.

Locals will be interested by a project funded by the City of Copenhagen: the ‘Copenhagen Wheel’, which will appeal to the 40 per cent of people in the city who commute by bike. Developed by MIT’s SENSEable City lab project, it’s the cycling version of the Nike Plus iPod-linked running shoe. The wheel harvests energy when cyclists brake, powering an electric motor, In the wheel, sensors monitor traffic, pollution, noise, and temperature information, all of which is broadcast wirelessly via smartphone, and the data collected for the commuters, their friends, and for the city. The MIT inventors will be hoping that a commitment to huge emissions cuts is made at the conference will necessitate greater investment in technology that’ll achieve those cuts. The wheel is a niche technology, but forward-thinking innovation in urban transport is essential with cities accounting for two-thirds of global emissions.

Private entrepreneurs also showcased their work, including Shai Agassi, ex-President of SAP (one of the three sponsors of Hopenhagen), and one of Time magazine’s top 100 influential people. His company Better Place provides electric car infrastructure services, and here in Copenhagen they exhibit their products and charging stations: quiet cars for a quiet city, which could provide emission cuts much greater than bike-based innovation if successfully rolled out.

Agassi demanded that governments agree an ambitious deal in a pre-conference video; he and all the green entrepreneurs hope that a comprehensive deal at the conference will be the impetus for further public and private investment. Al Gore explains that a comprehensive UN deal demanding strict emission cuts, and which offers financing for the developing world, will “unleash capital and innovation.” Whether or not the final UN deal ends up being the “Real Deal” that activists are calling for (and that looks increasingly unlikely), there will still be financing made available by the developed world to help their industries and help the developing world transition towards clean economies.

Making greentech developments accessible and fun, as Hopenhagen does, seems one way innovators are doing good work to improve city dwellers’ lives and draw ordinary people into the complex debates surrounding climate change. But away from the Science Museum sheen of Hopenhagen, windmills and tweaks to national grids will provide greater savings over time, and will likely continue to attract the majority of investment.

The service is known as an API and is common to sites like Google – basically it’s a tailor-made content interface, a rare and ambitious step in the media industry. The Guardian hope to eventually create an ad-network, using their acculmulated intelligence to be reach more eyeballs than the visibility and diversity of news-site would allow. Like all games, more eyeballs mean greater profit.

One half of Open Platform is dubbed Content API, allowing developers access to a vast array of archives, which would permit, for example, the free use of Guardian articles about relevant artist on a museum’s webpages. In addition they offer Datastore, a “collection of important and high quality data sets curated by Guardian journalists.”

It’s not all puppy dogs, confetti, and the beginning of web utopia. Eventually, commercial use of service with be served alongside adverts. The Guardian aren’t purely in it for profit; their composition assures that they don’t intend to seek profit for shareholders benefit. Instead, their motivation is independence and conformity to their trust’s founding values. They can afford to be innovative and take risks in order to lead the way: being courageous, as their values state, is important. Indeed, shareholders “would normally have a heart attack at such a move.”

The New York Times and LA Times have both been flirting with billionaires recently, as they fight for survival; the NYT have had to sell off and lease back parts of their headquarters, landing themselves with a $24m annual rent payment as they try to pay back their Carlos Slim loan. The LA Times may have the best deal, with their potential suitor pointing to the Guardian as an ideal model. “Newspapers ought to be owned by foundations, not look for great financial returns” suggested philanthropist Eli Broad.

This API sees the Guardian setting the pace ahead of competitors like the New York Times who launched a similar but more restrictive service recently, featuring – wow! -a search facility and access to live headlines. The Guardian’s model is different, focused on allowing commercial use of their content and data. The result may be a smart mash-up of data and content, much Guardian branding, and a new revenue streams from which the same water can be continually recycled, reused, and resold.

If content is king, then this is service is a hundred of the king’s best horses, and thousands of his best messengers, sending the Guardian far and wide. A misstep online is unlikely to cost the Guardian much, and should only encourage competitors innovation—the industry sure needs it. With this move, the Guardian redraw of where the boundaries of the newspaper industry lie, using to technology to reach as far as possible. It’s enough to make Conrad Black spit his prison breakfast all over his email-inbox. He would be right to be worried, though he may have to wait until his release in a few years time to see the Guardian’s plans for complete media-domination realised.

Interns are meant to learn on the job, and get thrown in the deep end; someone should teach them how to swim first. But in the US, internships are big money. College students keen on fleshing out an empty resume, but not so keen on the competition for places, are increasingly turning to the private sector to sort placements. The University of Dreams polishes resumes, interview skills, sets up all the logistics, and finds you a placement – all for $5,000-10,000 of Daddy’s money. It’s a business that has grown 1,000 percent in five years; as entrance to the job market is delayed, competition for places will only increase – struggling companies will be keen to cash in anywhere they can.

It’s the sort of thing that makes Johann Hari sick. Even using family connections to get internships and placements has him up in arms calling the whole thing a scam in the Independent. Hari never experienced an unpaid internship, succeeding in being paid for his internship at the New Statesmen. This is impossible now. Hari complains that talent is unfairly pushed aside by middle-class connections and a “corrosive nepotism” deciding that this scam “disfigures and damages Britain.” What possible solution is there?

Hari asks: “This is a question about what kind of country we want to live in.” I must ask: Is that the sort of newspaper you want to work for? The Guardian heard from staff at the Independent who explained “The paper is got out every day by an army of ‘unpaid interns’.” I can’t imagine how sick it would make Hari to take it one step further, and have interns pay for the privilege of bailing out the cash-strapped paper on a regular basis. Sounds like business sense to me – companies can continue to hire unaided interns at the same time.

Eager, bright interns should know that a trip to London, and six months on Uncle Dave’s sofa-bed, isn’t the way media internships have to work anymore. Anyone with motivation and an internet connection can offer their services to media companies around the world, and do all the work from home; or from student digs in the summer. The web allows you to communicate and work with colleagues through a combination of email, Skype, video-conferencing, internet messaging and very occasional face-to-face meetings. An increasing number of web-based businesses operate in this way – interns can too.

With graduate recruitment down, it might be a smart strategy. Telecommuting saves money on accommodation, it allows you to skirt around menial office tasks, and you can make flexible hours, working a part-time job at the same time. Working for online magazines, papers, or blogs is a different experience to traditional internships; you are likely to be valued, appreciated, and given something meaningful to do – not just bailing out a failing business model.

Like the hugely popular fantasy game World of Warcraft, Eve Online is an online multiplayer game set in a “persistent world”–action doesn’t stop when you quit. Serious gamers play for in excess of 30 hours a week, and thousands of pounds sterling can be won and lost during the game’s frequently dramatic and totally unpredictable course. In this sci-fi world players trade, fight, mine, build, and explore. Gamers spend real dollars on cards that pay for game-time, then trading these cards for in-game currency, creating an exchange between real and ingame currency. “Corporations,” groups of players, control and fight over sections of the huge galaxy, giving the game a loose thread and objective.

Only last week a rogue agent tore apart one of the most powerful corporations in an elaborate plot to which game-developers provided nothing except the architecture. And an 80bn ISK embezzlement by online investment banker “Xabier” is the latest in a series of high-profile events to hit the online community (ISK being the in game currency, not the beleagured Icelandic Krona). An amount totalling a few thousands pounds was taken by a player placed in charge of a large amount of currency in their position within on of Eve Online’s banks. It goes far beyond an act of smart-theivery: gameplay on Eve Online forces players like the chairman of the bank in question to issue statements calming investors, trying to avoid a run on the bank getting any worse, promising that “Dynasty Banking will get over these times and we will continue to strive to earn the public’s faith as one of the leading banks of Eve Online.”

With so little regulation, and massive frauds, this parable for the financial crisis is close enough before you consider the nationality of the game’s directors: Icelandic. Both the Icelandic banking and gaming industries like their games played with as little regulation as possible. Worldwide recession continues to hit online games’ profitability with the collapse of Iceland’s banking system and currency restrictions threatening Eve Online’s business model, tempting them to relocate to safer harbours, whilst at their customers thrive on the authenticity of their in-game economy — doesn’t sound very escapist, does it?

Whilst the game has weathered losses ten-times greater in the past – amounts somewhere in the region of $25k-$100k – talk of bank liquidity and the potential of a bank being bailed-out by their in-game competitors, mark Eve Online’s system as a little friendly. Despite the intense rivalry and double crossing between in-game corporations, players have invested a little more than cash into this game – their time and their lives. None of them want a whole universe fail because of a few greedy bankers, even if the game increasingly plays like the real world writ-galactic.

Facebook’s creative marketers are now selling the Web 2.0 starship as “a powerful way to share credible news and information and tap into the implicit trust that people have with their friends.” What does that mean? Well, it’s Facebooks attempt to position itself as the primary filter for the news. Tools like Facebook Connect already allow users to log-in to other web-sites like CNN and CBS, a clever move by Zuckerberg’s camp to encourage people to find, digest, and discuss information primarily through Facebook. Icelandic twenty-somethings, 96% of whom are on Facebook, are using it organise social revolts and demonstrations; Egypt is now feeling the Facebook revolution during its tensions with Gaza. And according to Facebook marketing man Randi Zuckerberg: “When you get a news clip from a friend, they are putting their own personal brand on the line, saying ‘I recommend THIS piece of content to you out of all the content that is out there.’”

More importantly though, every minute web users spend searching for information through Facebook is a minute they’re not offering their attention to the Adwords of competitor Google. 

By tapping into to this virally driven traffic, journalists and newspapers could regain some of the mindshare lost as the web took over as the primary info hub. It’s also probably a more meaningful way to attract attention on the web than just trying to strong-arm your way up the Google rankings using the dark arts of SEO, and forcing your reporters to place popular phrases like ‘Britney Spears’ through your news articles. As a recent report by Reuters explained, chasing clicks and page-views both dilutes a newspaper’s image, as well as their appeal to advertisers. A rush to get clicks, rather than readers, “may in fact erode the distinctiveness of the brand and its connection to a specific audience.”

Facebook may have found a powerful way of changing that. It will soon advertise content, take people to that content, let advertisers know who is taking rides where, for how long, and how often. This social networking taxi-service would stay free, advertisers would be happy, the news industry and the world would be saved. Right? Except, in this taxi, as well as steering the driver would be furiously taking notes about everything you did and said along the way…

The wealth-manager has all of his three companies under investigation for multi-million pound fraud, and he was going through a messy divorce. If you’re thinking of faking you’re own suicide, you could perhaps pay closer attention to the in-flight showing of MacGyver; though a friend who was sent an email by Schrenker after the crash has claimed that the pilot has Special Ops training and a dual personality. Which is, frankly, a badass combination.

Another pilot offers Thucydides’s advice: “The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it.” Said pilot is a bit like those goons who said how brave the 9/11 hijackers were; what’s brave is facing the music rather than going off on some Special Ops jolly while your clients get shafted. Schrenker merely joins French investor Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet who killed himself after losing a billion-dollars to the Madoff scandal, and Adolf Merckle who walked in front of a train after seeing his family company get broken up, in the ranks of rich men who left a legacy of sheer recklessness.

Twitter is one place that we may witness the public effort for a resurgence of the Republican grassroots movements, as they engage with the next generation of voters. Signing up in the week before Obama’s inauguration, Karl Rove has made a highly symbolic move as he wonders how anyone can steer the Republican Party out the wilderness. The irony is not lost that Rove has moved toward an open, inclusive and fairly liberal network at a time when Obama declares “I will open the doors of Government and ask you to be involved in your own Democracy again.” Rove must be desperate. Directing the Right’s bow towards blogs and social media has stumbled in the past, though Twitter continues to be an indispensable asset for political communication.

Rove’s final tip in his Op-ed “A Way Out of the Wilderness” declares “The GOP must master new media.” With all of Rove’s Twitter-talk about ninjas, he must feel the need to become a sensei of New Media, declaring “Democrats have successfully developed tools to exploit online advocacy, and Republicans must spend more time and energy doing the same.” The strategy is not lost on this Twitter commenter: “He’s obviously trying to build a new career in now a Democrat dominant political env. He’s vsmart…like a weasel.”

With Twitter displacing the mainsteam-media as the first place to break news stories, the BBC have been caught out using it to source information about Mumbai, inaccurately. Similarly, as journalists met in a five-star hotel in Athens for the Global Forum for Media Development, outside the rioting was happening, and being broadcast on Twitter and Facebook. A journalist who was present at the forum declared: “It is a dangerous world, indeed, when citizen reporters are completely trusted, both by the media institutions that incorporate them and by the audience who consume that information.”