By Peter Laarman

There was a lot of excitement around a documentary recently released on Amazon Prime that goes after some of the biggest bad actors who are gobbling up the world’s land and water as climate change makes these essentials ever scarcer. 

Written and directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite, the film’s small team of journalists associated with the Center for Investigative Reporting spent seven years looking into the extent to which an assortment of private actors--sovereign funds, LLCs, big institutional investors, etc.--are grabbing the world’s resources.

The team’s quest starts with the discovery that back in 2013 a company fronting for the Chinese government had purchased U.S.-based pork giant Smithfield Foods for $5 billion, thereby instantly acquiring one-fourth of all the pigs raised for slaughter in this country. They then combed through the massive Wikileaks trove of diplomatic cables to track down a huge Saudi Arabian investment in Arizona land, where Saudi-employed “farmers” now grow prodigious amounts of hay, sucking up precious water from a rapidly dwindling aquifer.  

Wall Street is next up for treatment. The team comes across an obscure, investor-backed trust company that purchases vast tracts of U.S. farmland that  is then leased to foreign interests. When confronted, the smooth-talking CEO of the operation readily admits that, yes, in this fashion the United States is basically exporting its water; but, he argues, that’s better than open warfare over the increasingly scarce source of all life (which, along with food, he refers to as “empire commodities”). 

In dramatic film fashion, complete with scary music and all, the reporting team then reveals that they’ve obtained something they call "the trove": a massive file of Erik Prince’s emails. We’re invited to recall that Prince, the brother of Donald Trump’s Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, ran the notorious Blackwater group of mercenaries. The film shows the satanic Prince in his new role as a kind of global commodities broker, focused on taking control by force and fraud of vast  (United Arab Emirates) sheik in charge of security for the Emirates and (wait for it) China.

Some measure of useful exposition follows. The filmmakers want us to understand that the thing many Arab states and China fear most is instability created by food shortages. The African continent encompasses something like 50-60 percent of “undeveloped” arable land, making it the obvious target of a new scramble for Africa that echoes the original European Scramble for Africa of the late 19th century. What’s more, while indigenous Africans clearly have ancestral claims to the land they use for their crops and cattle grazing, many lack legal title to that land, making expropriation and displacement by global investors that much easier. 

The film also makes the important point that when Indigenous peoples are deprived of resources, bad things—instability and terrorism—are likely to follow. The phenomenon of so-called Somali “pirates,” people who were once able to support themselves as fisherfolk, is offered as a case in point.

It’s when the film starts to wind down that its core weaknesses surface. Viewers aren’t given a clear enough sense of the extent to which we should be worried about foreign interests capturing scarce U.S. resources compared to the threat of domestic greedheads doing they're thing as part of the “normal” workings of capitalism. The film calls our attention to the domestic investment factor, but ever so slightly, when it drops the tidbit that U.S. public pension funds are also involved in the plundering of Arizona water. Perhaps it’s not possible to sort out who is doing what, but getting it straight matters greatly at a time when Trump and others are fanning the xenophobic flame at every opportunity. 

And when the film turns to its predictable “there’s still a way out” closing message, the writers and producers pull their punches by suggesting that there could be some easy technical solutions to the looming global food crisis, if only “we” would make the effort.

The blurring of dramatic filmmaking and old-style documentary reporting often seems to require this kind of story arc, with a dash of uplift at the finish, but I would be happier if the producers had left us with more clarity, however grim. 

I would not expect or even want an anti-capitalist screed, but it would have been helpful to see even slight acknowledgment that an emergent Western capitalism, along with its imperial-cum-settler-colonial auxiliary, launched  the resource wars as far back as the 16th century. It started with spices; then gold and silver; then sugar and cotton; then oil, bauxite, rubber, etc. And now it’s the very building blocks of life itself.  

Leave aside the politics. The film’s intention was to find and name bad actors. Its makers found a few, and it’s all quite entertaining. But with the survival of billions of people at stake, more rigor would have been welcome. 

Could it be that the baddest of bad actors here is a particular system (hint: it starts with a capital C) that rewards and sanctifies maximum accumulation, and the devil take the hindmost? Could it be that the nefarious foreign interests are merely playing by the same rules this system lays down? 

The Grab doesn’t venture an answer. But how we answer the question shapes our politics, our ethics, and (now) our very existence.

NOTE: The Grab premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2022, but was only just released in theaters and streaming services this month. An earlier version of this review appeared in Religion Dispatches of July 2, 2024 and is presented here courtesy of the author.

Rev. Peter Laarman is a participating member of the National Council of Elders and a frequent commentator in Religion Dispatches and LA Progressive. He describes himself as an irregular socialist but a reliable critic of the corporate state.

Image credit: Magnolia Pictures/VIMooZ