If you had been standing around Brandenburg, Germany (on the far eastern side of Germany) back in 2007....interested in buy farm land....the price would have been 'X'.
Today? The same land, with land and farm speculation going on...would be '4X'....meaning the property quadrupled in price in a matter of 13 years. Just a small farm area valued at 200k Euro in 2007....would today be worth 800k Euro.
People that study speculation...would marvel at this number and a classic capitalism/speculation discussion would start up. What people would point out....unless you insert a law or unusual event into this....the same property would triple in price by 2030.....meaning that original property in 2007 being 200k Euro....by 2030, would be 2.4-million Euro.
So this has triggered political discussion, with the state agricultural minister deeply involved in the idea of building a control situation. What the government points out....once this trend starts....livestock production stops. Vegetable production goes into massive overdrive in this type of situation.
There are basically three groups in this argument. The small-time farmers have an association which believes some type of protective mechanism needs to exist. The big-time farmers have an association, who believe that the government needs to stay out of this discussion. And then you have the government itself.....worried over a trend that probably isn't good for the region....but neither is a control mechanism.
The odds of some law preventing escalation? Unknown. Even if you make such a law, it'll be challenged in court.
It's a very good story from RBB (Berlin-Brandenburg public TV) and worth a read.
Massive farming operations likely to the winner at the end? When you go and look at the entire market scheme, the banking issues, modern technology....all of this leads back to large farms making a fair amount of profit, and being able to afford high-priced land. The little guy can't.
3 comments:
Yay capitalism!
If you had stood there in 1989, with East/West Germany on the verge of unification and predicted a farm-land property speculation surge within 15 years in East Germany...people would have laughed over the 'joke'.
This is the same discussion going on in Leipzig (southern part of town), where renovation projects are going on, and housing prices are starting a upward trend.
But this brings one to the obvious problem....when has the government (any country) really done much to slow down or law-write a problem out of existence, without failing, or just creating a fresh new problem?
You'd need to reform the government itself so that all the disaster capitalists within it can't keep profiting from their own actions
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