A Chilling Plot to Grab the World's Food and Water Resources
EPISODE 1574: In this KEEN ON show, Andrew talks to Nate Halverson, the producer and lead reporter on the new documentary movie THE GRAB, about the money, influence and rationale behind covert efforts to control the planet's most vital resource
Nate Halverson is an Emmy Award-winning senior reporter and producer at The Center for Investigative Reporting, covering business and finance with an emphasis on the global food system. Halverson broke the international news that California was literally sinking, a result of farmers over-pumping groundwater in the drought stricken Central Valley. He won a national Emmy Award for his reporting on the Chinese government’s involvement in the takeover of the world’s largest pork company, Smithfield Foods. He revealed the Saudi government’s plan to support the acquisition of food and water resources around the world that included a 15-square-mile farm in the parched Arizona desert, and other farms across drought stricken California. He reported on classified cables from the U.S. State Department that detailed wealthy countries were concerned about looming water and food shortages, including dire shortages in Yemen that helped trigger its devastating civil war. He has reported across the world, including Russia, Guatemala, England, Zambia, China, and Venezuela, and on investigative topics ranging from financial fraud and organized crime to uncovering internal documents that helped result in a $155 million settlement with a tech company. Before joining CIR, Halverson worked on projects with the Investigative Reporting Program at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, PBS NewsHour and at the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Press Democrat. He was awarded a 2014 McGraw Fellowship by the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, and he received degrees in economics and journalism from the University of Minnesota.
Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.
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