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[indistinct chatter]
Director: And then in terms of national security,
are there things you could say now...
that perhaps you couldn't say then,
about impending national security issues
and world-conflict scenario here?
Is there a world conflict in terms of like, World War III?
- ♪ [ominous music playing] - Schoonover: Well, I mean...
That scenario does not sound improbable to me.
Reporter 1: Just yesterday, the UN Secretary General warned...
Reporter 2: ...target the current social
environmental vulnerabilities
need to be implemented...
[overlapping news reports]
Reporter 3: ...on the brink of an all-out civil war right now.
Reporter 4: China is deploying troops
to its first overseas military base in Djibouti.
[overlapping news reports]
[protestors chanting]
[overlapping news reports continue]
Reporter 5: The importance of our food supply, and security
and safety cannot be underestimated.
- [man yelling in Arabic] - [gunshot]
[scattered cries]
♪ [ominous music continues]
- [beeping] - [door unlocking]
Nate: I've covered stuff in the past
that people told me I should be concerned about.
You know, that I should be watching my back.
I did a story that exposed corrupt bankers
that resulted in people losing millions of dollars
and hating my guts.
There she is.
Nate: I've gotten troves of secret information
from withinside of Facebook that showed how employees
talked about knowingly duping children out of money.
I'm gonna actually cut this.
Nate: Goodbye, internet.
I have reported in Macau,
going out and drinking with the triad bosses.
I was told they would dangle me out of my hotel room balcony
and drop me.
It feels safe. How safe is it?
Zach: Pretty safe.
Yeah, this project has kept me up at night
more than all of my other
investigative reporting projects combined.
♪ [ominous music concludes]
Nate: Testing, one, two, three. Testing, one, two, three.
- Director: Uh-huh, that's okay. - Okay.
Great.
Cool, are we ready?
[overlapping chatter]
All right.
Hi, I'm Nate Halverson, a reporter... I'll start over.
Hi, I'm Nate Halverson, an Emmy award-winning reporter
and producer here at the Center for Investigative Reporting.
We're one of... We're the largest... [clears throat]
It's difficult to say when I started on this project,
because this project, sort of, just started as one thing
and then just, totally just like,
ate up seven years of my life.
♪ [pensive music playing]
Nate: I got a call one day and I was asked
to look at this takeover of Smithfield Foods.
Smithfield agreeing to be acquired
by China's Shuanghui International for...
Nate: This was the largest purchase of an American business
by a Chinese company ever, and still is to date.
And so when I started looking at the numbers,
this was effectively one in four American pigs
that the Chinese bought, essentially overnight.
Senator: I mean, did you expect that this committee
would hold a hearing on the acquisition?
Larry: Uh, I don't know that I contemplated that, no.
Senator: Did you realize you were the victim
of a Chinese Communist plot?
[committee laughing]
[laughs] Senator, I did not...
To this moment, I'm not sure I understand I'm the victim
- of a Communist plot. - Senator: And the control of...
Nate: There was a lot of question
even if the Chinese government was behind it.
And if they were behind it, why?
And I think it's that "why" that was concerning people.
And they wanted to know, you know,
is another country making moves
to control part of the American food supply?
Uh, would you agree that Shuanghui
is a state-controlled company?
No, I would not agree, Senator,
that it is a state-controlled company.
It is... I mean, I think the...
I think that's fairly easy to research.
Nate: Larry Pope was the CEO of Smithfield Foods.
He told Congress that he doesn't think the Chinese government
is behind the takeover of his company.
Director: So...
But I went to China. [chuckles]
[speaking Chinese]
Nate: [in English] I flew to, like, the Nebraska of China.
I mean, I met with the president of Shuanghui.
Welcome to Shuanghui.
Nate: He gave me a tour of the factory.
[speaking Chinese]
Nate: [in English] After that, I flew to Hong Kong
to meet with more of the company's executives.
I was given a big, thick book,
um, that very explicitly says,
"Do not distribute in the United States."
Um, because it's full of information...
Um...
I mean, I took it back to the United States
because it was full of information. [laughs]
[laughs] Yeah, I mean,
when people say "follow the money,"
this is, like, literally following the money.
This is getting the book that breaks down every single dollar
of the largest-ever Chinese purchase of an American company.
Buried within this thing is, like, treasure.
A lot of it's really boring,
and then there'll be pure treasure.
And so, I knew that the Bank of China
had arranged the financing of this deal.
And the Bank of China is owned by the Chinese government.
It's controlled and run by the Chinese government.
And so I opened up their annual report
and smack dab in there is an entire page
devoted to the takeover of Smithfield Foods.
And it says that it does its, quote, "social responsibility,"
and is carrying out the national strategies of the government.
So by the time I sat down with Larry Pope,
I had the goods.
[indistinct chatter]
♪ [pensive music concludes]
- All right. - Nate: Yeah.
- Assistant: Larry, it is 1:15. - Larry: Okay.
- Assistant: I just wanted you to... - Any more questions?
Is there any other burning question I haven't asked?
Nate: Can I show you something really quick?
I'm just gonna show you the, uh...
This is the Bank of China document
where they lay this out.
I didn't know they did it in 24 hours.
You can see here, I just mark it. I mean...
They're saying that that transaction
is part of the government's plan and they're supporting it
and it's their social responsibility.
"The Bank performs its social responsibility."
"The Bank spares no efforts
to support Chinese enterprises in their..." Wow.
[sighs]
Overnight, Wan Long, the Chairman of WH Group,
picked up the phone, made a call to the Bank of China,
and the next day they had five billion bucks.
One in four American pigs.
Larry: All right.
- Nate: Thanks so much for the time. - Good luck.
♪ [suspenseful music playing] ♪
Nate: It's just one deal. It was one deal,
I was able to get to the bottom of it.
The Chinese government was behind the deal.
...the largest Chinese takeover...
Nate: You can turn on MSNBC, CNN,
Fox Business News,
and you just keep seeing "big food deal, big food deal."
And then all of a sudden, it kind of comes to me,
like, "Wait a minute, what... Are other countries doing this?"
That's the scale of it.
A vast leak of thousands of documents
from U.S. embassies and other diplomatic outposts...
Nate: So, around this time,
I start digging through WikiLeaks,
which had dumped, like, 200,000 State Department cables online.
♪ [pensive music playing]
I'd just start going through, I mean, there's 818 results.
And I came across this classified cable,
uh, "Food security agriculture getting spotlight."
It was basically the Embassy in Riyadh
sending information back to the State Department,
back to the U.S. government,
saying that King Abdullah is telling his companies
to go overseas and buy up food and water resources.
The cables, these classified cables
made it really clear this was a national security issue
for Saudi Arabia.
It wasn't just they were concerned
about running out of water, they were running out of water.
So, there was like a time in the '90s
when Saudi Arabia was the world's sixth-largest
exporter of wheat.
A desert country pumping up its groundwater
to grow wheat and export to other places.
And that didn't last.
Saudi Arabia had drained so much water from their aquifers,
they were nearly gone in 30 years, in a generation.
♪ [pensive music concludes]
And so King Abdullah had to say
to his companies and to his nation, like,
"We got to go overseas and find our food and water."
And that's the pattern.
That's the pattern we're starting to see.
♪ [mysterious music playing]
Nate: One of the first things I stumbled upon was that
a Saudi Arabian company had bought
effectively 15 square miles in the middle of nowhere, Arizona.
This place, La Paz County.
♪ [mysterious music concludes]
Holly: ...concerned about our basins here in La Paz County
and, um, you know, so I'm grateful
that we're able to keep it on the forefront,
let them know that you know what,
we're a small county, but we matter, and stuff like that.
So, anyways, you guys enjoy your margaritas.
- Woman: Thank you. - Okay, thanks.
I've heard from people, the residents,
that they've gotten so frustrated that they've
talked about taking their trucks,
their off-road vehicles, and tearing up fields.
I've heard them mention throwing bombs down their wells.
♪ [tense music playing]
Holly: The biggest farm is going to be Fondomonte,
the Saudis, the Saudi Arabians.
Their facility that they have is just huge.
It's like their own little world.
This wasn't... I didn't see this here a month ago.
Here you have trucks that are being weighed,
filled up with hay in the back,
so they can ship the hay either to China, Saudi Arabia...
I have no idea how many heads of cattle
that they're feeding over there.
All I know is that I've been told
that that's what they're using their hay for.
Sucking our water dry in order to grow hay,
so they can ship it overseas back to their country,
so they can feed their cows.
We have the aquifers underneath this,
and some of these pumps that they're installing
can pump up to 3,500 gallons per minute.
Millions and millions of gallons of water.
In a lot of these areas in Arizona,
there's no regulation to how much water you can pump.
You buy the land, free to pump as much water as you want.
So, this big Saudi Arabian dairy company goes to Arizona
and quickly becomes one of the largest
water users in the state.
And you know, what's happening is legal.
It's pissing a lot of people off.
But under current law, this is legal.
♪ [tense music concludes]
John: Yeah, my well went dry.
It drew down because the water's dropping.
There's not enough, you know, rain that could...
replenish it. I mean, this is...
You couldn't replenish this in a lifetime, you know.
♪ [pensive music playing]
Director: When did you first notice the water problem?
Well, I guess that would have been the day
when the water level went below my pump,
and the pump burned up and melted the casing and...
Yeah, that was a little disappointing.
I think everybody knows the problem, but...
I don't know how to correct it.
I can't pay for a high-powered lawyer.
Neither can any of my friends, you know.
And what good would it do anyway?
You know, you just take and take and take,
and pretty soon there ain't anything to take.
[crowd murmuring]
Holly: Because these people are so upset.
Holly: So when I say that, I feel her pain,
I feel your pain. I was out all day today
taking a look at the different farms, again.
I want conservation measures put in place
so we can all grow as a community,
where you guys can stay here and so can they.
Man 1: You're saying it's perfectly legal
for these people to come in here,
drain the aquifer, and the local people
have to redrill their wells that they've lived there for years?
- And you say that's perfectly legal? - [applause]
Tell us what's going to be done to improve this situation
because it's getting worse.
I know that there's large, large tracks,
miles and miles of green that wasn't there two years ago.
How is that possible? I thought these...
Man 2: ...protections are allowed to we homeowners here?
Our wells are running dry.
What we want to know is, what are you doing for us?
- [applause] - [overlapping chatter]
Anchor: Nathan Halverson is the first reporter
to break this story in the national press,
and he joins us now live.
Thank you so much for joining us.
- Thanks. - Producer: Three, two, one.
In China, here outside of a small...
- Producer: Okay, again. - Yeah.
Around me, literally, the dirt underneath my tires is sinking.
What does it mean that you guys have built this brand-new plant?
The wonderful smell of bacon
that pulls you out of bed in the morning.
I was doing all of these pieces, right?
And that's it. I got nothing more. Fuck.
And I do a story about this thing over here
and this thing here and this thing there.
But I was beginning to connect all of those stories.
We could see that other countries around the world
were growing increasingly worried about food and water.
And their strategies was to buy, purchase,
grab other countries' food and water supplies.
[keyboard clacking]
Nate: And so I began to think about
how is climate change gonna impact, you know,
how countries grab food and water.
And you know, the geopolitics of food and water.
I mean, I began digging through the Paris Accord stuff,
United Nations reports on climate change.
And what became clear is
it's going to impact countries very differently.
And that's when I stumbled across Russia.
The documents showed that Russia's food production
was going to benefit from climate change.
Imagine an area covered in white frost
slowly thawing out, and in its place comes up
green crops shooting from the ground,
followed by cattle, and sheep, and pigs.
It kind of goes from a desert of cold
to Iowa.
So what is Russia gonna do about that?
Well, it turns out
one of the things they're gonna do about it
is import American cowboys.
[cows mooing]
Todd: You know, my wife seen an ad on the internet
and as a joke, she thought it'd be funny as hell,
so she put my resume in.
And I was getting ready to watch Sunday football
in Valentine, Nebraska,
and this Skype thing come over the computer,
and I hollered at her, "Honey!"
She kind of got panicky and said,
you need to talk to him. It's about a job.
So I answered it,
and 30 minutes later, I was hired.
Pretty much my wife didn't think that was very funny
after all that, you know,
because now we're packing up and going to Russia.
Oh, here we go. Here we go.
You guys better give him some air.
[indistinct clamor]
Todd: Oh, he's tapped out, boys.
They don't have that in Russia.
And they figured if they were gonna do it right,
what they needed was the guy in the cowboy hat
with the chaps on the horse.
♪ [rock cover of Russian national anthem playing] ♪
Commentator: [in Russian]
Victor: [in English]
♪ [rock music continues through laptop speakers] ♪
Victor:
Commentator: [in Russian]
[in English] Yeah, yeah, we went there.
We went to the Russian rodeo.
Government officials were in the stands.
The head of the cattle companies were there.
It was... It was an amazing spectacle.
♪ Singer: Now go, walk out the door ♪
♪ Just turn around now
♪ 'Cause you're not welcome anymore... ♪
♪ [melancholy music playing]
Victor:
One of the targets that...
Nate: I mean, who would have known that President Putin
knew so much about cattle?
Like, this was a top-down decision.
This came from Putin.
This came from President Putin.
[in Russian]
Nate: [in English] When the Soviet Union fell,
there were shortages across the board.
You know, people were hungry
and they started slaughtering their cattle in huge numbers.
The number of cattle in Russia plummeted.
And so when Putin took over, he at some point decided
to rebuild that cattle herd.
- ♪ [music intensifies] - Nate: And not just to feed Russians,
but to give Russia geopolitical power.
Director: How much?
Well, according to some,
it's gonna give them more strength
than all their oil reserves and all of their weapons do.
Victor:
♪ [music softens, concludes]
Nate: As food and water become more precious,
countries are looking to grab up that resource for themselves.
Whether it's to wield power,
or whether to make sure they're feeding their people.
Yes. Um, the journalist, she's up in Minneapolis.
And so the question is, what countries are doing this?
You know, where are they doing it?
And how are they doing it?
You know.
And is this gonna work out well for the world?
As I began pulling on threads,
one thread and then another thread,
information just kept falling into my lap.
And at some point, I was swimming in it.
And the only way I was gonna be able to parse it through
and tell the big story, I needed a team.
[door unlocking]
- Hi! - Nate: Hey!
- How's it going? - Nate: Good.
- [cooing] - Nate: Come on in.
Mallory: I was in the Marine Corps Reserves
from 2007 to 2014.
And after that, I was a traveling videographer.
And that's where I heard about this project.
I saw it was about food security and national security,
and so I was just super interested in that.
Being able to get in the dirt and see who are the companies,
who are the countries, who are the actors...
It's something that needs to be done.
And if we didn't, that would say more
about us and who we are as journalists and as people,
if we didn't pursue it, if we didn't do
everything in our power to investigate it
and to bring those truths to light.
Nate: And when you say the future is now,
- like, how do you... - The future is food riots.
The future is complete instability because of...
inequities with access to food and water.
All I knew was untitled food and water documentary.
Nate: Threatening violence because of water scarcity...
I thought maybe, this is through
the Center for Investigative Reporting,
there might be more to it than that.
- Turns out, there was. - ♪ [ominous music playing] ♪
He had me looking into companies
listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange,
mercenaries...
These shadow worlds that I hadn't operated in before.
This sort of "follow the money."
Very rich and very influential people are preparing.
They're securing their water.
They're securing their access to food for themselves
and their families for generations.
I first learned about that when we were looking into attending
the Global Ag conference in New York,
which is essentially all the major agricultural investors
around the world come together in New York
and just essentially talk about how to divide up
some of the last remaining farmland on Earth.
Emma: As our reporting deepened,
and we're looking all over the world,
we're seeing it's not just China.
It's not just Saudi Arabia. Not just Russia.
It's the United States, too.
♪ [tense music playing] ♪
Hargroves: Every century is characterized by
a key commodity, an empire commodity.
So in the 1500s, you had spices.
1600s, sugar.
17-1800s, cotton. 1900s, hydrocarbons.
And the 2000s and going forward, I think it's really about water.
For instance, if you focus on China,
China does not have enough water to feed its population.
The reason that they are such large food importers
is that they are importing food as a proxy for water.
So, our way is basically buying farmland
and we want to make sure
that we're focusing on areas that are water-rich
you know, that can sell crops to areas that are water-poor.
So in 2018, we purchased a farm in southwest Arkansas
that is 25,000 acres in size. And to put that in perspective,
that is close to two times the size of Manhattan.
Look, so a property of this size is enough to feed
the corn consumption of Hong Kong
for two-and-a-half years.
Shane: Our guys in New York, the way I see it,
their job is to raise the money,
manage it for the investment side.
My job is to manage the asset.
Director: Who have you heard that the potential buyers are?
That's an Edward question on that.
That's an Edward question.
So, who would lease this farm?
Well, it could be any number of large farmers.
There are some very large farming operations out there.
Or it really could be...
It could even go down to food buyers, or...
food security, um, agents of governments.
Emma: So this is Wall Street big money
operating all over the United States,
leasing land to foreign countries.
Nate: You know, he's one of the original people
that saw this coming.
Edward Hargroves manages 750 million dollars
in farmland investments.
Hargroves: The joy about Arizona is in the certain areas
in which you have unrestricted water access.
Arizona is one of the few places
that you can have that privilege.
We have a farm that we've been developing
for the past few years. It's about 5,000 acres,
growing alfalfa that's exported out to the UAE.
Nate: Wall Street sees the same thing
that these big powerful countries see.
They see increasing demand, decreasing supply.
And what does that mean? That means profits.
♪ [tense music concludes]
You know, certainly, um, I sympathize,
empathize with, you know, the water scenario.
The fact that, you know, when you get asked questions,
"Are we exporting our water to somewhere else in the world?"
And, you know, of course, ultimately, the answer is yes.
And it's a hard, you know, question to navigate on
you know, what is right and wrong,
the value between commerce and sustainability.
♪ [pensive music playing]
Hargroves: The U.S. is the greatest exporter of food
in the world.
If the U.S. was to stop exporting,
we would have Armageddon.
Absent our product,
Uh, I mean, I...
You'd have world war. Absolute world war.
Robert: The U.S. government regulates
the export of technology very rigorously
for national security interests. Okay.
Should our food and water not fall
under similar consideration?
So... is it possible to regulate that?
I have... You know, that's a...
deeply philosophical, academic type of question.
I will tell you as a practical matter,
while the policy experts are debating,
whoever needs the water and has guns
is gonna go after it and get it.
Maria: I started addressing the topic of water
as a national security issue in 2011.
The CIA looks ahead 25 and 50 years.
And when they saw that that equation with water
was going to change, and potentially dramatically,
that made them sit up and listen.
Lee: It's unusual to see a group
of retired three- and four-star admirals and generals
talking about this set of issues.
Between now and 2050,
two billion people are gonna be added to the planet.
The demand for food is gonna increase.
The amount of arable land is not substantially going to increase.
The lack of arable land, useful land,
is going to be a serious problem for many countries.
Aaron: We're gonna have over a billion people
living in countries that face absolute water scarcity.
In other words, they're not gonna have enough water
to meet their domestic, their economic,
their environmental needs.
And these countries are gonna be at a greater risk of fragility,
a greater risk of failure.
Molly: You know, the famous quote about
nine meals away from chaos,
you know, there's a lot of truth to that.
It's all about power, really.
And food is a very obvious and central way to wield power.
I had somebody within the U.S. intelligence community
say to me that the 20th Century had OPEC,
a few countries that controlled the world's oil supply.
In the future, we're gonna have Food-PEC,
a few countries that control the world's food supply.
You know, for years and generations,
wars have been fought over oil.
In a short matter of time, they will be fought over water.
♪ [mysterious music playing] ♪
Molly: There's a process called "red-teaming."
And that's, you become like the devil.
You become the very worst kind of enemy,
you know, that you could possibly imagine.
And this is used in war games.
If I were to red-team the U.S. food system,
to do serious damage,
I'm not gonna have the war they're ready for.
I'm gonna go for something
that really just sits us back on our heels,
and we're out of commission.
You know, and I've joked with people,
that would be trashing Netflix,
making your bank account read "00.00,"
and messing with our food supply.
For example, there is a very defined period of time
where those combines have to get out
and work basically 24 hours a day.
And they're smart.
And they're generally unsecured.
It's amazing technology that has not been secured against hacks.
Nobody ever thought about the hacks.
So stop the combines for three weeks.
It would be a disaster for the American economy.
[indistinct chatter]
Nate: Some of the best military
and intelligence minds, I mean, this is like three-,
four-star generals,
intelligence from Britain and the U.S.,
like, experts in their field,
actually come together and do simulations where
two countries are in a massive conflict over water.
We need to take decisive military action.
We show our people that we're prepared to take action
to get them the access to the resources
that they deserve.
How do you think that's going to end?
Once we have taken over the dam, do we destroy the dam?
Do we... How do you see this ending?
You can't hold a dam on the ground with a helicopter.
So how are you gonna hold it?
And how many people are you gonna lose?
Surely you've done that modeling.
[speaking Chinese]
Nate: [in English] These are the things I'm hearing from sources,
you know, the experts,
the people in the know on food and water,
that these are the drivers of conflict and war
in the future.
The most original human interaction,
in many cases, is the rise to violence.
Reduction in resources that comes from climate change,
comes from changes to the environment,
may, and in our case will, lead to conflict.
Humans will rise to violence if they have nowhere else to go.
If they have nothing else to do, they move to violence,
not always, not inevitably, but very often.
Nate: Climate change can mean
that some areas are gonna get not enough water,
and some areas are gonna get too much water.
But the net of that is less food.
It's less arable land.
And although climate change has been in the conversation,
you know, what's not really being talked about is what
some of the most powerful people are doing with that knowledge.
And we're not seeing the global community
taking concrete steps to solve this.
What we're seeing in the background is
countries beginning to grab up
those final resources for themselves.
And a lot of this is happening in the shadows,
quietly, away from the public eye.
I mean, we...
Yeah, I mean, you know,
the trove is something that we, you know,
want to make sure that, uh,
that we're being secure about, talking about the trove.
Director:
I mean...
I don't know.
I don't know how the other team members felt,
but I think once you realize what the trove is
and what we're working on, I don't know how...
Like, it creates a sense of insecurity
in your life.
[laughter and chatter]
[Nate sighs]
♪ [ominous music playing]
- Robert: Hey. - Nate: Hey!
- Robert: How's it going? - Nate: Good.
- Where are we going? - Nate: We're gonna...
- We'll go into Kevin's office. - Okay, cool.
I'll show you, uh...
We have an exciting development.
- Yeah, yeah. - A treasure trove.
Yeah, in there? And that's an air gap?
- Nate: It's air-gapped. - Robert: Okay.
So, we got it yesterday. We moved it to this machine.
But I figured, uh,
I'll kind of just show you a little bit of what we got,
- and... - Yeah, what is it?
I want to know.
So, uh... Let's, uh... I'm just gonna close the door here.
All right.
Nate: So, uh...
a source who I've been talking to for quite some time
finally kicked over...
Robert: Did they email, by the way? Okay.
- Hand-delivery. - Robert: Okay.
Good.
- Thousands and thousands of... - Oh, wow.
Oh, fucking A. All right.
- Thousands of? - Thousands of.
Ten thousand plus. I have to go through it all still,
but we're talking thousands and thousands.
And they include attachments, prospectuses, drafts.
This is the whole company?
It's not one particular person's email?
We have basically the company's emails
- for about a one-year period. - Okay.
- And... - Alright.
What... [laughs]
Director: Can you tell us how you got it?
I can talk, uh...
I can describe vaguely how I got this information.
- ♪ [ominous music concludes] - Um... I...
have a source...
um... who hinted
that they might have something I'd be interested in.
And that started a two-year dance
of me learning a little bit more about what they had,
a little bit more about what they have.
"Oh my God, do they really have that?"
"Holy shit, I think they have that."
"Oh my God, I have it."
And that computer has never been on the internet.
We wiped it clean.
We ripped out, we physically ripped out its WiFi.
And then we put glue in the ethernet.
Okay, all right. Wait, what is this map?
This was just, uh...
Okay, this is how they're dividing up Africa?
- Mm-hmm. - Okay.
And these are their investment opportunities.
So, of course, the usual stuff, minerals and oil.
And smack dab in the middle...
food.
♪ [ominous music playing]
So just like a bunch
of really interesting characters, people...
Lots of military folk, lots of veterans.
Nate: You know, we've been trying to figure out
who else was grabbing up food and water
and where they were doing it, and that's when
this fell into our lap.
I don't know what point the team started calling it "the trove,"
but it was the way we could just, you know,
securely talk about what we had.
[speaking indistinctly]
Uh, Nate, can we talk about the trove? [laughs]
Nate: Yeah, go for it.
- ♪ [ominous music playing] - All right, um, so, the trove is a collection
of, um, over 10,000 documents that were leaked to Nate
that are the internal communications
of Erik Prince's Frontier Resource Group.
That is his venture that he started after Blackwater.
Members of the Committee, my name is Erik Prince
and I am the Chairman and CEO of the Prince Group
and Blackwater USA.
Reporter: Blackwater, the secretive private army
that for critics, came to represent the ugliest face
of American power.
Blackwater, we have to question in this hearing whether
it created a shadow military of mercenary forces
that are not accountable to the United States government,
or to anyone else.
He's been accused of getting rich
off of the deeply unpopular war in Iraq,
but he says his critics have it all wrong.
Reporter: Did your people ever kill innocent civilians?
It's entirely possible.
Reporter: The CIA declined to comment
on its association with Prince.
Nate: Erik Prince is a super divisive person.
Prince's sister is Betsy DeVos, former Secretary of Education.
He's a former Navy SEAL,
so he's a highly trained, skilled soldier.
He then hired a bunch of highly skilled,
trained soldiers
to do those things in Iraq and Afghanistan
for the U.S. government
and became a very lucrative and large business.
He then sold that company.
Because you're still in business, yes?
- Not in government contracting business. - ♪ [menacing music playing] ♪
You don't work with the United States government anymore?
I sold the whole thing. I'm done.
So what do you do?
I started a private-equity fund. We invest in energy, mining,
agriculture kind of things in Africa.
Get the fu-- Okay. Can I tell you something?
[audience laughter]
Correct.
Oh, yeah, for sure. This is the part of the story that...
increasingly makes us think that
all of our communications are hacked.
Mm-hmm. Because there's no bigger story
I can see to work on
that will impact more people than this story.
And there's no story I've worked on
that has this amount of wealth behind it.
And there's no story that I've worked on
that has this amount of, like, mercenary guns behind it.
And there's no story I've worked on that has, like,
this level of spycraft technology behind it.
But... [stammering]
I'm always gonna operate under the assumption
that I'm hacked.
What's that? Yeah.
Sound recorder:
Yeah.
Sound recorder:
Uh...
♪ [menacing music fades]
Nate: Erik Prince started this company
called Frontier Resource Group,
right, to invest in land in Africa.
Well, we have the company emails
for about, like, a one-year period
where, you know, we can see that they're looking at
possible farm deals in Africa.
And Erik Prince doesn't work for free, right?
I mean, his client list historically
has been some of the most powerful people,
the most powerful governments in the world.
So, we expect these emails are gonna become a playbook for
how people are looking to grab up food and water.
Imagine somebody wants to go and start a farm,
what do you think they do?
They go buy tractors. They go do this.
They do that. They do farmer stuff, farmer stuff.
But what is Erik Prince talking about in these emails?
He's talking about things like
having a robust defensive capability around a farm.
These are the kind of things that Erik Prince is looking at
when he's going into these regions.
...so it says "area by hectare"?
Nate: Why is somebody whose background and expertise
is fighting wars, like,
what value do they bring to the farms, right? Like, why?
I mean, it's like a who's-who.
It's like the MVPs of the mercenary world, right?
Mallory: Right.
Nate: And the answer, from our reporting,
is because this stuff has become the point of conflict.
Hey, Captain Mann.
Sorry, some technical difficulties with Zoom here,
but I think...
I can hear you now.
We were told that mercenaries wouldn't talk to us.
There we go.
- Hi. - Greetings.
Greetings.
But, you know, we were able to get these folks on the line.
We were actually surprised by the candor in which they spoke.
And they warned us how some mercenaries operate
and what some of them are up to now.
Simon: The whole story of why Africa
looks the way it does today,
which obviously has a lot to do with the colonial era,
a lot of that has to do with what we would now call PMC.
Private military corporations.
So what happened with the Equatorial Guinea situation?
What were you asked to do, and how did that turn out?
Yeah, I mean, I was asked to, um, overthrow the regime.
♪ [pensive music playing]
Nate: Simon Mann is former British military
who was hired to overthrow the government
of Equatorial Guinea. He ended up being arrested
and spending time in an Equatorial Guinea prison.
You know, so we figured if anyone knows
the inner workings of the mercenary world,
it's this guy.
I mean, is that possible?
Is Erik Prince investing in agriculture in Africa?
Yeah, I think he is.
I mean, I know Erik. Erik's a friend of mine.
They know that Africa represents this enormous untapped resource.
They also know that it's not for the...
It's not for the faint-hearted.
So if you're gonna go and do stuff in Africa,
you need airplanes, you need logistics,
you need trucks.
And you're gonna need security.
Enter Erik.
John: I think Iraq
glamorized the PMC industry somewhat.
All of a sudden, there were tens of thousands of these people
running around in Iraq as private security consultants.
Big players such as, you know, Erik Prince with Blackwater
is probably the most prominent.
But that day's come and gone.
And the opportunities are not there for people
to get those sorts of contracts anymore.
And so I guess the issue is, where are the hotspots?
And most of them are in Africa at the moment.
Nate: Africa has 50 to 60 percent
of the remaining arable land left in the world
that hasn't been, quote, unquote, "farmed."
That doesn't mean that it's just sitting there
without people on it.
It's peopled. People are farming it.
They're farming it for their food,
for their lives, you know, to feed their children.
♪ [women singing]
Nate: In a lot of these places,
I mean, these are these people's ancestral lands.
They were born there. Their parents were born there.
Their grandparents were born there.
They don't have deeds.
You don't have deeds to the land you've owned
for, like, time immemorial.
There's always a problem in Africa
where, you know, you don't really have ownership
of land necessarily in the same way
that we would see it. You know, there's no deeds.
There's a village over there.
This is where they graze their cattle.
Well, now you're not gonna be able to graze your cattle.
And maybe this... We're gonna have to move you.
That potentially is a great problem.
Director: And what if there's an uprising?
Well...
That's part of... That's where we come in.
Anuradha: To be a good investor in Africa,
it's not just about having your resources
and you go and buy or lease land.
It is logistics.
You're moving into areas where nobody has gone before.
So you need people who have experience
and no hesitation to use weapons,
who can ensure movement of whatever resources are needed.
And then you need connections with the political elite.
- [computer chimes] - Sean: Okay, let's see.
Nate: You still sound okay on our end.
Director: Yeah.
I have a separate microphone here.
I think in areas where there's very weak rule of law
and very little international media attention,
it's a wild, wild west.
Real experts in this field,
you've gotta go around and do things
like make bribes and keep order...
Nate: One of the questions I always have is,
why does a community give up their land, right?
And as you're going in through the emails,
there's answers in there.
In the emails they write,
"So, the price for us will be very low."
You know, "It depends how many gifts
we grant the village chief."
And I think you'll always find somebody out there
to give their clients whatever they want,
if the price is right.
♪ [pensive music concludes]
Mallory: Because we know that they focus...
When they're trying to pitch all these banks,
like Credit Suisse and JP Morgan,
they're focusing on Sub-Saharan Africa.
So we know that's where they're looking.
It's like the place is the frontier market.
Nate: We can see in the emails back in 2012
that they've charted out what areas have the best water
and the cheapest land.
And in the trove, they make it super clear,
that place is Zambia.
And I've been to Zambia before, in 2017,
on a previous reporting trip.
And so, you know, I reached back out to my contacts.
I set it up for us to go back, so we could see, you know,
what this looks like for the people
who are living in the spaces being grabbed up.
♪ [tense music playing]
[indistinct announcement over P.A.]
Nate: Um...
It's fine. It's okay.
[indistinct chatter]
Nate: Oh, she wants the... Yeah.
Emma: Yeah, the invitation letter.
Officer 1: Mm-hmm.
Emma: Okay. So...
[Officer speaks indistinctly]
Emma: Of course, of course. Let me just hand you my...
Nate: And you saw, ma'am,
that we have the business visa stamped here.
Officer 1: Yes, I know.
Nate: Yeah, they've taken our paperwork
and they've pulled us aside
and are making us stand here
and jump through some extra hoops.
Crew member: I think it's gonna be fun.
Officer 2:
Nate: Sorry, what was the question?
Emma: Who gave us authority to board?
Nate: The Zambian Embassy, yeah.
Officer 2: Let me see your paper.
Nate: This is from the Zambian Embassy.
Do you want that? No.
Emma: At that point...
this woman took all of our passports.
She escorted us to a room in the back,
which ultimately became, you know, a detention room.
♪ [ominous music playing] ♪
[muffled chatter]
♪ [ominous music fades]
[indistinct chatter]
[speaking Lala]
Nate: On that previous trip to Zambia in 2017,
I had met a human rights attorney,
a guy named Brig, who was helping people
fight back against their land being grabbed.
[in Lala]
Nate: [in English] With essentially nothing,
Brig pushed and shoved and fought his way
into university, and then into law school,
and then ultimately into Georgetown.
And this is a person who could have done anything.
And instead,
he just went back to fight for the people.
♪ [mysterious music playing]
On my first trip, Brig had taken me up to Serenje
to meet families, to meet people
that had been kicked off of their land.
Nate: What... Can he tell us what happened to his house?
Felix: [in Lala]
Kharika: [in English] He said this white man
just came with a tractor and said, "Now this is my land."
"You have to move out."
Nate: Nobody consulted them,
nobody told them, nobody paid them or...
[Kharika speaking Lala]
[in Lala]
Kharika: [in English] The only help they received
is this tent from the government.
Since then, there's no one who's helping them.
You can see this is where they live,
this is where they sleep.
So these are the provisions for housing
that were given by the government.
Nate: How long ago did this happen?
Kharika: [in Lala]
Kharika: [in English] She said when they arrived here,
they just slept under a tree with their goods.
[in Lala]
Kharika: [in English] As a result of the cold of staying under the tree,
the small child died.
[in Lala]
[sobbing]
Kharika: [in English] She's saying she's suffering,
she's crying, because she has been subjected to hardship.
[in Lala]
Kharika: [in English] She's saying she used to have the house,
now she's sleeping like this.
- [Brig speaking softly] - ♪ [melancholy music playing]
[Febby speaking Lala]
Kharika: [in English] He's telling her just to wait,
that some help is gonna come.
[baby gurgling]
Nate: What we're hearing is that these are...
These are white farmers
that are kicking them off their land.
And so I begin to dig into it.
And these guys are backed by LLCs.
But then that LLC in Zambia will be owned by another LLC
that is actually registered in an offshore company
in Mauritius or the BVIs or the Cayman Islands.
And that's a dead end.
It's like a Russian doll of LLCs and LLCs.
And the more we dig, the more it becomes clear,
that could be owned by anybody.
You know, and that's what the trove emails
have begun to show us,
how investors structure these deals
to hide who is behind them.
And what Brig shows us
is the human cost of these hidden deals.
Man: [on TV] ...before you begin to take possession of the land
that the Lord, the God of your ancestors...
Nate: Is it okay if we answer this phone call, sir?
Officer 3: Come again?
Nate: Is it okay if we answer this phone call?
Officer 3: Yeah, it's fine.
Emma: Thank you.
So, we'd been sitting in the room for some time,
when one of the crew members pointed out that
there was a piece of paper on a police bulletin board
- right behind my head. - [camera clicks]
Nate: Right there, smack dab on it,
was all of our names and passport numbers.
They were definitely waiting for us.
[plane engine rumbling]
Director: What's going on now, Nate?
Nate:
♪ [ominous music playing]
Nate: [sighs] I called people I knew
from U.S. intelligence.
And I called people in Zambia and talked to whoever I could
to try to piece together why it was
that we were getting kicked out of the country.
Yeah, hi, Ambassador. How are you doing today?
Ambassador:
I'm doing all right. I'm doing all right.
Ambassador:
Thank you. Yeah, it was disappointing to get so close.
We got the paperwork, you know,
Emma specifically got the paperwork that showed...
I mean, I'm just gonna say it. They basically said
that we were hostile to the state,
that we were basically enemies of the state.
Ambassador: ...not given properly.
I see. We had business visas
and we also had media credentials.
Ambassador:
But they were the ones that told us we could...
Ambassador:
Nate: Okay.
Ambassador:
Nate: Okay. Alright, um...
Ambassador:
Thank you, Ambassador, you have a good day.
Ambassador:
[call ends]
[chuckles]
Oh, right. Right. [chuckles]
[birds calling]
- ♪ [pensive music playing] - Nate: So our sources are telling us that
we got kicked out because of our reporting on food and water,
and we don't know who pushed the Zambian government
to kick us out. And we might not ever know.
And we're still trying to figure out
who's the big money behind grabbing up,
you know, land in Africa.
And we're calling people,
emailing people, and just getting blocked.
[laughs] Just... Nobody wants to talk.
Um, he's a ghost, right.
I mean, like, I don't think he'll ever talk to us.
You know, I think, two words to us, he'll speak,
- "Fuck you, fuck off," right? - [Mallory chuckles]
So I think we have to find somebody
who was there with Frontier Resource Group.
Mallory: I think Gregg Smith is actually
one of the ones that is most likely to talk.
Nate: Gregg Smith is in a lot of emails.
He's somebody with a military background,
also a finance background.
This is a guy right at the center of things.
You know, he came in, he joined them
in their effort to grab up resources in Africa.
They were working together. Yeah.
Erik Prince and Gregg Smith were working together.
And then, at some point,
you know, he says he didn't like what Erik Prince was doing.
Well, would it work for us
to come out and sit down with you,
at the end of this month?
At first, it went really well. He said he would talk to us.
And then, one day, maybe a week or two
before we were set to fly out and meet him...
Mallory: This is another tweet that came from Gregg Smith
that said, "Just a heads up to friends and journos
looking into Erik Prince."
"The word is Erik is using NSO
or a similar technology to track a bunch of comms."
"Might want to look into new devices
or have yours scrubbed. 2016 all over again."
Nate: And also we see a tweet from Gregg Smith,
you know, warning journos, journalists,
that Prince might be trying to hack their phones.
"Nate, I've decided not to participate in the documentary."
"Please cancel any plans you have made
to come out here. Regards, Gregg."
Doesn't want to be interviewed.
Director: Why?
He didn't say.
He hasn't responded to my messages
or calls since, so... I don't know.
I know last time we spoke, you said you weren't interested
in being in the documentary, and I totally hear that.
Um...
Mm-hmm.
He said, "I trust no one but myself right now."
Nate: What about the admiral in D.C.?
Mallory: So, he's another potential person
and I reached out to him last week
and I sort of, you know, did the,
"Good evening sir, as a former Marine, I..."
He said, "I don't have anything to do with them anymore,
and I won't talk about that."
So...
Let's add in Dorian's...
Automated voice: Your call has been forwarded to
an automated voice messaging system.
And I just wanted to make sure
I give you every opportunity to comment.
[phone ringing]
[failed call chime]
Automated voice: The mailbox is full...
Nate: You know, so I think in any investigation,
you hit a low point, right,
where you're swimming in information,
you're trying to make sense of it.
Emma: In order to tell this story right,
you need to tell it on this massive global scale.
That's right.
- It's all interconnected now. - It's all connected.
It's like every thread could be a story.
Every thread could be something potentially,
if you do enough digging.
And it's hard to not feel overwhelmed.
Nate: And then in a story like this,
you're also dealing with the fact that you're witnessing
the callousness of...
the way we're seeing people treat other humans.
Um... It gets to you after a while.
So here's one of the examples
of an email I came across from Sean Rump.
Sean Rump is his right-hand man.
Yeah, yeah.
Mallory: "If you come across some run-over,
shot, or otherwise fucked-up native..."
This is hard for me to even say out loud.
But obviously, I'm reading from this. So...
"If you come across some run-over, shot,
or otherwise fucked-up native, say a prayer for them."
"You don't help injured bleeding people in Africa."
"AIDS, Hep A, B and C and the myriad of other ailments
that keep their life expectancy around 42
is to be avoided at all costs."
"People die in the Third World."
"It's Darwin's selection at its most pure."
It was really upsetting,
and I think that sort of indicates what they are...
Yeah, it's infuriating.
They can't come forward and say,
"We're going to Africa to build farms to feed Africans."
Like, you just said you don't give a fuck about Africans.
Nate: David.
Mallory: Hello.
How's it going?
David: So, this is the galaxy.
What we call the galaxy.
And basically, it is all of the connections
that we've found so far from looking through the trove.
Nate: David is like the wizard behind the curtain
that nobody ever sees.
David: And so this shows who was communicating
with who on the emails.
Nate: He took, you know, this trove of emails,
of Erik Prince's company's emails,
with all of these attachments
and worked with the CIR data team
to, you know, put it all into a database
that we could search. And then David, on top of that,
built this incredible visualization tool.
David: And that allowed us to build out
some of these other connections.
And from this we saw that Erik Prince
was tied to his company, Frontier Resource Group...
Nate: After months and months, you know, we had a breakthrough.
Frontier Resource Group, they had a silent partner
that we, or one of my teammates specifically,
had that eureka moment, where she was like,
"I think I've figured out who's secretly backing them."
Something called RG. I stumbled upon an email,
where they were saying that it was tied to RG, these initials.
And that it was something that the boss
didn't want anybody to talk about.
So once I started doing some searches,
I found this email called Royal Group,
with Sheikh Tahnoon's name in it.
Nate: This is Sheikh Tahnoon.
Brother of the ruler of the United Arab Emirates.
A member of the royal family.
Sheikh Tahnoon was the founder of First Gulf Bank,
now First Abu Dhabi Bank.
He is behind ADQ, which is a huge sovereign wealth fund.
Nate: One of the most powerful men in the world.
That's his backer.
Runs the national security for the Emirates.
You know, he's building companies
to dig into spy tech, intelligence efforts.
This is a bigger-than-life guy.
And Sheikh Tahnoon's companies,
they've gone on a huge buying spree.
They've bought one of the largest grain traders
in the world, or a big portion of it.
And they're buying companies that own food
and water all over the world.
When we figured out it was Tahnoon,
it again was the pattern re-emerging.
It was another water-stressed country
that was going to another part of the world
to grab food and water resources.
And this time, it wasn't Arizona.
It was all across Africa.
The question is, why does Tahnoon need Erik Prince?
Turn the camera off, man.
You know, we've reached out to Erik Prince.
I've gone to his offices in Hong Kong.
You know, we've reached out to Sheikh Tahnoon,
and we haven't been able to get anywhere with it.
But we found somebody who was willing to talk to us.
Somebody who was on the inside.
Robert: [over phone] So you're gonna drive through,
go straight up.
[gate opening]
Look how beautiful. Wow.
Yeah, it's a pretty nice fucking spread.
I'm gonna go into business with Erik Prince.
So this is a souvenir from my special forces friends
who are working in Syria.
And I asked him for an ISIS flag.
Nate: Robert Young Pelton is a writer.
He's an entrepreneur.
He even has run, you know, intelligence networks in Africa.
They just loosed off a few artillery shells at us,
but, uh...
Nate: He shows up in the emails. He's in the emails.
Him and Erik Prince worked together for years.
You know, at one point they have a falling out.
They even at one point sued each other.
He's written books about the Blackwater guys.
I mean, he knows this world well.
It's wrong to be obsessed with Erik Prince
because it's kind of like, how did he get into the room?
Like, who led him into the room?
So you got to remember, the UAE...
energized Erik Prince.
So, I've known Erik, I mean...
ten years, I guess. I've known him more than that.
And he's gone through different phases.
He did something very interesting.
Well, and that is basically, what's the most valuable thing
to the wealthiest people?
Security. Right?
Sheikh Tahnoon is responsible for the security
and well-being of the kingdom.
That's a very heavy responsibility to have.
Erik was hired to help build a mercenary army
for the Emirati royal family.
Nate: People in the national security sphere,
like Tahnoon, they know that this is
a political stability issue.
Ultimately, what they're controlling
is not having a bunch of hungry, pissed-off citizens.
And this is what people tell us over and over again
is what happened with the Arab Spring.
- ♪ [anxious music playing] - [indistinct clamor]
Reporter: This is what popular uprising looks like.
- [gunfire] - [yelling]
Reporter: It appears to be the end for Tunisia's president
after 23 years in power.
[chanting in Arabic]
So the Arab Spring was a key time
in the last decade for agriculture in general.
And it was the result of shortages
of available food supply around the world.
[shouting in Arabic]
Reporter 1: Unrest is spreading across the Arab world...
Reporter 2: Now to the growing unrest in the Middle East.
Reporter 3: Protests that toppled President Hosni Mubarak
in Egypt are now ripping through the Middle East,
with anti-government demonstrations in Bahrain,
Yemen, and most significantly in Iran.
Reporter 4: The political fires that burned across North Africa,
many say, were kindled in Russia last summer.
Extreme drought triggered wildfires
and destroyed a third of the country's wheat harvest.
Russia refused to export the rest of its harvest.
Markets panicked and food prices shot up.
Nate: When Russia shut down its wheat exports,
they needed to make sure they had enough grain at home,
so people wouldn't slaughter their cattle.
They were protecting Putin's idea
of building up that cattle herd.
The cattle industry that they were importing
American cowboys for.
And when they did that,
it sent global grain prices through the roof.
[indistinct clamor]
Reporter: Meanwhile, the revolution in Egypt
has sparked a new wave of protests across the region.
Nate: Anytime you talk to somebody
in the intelligence community, they always say, like,
"It's never just one thing, right?"
"It's a combination of things."
But in this case, our sources are telling us
that the thing that pushes it over the cliff
is food prices.
Food prices spiking.
All across the Middle East,
countries saw what happened in the Arab Spring.
They saw what happened when food prices spiked,
and they said, "We need to control our food
if we want to control our political stability."
So this email is on the last day of the trove,
September 25th, 2012.
It says, "He's the fourth richest man in China."
"We're gonna have dinner together
at our mutual friend's home in Shenzhen."
Nate: So we had our breakthrough.
We figured out who his financial backer was.
And at the end of the trove, you know,
we can't see which of those big farm deals,
if any, they finalized.
But we can see that they're going in search of a new client.
And we follow that path to Hong Kong.
When we start researching there,
we found out he's got a new backer.
China.
And we're back where the entire investigation started.
♪ [tense music playing] ♪
Erik Prince: Frontier Service Group,
a Hong Kong company,
will provide fresh capital, know-how.
And we'll tie it into our logistics expertise.
We have a significant logistics operation
that operates from South Africa.
Nate: Well, I think the takeaway here is that
the world's wealthiest governments
are turning to Erik Prince
to help them get into Africa, right,
to help them use his muscle and know-how
from working in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars
to get resources out of Africa.
And so we started looking into Erik Prince's new company.
And he's got a new partner, Johnson Ko.
A well-known Hong Kong financier
with ties to the Chinese government.
And around 2014, at the same time when they became partners,
Johnson Ko had helped create another new company,
KuangChi Science.
which had started doing classified research
for the Chinese government.
Announcer: The development of a jetpack
that based on current testing,
will have over 30 minutes flight capability
and an altitude up to 1,000 meters.
This company, KuangChi Science, bills itself
as helping within the African market.
Announcer: With potential usage spanning search and rescue...
Nate: So Erik Prince's partner was part of a company
that was designing jetpacks.
They were billing these things as could be used
for executive extraction.
So, if an executive was at a refinery
or at a big corporate farm,
and people rose up,
and there was unrest, and there was an attack,
you could get into your jetpack and...[whistles] ...get out.
They're doing all kinds of things.
They're doing invisibility cloaks.
Reporter: It works by bending the light around an object.
Imagine what that could do for a sniper.
Nate: You know, secret classified work
for the Chinese military.
[speaking Chinese]
You just got to remember, I started looking
at food and water. I started looking at pigs,
if you really want to get down to it.
Why and how China purchased one in four American pigs.
How I went from pigs to invisibility cloaks...
And just following it, I found myself back in China.
Yeah, and you know, it kind of makes sense.
Because China is one of the most powerful countries in the world.
But we know that China, the one thing that they really need...
food and water resources.
The truth is, China's economic growth strategy
is non-sustainable.
China is running out of water in the north.
And without water, you can't grow.
♪ [ominous music playing]
Nate: Hongzhou, thank you so much for sitting down
and talking with us. I appreciate it.
Can you just say in basic terms what the Great Famine is?
[speaking Chinese]
Hongzhou:
One thing that I saw in your book
that I didn't know was that during the Great Famine,
the U.S. had a...
When millions of people were starving in China,
the U.S. had an embargo against China.
So they wouldn't let food go into China.
Hongzhou: Yes.
Um...
Nate: The leadership of China remember a period
of dark, deep deprivation.
And they don't ever wanna go back there.
And they know that their political futures
and the stability of the country
is based on being able to feed their people.
It's become part of their five-year plan,
their national security strategy,
to get food and water from around the world.
♪ [ominous music continues] ♪
Nate: And this is what we're seeing. This is the grab.
A scramble for food and water in the 21st century.
Slowly, we're seeing a massive consolidation
of who controls the food and the water in the world.
[chanting]
Nate: If we know that hungry people are unhappy people
and unhappy people rise up,
it's kind of a no-brainer to make the connection
that there might be conflict.
And this is what we're starting to see, all across Africa.
People fighting back when their land is taken.
Just now, we're getting reports from Brig
that people are rising up.
That there are these incidents now of conflict
that are beginning to bubble up.
People are beginning to push back.
[crowd shouting indistinctly]
Cameraman: Tell me what happened here.
Nate: And then we got an update from Brig,
who had visited his homeland,
his ancestral land where he grew up.
And it was happening there, too.
[chatter and laughter]
Brig:
♪ [melancholy music playing]
Nate: And they're trying so hard
to get the world to pay attention
to what's happening to them. You know?
They're using their cell phones to document what's happening
to show the world in real time what's going on.
[indistinct argument]
Nate: We don't always know who the investors were there.
China, UAE, Saudi Arabia,
Wall Street, Erik Prince. We don't know.
But we can see the damage being done on the ground.
[indistinct chatter]
[machinery whirring]
[in Lala]
[crowd murmuring]
[crowd murmurs]
♪ [pensive music playing]
[in English]
It does...
This is the idea of being
these quote, unquote, "frontier markets." Right?
They're very far from watching eyes.
These things kind of happen in the shadows.
And these are... Ultimately, they can become
just forgotten people,
until they get pissed enough, until they rise up,
until there's a big enough conflict
that the world takes note for a little bit.
♪ [pensive music continues] ♪
[in Somali]
Nate: [in English] One of the surprising things we learned was that
Somali pirates came from fishermen
that had their fishing stocks depleted.
Foreigners came in.
They trawled all of the fish out of those regions.
And so the Somalis that had been making their livings
off of going out and fishing and selling that fish
didn't have that income anymore.
And it was an incentive for them to become
quote, unquote, "pirates."
Reporter 1: More than 90 ships have been attacked this year.
And at least 36 have been hijacked,
according to the International Maritime Bureau.
Reporter 2: To defend themselves,
shipping companies are now spending
close to a billion dollars on private guards,
who are now waging a largely hidden
mercenary war against pirates.
[machine gun fire]
You know, where does Daesh, or ISIS, or ISIL, pop up?
It pops up in places where it's, you know,
tough to get by, generally speaking.
Translator: I swear to the Almighty God,
you will not see them again until after you release
our people that you captured.
Ertharin: That's a reality in too many places.
Boko Haram in northeast Nigeria, the Lake Chad region.
Al-Shabaab in Somalia.
You can go around the continent and identify
different extremist groups that prey upon deprivation.
- [crowd chanting] - They are not happy.
Schoonover: There are ongoing conflicts
in Yemen, in Libya,
Mali, Venezuela, of course.
It would not be in the best interests
of the United States to add to that list.
[indistinct clamor]
Schoonover: If you follow this trajectory,
we may see a world that is essentially unrecognizable.
A world war triggered by competition
over natural resources
doesn't seem that improbable to me.
Um...
Whether we go to war or not, you know,
that's a political decision, right?
[footsteps echoing]
[film crew speaking Russian]
[conversation in Russian]
Crew member: We are rolling, guys.
[conversation in Russian]
Nate: [in English] Andriy, thank you so much
for doing this interview with us.
I know it's late in the evening there.
So back in 2020, we interviewed Andriy Senchenko,
the former Deputy Chief of Staff for the Ukrainian president
when Russia grabbed Crimea in 2014.
♪ [pensive music playing]
Reporter 1: This is a Russian invasion.
The U.S. says it has no doubt these are Russian forces
and has demanded their immediate withdrawal.
Reporter 2: When Russian forces invaded,
the Ukrainian government then built this dam
to try and stop the water flow and force the Russians out.
Nate: And it turns out that when Russia
came over and grabbed Crimea,
the Ukrainians were like, cool, well...
[clicks tongue] No water.
And it was this decision made by Senchenko.
[speaking Russian]
Nate: And so, yeah, we were like,
"Well, we gotta talk to this guy."
So, when the Russians entered Crimea,
why cut off their water supply?
[in Russian]
Nate: [in English] So by the time we talked to him,
the water to Crimea had been shut off for seven years.
The agriculture had been decimated.
They were trying to put in desal plants,
they were trucking water over.
And it had become so expensive for the Russians
that a lot of people were beginning to conjecture
that in order to save Crimea,
Putin was going to have to invade Ukraine
and take control of that water canal.
The Crimea buildup is getting pretty intense now.
- There's, like, 80,000 troops. - Emma: Yeah.
Nate: So, Mal's tracking this.
Mal's tracking this dispute over water
between Russia and Ukraine.
Because this was a case where tensions over water
could spark an international war.
They built up these troops, they're doing exercises,
and they're bringing in artillery, and...
Nate: So less than a year before the Russians invaded,
we reach out to Senchenko again,
because we want to know what he's seeing
and what he thinks about it.
♪ [ominous music playing]
I'm sorry, do I understand you correctly?
You think the Russians are bluffing,
that they're not going to invade and take the canal?
[in Ukrainian]
[in Russian]
♪ [ominous music intensifies]
[explosion]
Reporter: [in English] Months-long build-up of Russian troops
on the border with Ukraine has turned now into an invasion.
The skies over multiple cities,
including the capital Kyiv, lit up...
Fontelles: These are among the darkest hours
for Europe since the end of World War II.
Nate: Within the first days of the war,
what do the Russians do?
They blow up the dam blocking water to the canal.
And that gets immediately reported back to Putin.
♪ [ominous music playing]
Man: [in Russian]
Nate: [in English] Reports of Russians
seizing Ukrainian cargo ships
full of grain
and taking it and hauling it back to Russia.
One of Ukraine's largest grain silos, blown up.
We see this concentration on food, on water,
immediately as the war starts.
You see a country that's been talking about creating
a Grain-OPEC or a Food-OPEC invading another country
that would make it the largest grain exporter in the world,
effectively the most powerful food-exporting country
in the world. You know?
This is what security experts are now worried about.
They're openly talking about the possibility of Russia
using its food supply as a weapon.
The Russian government seems to believe
that using food as a weapon
will help accomplish what its invasion does not.
The consequences of these actions
have been devastating.
The food supply for millions of Ukrainians
and millions more around the world
has quite literally been held hostage
by the Russian military.
♪ [melancholy music playing] ♪
Ertharin: The reality is,
Ukraine is the number-one provider
of food that WFP, the World Food Programme,
distributes into the populations in need.
Reporter: And now, the head of the World Food Programme
has warned that the conflict in Ukraine
could send global food prices soaring...
WFP noted that the Russian Federation and Ukraine
are responsible for 29 percent of the global wheat trade,
and that any serious disruption of production and exports
from the region could push food prices
beyond their current ten-year highs.
The Executive Director of World Food Programme,
he warned that bullets and bombs in Ukraine
could take the global hunger crisis
to levels beyond anything we've seen before.
Anuradha: We need to understand Ukraine
as not just a struggle for democracy,
but it is, once again, a struggle for resources
and who owns and controls it.
- [insects hissing] - [bird squawking]
Nate: We're seeing the destitution,
the damage this is causing
for millions of people around the world.
I mean, it's...
You're gonna want to talk to him.
Nate: I think it's fair to say
that there are people in the United States
who are suffering from essentially the same thing.
Not at the same scale
and not with the same degree of deprivation,
but they are watching what was theirs
become someone else's,
and having little or no recourse.
This is the pension fund for Arizona state.
Nate: Holly's own pension fund, without her even knowing it,
the money that's supposed to fund her retirement
is draining the water from her land.
And she has no idea. No idea.
So basically, your pension fund funded that takeover
that is now Al Dahra, that's shipping it overseas.
I want to scream right now. [laughs]
That is incredible.
Absolutely incredible.
Wow. [clears throat]
Yeah.
Wow.
[clears throat]
This...
- And you know, I'd be... - [vehicle rumbling]
There you go. All day long. See it all day long.
And what is our state doing? Absolutely nothing.
And because you just showed me this,
it explains why they're not doing anything.
Because why would they?
They're, you know, it...
To me, it's extremely disturbing.
And it quite frankly makes me very angry.
♪ [melancholy music playing]
Anuradha: In our work, where we have looked at
hundreds and hundreds of land deals
all over the world,
majority of the deals are actually U.S.-based
and by European investors.
So there's far more in common
in the struggles of the dispossessed.
You talk about Africa,
along with land grab, you have water grab.
But if you look at the struggles in the United States,
the fight and the struggle is against the same corporations
who are taking over land globally.
These corporations, of course, are not working
for the U.S. government to ensure U.S. food supply.
Instead, you have a scenario where the U.S. government,
or the European governments are working for the corporations.
The priority is not the people.
Ertharin: When we talk about a vulnerable population,
we are not talking about a particular geography.
We're talking about people who lack power,
lack access to making the decisions
about their own lives.
And that's true whether that population is in Arizona
or in the Ukraine.
Man: [in Ukrainian]
Molly: [in English] Rural communities have a fabric.
And so when that land is purchased,
if it is managed in a way
that is not contributing to the community,
that's a sabotage of the community.
So it really becomes like a raid.
And even though it's legal...
it's raiding resources that aren't yours.
Nate: People are going to have to ask themselves
if this is an intractable movement.
If you have some of the wealthiest countries
in the world, and you have people's own pension funds
that are all behind this movement,
who's going to stop it?
If you're an Emirati,
why would you want to stop them?
If you were Chinese, why would you want to stop them?
You want your country doing these things.
And I think it's tough to fault China
for making sure that they're gonna have
enough food and water for their people.
That's the purview of a country.
The same with UAE, and the same with the Saudis, you know.
It's the purview of a country to make sure they have
the resources that their people want and need.
Molly: The capitalist system we've got now permits that,
because we thought these resources were all endless.
It's one of those classic things
where the fundamentals have changed very significantly,
and we're just operating along like it's business as usual.
♪ [music intensifies]
Nate: The problem isn't countries
or people trying to secure their food supply.
The problem is how.
How some people in some places are securing their food.
[protestors chanting]
Nate: Going in and grabbing other people's land,
depriving them of a future.
Going in and grabbing people's water,
sucking their aquifers dry, depriving them of a future.
It's problematic in so many ways.
It's inequity.
It's seeding future conflict.
It's destabilizing the world.
Owen-Burge: We in the developed nations
demand huge amounts of food,
out of season, whenever we want. And we throw away a third of it.
If we didn't say, "I want a watermelon in December,"
then they wouldn't have that pressure,
that market pressure,
to suck up all the water to make this food for us.
All of these problems always end up with
an inability to accept the responsibility
by developed nations.
Anuradha: We have over-consumed.
We have overdrawn
on resources that were meant for future generations.
Nate: The West often looks to other countries.
There's reports that have come out that said,
"If China's meat consumption continues,
there's no way we're gonna be able to meet
our climate change goals."
And that might be true, but it's said by the West,
who consumes almost twice as much meat
per capita as does China.
And yet, there's this finger-pointing
at the developing world for increasingly eating meat.
But it's like, yeah, but they're just getting closer
to eating your diet! You know? Like...
Maybe you look in.
Maybe the solution is inside your borders, you know?
♪ [music picks up tempo]
Molly: This is the master plan.
This is how it's gonna work.
Nate: One of the points of hope
is that the same people that are identifying the problems,
that are saying the future looks really bleak,
there's always an asterisk, "unless we do..."
And there's a solution.
Molly: What if we use, instead of grass,
we use bacteria,
and instead of cows, we use fungi.
And you can do that in three days.
In theory, you could make food out of thin air.
So we have people from the defense sector
talking about restructuring the food system.
You have Wall Street investors like Edward Hargroves
operating big commercial farms
who have kind of done an about-face.
Because they saw first-hand what was happening to the soil.
And now they're moving into regenerative farming.
So, you know, at the time, you only know what you know.
And without the current farmland portfolio,
we never would have had this opportunity.
But we can do better.
And we're always going to be looking to do better
across the board.
Anuradha: We know the hungry are the best experts on hunger.
We know that the majority of the food that is consumed
in the world today,
eighty percent of it comes from family farmers.
We need to invest in smallholder farmers.
We need to ensure their seed rights,
their land rights, their water rights.
Molly: The world produces enough food
to feed everybody now properly, and we don't do it.
In fact, some people say
the world produces enough food today
to feed those in 2050,
if we were to reshape the food system.
Nate: There's enough water in the world
to grow enough calories
to feed everyone in the world, not just today,
but in the year 2050 when there's nine billion people,
and when there's ten billion people.
The intelligence community says this is solvable.
Engineers say this is solvable.
If we solve it.
♪ [music concludes]
[crowd cheering]
♪ [crowd singing in Lala]
♪ [continue singing]
Brig: [in Lala]
[crowd murmurs]
[in English]
Okay.
[applause]
Anuradha: This is the height of resistance.
This is the height of conflict.
And there are victories.
Yes, they're few. They're rare.
But we cannot undermine
the importance of those victories.
History will repeat itself,
because the model of taking over resources
is so unsustainable, it cannot last.
♪ [crowd singing]
♪ [soft music playing]
Nate: It's always the big question
when you're working on a big investigative piece,
when do you call it enough?
When do you say, okay, I need to take what we've learned
and share it with the public.
And I think we're at that point.
[indistinct chatter]
Nate: Whether or not people are gonna give a shit or not,
you can't control.
What you can control is getting it done.
Getting the information into people's hands.
Then it's up to them.
Nate: It is pleasant, isn't it?
Mallory: Yeah.
♪ [ominous music playing]
[talking indistinctly]
Manager:
Thank you.
[indistinct chatter over radio]
♪ [tense music playing]
♪ [tense music continues]
♪ [tense music concludes]