Over at dagblog, TPMer Donal recently posted the news that a South Korea company is pursuing a deal with Madagascar to lease almost half of its currently farmed land for 99 years in order to grow crops for feed and biofuel. Chinese companies have been doing similar deals with a number of African countries but at much smaller scales. Trade deals between multinational corporations and third-world countries have been sources of controversy since the 70's, but the history of such arrangements stretches back to the Dutch East and West Indies Companies, established in the 17th century. New York City itself was founded as New Amsterdam by the Dutch West Indies Company in order to facilitate the purchase of natural resources, including fur and tobacco, from an as yet undeveloped America.

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Japan's economy is now officially in recession according to those in charge of labeling such things, which means that they beat us again. While most believe that the U.S. has already entered a recession, it's not official until we have two consecutive quarters of negative growth, so we're just going to have to wait until January. Thus, despite the fact that Japan's auto companies run circles around the befuddled behemoths in Detroit and clobbered our electronics companies long ago, even though Japanese save like misers and Americans spend like sailors, and notwithstanding our $5B trade deficit with Japan, they still out-recessioned us.

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