Reuters: Land purchases by foreign investors in poor countries and the growing use of biofuels are boosting pressures on agricultural farmland and helping make 500 million small farmers hungry, a U.N. envoy said on Thursday. Olivier De Schutter, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the right to food, said the combination of environmental degradation, urbanization and large-scale land acquisitions by foreign investors formed an “explosive cocktail” for small farmers. “The plots cultivated by …