It’s usually only alluded to in TV news coverage of why China is so interested in “developing” Africa with roads and infrastructure and buying up swaths of America or Australia, what Saudi Arabia is up to purchasing land abroad or why Russia “really” covets Ukraine.

But every now and then a fictional feature film comes right out and says what governments won’t, and what journalists are often too timid or under-funded to get at.

If James Bond knows nefarious multinational actors are after arable land and water (“Quantum of Solace”), why isn’t anybody else talking about it?

For “The Grab,” filmmaker Gabriela Cowperthwaite (“Blackfish”) checks in with reporter Nate Halverson and his team at the Center for Investigative Reporting, people who are following tips, digging through data dumps of leaked emails from notorious, shadowy figures, visiting Africa and China and connecting the dots about the great conflict of the “future” that is already joined today.

The world is just now getting past the malevolent oligarchy that was OPEC. Journalist Halverson says we’d better prepare outselves for “FARMPEC.”

“The Grab” is a dogged doc about a complex yet kind of plain-sight-simple subject. When Chinese interests buy much of La Paz County in Arizona, it’s not mere land speculation. They’re pumping water, raising crops on desert land, drying out locals’ wells and shipping their hay and whatever back to China.

When Russia is online recruiting genuine American cowboys to come to a climate-changing Siberia, it’s because Putin thinks they can be the meat provider to the world as the planet warms. When Ukraine responded to the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea by closing off river water to the canal that supplied the peninsula, the ruinous expense of his aggression pushed Putin to try and invade the rest of the country.

When Saudi Arabia and other rich oil states in the Middle East buy land in Africa and America, they’re using their climate-changing profits to insulate them from the next “wars over resources.”

“Whoever needs water and has guns is going to go get it,” a CIA analyst tells us.

Cowperthwaite’s film follows years of this team’s work, the ultimate “follow the money” project that chases down China’s motives for buying Smithfield (pork) Foods, taking ownership of “one in four pigs” in North America.

China loves pork, and the leaders there remember The Great Famine. And unlike American TV news talkers, Chinese communist leadership knows what “inspired” “The Arab Spring” — food shortages and inflation, hungry young people with “nothing to lose” taking to the streets and toppling regimes.

“The Grab” shows us Chinese, Russian, United Arab Emirates and American villains in this shadow war over “food security.” Nabbing mercenary mogul Erik Prince’s emails gives away the game that high profile right wing actors aren’t acting out of nationalist pride. They’re trans-state opportunists properly painted in Bond villain colors. Prince moved beyond his scandal-plagued Blackwater mercenary “contractor” company to run a Frontier Services Group, a Chinese-owned company setting up land acquisition and “security” for oligarchs, far and wide.

Halverson ties this vast rich state vs. poor country conspiracy up and guides Cowperthaite toward CIA, Army, Navy and State Dept. veterans, non-government organization experts, reporters working with him and Holly Irwin, a dismayed county supervisor in La Paz County, Arizona, where decades of “anti regulation” voting by the conservative locals have allowed the Chinese to come in and take all their water from them.

And we meet Brigadier “Brig” Siachitema of Zambia, home to the most coveted land and water in Africa. He’s a Georgetown-educated lawyer who returned to his homeland after graduation to help locals “fight back” against the corrupt officials that sell the land that they own and depend on, but whose ancient legal “deed” standing provides multi-nationals with the opening to vast transfers of land.

“The Grab” is more informative than polemical, and plays as a dry — sometimes suspenseful, often fact-packed — treatment of the subject.

But it isn’t just cautionary, it’s sounding the alarm. It’s not predicting the future, it’s reporting on the present.

And if you aren’t shocked at a turn of events where it has become obvious that “governments are working for corporations” that acquire “food and water security,” well you must know your Bond villains by heart.

Rating: unrated, scenes of street violence, profanity

Cast: Nate Halverson, Holly Irwin, Molly Jahn, Anuradha Mittal, Robert Mitchell, Robert Schoonover, Mara Hvistendahl and  Brigadier “Brig” Siachitema.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:45