What Drives the Global Land Rush?

By H. Selod, K. Deininger, Rabah Arezki. Social Science Research Network, 2011

272 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper studies the determinants of foreign land acquisition for large-scale agriculture. To do so, gravity models are estimated using data on bilateral investment relationships, together with newly constructed indicators of agro-ecological suitability in areas with low population density as well as land rights security. Results confirm the central role of agro-ecological potential as a pull factor. In contrast to the literature on foreign investment in general, the quality of the business climate is insignificant whereas weak land governance and tenure security for current users make countries more attractive for investors. Implications for policy are discussed.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/43596b0584018d6f662d7c995ea8ac969de5a2d6

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Citations in the corpus

Large Farm Establishment, Smallholder Productivity, Labor Market Participation, and Resilience: Evidence from Ethiopia (2016, background): “In light of the policy relevance of this issue, the marked differences between general FDI and large-scale agricultural investment (Arezki et al. 2015), and the fact that in many African countries the large majority of land-related investment originates with domestic rather than foreign investors, e”
Climate Change Impacts on Global Food Security (2013, background): “Structural consequences can emerge, particularly when property rights are lacking and traditional land and water rights are not protected, as is the case in many developing countries with food security problems (43–45); these structural problems lead to erosion of the assets of the poor, as seen dur”
How and why chiefs formalise land use in recent times: the politics of land dispossession through biofuels investments in Ghana (2014, background): “These assertions overlap other propositions that most large-scale land leases occur in state-owned land tenure regimes (Cotula 2012) and hence pinpoint ‘weak governance’ (Arezki, Deininger, and Selod 2011) or ‘coercive land governance’ (Huggins 2013) as decisive factors for land dispossession.”