Towards a better understanding of global land grabbing: an editorial introduction

By Saturnino M. Borras Jr., R. Hall, I. Scoones, B. White, Wendy Wolford. 2011

863 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Over the past several years, the convergence of global crises in food, energy, finance, and the environment has driven a dramatic revaluation of land ownership. Powerful transnational and national economic actors from corporations to national governments and private equity funds have searched for ‘empty’ land often in distant countries that can serve as sites for fuel and food production in the event of future price spikes. This is occurring globally, but there is a clear North–South dynamic that echoes the land grabs that underwrote both colonialism and imperialism. In addition, however, there is an emerging ‘South–South’ dynamic today, with economically powerful non-Northern countries, such as Brazil and Qatar, getting significantly involved. The land— and water and labor—of the Global South are increasingly perceived as sources of alternative energy production (primarily biofuels), food crops, mineral deposits (new and old), and reservoirs of environmental services. National governments have looked inward as well, in what is often internal colonialism whereby land seen officially as marginal or empty is set aside for commodity production. The pace and extent of these land deals has been rapid and widespread (GRAIN 2008). Estimates by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) suggest that roughly 20 million hectares exchanged hands in the form of land grabs between 2005 and 2009 (von Braun and Meinzen-Dick 2009). The World Bank report on land grabs (or, as the Bank calls it, agricultural investment), released in September 2010, estimated this global phenomenon at 45 million hectares (World Bank 2010). Sub-Saharan Africa is the site of the most speculative major land deals, including one thwarted deal in Madagascar that brought down the government (Cotula et al. 2009), while major areas are being targeted for commodity crops, fuel crops, investment, and ecosystem services in South America, Central America, Southeast Asia, and the former USSR (Zoomers 2010, Visser and Spoor 2011). There are various mechanisms through which land grabbing occurs, ranging from straightforward private–private purchases and public–private leases for biofuel production to acquisition of large parcels of land for conservation arrangement, with variegated initial outcomes (Hall 2011, Wolford 2010). Some of this land has been cleared of existing inhabitants and users but not yet put into production; in many cases buyers and investors are simply preparing for the next global crisis. The Journal of Peasant Studies Vol. 38, No. 2, March 2011, 209–216

Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6b8e14b6d36edd0929b3372ec0787377623394cf

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Citations in the corpus

The Tragedy of the Grabbed Commons: Coercion and Dispossession in the Global Land Rush (2017, background): “Informed by political economy and political ecology perspectives (Agrawal, 2005; Borras et al., 2011; Clement, 2010; Poteete, Janssen, & Ostrom, 2010; Ribot & Peluso, 2003), we have identified different dimensions of analysis that characterize the dynamics of LSLAs in the cases included in our…”
Grabbing “Green”: Markets, Environmental Governance and the Materialization of Natural Capital (2013, background): “…expropriation of land and resources (Fairhead et al. 2012: 237; see also Borras et al. 2010; Peluso and Lund 2011), and which comprise an important component of the current explosion of global land grabs, or “large scale (trans) national commercial land transactions” (Borras et al. 2011: 210).”
Land appropriation, surplus people and a battle over visions of agrarian futures in Africa (2013, background): “The same authors conclude that ‘current procedures lock affected people into unfavourable negotiation and development pathways’ (Vermuelen and Cotula 2010, 913; cf. Borras et al. 2011 on ProCana in Mozambique).”
The politics of evidence: methodologies for understanding the global land rush (2013, background): “This second JPS Forum on Global Land Grabbing brings together four papers, originally presented at the Global Land Grab II International Conference3 organised by the Land Deal Politics Initiative (LDPI) , and debated at a lively plenary session.”
New investment, old challenges. Land deals and the water constraint in African agriculture (2012, background): “( 2011 , 209) also state ‘in many cases buyers and investors are simply preparing for the next global crisis’.”
Land expropriation and displacement in Bangladesh (2012, neutral): “( 2011 ), De Schutter ( 2011 ) and Peluso and Lund ( 2011 ).”
Plantations, outgrowers and commercial farming in Africa: agricultural commercialisation and implications for agrarian change (2017, background): “The recent onset of a ‘global land grab’ (Borras et al. 2011) and evidence of largescale land acquisitions in Africa has refocused attention on this longstanding debate, in a context of assumed land scarcity (Scoones et al. 2014).”
Governing Global Land Deals: The Role of the State in the Rush for Land (2013, background): “Over the past decade, there has been a dramatic increase in large-scale land acquisitions for the purposes of securing access to the means of producing natural resource commodities (see Borras et al., 2011; Deininger et al., 2011; de Schutter, 2011).”
Hegemonic transitions and global shifts in social metabolism: Implications for resource-rich countries. Introduction to the special section (2012, background): “Land grabbing at a very large scale by state or private agents is another of the unique features of the emerging global regime for the exploitation and provision of natural resources (Borras et al., 2011; Deininger et al., 2011), as discussed by Scheidel and Sorman in this special section.”
Making Concessions: Extractive Enclaves, Entangled Capitalism and Regulative Pluralism at the Gold Mining Frontier in Burkina Faso (2018, background): “Recent concerns over ‘‘land grabbing” portray dynamics of resource enclosures as discrete enclosed spaces of ‘‘accumulation by dispossession” (Borras et al., 2011; White et al., 2012).”
Accumulation by securitization: commercial poaching, neoliberal conservation, and the creation of new wildlife frontiers (2016, background): “Control, which can be defined as “practices that fix or consolidate forms of access, claiming, and exclusion for some time” (Peluso and Lund, 2011, 668), does not necessarily entail complete ownership or even enclosure and vice-versa (Borras et al., 2012; Borras et al., 2011; Hall, 2011, 2013).”
Land grabbing, social differentiation, intensified migration and food security in northern Ghana (2017, background): “The Journal of Peasant Studies, 2017 Vol. 44, No. 2, 421–444, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2016.1228629 civil society groups, research institutions, non-governmental organizations, and the World Bank (Borras et al. 2011; Borras and Franco 2012; Cotula 2013; Deininger 2011; GRAIN 2008; Kaag and”
Plantation rubber, land grabbing and social-property transformation in southern Laos (2012, background): “…has been attributed to a variety of causes: food security fears by wealthy countries with little arable land, commodity price hikes increasing the profitability of directly controlling agricultural production, and the use of land for biofuels and carbon sinks (Zoomers 2010, Borras et al. 2011).”