Food, Justice, and Land - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 254

The current global land rush is not only motivated by the food scarcity narrative but
also by responses to converging crises confronting humanity and the planet: food, fuel/
energy, climate change, and finance. The land grab is not entirely about food. Fairhead,
Leach, and Scoones (2012) write of “green grabbing” (land grabbing in the name of the
environment) that includes production for biofuels—see the chapter by Pimentel and
Burgess in this volume—and climate change mitigation strategies such as REDD+.
Mehta, Velwisch, and Franco (2012) write of water grabbing. McMichael (2012) talk
about increasing financialization of agricultural commodity production partly as reac-
tion to the financial crisis. Land has recently become a highly visible object of conflict
again, and not only for its food-producing potential.
One of the overarching narratives that accompanies this global land rush is a simple
but fundamental mainstream assumption: There is enough land, but it is distributed in
ways that result in suboptimal efficiency, and, thus, there is unnecessary global insecu-
rity of food supply. The solution to the aggregate supply question lies in the existence
of marginal, underutilized, empty, and available lands. Deininger and others (2011)
have estimated this land in the aggregate to be 445 million hectares at a minimum, and,
depending on other factors, could be stretched up to 1.7 billion hectares of land world-
wide. It is concentrated in the poorer countries of the globe. Conventional notions of
land reform applied within national borders and addressed redistribution of large pri-
vate land property. Contemporary land policy debates confront a new global context.
Nevertheless, despite the political decline of conventional land reform that had such
important historical consequences, redistributive land policy requires rethinking, with
many of the same evaluative strands in place.
Not all urgent land issues today have to do with global land grabbing, despite
its global importance. As Borras, Gomez, Kay, and Wilkinson (2012) highlighted
in their study of current land grabbing in Latin America, generic “land concentra-
tion”—not land grabbing per se —is resurging in the region (alongside more straight-
forward “land grabbing” cases). The dynamics partly involve “foreignization” of
space that continues to animate controversial and heated debates in the region,
highlighting some controversies especially around the rise of Brazilian acquisitions
of land in Bolivia and Paraguay. This creeping land concentration—in the midst of
universal revaluation of land as a scarce resource in response to converging mul-
tiple crises and the industrial-commercial-financial rise of BRICS countries (Brazil,
Russia, India, China, and South Africa)—is also felt in the North. Yet, aside from
weak voices for conventional land reform, as in Bolivia and Paraguay, one does not
see significant political support in the form of policy. This political absence does
not mean there is no popular demand and call for some form of “redistributive land
policies.” There is, and, as they did historically, social movements continue to raise
the issue of land and justice. The general response of La Vía Campesina to global
land grabbing is to call for “land reform.” But the very fact that the call seems to have
not gained traction in different parts of the world, even among those struggling
against current global corporate enclosures, indicates the need to re-cast analysis of
pro-poor land policy.