Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
balance are visible in nodes of violent urban protest and rural land use change, dispos-
session, and resistance. As many as thirty countries experienced food riots during the
2007-2008foodcrisis(PatelandMcMichael2009,9).Initsatermath,observershave
noticed a rapid acceleration in large-scale land acquisitions, of which the Malagasy and
Malian projects are examples, in a process that activists have labeled a “global land grab.”
InthecharacterizationofGRAIN,aninternationalNGO:
On the one hand, “food insecure” governments that rely on imports to feed their
people are snatching up vast areas of farmland abroad for their own offshore food
production. On the other hand, food corporations and private investors, hungry
for profits in the midst of the deepening financial crisis, see investment in foreign
farmland as an important new source of revenue. As a result, fertile agricultural land
isbecomingincreasinglyprivatisedandconcentrated.Ifletunchecked,thisglobal
land grab could spell the end of small-scale farming, and rural livelihoods, in numer-
ous places around the world.
(GRAIN2008,1)
As this quotation indicates, the examples of “food security land grabbing” from Mali
and Madagascar are just one face of the phenomenon of large-scale land acquisition.
Infact,private-sectorlandtransfers(or“investmentlandgrabbing”)areestimatedto
involvemuchgreaterareasthangovernment-leddeals(Anseeuwetal.2012;Cotula
2011).1 Additionally, as in the case of the Madagascar deal for food and biofuel produc-
tion,landacquisitionsareaimednotjustattheproductionoffoodcrops,butalsoat“lex
crops”thatmaybeusedforfoodorbiofuels(e.g.,soybean,sugarcane,oilpalm),and
nonfoodcrops(e.g.,rubber,jatropha).2Landgrabbingthusinvolvesavarietyofpublic
and private actors with distinct economic and political interests in different forms of
agricultural production.
Developing a more complete picture of the magnitude and character of land grab-
bing worldwide is an extremely difficult endeavor: empirical data on land deals are criti-
cally scarce, in part because the details of many transactions are never made public. As
a result, scholarly treatments of land grabbing have remained limited in scope or pre-
liminaryintheirabilitytogeneralize.Currently,efortsareunderwaytocompilemore
comprehensive data on land deals,3 and case study material is contributing to a more
contextualizedunderstandingofthephenomenon.4 At a basic level, however, it seems
clear that the acceleration in large-scale land acquisitions by both public and private
sectoractorsisindicativeofafundamentalshitinactors'understandingsoftheglobal
food system and, more generally, of the global political economy.
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