The Twenty-first Century Agricultural Land Rush - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 830

forivemajorcropsofthefood-feed-fuelcomplex(wheat,maize,soybean,sugarcane,
oilpalm),currentlanduse,populationdensity,andinfrastructureaccess.hereport
found the largest areas of land potentially suitable for cultivation in Africa, followed by
LatinAmerica,withmorethanhalfofglobalavailability(224 millionoutof446 million
hectares)concentratedinsevencountries: Sudan,Brazil,Australia,Russia,Argentina,
Mozambique,andDemocraticRepublicoftheCongo(WorldBank2010,56;seealso
Deininger2011).20 As would be expected from these statistics, foreign investors have
indeedsoughtlandinallthesecountries(GRAIN2011),andAfricahasbeenparticu-
larly prominent as a site of land transactions. Though the overall proportion of African
dealsmaybeinlatedduetomediabias,fully62 percentoftheagriculturallanddeals
intheLandMatrixdatabasewereinAfrica(Anseeuwet al.2012).UNCTAD(2009,
122) alsohighlightstheabundanceofwaterresourcesinhostcountriesrelativetohome
countries,thoughpercapitafreshwaterresourcesrangewidely—intheGulfStates,for
example,from49cubicmeters(m3)inUAEto399m3inOman;andinhostcountries
from366m3inPakistanand813m3inSudanto29,000m3inBrazil.21
Complementing biophysical and social conditions of land availability, the structural
position of a country in the global economy bears on whether or not land is likely to
be transferred to foreign investors. Middle-income, semi-peripheral countries such as
BrazilandArgentinaandhigh-incomecountrieslikeAustraliaarelikelytobeattrac-
tive in principle to foreign investors seeking large tracts of farmland, due to their large
areas of land potentially suitable for agriculture. However, these countries also have
more developed and politically organized domestic agricultural complexes, and the
overall economies in these countries are less critically dependent on agriculture than the
economiesofmostlow-incomecountries.Low-income,peripheralcountries,mean-
while, tend to have less capital-intensive, less market-oriented agricultural sectors,22
but at the same time a proportionally greater dependence on agriculture for employ-
ment and foreign exchange. Under these circumstances, countries with more highly
capitalizeddomesticagriculturalsectorsmayseeforeigninvolvementinlanddealsasa
threat to national resource sovereignty and domestic agro-industry, while low-income
countries may see the opportunity through land transfers to earn foreign exchange and
develop domestic infrastructure and technological capabilities. Land abundance is
therefore mediated by the structural position of a country in the global economy, with
low-income countries with less capital-intensive agricultural sectors more likely to be
hoststoofshorefarmlandinvestments(cf.Anseeuwet al.2012,10).Asanexample,
Indonesia(alower-middle-incomecountry)in2010changeditsregulationstoallow
foreign participation in staple food crop production, permitting foreign ownership of
upto49 percentinstaplecropplantations(GovernmentofIndonesia2010),whileBrazil
(ahigher-middle-incomecountry)since2010hassoughttoimposemorestringentlegal
limitsontheacquisitionoffarmlandbyforeigners(GovernmentofBrazil2010).
Domestic institutional factors interact with land availability and structural position
to help determine host country participation in land deals. Data on land deals indicate
that the most-targeted host countries for large-scale farmland acquisition tend to have
weaker rural land tenure security, raising concerns for the respect of the rights of local