Abstract
With the expansion of the global transnational agricultural planting scale, research on transnational agricultural land investment is growing. In order to analyze the development context and basic characteristics of this research, and to discover the research hotspots and frontiers, this study used documentation and bibliometric methods to examine the achievements of it. The results show the following: (1) Transnational agricultural land investment research is mainly focused on the social sciences, development studies, economics, environmental sciences and geography. (2) The concentration of researchers in this research field is not high, and there is still a lack of authoritative researchers with high influence. The cooperation network has been initially formed between research institutions. Among them, universities and research institutes are the main institutions of transnational agricultural land investment research, but the degree of integration among the research teams is not high. (3) The evolution of the research theme of the field has experienced three stages—an embryonic stage, growth stage and stable stage—and the research content shows a trend of continuous divergence and deepening. (4) From 2005 to 2019, the research hotspots of the research focused on “Land Grabbing, Global Land, Africa, Investment”. At present, the emerging frontier research topics are “Indonesia, Livelihood, Trajectory and Sustainability”. With many years of development, the research has become an obvious "land" attribute, independent from traditional agricultural economic research, and the research topics are becoming more and more mature, refined and diversified. Transnational agricultural land investment research is attracting continuous attention from scholars in multiple disciplines and fields.
Highlights
Since the 21st century, due to the rapid growth of the global population, the improvement of the dietary structure in developing regions and the development of the bio-energy industry, global food demand has continued to rise, and the pressure on the supply and demand of water and agricultural land has continued to increase
In order to solve the issue of future food insecurity and improve the efficiency of farmland use, the FAO, World Bank Group (WB) and Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) advocated for solving the problem by transnational agricultural investment [2]
There are three research institutions that have published articles more than 10 times, namely, the Polytechnic University of Milan in Italy, the University of Toronto in Canada, and China Agricultural University in China. It seems that the number of articles issued by research institutions with a frequency of more than 10 times accounts for 55.5% of the total number of articles issued by the top 15 institutions, which reflects the concentration of Transnational agricultural land investment (TALI) research institutions and the large differences in research capacity among them
Summary
Since the 21st century, due to the rapid growth of the global population, the improvement of the dietary structure in developing regions and the development of the bio-energy industry, global food demand has continued to rise, and the pressure on the supply and demand of water and agricultural land has continued to increase. There are several problems that need to be solved urgently in TALI, including how to regulate the activities of enterprises in TALI, prevent them from harming the livelihoods of locals in the host country, and improve the efficiency of agricultural land utilization in developing regions, as well as enhance the level of food security in the host country and increase the global agricultural products’ supply [18]. The software mainly uses the statistical information of the authors, research institutions, disciplines, research topics and keywords of the literature, to identify the research hotspots, key literature and research trends of the research objects [19] It presents another viewpoint on the characteristics of topic distribution and changes of research hotspots in TALI research more clearly. (3) What is the general trend of TALI research? (4) What are the hot topics, keywords and development paths of TALI research? (5) What are the challenges and frontiers of TALI research?
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