The Transnational Land Rush in Africa: A Decade After the Spike

PDF HTML阅读 XML下载 导出引用 引用提醒 跨国土地利用及其生态影响 DOI: 10.5846/stxb201304250809 作者: 作者单位: 北京大学建筑与景观设计学院 作者简介: 通讯作者: 中图分类号: 基金项目: Transnational land use and its potential environmental consequence Author: Affiliation: College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture,Peking University Fund Project: 摘要 | 图/表 | 访问统计 | 参考文献 | 相似文献 | 引证文献 | 资源附件 | 文章评论 摘要:在全球食物价格不断上涨，粮食安全已经威胁到经济安全的环境下，跨国农用地投资成为国际浪潮。跨国农用地投资推动着各国的土地资源向全球化资源转变，对土地的跨国利用成为全球土地资源优化配置的必然。在对跨国土地利用的背景及现状进行阐述的基础上，指出“代理性农业耕作”方式对区域生态环境可能造成的影响。同时，新型农业科技与跨国土地利用的结合，也在推动着农业经济发展的同时，改变着传统的土地利用模式，进而改变着区域生态环境。最后，指出需要对跨国土地利用做出理性分析并建立相关的国际规则，从而维护可持续粮食安全及生态安全。 Abstract:Attributed to economic forces and fluctuations, global food insecurity is the result of international spikes in food prices, and drives dynamic changes in global transnational land investments. In the form of private negotiations, government leases and concessions in exchange for the development of agricultural infrastructure, irrigation systems and transportation systems, foreign soil is being exchanged in commerce between countries at an unprecedented pace. Moreover, this trend has been intensified by the increased urban demand from rapidly developing countries in Asia, as well as the transition of crops from foodstuffs to feedstocks for biofuels in Europe and America. Transnational land investments promote the transformation of local national land resources into global resources, and dynamic changes in transnational land use is the inevitable result of this land resource optimization.Food security will be among China's most significant national challenges in this century. The discourse on food security in China is limited to defending the red line of 1.8 million mu of arable land, while the phenomenon of transnational land investments in a global context and its potential environmental impacts, which may also lead to food insecurity, have received relatively less attention. In fact, great international concern has arisen over China's land acquisitions for agricultural and biofuel production in the past decade. As an increasingly influential member of the international community, China should be aware of and committed to addressing challenges arising in the course of transnational land investment.Therefore, this paper firstly reviews the background and current situation of transnational land use, and identifies the potential environmental impacts of surrogate farming practice on regional ecological systems. While historically not new, the current processes of transnational land acquisition could be viewed as the largest-scale operation of long-distance farming in human history. Modern agricultural technology, which has played an important role in the improvement of agricultural economy,changes conventional modes of land use and causes further dramatic impact on regional ecological systems. Moreover, through a series of case studies, it highlights the fact that industrial agriculture promoting short-term crop yield is prioritized over long-term soil replenishment and ignores the complex ecology of soil. Water basins-ecologically fragile, economically and politically valuable-have also now become the target of a new wave of large-scale agriculture projects promoted by transnational land acquisitions. Consequently, the growing international and transnational commodification of soil threatens the longevity of vast sections of the world's arable land, the quantity and quality of fresh water, and the health of essential ecosystems world-wide, if no proper rules are established to prevent the deleterious effects of soil-mining and industrial farming practices. Finally, the paper points out the necessity of comprehensive monitoring and analysis of trends in transnational land use, as well as the establishment of relevant international rules, for the purpose of maintaining sustainable food security and ecological security. It argues that the guidelines should include the following key points: (1) Ensuring food security, which means broad-scale alignment between transnational land investments and national agriculture and food policies; (2) Consultation with and participation of local governments and agencies, ensuring greater linkage of investments with local development plans; (3) Environmental sustainability, which means quantifying and measuring environmental impacts, promoting sustainable resource use and land use policies, and minimizing the risk of negative impacts on ecosystems, natural processes, and societal goals. 参考文献 相似文献 引证文献

Drawing from and contributing to the International Relations (IR) aesthetics literature, I analyse how Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore’s 2005 Venice Biennale performance-based video installation Fountain is an enactment of creative presence at an intersection of international and transnational politics. Belmore’s aesthetic method of engaging with water as a visual interface between the artist and viewer, by projecting the film of her performance onto a stream of falling water in the Canadian Pavilion exhibition, offers a method of understanding and transforming settler colonial power relations in world politics. I argue that Belmore’s artistic labour and knowledge production is an expression of Indigenous self-determination by discussing how Fountain is situated in relation with Indigenous peoples’ transnational land and waterway reclamations and cultural resurgences as well as the colonial context of the international art world dynamics of the Venice Biennale. My analysis of Belmore’s decolonial sensibility and political imagination with respect to water contributes to IR aesthetics debates by foregrounding the embodiment of knowledge production and performance artwork as a method of decolonisation.

it mean? What are its principal dimensions? What issues are implied in the concept? We believe that to speak to these questions can itself be a significant act contributing to better international communication and cooperation in planning. Our analysis may also have some bearing on certain domestic land use issues, especially at a time when many are looking to state planning as a panacea for land use and environmental problems. Earlier literature of a taxonomic na-

Large-scale transnational land acquisition of agricultural land in the global south by rich corporations or countries raises challenging normative questions. In this article, the author critically examines and advocates a human rights approach to these questions. Mutually reinforcing, policies, governance and practice promote equitable and secure land tenure that in turn, strengthens other human rights, such as to employment, livelihood and food. Human rights therefore provide standards for evaluating processes and outcomes of transnational land acquisitions and, thus, for determining whether they are ethically unacceptable land grabs. A variety of recent policy initiatives on the issue have evoked human rights, most centrally through the consultation and negotiation of the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests concluded in 2012. However, a case of transnational land appropriation illustrates weak host and investor state enforcement of human rights, leaving the parties to in interaction with local groups in charge of protecting human rights. Generally, we have so far seen limited direct application of human rights by states in their governance of transnational land acquisition. Normative responses to transnational land acquisition—codes of conduct, principles of responsible agricultural investment or voluntary guidelines—do not in themselves secure necessary action and change. Applying human rights approaches one must therefore also analyze the material conditions, power relations and political processes that determine whether and how women and men can secure the human rights accountability of the corporations and governments that promote large-scale, transnational land acquisition in the global south.

Claim-making in transnational land deals: Discourses of legitimation and stakeholder relations in central Uganda

This article examines the issue of ongoing transnational tensions and disputes around land and property ownership that the members of the British-Bangladeshi diaspora are encountering in rural Sylhet, their origin region in their home country. While the existing literature on transnational communities documents migrants’ land-purchasing and house-building practices in their country of origin, too often in a celebratory way, the material disputes and tensions that arise from these investments, and their effect on transnational personal, familial and social relationships, have yet to be exposed. For British Bangladeshis, these disputes are rife and in some cases are being articulated through intimidation and even violence. My research suggests that these evolving phenomena of land and property disputes threaten to disrupt the transnational relationships that were established and maintained by one generation after another.

ABSTRACTThe recent proliferation of transnational land deals has put the long‐fraught relationship between international cooperation, national development and local dispossession back in the political spotlight. This article argues that transnational land access cannot be resolved as a political question without a better understanding of the material, legal and administrative geographies that accompany and enable it. Using evidence from Laos, the paper illustrates two tools for ‘resolving’ the global land grab geographically: first, a biographical or trajectory‐based approach that connects specific land grabs to larger development landscapes (e.g. of urban infrastructuring); and second, genealogies of property formalization that interrogate and deconstruct the legal geographies of land access, both on and off the map. The paper concludes by suggesting that these tools have purchase elsewhere as well.

Transnational land deals: Towards an inclusive land governance framework

<p>Humanity’s capacity to live without irreversibly compromising the environmental and biophysical conditions on which it depends is at stake. The expanding societal needs for food and energy add an unsustainable pressure on limited amounts of freshwater resources. In this context, the recent global economic and food security crisis, the adoption of new bioenergy policies, trends of water and land commodification, have been described as the drivers of a fast escalation in transnational land investments. A phenomenon described as a new ‘global land rush’. This process is favoring a strong transformation of the rural landscapes in large parts of Latin America, Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, with small-scale farming, the most diffused system of production, being displaced by large-scale commercial intensified agriculture. Such land deals may result in the dispossession of traditional users, subsistence and small-holder farmers by large-scale commercial agriculture, as well as expansion of agricultural land at the expense of savannas, forests, or other ecosystems. Here, we bring together the insights from distinct studies conducted on these different dimensions using the (to our knowledge) largest available sample of georeferenced global transnational land deals. We synthesize these studies with the objective to identify and highlight the interconnectedness of the phenomenon and how different interdependencies and trade-offs play out. Using data from the Demographic and Health Survey Program we then investigate the livelihood, health and food security dynamics associated with this phenomenon.  We identified the main archetypes such large-scale transitions and defined their temporal trajectories (e.g., before and after the deals). We found that a significant portion of such deals, especially located in Southeast Asia, showed strong simultaneous increases in deforestation, crop cover and probability of export/trade, severely undermining the food security in such areas. Our approach offers a robust methodology to understand the multi-sectoral implications of the global land rush in a systematic, multi-dimensional and integrated way that we believe is helpful to inform policy. </p><p><br><br></p>

This paper evaluates how Tibetan farming communities choose between two methods of livelihood production: working as labourers on vineyard land they have leased to a French winery or collecting valuable fungi. I argue new transnational land and labour management, as part of institutional rearrangements in land tenure, are leading to significant changes with mixed benefits for rural farming communities. These communities respond by seasonally seeking freedom from capitalist labour and returning to communal forms of income production based around community land tenure and common‐pool resources. Although villagers have become contracted labour, they choose to escape this new agricultural work in the mountains, collecting fungi together as a community. The common‐pool land on which fungi are collected is also managed for access in a specific way by and for the community. Contrary to agricultural labour for the winery, fungi collection creates a chance for people to interact once again more as a cohesive community as they once did in their fields by collecting a commodity from land controlled by the community. The disembedding of one section of the economy has thus in a way reinforced the embeddedness of social relations in another as a coping mechanism for the former.

This introductory chapter of the book gives an insight into recent debates on foreign land acquisitions (FLAs) before analyzing the role of the state, land reforms and privatization in shaping foreign land deals and accompanying agrarian changes. It also traces the anatomy of other chapters, and shows how authors speak about the role of the state in transnational, foreign and domestic land acquisitions, land reforms and privatization. The chapter shows how new landscapes are being actively produced through dynamic encounters between various actors involved in a land deal, and how these transformations affect smallholders and their families reliant on land in Africa. Overall, though in different ways, the chapters demonstrate the central role of the state (encouraged by economic policy) in creating the fertile ground for large-scale land deals, in addition to highlighting the importance of detailed empirical studies to distill the rootings and becomings of these processes. Keywords:Africa; foreign land acquisitions (FLAs); land reforms; privatization

Intensifi ed and competing claims over land are crucial to understanding current urban transformations in Africa. This paper aims to highlight the role of transnational migrants in urban land investments and claim making on urban land. While the relationship between urbanization in Africa and migration has long been a focus of research and policy, att ention had mainly focused on the intertwinement between rising urbanization and the infl ux of rural migrants, internally displaced people (IDPs) and refugees struggling to survive and gain access to urban space and services. More recently, the African city has gained a more positive image as a consequence of Africa's economic boom and has come to be seen as a pillar of development, rather than a place of chaos and poverty. In this 'urban turn' in development thinking and concomitant technocratic and infrastructural policy approaches, the link between urbanization and migration has been largely overlooked. We argue, however, that transnational migrants in particular are an important category in claim-making processes over urban land and real estate and add to these in specifi c ways. Using case studies in Khartoum and Dakar, we investigate the ways in which transnational migrants contribute to speculation, rising land values and processes of socio-spatial inclusion and exclusion. Rather than making a comparative analysis, we use two concrete cases to gain an empirical understanding of the processes associated with these diaspora investments, including the question of whether these transnational migrants can be considered as contributing to urban 'land grabs' or not.

Cambodia has become a principal target of transnational (and domestic) land grabs over the past decade, mostly in the form of economic land concessions (ELCs). The northeastern part of the country—where the majority of Cambodia’s indigenous people reside—is a particular hotspot. In this article, we discuss three policy mechanisms that the Cambodian government has employed to extend and legitimize land exclusions in the name of national economic development through the example of two indigenous villages in Srae Preah Commune, Mondulkiri Province. First, we show how the allocation of two ELCs has deprived indigenous communities of their communally managed land. Second, we examine how communal land titling processes have failed to provide indigenous villagers with effective legal mechanisms to counteract ELCs and land encroachment by internal migrants. Third, we elucidate how the promotion of cash crop production contributed to livelihood and land use transitions from a reliance on forest resources in 2003 to a dependence on cash crops in 2012 to a struggle to remain resilient amid a slump in crop prices in 2018. We conclude that the combination of these policies has undermined communal ownership and livelihood resilience under a situation of limited exit strategies.

ABSTRACTDespite international media’s waning attention, research and political debates on global land grabbing have not subsided. We argue the importance of understanding the ‘transnational land investment web’ of corporate and state actors and institutions, which are not always immediately visible. Focusing on transnational corporations (TNCs) based in the European Union (EU), we examine five sets of actors and institutional spheres through which these actors are able to grab lands beyond Europe. It is crucial to understand these not as individual sets of actors or institutions, but as interconnected sets, comprising a web. These are EU-based: (1) Private companies using regular institutional platforms; (2) Finance capital companies; (3) Public–private partnerships; (4) Development Finance Institutions; and (5) Companies using EU policies to gain control of land through the supply chain. One implication of this complex web is that democratic governance in the context of land grabs becomes an even more daunting challenge.

The Tragedy of the Grabbed Commons: Coercion and Dispossession in the Global Land Rush