Land Appropriation Research Articles

Water appropriation in the production of tobacco: governance, policies and sustainability

Fil: Iribarnegaray, Martin Alejandro. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnicas. Centro Cientifico Tecnologico Conicet - Salta. Instituto de Investigaciones en Energia no Convencional. Universidad Nacional de Salta. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas. Departamento de Fisica. Instituto de Investigaciones en Energia no Convencional; Argentina

Sustainable Colonization: Tar Sands as Resource Colonialism

ABSTRACTCanada is one of the world’s largest petrostates, owing to large shale oil deposits, also known as tar sands, which can be found within its borders. In recent decades, as the price of crude oil has increased dramatically, corporations and the Canadian state have worked together to open the oil deposits in Northern Canada for extraction and transportation. Despite a stated commitment to environmental sustainability by the United States and Canadian governments, both have endorsed tar sands extraction and transport. Government and corporate entities have tried to reframe tar sands as “ethical oil,” yet all steps in the process involved pose tremendous ecological, social, economic, and cultural threats to First Nations communities in Canada, landowners in the Midwest and Texas, local ecosystems, and the global climate. This practice is part of a long-standing pattern of appropriating and using public and First Nations land for economic development. We argue that tar sands production on First Nations land is a practice of resource colonialism: the theft and appropriation of land belonging to indigenous people in order to access natural resources. By branding tar sands as “ethical oil” and labeling production companies as “sustainable,” the public and private sectors bound up in the extractive economy claim to provide an essential public service while misdirecting attention away from acts of colonialism that make these resources available. In this article, we examine the ways in which corporate and state entities use the discourse of sustainability as a cover for continued resource colonialism.

Land grabbing, social differentiation, intensified migration and food security in northern Ghana

This paper argues that large-scale land appropriation is displacing subsistence farmers and reworking agrarian social relations in northern Ghana. The recent wave of farmland enclosure has not only resulted in heightened land scarcity, but also fostered a marked social differentiation within farming communities. The dominant form of inequality is an evolving class of landless and near-landless farmers. The majority of households cope with such dynamics by deepening their own self-exploitation in the production process. The fulcrum of this self-exploitation is gendered property rights as part of the conjugal contract, with men exerting a far greater monopoly over land resources than had previously been the case. Due to acute land shortages, women’s rights to use land as wives, mothers and daughters are becoming insecure, as their vegetable plots are being reclassified as male-controlled household fields. The paper further documents the painful choices that landless farmers have to make in order to meet livelihood needs, including highly disciplined, yet low-waged, farm labor work and sharecropping contracts. In these livelihood pathways, there emerge, again, exploitative relations of production, whereby surplus is expropriated from land-dispossessed migrant laborers and concentrated with farm owners. These dynamics produce a ‘simple reproduction squeeze’ for the land-dispossessed. Overall, the paper contributes to the emerging land grabbing literature by showing geographically specific processes of change for large-scale mining operations and gendered differentiated impacts.

Nodes of resistance to green grabbing: a political ecology

Green grabbing is the privatization or appropriation of land for purposes of advancing a “green” economy while excluding local, indigenous people from natural resources. This is a problem of global scale that has arisen mainly during a historical period when free market, neo-liberal policies have dominated the world economy. The academic li-terature on the subject rarely mentions resistance to green grabbing, nor are there many efforts to critically and syste-matically examine the social dynamics of this process. We consider both what works and what fails during the process of opposition, as well as the social psychology of risk taking among both green grabbers and opponents. The paper con-cludes with a way forward proffering the resistance.

Biofuels and the hazards of land grabbing: Tenure (in)security and indigenous farmers’ investment decisions in Ghana

The past decade has witnessed a renewed interest in transnational land deals in the developing land-abundant countries of Sub Sahara Africa (SSA), Asia and Latin America following the convergence of the global financial, food and energy crises in the mid 2000s. In much of SSA, these deals occur on customary lands which are managed by traditional authorities on behalf of and in trust for the entire local community and are thus occupied by indigenous farmers. The traditional authorities have, for diverse reasons, become much interested in alienating large tracts of customary lands to foreign investors for biofuel and food crop plantations. In this paper, we examine the effects of the current mode of communal land acquisition for Jatropha cultivation in Ghana on the security of indigenous farmers’ land rights and their decisions to invest in their farms. Empirical evidence is based on primary data collected from field surveys conducted in two districts in Ghana; Yeji and Ejura in the Brong Ahafo and Ashanti regions respectively. We observed that the increasing appropriation of communal lands for biofuel plantations without consultation, fair and adequate compensation to the indigenous land holders has resulted in uncertainty and tenure insecurity among farmers in affected communities. Consequently, such farmers have become relatively disinterested in farming, cultivating smaller farm sizes and thereby showing low investments in their farms. These findings provide a new perspective for considering the relationship between increasing biofuel cultivation and food security in developing Africa.

Nodes of resistance to green grabbing: a political ecology

Green grabbing is the privatization or appropriation of land for purposes of advancing a “green” economy while excluding local, indigenous people from natural resources. This is a problem of global scale that has arisen mainly during a historical period when free market, neo-liberal policies have dominated the world economy. The academic li-terature on the subject rarely mentions resistance to green grabbing, nor are there many efforts to critically and syste-matically examine the social dynamics of this process. We consider both what works and what fails during the process of opposition, as well as the social psychology of risk taking among both green grabbers and opponents. The paper con-cludes with a way forward proffering the resistance.

Human appropriation of land for food: The role of diet

Human appropriation of land for food production has fundamentally altered the Earth system, with impacts on water, soil, air quality, and the climate system. Changes in population, dietary preferences, technology and crop productivity have all played important roles in shaping today’s land use. In this paper, we explore how past and present developments in diets impact on global agricultural land use. We introduce an index for the Human Appropriation of Land for Food (HALF), and use it to isolate the effects of diets on agricultural land areas, including the potential consequences of shifts in consumer food preferences. We find that if the global population adopted consumption patterns equivalent to particular current national per capita rates, agricultural land use area requirements could vary over a 14-fold range. Within these variations, the types of food commodities consumed are more important than the quantity of per-capita consumption in determining the agricultural land requirement, largely due to the impact of animal products and in particular ruminant species. Exploration of the average diets in the USA and India (which lie towards but not at global consumption extremes) provides a framework for understanding land use impacts arising from different food consumption habits. Hypothetically, if the world were to adopt the average Indian diet, 55% less agricultural land would be needed to satisfy demand, while global consumption of the average USA diet would necessitate 178% more land. Waste and over-eating are also shown to be important. The area associated with food waste, including over-consumption, given global adoption of the consumption patterns of the average person in the USA, was found to be twice that required for all food production given an average Indian per capita consumption. Therefore, measures to influence future diets and reduce food waste could substantially contribute towards global food security, as well as providing climate change mitigation options.

A certificação do latifúndio: considerações acerca do registro Torrens como blindagem da propriedade privada no caso das terras concentradas pelo Projeto Jari

O latifúndio constituído pelas terras do controverso Projeto Jari na divisa dos estados do Pará e do Amapá, na Amazônia brasileira, é composto pelo pretenso remembramento de mais de uma centena de imóveis. A legitimidade dessas terras é questionada em diversas e emaranhadas demandas judiciais. Pretende-se aqui dar um panorama da situação fundiária dessa área avaliando a apropriação ilegal de terras públicas, sobretudo por meio de registros Torrens, uma modalidade de registro imobiliário que garante uma blindagem especial à propriedade

Terra de índio x terra de branco: presença indígena e apropriação de terras em Guarulhos, sécs. XVII-XIX

O texto discute a transformação da sociedade e do território guarulhenses,através da análise do processo de apropriação privada das terras doaldeamento original, pois a trajetória da apropriação de terras em Guarulhos étambém a história do processo de desamortização das terras aldeamento de NossaSenhora da Conceição, fator e consequência da redução progressiva da populaçãoindígena. As fontes documentais analisadas – a série “Registros de Terras daProvíncia de São Paulo”, produzida em obediência à Lei n. 601, de 18 de marçode 1850, e o Livro Primeiro de Aforamentos de Guarulhos. Essas, ao lado daanálise da legislação, permitiram traçar o processo de apropriação de terras pelaelite guarulhense como uma consequência da progressiva desamortização dasterras do antigo aldeamento ao longo do século XIX.

The futures of pastoralism in the Horn of Africa: pathways of growth and change.

This paper reviews pastoralism in the Horn of Africa region with reference to the basic socio-economics of pastoralism, and the use of mobile livestock production to generate income and food for human consumption. The paper also examines long-term trends in pastoralist areas which, at first sight, appear to be contradictory. The first trend is the growth of a substantial domestic and export trade in livestock and meat across the region, driven largely by supplies from pastoralist areas and local and international demand. This trend indicates robust and responsive livestock production and marketing in pastoralist areas, despite recurrent drought, conflict and weak governance. In contrast, the second trend sees increasing levels of poverty and destitution in pastoralist areas, and continued high levels of human malnutrition. The co-existence of economic growth and increasing poverty in 'high-export' areas is explained by human population growth, drought, and the private control of pastures and water by wealthier producers. All of these factors combine to push poorer producers out of pastoralism. In areas with lower market orientation, other forms of declining land access are often evident, including the appropriation of land for mechanised farming, hydroelectric schemes, and bush encroachment. These changes, plus population growth and drought, also push people out of pastoralism. In all areas, pastoralism will continue to be the main economic activity but, at the same time, increasing numbers of people are seeking other livelihoods.

Uneven state formalization and periurban housing production in Hanoi and Mexico City: Comparative reflections from the global South

In the early 2000s, Vietnam and Mexico turned to the private sector to respond to increasing housing demand and tame the growth of uncontrolled periurban settlements. Around Hanoi, such arrangements fostered the construction of vertical developments while large subdivisions of single-family houses spread over former lakebeds in the peripheries of Mexico City. A stronger role of the private sector in the planning and provision of housing is often seen as an outcome of crisis-driven and crisis-inducing neoliberal reforms. However, the cases of Vietnam and Mexico suggest that a fuller understanding of housing production strategies currently favoured by each state needs to account for important elements of continuity in social, political, and economic practices. This continuity is demonstrated through the comparative analysis of three aspects of the restructuring of housing production in Mexico City’s and Hanoi’s periurban areas: (i) the discourses of ‘order’ used to legitimate heightened private sector involvement, (ii) legislative reforms facilitating periurban land appropriation for redevelopment, and (iii) the socio-spatial outcomes of these recent changes in terms of housing affordability, liveability, and quality. We conclude that both city-regions, despite important differences in their institutional and economic systems display enduring state/market/civil society relations associated with processes of ‘uneven state formalization’. This continuity and unevenness, we argue, better explains recent transformations of periurban housing production than an emphasis on the ruptures resulting from neoliberal reforms.

Land-use change, territorial restructuring, and economies of anticipation in dryland Kenya

ABSTRACT Land-use patterns in the Eastern African drylands have changed greatly in recent decades. Ethnographic data from East Pokot, in Kenya’s Baringo area, illustrate some of the major dynamics of change and point to relevant drivers. While the pastoral Pokot people managed an open, unfragmented rangeland until the 1990s, wildlife conservation, sedentarization, and land-use intensification, together with increasing contestation of borderlands, have led to a profound fragmentation and contraction of the commons, and a fundamental territorial restructuring. These dynamics are driven by economies of anticipation, fuelled by expectations of future developments such as large-scale infrastructural expansion and changing institutional frameworks, and entail massive conflicts around access to and control over land. While much attention has been paid to the role of external actors in land appropriation in East Africa, this paper directs attention to endogenous agency and compliancy in territorial restructuring.

Evaluation of Deterministic and Complex Analytical Hierarchy Process Methods for Agricultural Land Suitability Analysis in a Changing Climate

Land suitability analysis is employed to evaluate the appropriateness of land for a particular purpose whilst integrating both qualitative and quantitative inputs, which can be continuous in nature. However, in agricultural modelling there is often a disregard of this contiguous aspect. Therefore, some parametric procedures for suitability analysis compartmentalise units into defined membership classes. This imposition of crisp boundaries neglects the continuous formations found throughout nature and overlooks differences and inherent uncertainties found in the modelling. This research will compare two approaches to suitability analysis over three differing methods. The primary approach will use an Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), while the other approach will use a Fuzzy AHP over two methods; Fitted Fuzzy AHP and Nested Fuzzy AHP. Secondary to this, each method will be assessed into how it behaves in a climate change scenario to understand and highlight the role of uncertainties in model conceptualisation and structure. Outputs and comparisons between each method, in relation to area, proportion of membership classes and spatial representation, showed that fuzzy modelling techniques detailed a more robust and continuous output. In particular the Nested Fuzzy AHP was concluded to be more pertinent, as it incorporated complex modelling techniques, as well as the initial AHP framework. Through this comparison and assessment of model behaviour, an evaluation of each methods predictive capacity and relevance for decision-making purposes in agricultural applications is gained.

Commercial Conquest: Empire and Property in the Early US Republic

AbstractAlthough consent and commerce were dominant principles of revolutionary political culture, early American expansionists engaged in the continual appropriation of indigenous land. How were these principles of consent and commerce combined with processes of territorial conquest? Rather than a Lockean right of conquest where labor establishes the right to property, architects of early American expansion drew on a possessory right to property in which property is established by social convention rather than natural right. Political thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson and Henry Knox enlisted the possessory right to property in the justification of early US colonization, emphasizing the importance of purchasing Indian land. Yet when Indian nations refused to sell their land, these same figures cast indigenous resistance and coercive reactions to it as exceptions to the norm of commercial expansion, giving rise to a discourse of commercial conquest that aided in the justification of native dispossession.

Le patrimoine toponymique d’origine et d’influence françaises à l’école en milieu minoritaire : une voie de construction identitaire à emprunter

Essentiels à l’orientation et à la localisation, les noms de lieux, ou toponymes, sont des marques identitaires, symboles d’une présence et d’une appropriation du territoire. Ils constituent l’une des composantes majeures du paysage linguistique. Inspiré par une recherche qui a permis d’identifier et de répertorier près de 2 500 noms de lieux d’origine et d’influence françaises en Saskatchewan, la présente étude fait le point sur la place accordée à la toponymie dans les écoles francophones en milieux minoritaires. Un constat s’impose. L’étude de la toponymie est quasi absente des programmes d’études. Plusieurs facteurs permettent d’expliquer cet état de fait : la jeunesse de la science toponymique parmi les sciences humaines, et une méconnaissance de la richesse des toponymes d’origine et d’influence françaises dans les provinces et territoires canadiens. Après avoir discuté les obstacles qui se posent à l’identification d’un tel patrimoine et à sa mise en valeur, nous faisons valoir le puissant rôle de paysages linguistiques virtuels que peuvent jouer les cartes toponymiques à l’école.

Mapping the pastoral migratory patterns under land appropriation in East Sudan: the case of the Lahaween Ethnic Group

The loss of about 4 million ha of land in East Sudan to mechanised rain‐fed agriculture severely restricts pastoral mobility, as much of this land is the traditional rangeland for different transhumant pastoralists and smallholder farmers in the area. The aim of this paper is to map the current transformations of the migration patterns of transhumant pastoralists in East Sudan as a result of the land appropriation, by taking the Lahaween ethic group as an example. The paper followed a mixed approach of mapping, geo‐coded field trips using GPS device, focus group discussion and key informant interviews. The findings showed that the annual movement of the Lahaween covers approximately 350 km. They spend 77% of their annual cycle in the summer areas. Frequent and rapid herd movement is a principal strategy in the process of coping with land appropriation. Other coping and adaptation mechanisms taken by the Lahaween included separation of animal types; separation of herds from households; fragmentation of households; use of vehicles and mobile phones in managing herds; entering the national game park; and crossing the international border. The need to promote and facilitate livestock mobility is a longstanding claim in the region. However, the continued neglect of livestock movement territories by state planners is a contested issue which might add a new dilemma of conflict to the country. The mapping exercise presented in this paper is expected to offer a technical guide for solving the problem of congested mobility. It also provides decision‐makers with the current territories of pastoralists' movements.

Revival, Recognition, Restitution: Indigenous Rights in the Eastern Caribbean

Abstract:The idea that the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean islands became extinct has until recently dominated scholarly discourse and popular awareness. This “extinction” narrative served to justify the appropriation of indigenous lands during the colonial period, and its legacy continued into post-independence. In recent years, these misconceptions have been put under increasing scrutiny, not only by archaeological, historical, and ethnographic research but also, more importantly, by communities themselves. In Dominica, Saint Vincent, and Trinidad, communities are contesting negative stereotypes, reasserting their presence, and agitating for their human rights in the post-colonial islands states. This article discusses the acquisition of indigenous rights by descendant communities in the eastern Caribbean. It reveals the various degrees to which communities have gained state recognition and illustrates that while progress has been made in relation to recognition and cultural rights for communities in the islands, issues remain in relation to land security.

Between a Rock and a Stormy Place: From Overheating to Expulsion in Subic Bay (Philippines)

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the dynamics behind recent land and water appropriations in Subic Bay (Philippines). The communities adjacent to the former US Naval Base Subic Bay have undergone major transformations since the US military left in 1992. Through the establishment of a Freeport Zone, the area has become a hub for foreign direct investors seeking to profit from the Philippines’ low labour costs. Today, the most important investor in Subic is a South Korean conglomerate that has built one of the largest shipyards in the world in the area. The shipyard, providing labour to tens of thousands of workers, has also led to the dislocation of hundreds of subsistence fishers. With their old fishing grounds lost due to increasing pollution and newly established water boundaries, these villagers find that both the land and water they depend upon are increasingly becoming a scarce good.

Land, Place and Resistance to Displacement in Phulbari

This paper argues for a more context-specific understanding of dynamics of resistance to land dispossession in Bangladesh. The context is Borogram, a village in Phulbari where a large scale land appropriation has been planned for a proposed mining project. Emotion against possible displacement from land runs high in Phulbari. Whilst national resistance to mining involved ideas of nationalism and imperialism, local people’s experience was different. The paper shows how the stories of resistance to land appropriation need to be understood in relation to social relationships and accompanying entitlements, claims and mutual obligations which exist around a place. The paper argues that dispossession is not merely about the loss of farming land for those threatened by it, but the social ties they have built up over generations in their village.

From land dispossession to land restitution: European land rights in South Africa

ABSTRACTBehind every colonial and imperial project laid a persistent constellation of ideas in which rights, obligations and duties were specified to justify colonialism and establish ownership of land. This constellation of ideas provided the reasons for European expansionism, in addition to forming part of the ideological practices of the land-centred settler colonial project of founding new political orders. In this article, I explore the ideologies of land appropriation in colonial South Africa, paying particular attention to the idea of ‘empty land’ and ‘trusteeship’. As well as attending to this partly neglected aspect of South Africa's colonial history, I argue that land restitution today continues to be informed by norms that were used to justify occupation and the appropriation of lands inhabited by indigenous peoples.