Land Grabbing Research Articles

Innovations and Quality Seed Potato Multiplication in the Central Kenya Highlands

Aim: Potato is an important food crop in Kenya. Land for seed potato multiplication was allocated at Tigoni, but the volume produced declined due to land grabbing. To overcome this constraint partnerships were forged among various actors. The objective of the study was to unravel the link between partnerships and the history of land tenure in Kenya. Methods: Data was collected through qualitative methods. These included 25 key informant interviews, 9 focus group interviews and observations. This was complemented with secondary sources that included journal articles, books and reports. The qualitative data was transcribed, coded and analysed through ATLAS.ti 23 computer software. Results: The study found that collaborations with smallholder farmer groups did not provide quality seed potato due to inadequate land for crop rotation resulting in disease infestations. The study concluded that R&D partnerships did not deliver a reliable volume of quality seed as predicted, because they failed to address contextual constraints related to historical land shortages. Recommendation: The study recommended a government policy that ensures that all the grabbed land meant for research and seed multiplication was reverted to KALRO Tigoni to guarantee adequate potato seed multiplication.

Pathways towards sustainability: A capacity needs assessment for the implementation of the Colombian Policy for Sustainable Cattle 2022–2050

Cattle farming is one of the main agricultural activities in Colombia, but its mainly extensive nature generates significant social and environmental impacts, such as land grabbing, agricultural frontier expansion, increased greenhouse gas emissions, and deforestation. To transform cattle systems towards sustainability, the Policy Guidelines for Sustainable Cattle 2022–2050 (LPGBS) were launched in 2022, resulting from conversations between sector institutions and the national government. Although the LPGBS are proposed as the roadmap for cattle farming in the coming decades, their implementation has faced delays and raised doubts among the involved institutions. This research analyzes the current state of the LPGBS to identify difficulties and determine strategies that promote sustainability in cattle systems by building capacities. The research is based on a mixed-methods approach and contains a literature review on the evaluation of public policies in the cattle sector, complemented by 26 key-informant interviews with experts from public and private institutions involved in developing the LPGBS. These interviews provided key perspectives and practical experiences to understand current difficulties in the implementation of the LPGBS and identify the capacities needed to achieve the planned transition to sustainable cattle farming. Results reveal several difficulties in the LPGBS design stage, including institutional weakness, low governmental participation, and lack of trust among stakeholders. However, important progress was made, such as the construction of social, environmental, and productive sustainability criteria, the consolidation of the sustainability approach at the cattle landscape level, and regional participation. The capacities necessary to drive the implementation of the LPGBS include strengthening rural extension programs, access to financing, and the implementation of a traceability system for monitoring and evaluation. These findings highlight the importance of evaluating policies at early stages to provide crucial information for decision-makers and public policy formulators to correct and improve implementation processes.

Dispossession and beyond: Politics of rural land conversion in China's tourism villages

Across the peripheries of global South cities, projects to convert rural land for development purposes have brought dramatic impact on rural communities and environments. Many of these initiatives involve aggregating land, mobilizing investments, and resettling populations, with direct implications for villagers’ land rights and livelihoods. In existing studies, rural land conversions have often been examined through frameworks of “land grabbing” and “dispossession”. This paper argues for the need to go beyond these frameworks in conceptualizing the varied pathways and outcomes of rural land takings. It presents a comparative case study of two villages in China, whose land has been redeployed for tourism development. In one village, state-led expropriation led to the loss of land rights and the resettlement of villagers in new housing complexes. In another, villagers held onto land ownership and their property but saw intra-community inequalities amplified as residents were differentially incorporated into the tourism economy. By demonstrating how the nuanced mechanisms of land conversion could facilitate variegated livelihood and distributive outcomes between and within communities, this paper problematizes universalist conceptualizations of dispossession and calls for theorizing both “with” and “beyond” dispossession to account for the multifaceted dynamics of land development in global South contexts.

Critical Analysis on Land Grabbing as an Organized Crime

Abstract: Land grabbing has emerged as a critical issue in contemporary global discourse, significantly impacting socio-economic and environmental landscapes. This research examines the phenomenon of land grabbing, defined as the large-scale acquisition of land, often by foreign entities or corporations, which displaces local communities and disrupts traditional land use practices. Utilizing a mixed-methods approach, this study analyses case studies from various regions, including Africa, Asia, and Latin America, to uncover the underlying motivations and implications of land grabbing. The findings reveal that factors such as food security, resource scarcity, and economic development drive land acquisitions, frequently resulting in adverse effects on local populations, including loss of livelihoods and environmental degradation. Additionally, the research highlights the role of government policies and international trade agreements in facilitating land grabbing practices. The study underscores the need for robust legal frameworks and the active involvement of local communities in land governance to mitigate the negative impacts of land grabbing and promote sustainable development. Ultimately, this research contributes to the understanding of land grabbing as a complex interplay of economic interests, social justice, and environmental sustainability.

Crypto/Space: Computational parasitism, virtual land grabs, and the production of Web3 Exit zones

This paper explores how so-called ‘Web3’ blockchain projects are materially and socially constituted. A blockchain is an append-only distributed database. The technology is being hyped as applicable for a whole range of industries, social service provisions, and as a fix for economic disparities in communities left behind by mainstream financial systems. Drawing on case studies from our ongoing research we explain how, despite being virtual, Web3 projects are dependent on clearly defined spaces of production from which they derive their speculative value. We conceptualise this relationship as Crypto/Space, where space and blockchain software are mutually constituted. We consider how Crypto/Spaces are produced in three ways: 1) how project developers are adopting a parasitic relationship with host locations to appropriate energy, infrastructure, and local resources; 2) how projects enable ‘virtual land grabs’ where developers are engaging in land acquisitions, and associated displacement of local people, with no real intention to use the land for the declared purpose; and 3) how blockchain technology and speculative finance imaginaries are inspiring new anarcho-capitalist crypto-utopian ‘Exit zones’, often in the Global South. Far from being a zero-sum virtual game world, we argue that cryptocurrency projects are parasitic, often requiring predation on poor and otherwise marginalised communities to appropriate resources, onboard new users and enable favourable regulation.

Counterinsurgency, forest governance, and the dynamics of change in the forests of South Asia: Transition in Bangladesh's forests

Since the end of the Cold War, attention has increasingly focused globally on the nexus of conflict, natural resources, and governance, particularly in forested regions. This paper presents a comprehensive historical and comparative analysis of forest and biodiversity loss in Bangladesh over the last 50 years, attending to the impacts of counterinsurgency in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) and governance changes in the plains. Drawing on Peter Vandergeest and Nancy Peluso's seminal concept of “political forests,” the study critically analyzes how counterinsurgency, state-led development, and green militarization in the CHT, alongside neoliberal development, commercialization, and land grabbing in the plains, have reshaped forest governance and territorial control in the country. The analysis reveals that counterinsurgencies in the CHT, driven by domestic priorities and strategic interests, expanded colonial-style territorial control over forests, thereby exacerbating biodiversity loss. In the plains, neoliberal governance has promoted forest degradation through commercial exploitation and state-sanctioned land grabbing, with economic growth being pursued at the cost of environmental sustainability. This paper presents a critique of both militarized and neoliberal approaches to conservation, demonstrating how these models prioritize political and economic agendas over ecological integrity and local community needs. In conclusion, the study advocates a paradigmatic shift toward inclusive, community-centered forest governance that empowers local populations and emphasizes environmental stewardship, challenging dominant state-centric and market-driven approaches to forest management.

Conservation threats from tourism land grabs and greenwash

We report a new threat to conservation, namely land grabs by large tourism developers inside public protected areas. Locally, these tourism land grabs damage national parks through building footprints and access corridors, bringing habitat fragmentation, noise, light, roadkill, fire risk, and invasive plant and animal species and pathogens. They also create negative impacts on social equity and regional economies. The global tourism industry now perceives private development in public national parks as a mechanism to profit from land speculation, rather than merely monopoly provision of visitor services. Investment funds now use tourism, often with socialwashing components, as a political lever for land grabs. International “nature positive” marketing by tourism industry associations and multilateral tourism advocacy organisations is greenwash: it lacks substance, and aims to coopt conservation organisations.

Covering the land with oil palm: revelation, value, and landownership among the Kairak‐speaking Baining of Papua New Guinea

AbstractThis article explores how a displaced Papua New Guinean people decided to lease their customary land for oil palm plantation farming to restore their land use rights and resolve ongoing disputes with migrant settlers. By transforming the landscape into a territorialized space as a plantation, Kairak‐speaking Baining hoped to gain actual landownership status and control over their land, which in turn, they believed, could bring them the development they had long dreamed of. I argue that Kairak conceptions about the plantation as a tool to reveal their landownership and remove the settlers drew on Melanesian notions about covering and revelation, changing perceptions of value, and discourse around ‘settlerhood’ and ‘nativism’, and show how agribusiness capital expansion strategies leverage regional politics of identity and autochthony. By illustrating how the plantation expansion unfolded differently in this region, the material offers new insights on the Plantationocene, global land grabs, dispossession and migration, and reaffirms the consequences reported elsewhere in the world where enclosures of exclusion lead to forceful rearrangements of people's social and economic lives, leaving their hopes and plantation promises unrealized.

Does community-based tenure prevent land grabbing? The oil palm case in Mexico

The recent oil palm expansion has resulted in significant land losses for rural communities globally, raising concerns about food security, poverty, and the loss of common resources. This study investigates whether community-based tenure regimes in Mexico, particularly ejidos, prevent land grabbing and land concentration in oil palm producing regions. By mapping oil palm plantation types (smallholdings, mid-sized and large-scale plantations) across major land tenure regimes (ejido, communal and private property) using high spatial resolution imagery from Google Earth and ESRI/Maxar, we explore the relationship between tenure forms and land concentration. Our findings suggest that ejido lands largely prevents land grabbing by oil palm, although neoliberal reforms have favored land concentration, especially under private tenured land (southern Campeche) but also in some ejidos facing illegal land-based investments (Lacandon rainforest). This research contributes to broader debates on oil palm, tenure regimes and land grabbing, highlighting the need for land tenure policies that protect rural communities from industrial plantation encroachments.

Illegal luxuritecture: How the super-rich in Hong Kong land grab and unlawfully expand their luxury living spaces

This article introduces the concept of ‘illegal luxuritecture’ – illegal luxury architecture – to capture the way a minority of super-rich expand their living environments without planning permissions, sometimes through land grabs of government land. Typically, illegal housing is associated with the urban poor, but it is argued that through elite capture, unauthorised building works (UBWs) have also been utilised by the super-rich. This article focusses on Hong Kong where a number of illegal luxuritectural structures came to light after September 2023 when the most severe rainstorm since records began in the 19th century caused the collapse of unauthorised building works. Illegal luxuritectural construction involves illegally altering building foundations and sometimes flood protection walls, causing destabilisation of soil and creating landslides. Although failure to comply with Building (Planning) Regulations and the Buildings Ordinance is a criminal offence which can result in fines or imprisonment, findings suggest that a minority of the elite class tends to ignore these regulations. This is because, the fines for unauthorised building works are relatively small in relation to the high value of the property or the rental income generated, and prison sentences are almost never imposed. This article contributes to the current academic discussions on the super-rich in general and the housing of the global super-rich in particular.

Who rents out the land? Agrarian capital accumulation and lessor landowners in South America: The case of Uruguay

AbstractThis article studies the connections between lessor landowners, land grabbing and land financialization in contemporary capital accumulation. Drawing upon extensive empirical research conducted in Uruguay, which combined database analysis and in‐depth interviews, the paper provides key insights to understand why land leasing has become a central strategy of ground rent appropriation among different types of landowners at the beginning of the 21st century. Our main results show that the leasing strategy is a combination of tenant‐capitalists' expansion, social differentiation and demographic processes of the small landowning capitals displaced from production that rent out their lands, the process of land financialization through large institutional investors, which deploy a land banking strategy, and the optimization of land exploitation among landowner‐capitalists. Moreover, our results highlight the importance of prioritising the study of landowners as a class in itself and the different forms of ground rent appropriation.

Land conflicts from overlapping claims in Brazil’s rural environmental registry

Satellite-based land use monitoring and farm-level traceability offer opportunities for targeted zero-deforestation interventions on private lands. Brazil's Rural Environmental Registry (Cadastro Ambiental Rural, or "CAR"), a land cadaster based on self-declaration of property boundaries, was created to monitor compliance with national forest laws. It has become an important enabling measure for sustainable supply chain initiatives like the Amazon Soy Moratorium. However, CAR enrollment is increasingly used to bolster illegal land claims, putting it at the heart of land grabbing dynamics. Self-declaration of properties in the CAR offers a unique situation to study land conflicts and their impact on land use decisions on a large scale. We quantified competing land claims among 846,420 registrations in the Brazilian Legal Amazon and applied a series of generalized linear mixed-effects models. We determined that CAR overlaps are more prevalent on larger registrations, in more densely settled areas, and in areas with less secure land tenure. We tested how landholders respond to land conflicts, finding significantly more deforestation and declared legal forest reserve on lands with multiple claims. CAR overlap results in an overestimation of forest reserves by up to 9.7 million hectares when considering double-counted and deforested areas of reserves, highlighting an overlooked form of Forest Code noncompliance. While the CAR continues to be used as evidence of land tenure, we conclude that the formalization of land claims through self-declarations is inadequate to decrease conflicts. CAR overlap information provides objective evidence of land conflict that authorities can leverage with field inspection to ensure peaceful occupation before issuing land titles.

Oil Palm Plantation Expansion and Population Problems: An Explanatory Factor for Deforestation in Indonesia

Deforestation in Indonesia remains a significant issue due to various factors. This article reveals the impact of demographic variables on deforestation, using oil palm plantation expansion as a case study. The study applies Hunter's model, considering population dynamics and intermediate variables, namely science and technology, institutions, policies, and culture. Through traditional literature review methods, demographic data and field research results from 2010 to 2020 were elaborated, focusing on Sumatra, Kalimantan, and Sulawesi. The findings underline that Indonesian rapid population growth drives high consumption rates. Additionally, the development of oil palm plantations is faced with high demand for CPO, policies that attach too much importance to investment, and agrarian deregulation. All these intermediate variables are visible through the agricultural expansion as a pattern of agricultural development. The massive expansion by private companies resulted in a change in the socio-ecological landscape. In addition, there are dilemmas in the villager's livelihood system, such as shifting traditional livelihood bases, livelihood dualism, the emergence of new vulnerabilities, and land grabs. In order to realize sustainable palm oil development, we suggest governance reforms at the global, national, and local levels.

Moving toward a fairer access to land fostering agroecological transition? A decade of legal change and reframing of debates around soil and climate in France

Although farmland concentration receives narrower media coverage than land grab, it goes hand in hand with impactful environmental and demographic consequences. This article examines the case of France, one of the European countries with the highest level of farmland market control. It questions to what extent the regulation of access to land is adapted to initiate an agroecological and food transition. Its objective is to analyze why and how land concentration has been reframed in the past decade, by which types of stakeholders, building on which sources of legitimacy, and with which legal strategies and results. The theoretical framework combines the sociology of controversies and agenda-setting with a land justice-based approach. This article builds on a textual hermeneutics of 3 documental corpora encompassing a press review with 172 items, 112 documents (press releases, opinion pages, reports, notes, interviews, public speeches, amendment proposals, draft bills, laws, and decisions), and 3,409 tweets (those mentioning loi foncière or the #LoiFoncière hashtag, and those quoting, retweeting, or replying (to) them). These data were contextualized using sporadic participant observation. Since 2013, and more specifically since 2018, 2 networks of left-wing politicians, left-wing farmers’ unions, and civil society nongovernmental organizations have brought land justice concerns up-to-date to put farmland concentration on the political agenda. However, only minor progress has been made. A major factor in this is the chronological gap between, on the one hand, the successive reframings of the issue (from soil quality and climate change mitigation lenses), the proposed legal devices, the degree of projected legal change and, on the other hand, the pace at which the window of opportunity for a new land law has opened and closed. Indeed, the land imaginaries of land commons that underpin the agroecological transition are not yet sufficiently socially legitimate to be enshrined in law.

An Assessment of the Impact of Corporate-Driven Foreign Land Investments on Selected Human Rights in Mozambique

Abstract This article focuses on the impact of land investments in Mozambique. It examines the effects these land investments are having on local people’ access to food and sustenance, culture, land and water, and political engagement in some Mozambican provinces and areas. The next section critically evaluates whether human rights related to the aspects are being violated, as well as Mozambique’s legal obligations under both local and international law. The main goals are to alert the academic community to the negative impacts that land grab and investments have on local populations in Mozambique and to explain how these activities can be effectively stopped by using the normative framework now in place on human rights. It argues that foreign companies and investors in Mozambique are causing significant negative impacts on local communities, including livelihood, food, culture, land, and political participation. These issues are already protected by human rights law, and effective protection by the state could help combat land grabbing. Mozambique’s judiciary, civil society, and human rights institutions should work together to prevent local communities from being harmed.

Food System Governance in the Cambodian Mekong Delta: Food Production, Food Security, Migration, and Indebtedness

Despite the government’s active promotion of rice production, a significant portion of the population still faces food insecurity. While existing literature often highlights the success of achieving rice surplus, few studies delve into the connections between rice surplus and food security, and critically analyze why food security is persistent. In addressing this issue, the study investigates the underlying causes of food insecurity amidst the government’s efforts to increase rice production. The study entails a comprehensive review of existing literature and an examination of food security in three provinces in the Cambodian Mekong Delta. It concludes that while rice intensification has led to increased rice production available for consumption, challenges persist in terms of access to and utilization of rice for food consumption. These challenges are attributed to increased production costs with minimal profit margins, indebtedness, migration, land grabs, water conflicts, and lack of institutional integration in food systems, compounded by the effects of climate change and environmental degradation. As a result, a farming household with one hectare of farmland cannot produce enough rice for food consumption. Consequently, young people opt to sell off their land to settle debts and seek employment opportunities in urban and overseas areas.

Non-green ecological conservation: right-wing ecology in contemporary Germany

ABSTRACT After the rise and mainstreaming of the modern ecological movement, the right-wing ecological ideology has not gradually died out, and right-wing ecologists are still very active today. They not only actively participate in ecological debates and activities, but also combine their ideological concepts with practice, and focus on right-wing land grabbing in rural areas. As ecological issues tend to blur the boundaries between political camps, right-wing ecological conservation in ‘green’ garb is extremely misleading and harmful, and therefore needs to be studied in depth. Firstly, this article analyses the ideological basis of right-wing ecology in contemporary Germany from three aspects: historical view, human view and worldview. Secondly, by analyzing the basic positions of right-wing ecologists in the three main fields of ecological conservation, namely species protection, animal protection, green genetic engineering and organic agriculture, and their specific modes of action, this article identifies the motives of the right-wing ecologists’ participation in ecological conservation in terms of historical reasons and practical needs, and analyses the characteristics of their argumentation. Finally, on the basis of the above research, this article specifies the essential differences between right-wing ecological conservation and modern, civilized and scientific ecological conservation and its harms.

Does the Buck Stop Somewhere? Blame Games and State Capture in the Legalization of the Israeli Land Grab

This article explores the intricate relationship between the Israeli state and Jewish settlers in the occupied Palestinian West Bank after the Oslo Accords (1993). It shows that, despite the accords, which prohibited the establishment of new settlements, such activities persisted. Instead, the accords triggered the seemingly spontaneous emergence of numerous illegal “hilltop settlements,” tolerated by higher echelons of government and actively supported by lower levels. These settlements subsequently underwent a gradual post hoc formalization process, ultimately leading to their full legalization. The article elucidates how a faction within Israeli society influenced segments of the government, employing blame games as a strategy to rationalize the legitimization of the Israeli land grab. Notably, it highlights the strategic and deceptive tactics employed by various Israeli governments in their dealings with the settler movement. The article concludes by reflecting on the political implications of the settler movement's success for the democratic character of the Israeli state.

Discursive Representation of Social Actors in Selected Speeches of the Former Zimbabwean President, Robert Mugabe

This study investigates the discursive devices deployed by the late former Zimbabwean President, Robert Mugabe, to represent social actors in his speeches, in order to unveil how these devices and the ideologies in them are mobilized to maintain political power and garner popular support. The data for the study comprise his: 2002 world summit on sustainable development speech in South Africa, 2005 party manifesto speech in Zimbabwe, 2003 Non-aligned speech in Malaysia, and 2007 UN speech in New York. These were subjected to qualitative analysis with insights from Teun A. van Dijk’s socio-cognitive model of Critical Discourse Analysis. The study reveals that Mugabe uses discursive polarization strategies to emphasize positive things/de-emphasize negative things about his in-group (himself, Zanu-PF, the majority black, majority Zimbabwean supporters, and the third-world country allies), but emphasizes negative things/de-emphasizes positive things about the out-group (the minority white Zimbabwean land grabbers, the USA, the UK, Tony Blair, George Bush, etc.). The discursive strategies identified were used to pursue land ownership, anti-imperialist, revolutionary, and Marxist ideologies. The study concludes that these strategies were employed by Mugabe as linguistic, rhetorical and political strategies to maintain power and mobilize the support of majority black Zimbabweans for years.

Centering Afro-Colombian Lideresa Felicita Campos: Counter-narrative Comics against Land Grabs

Abstract: This article explores the representation of social leader Felicita Campos in a comic book created by members of her community and a team led by sociologist Orlando Fals Borda and painter Ulianov Chalarka in the early 1970s. The comic portrays Campos, a female Afro-Colombian peasant, fighting for recognition of her community's land ownership rights during the 1920s amidst intense repression and violence. Through critical analysis of visual narratives, historical research, and literary criticism, this article highlights the significance of "Felicita Campos: La mujer campesina en lucha por la tierra" as a mnemonic device for remembering and learning from past struggles against land theft and injustice. It also examines her representation as a female protagonist in relation to the natural and non-human world, comparing it to other female roles and representations in Colombian and Latin American comics. The article emphasizes the importance of amplifying the voices of marginalized communities and promoting social justice through visual media like comics. Overall, this article contributes to the scholarship on Afro-Latin American studies, comics studies, and oral and literary traditions, underscoring the importance of "Felicita Campos: La mujer campesina en lucha por la tierra" as a tool for etnoeducación and generating dialogue and participation among marginalized communities.