Land Rush Research Articles

Defining “success” in large-scale agricultural investment: a typology based on different stakeholder perspectives

In 2007/2008, a triple crisis of food, fuel and finance sparked a global rush for agricultural land; tens of millions of hectares were acquired, primarily by foreign investors, within countries in the Global South. Amidst those transactions, intergovernmental organizations, national governments, investors, and community members envisioned what “success” of such investments entails. Although not explicitly defined, each stakeholder had different conceptualizations and measures of it, based upon the descriptions used and desired outcomes sought. Despite a large amount of literature analyzing the global rush for land, as far as we are aware no one has analyzed the diverse viewpoints about what success entails. This paper compares conceptualizations among four key stakeholder groups, based on ideal types from dominant narratives, and develops a typology of ideal stakeholder framing of success to allow comparisons of uses and thereby provide a foundation for researchers who are assessing the global land rush. This paper provides clarity about widely used, but inconsistently defined, framing providing an important foundation for clarity of meaning and comparative differences between stakeholders. The typology advances the discourse on the land rush by providing nuance to this widely used framing and makes explicit its diverse meanings.

Crop booms as regime shifts.

A crop boom is a sudden, nonlinear and intense expansion of a new crop. Despite their large impacts, boom-bust dynamics are not well understood; booms are largely unpredictable and difficult to steer once they unfold. Based on the striking resemblances between land regime shifts and crop booms, we apply complex systems theory, highlighting the potential for regime shifts, to provide new insights about crop boom dynamics. We analyse qualitative and quantitative data of rubber and banana plantation expansion in two forest frontier regions of northern Laos. We show that preconditions, including previous booms, explain the occurrence (why) of booms, and triggers like policy and market changes explain their timing (when). Yet, the most important features of booms, their intensity and nonlinearity (how), strongly depended on internal self-reinforcing feedbacks. We identify built-in feedbacks (neighbourhood effects and imitation) and emergent feedbacks (land rush) and show that they were social in nature, multi-scale from plot to region and subject to thresholds. We suggest that these are regular features of booms and propose a definition and causal-mechanistic explanation of crop booms, examining the overlap between booms and regime shifts and the role of frontiers. We then identify opportunities for management interventions before, during and after booms.

Racial capitalism and women’s horticultural labour in Senegal: neo-housewifisation and the micro-politics of paternalism

ABSTRACT The article addresses the social relations of labour in Senegal a decade after the land rush. Based on an intersectional feminist analysis of three firms, the study found that workers’ subjugation to patriarchal control in their households and workplace capitalists indicate the emergence of labour control associated with settler colonies of Africa. I argue that strategic alliances between patriarchy and racial capitalism influence the mobilisation and control of labour classes: i) through the subordination of women and younger male workers to farm management through the micropolitics of paternalism; and ii) through new spatial fixation forms of previously mobile footloose labour of women and junior workers staying close to their families for work such that they become a compliant and tied labour force. This occurs simultaneously with an urban exodus to the rural and peri-urban areas where the commercial horticultural farms are located. Class consciousness is stymied so resistance is circumscribed, taking limited, individualised forms.

Land rush

ABSTRACT Studies and debates on the issue of land grabs have generated multiple terms and concepts that are used loosely and interchangeably, such as large-scale land acquisitions, land grab, land deals, land enclosure, and land rush, among others. Explanations and critiques of such terms have built and enriched our knowledge. Yet, there is one term that has been under-explored: land rush. Here, we offer our own definition of a ‘land rush’, which has a different meaning from the other commonly used terms. These differences have important theoretical, methodological and political extensions and implications. Applying the lens of ‘land rush’ requires us to adjust our focus, and shows that the literature and public debates have focused on ‘concluded, operational land acquisitions’; they have tended to be dismissive of ‘failed land deals’, blind to ‘pin prick’ types of land accumulation, and have rarely taken the ‘land rush’ itself as the unit of inquiry and subject of public debate in any systematic way. This has led to a fragmented knowledge. Using the concept of the ‘land rush’ enables us to connect the issue of land grabs to broader global social life more effectively. As such, it is a key concept in Critical Agrarian Studies.

Does land tenure change accelerate deforestation? A matching-based four-country comparison

The scale and pace of land tenure change for agricultural development, often known as ‘land grabbing’ or ‘global land rush,’ are historically unprecedented. Control over millions of hectares of land has shifted over the past decade for the production of food, fiber, and biofuel. However, the rapidly growing body of research on land tenure change provides few rigorous assessments of deforestation across multiple countries with distinct biophyisical and socioeconomic characteristics. In this paper, based on spatial boundaries of land transactions (LTs) in Cambodia, Ethiopia, Liberia, and Peru, we investigate their association with deforestation using a pixel-based matching approach. Our findings suggest that the context, size, and distribution of LTs and the associated deforestation patterns vary substantially across the four countries. Land tenure change significantly accelerates deforestation in Cambodia and Liberia, but such acceleration is insignificant in Ethiopia. In Peru, we observe the opposite trend, where areas adjacent to LTs experience higher deforestation than areas within. Our analysis reveals how patterns and outcomes of LTs are linked to country characteristics and contexts, and suggests that sweeping generalizations about positive or negative consequences of LTs on deforestation and possibly other socioenvironmental outcomes need to attend more closely to specific patterns and drivers of LTs.

Making concessions pay? Historical vs. potential tax revenues from Laos’s rubber sector

Under-taxation has been a prominent feature of the global land rush, figuring centrally in early concerns that transnational land deals constitute a new round of land grabbing rather than a source of productive investment. In the years since, however, under-taxation has been widely ignored in subsequent literature on state land concessions in the agri-plantation sector across the global South. To address this gap, this paper draws on ongoing research in Laos, where improved concession inventory efforts have helped stimulate a wide-ranging debate (both in and out of government) about the country’s still-opaque processes of concession taxation. We use the rubber sector to examine a pair of concession-taxation strategies that have been pursued to varying degrees both in Laos and more broadly: taxing land from the time it is alienated to a concessionaire (a land fee model), and taxing the resource itself – in this case rubber plantations – from the time they become productive (a royalty model). Using a quantitative-geographic approach enabled by Laos’s recently updated land concession inventory, we estimate potential tax revenues from rubber plantations under four taxation regimes that were deployed in various parts of the country over the last decade and a half: two of each type, with each type including higher and lower per-unit variants. Our analysis of the space of potential taxation implies significant opportunity costs inherent in the status-quo approach to taxation, which we discuss via the example of unaddressed need for concession-related compensation. Especially at the higher-end range, where taxation potentials total in the tens of millions of dollars per year, we find that Laos’s rubber-concession landscape has significant potential to help address this issue. To the degree that under-taxation is addressed in the future, however, new concession-tax revenues will increasingly be subject to spending demands from outside the rubber sector.

Beyond land grabbing narratives, acknowledging patterns and regimes of land control in Senegal

Land is central to addressing global development challenges, and land governance is at the heart of paradigms of democracy, justice, sustainability, and resilience. Despite the thoroughly recognized importance of land as a basis for all human-nature relations, the land sector is challenged by mechanisms of commodification and land control. The widely recognized global land rush of the late 2000 s increased the pressure on land, spotlighting in particular the rising demand for arable lands. But despite a growing awareness, the patterns and regimes of dispossession are still subject to blind spots, due in part to a recurring focus on foreign land grabbers, a lack of transparent data on land investments, and several methodological limitations. In Sub-Saharan Africa, one of the world's most targeted areas in terms of land investments, Senegal offers an interesting case study because published data on land control has been limited to foreign land investments. In this study, conducted in partnership with the technical committee of the Senegalese Land Governance Observatory, we propose another way to look at land control in agriculture by encompassing all types of investors at a national scale and focusing on the full ensemble of control processes. In our results, we describe the dynamics of land investments through time and space and identify three different types (or clusters) of investment patterns with specificities in terms of investing stakeholders, crops, and markets. While we highlight the inequality in land distribution and control, we also stress the environmental impacts of large agricultural investments that encroach on common lands and the social consequences of restricting access and use of resources, which further exacerbates the exclusion of local communities.

The carbon cost of agricultural production in the global land rush

Increases in the number of large-scale land transactions (LSLTs), commonly known as ‘land grabbing’ or ‘global land rush,’ have occurred throughout the lower- and middle-income world over the past two decades. Despite substantial and continuing concerns about the negative socio-environmental impacts of LSLTs, trade-off analysis on boosting crop yield and minimizing climate-related effects remains limited. Our study makes use of a global dataset on LSLTs for agricultural production to estimate potential carbon emissions based on different scenarios of land cover change and fertilizer use, as well as potential value of agricultural production on transacted land. We show that, if fully implemented on ∼ 38 M ha of transacted land, 2.51 GtC will be emitted during land conversion, with another 24.2 MtC/year emitted from fertilizer use, assuming farming technology of investors’ origin is adopted on transacted land. Comparison of different combinations of forest protection policies and agricultural intensification levels reveals that enforcing strict deforestation regulation while promoting fertilizer use rate improves the carbon efficiency of agricultural production. Additionally, positive spillovers of investors’ farming technology on existing arable lands of host countries can potentially double their crop yield. Our analyses thus suggest that fostering agricultural intensification and technology spillovers under strict regulation on land allocation to investors to protect forests would allow for boosting agricultural yield while minimizing carbon emissions.

Modeling trade-offs among ecosystem services for agriculture in the “sisal belt” of Kilosa, central Tanzania

Exploring ways to maintain a biophysically functioning environment while improving human welfare based on competing stakeholder land uses is critical for sustainable development, especially under the context of a surging “global land rush”. This research (1) integrates different stakeholders’ perceptions of human-environmental conditions and dynamics in the “sisal belt” of Kilosa, Tanzania, in terms of three alternative development visions or scenarios of land uses and covers, and (2) demonstrates the trade-offs and synergies among several ecosystem and economic outcomes at a landscape level. Two spatially explicit modeling tools, Future Land Use Simulation (FLUS) and Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Trade-offs (InVEST), are combined to assess future land-use and -cover patterns and project changes in four ecosystem services, including provisioning commodity production, under the three stakeholder-defined scenarios for the study area up to 2030. Each scenario had higher commodity production values relative to the baseline conditions of 2018 but lower levels of ecosystem services addressed at the level of the Kilosa sisal belt landscape. Carbon and water services may generate synergistic effects provided specific mitigation and payment mechanisms are installed. The spatial distribution of the changes in these services is projected. Our approach provides an empirical-based platform to inform landscape management and planning. It provides a co-designed means to address possible futures of human-environmental conditions affecting sustainability, in this case for food production, resource use, poverty alleviation, and environmental conservation.

“Taken-left” dynamics? Rethink the livelihood changes of affected villagers in the era of the global land rush

When large-scale common land is taken from villagers by investors with little compensation, their labour unneeded, villagers’ livelihoods tend to be largely destroyed. This implies a tendency to focus on what has been taken from villagers during the land-based change, which has valid and has far-reaching social relevance. But as the rise of the industrial tree plantation (ITP) sector in Guangxi shows, some villagers are capable of having their livelihoods maintained and even expanded when big investors come and acquire massive amounts of land. This seems to be an anomaly at a first glance, considering what has been taken from villagers, but these unexpected and positive livelihood changes can be explained when one closely examines the dynamic of what is taken and what has been left to villagers. During this ITP boom, although large-scale collectively owned forestland is taken by investors and few work opportunities are created to incorporate those affected, villagers’ control over farmland plots and their access to off-farm work opportunities remain (including the land system and labour dynamics). This paper highlights the importance of analysing “taken-left” dynamics to more fully capture diverse livelihood changes.

Architecting the Metaverse: Blockchain and the Financial and Legal Regulatory Challenges of Virtual Real Estate

There has been disagreement over the value of purchasing space in the metaverse, but many businesses including Nike, The Wendy’s Company, and McDonald’s have jumped in headfirst. While the metaverse land rush has been called an “illusion” given underdeveloped infrastructure, including inadequate software and servers, and the potential opportunities for economic and legal abuse, the “real estate of the future” shows no signs of slowing. While the current virtual space of the metaverse is worth $6.30 billion, that is expected to grow to $84.09 billion by the end of 2028. But the long-term legal and regulatory considerations of capitalizing on the investment, as well as the manner in which blockchain technology can secure users’ data and digital assets, has yet to be properly investigated. With the metaverse still in a conceptual phase, building a new 3D social environment capable of digital transactions will represent most of the initial investment in time in human capital. Digital twin technologies, already well-established in industry, will be ported to support the need to architect and furnish the new digital world. The return on and viability of investing in the “real estate of the future” raises questions fundamental to the success or failure of the enterprise. As such this paper proposes a novel framing of the issue and looks at the intersection where finance, technology, and law are converging to prevent another Dot-com bubble of the late 1990s in metaverse-based virtual real estate transactions. Furthermore, the paper will argue that these domains are technologically feasible, but the main challenges for commercial users remain in the legal and regulatory arenas. As has been the case with the emergence of online commerce, a legal assessment of the metaverse indicates that courts will look to traditional and established legal principles when addressing issues until the enactment of federal and/or state statutes and accompanying regulations. Lastly, whereas traditional regulation of real estate would involve property law, the current legal framing of ownership of metaverse assets is governed by contract law.

Time will tell: Temporalities of a European land deal in Zambia and its critics

Like many other examples of the ongoing global land rush, a large Zambian land deal initiated by a European agribusiness in 2012 was met with cries of alarm from international critics about the amount of land purchased and the negative impact the investment could have on local residents. The agribusiness, however, responded relatively quickly. Not only did this initially contribute to protecting the position of (affected) residents, but it also enhanced the image of the agribusiness as a corporation willing to listen to concerns. As with land deals elsewhere, though, the situation looks much different ten years on, with the project not living up to its promises, either financially or regarding rural residents. To better understand these discrepancies, a closer look at various temporalities together is revealing – importantly, as others have discussed, because tensions between temporal dimensions of finance and agriculture frequently affect land deals. But simultaneously, as the Zambian case demonstrates, (international) critics, such as advocacy groups, NGOs, and media, operate according to particular temporal dynamics – with attention devoted to the investment fluctuating over time – while (local) stakeholders, including neighbouring rural residents and state institutions refraining from enforcing the agribusiness to honour agreements along the line, also affect developments. Through analysing these temporalities over an extended period of time, this article aims to contribute to an understanding of challenges involved in holding land deals to account. Accordingly, broader lessons can be drawn about the ambiguous potential for mitigating negative effects of large-scale land acquisitions – and corporate practices more generally.

Rescaling the land rush? Global political ecologies of land use and cover change in key scenario archetypes for achieving the 1.5 °C Paris agreement target

ABSTRACT Advancing future-oriented perspectives in political ecology and critical agrarian studies, this paper examines projected land use and land cover change (LULCC) dynamics in four ‘archetypal’ scenarios foregrounded by the IPCC for limiting global warming to 1.5°C by 2100. Focusing on the Global South, we explore how these archetypes project a radical reversal of historical LULCC and rural population trends, potentially implying a considerable rescaling of contemporary land rush dynamics. Taken together, land-based climate mitigation futures highlight risks related to the (re)production of relative surplus populations through processes of rural enclosure and accumulation by dispossession in the Global South.

‘Adversely Incorporated yet Moving up the Social Ladder?’: Labour Migrants Shifting the Gaze from Agricultural Investment Chains to ‘Care Chains’ in Capitalist Social Reproduction in Senegal

In Senegal, the growth of horticulture has been particularly rapid in the last decade or so, partly coinciding with the 2007–2008 ‘land rush’ and a boom in agricultural investment. This article analyses the implications of the rise in foreign direct investment (FDI) in the horticultural sector in northern Senegal. Specifically, it examines FDI’s effects on labour migration and the social reproduction of rural classes of labour through an intersectional feminist and gendered lens. It argues that invisibilised ‘care chains’ that overly burden women, and communities of solidarities, play a crucial role in the social reproduction of horticultural workers, most specifically migrant workers, and provide a subsidy to agrarian capital. Yet, capitalist development does not always translate to better wages and more inclusive laws and policies for horticultural wage workers and providers of caring labour who are adversely incorporated in these political economies. As a result, this requires further attention from policy-makers and political leaders. Using a combination of working-life histories and survey data gathered through two rounds of fieldwork over two years, and secondary data from relevant databases, this article focuses on the River Valley Region and Louga to analyse the emerging challenges of labour migration, social reproduction and caring labour in rural Senegal.

Do land rushes really improve food security in Sub-Saharan Africa?

Developing countries have been affected by the land rush phenomenon for several years. This paper investigates the effect of a land rush on food security during the period 2000–2018. Using panel data for 32 Sub-Saharan African countries, econometric investigations show that land rush not only has an adverse effect on the production of cereals but also increases malnutrition. More interestingly, the effect on food security do not depend on land use. Unlike land acquisition for biofuel which has no effect on food security, land acquisition for food crops, mixed production of biofuel and food crops and land for other uses contribute to food insecurity in Sub-Saharan Africa through a decrease in cereal production and increased malnutrition.

The value of so-called ‘failed’ large-scale land acquisitions

The land rush has remained, and is likely to remain, a significant global phenomenon despite waning international media attention. The scope of the phenomenon is likely to be wider than previously thought. Quantifying the extent of land deals in order to study the social phenomenon spotlights the relevance of two distinct but dialectically linked ‘scopes’, namely, the scope of land deals in terms of the precise geographic physical land area of Operational land deals, and the scope of land deals in terms of the larger extent of lands implicated in land deal-making, of which only a part ends up as operational land deals. The latter category is necessarily bigger than the former, and its logic results in the production of Non-operational land deals. Studies have been overwhelmingly about Operational land deals, inadvertently downplaying the relevance of Non-operational land deals. The challenge is to study both Operational and Non-operational land deals because they are co-constitutive.

Land acquisition through Bricolage? Politics of smallholder acacia plantation expansion in upland Central Vietnam

ABSTRACT Commodity booms can lead to intense pressure to access land. We document a case where villagers, far from being passive victims of land grabs, acquire land themselves by navigating between customary institutions and state policies. The mechanisms by which villagers re-territorialize forest to their advantage include enclosure, encroachment, theft, and re-claiming. These mechanisms evolve over time, notably in response to a closing of the forest frontier, thus challenging locals seeking livelihoods and state officials managing forests. The paper questions assumptions about local villagers' positionality in the global land rush and calls for rethinking the nature of peasant politics worldwide.

Agri-investment scholars of the world unite! The finance-driven land rush as boundary object

This response addresses several of the issues raised by the commentaries on my book Farming as Financial Asset: Global Finance and the Making of Institutional Landscapes (2020). Reflecting upon the intentions and limitations of the book, it makes a call for treating agri-investments to which scholars contribute from different geographical, theoretical, and methodological angles. In detail, it engages with the question of how farmland investments relate to other ‘asset classes’ in terms of the practical (and political) problem of institutional investibility, the material and human dimensions of institutional landscapes, the ownership question, as well as the challenge to write a book that has a global historical outlook and offers situated accounts at the same time. It also engages with questions of comparativism, methodology, and the political implications of an opening-the-black box approach.

Land formalization turned land rush: The case of oil palm in Papua New Guinea

Land formalization for large-scale agricultural development has received renewed interest in academic and policy circles as a mechanism to spur economic development and growth. International development organizations increasingly promote large investments by private investors in the agriculture sector to enable access to capital and technology, and generate employment and productivity. This article uses a case study in Papua New Guinea (PNG), where the government seeks to attract large-scale transnational investments for oil palm production by formalizing large swathes of customary land. Employing a political economy approach to land rights, the case demonstrates how PNG’s recent land formalization policy has been captured by powerful ‘big shots’ and companies, within an environment of weak and changing governance. The article highlights the importance of analyzing contextual factors such as the local political economy to understand the process and outcomes of land formalization attempts. To understand the distributional outcomes of land formalization, this article finds that it is less useful for governments and development agencies to ask if land formalization works, but rather for whom and under what conditions.

Historical grounding, political contexts, material hurdles: Towards more in‐depth understandings of ‘finance going farming’

AbstractTwo recently published books—Fairbairn's Fields of Gold and Ouma's Farming as a Financial Asset—now provide the first extensive investigations into finance's engagement with farmland. Both books set out to understand finance's growing interest in farmland from the perspective of the financial actors involved, and inquire how, why, and with what kind of challenges ‘finance has been going farming.’ This review essay discusses the two books in the context of the ‘land rush’ literature. It outlines how they contribute to an advanced understanding of the financialization of farmland in three ways, by (i) embedding finance‐farmland intersections historically; (ii) scrutinizing the role of the state within financial farmland investments; and (iii) exploring the hurdles involved in ‘marrying’ finance with farmland. I then critically reflect on the areas that have not been covered by the authors. Critical agrarian studies need to investigate how financialization intersects with the digitization of agriculture, examine life expectancies and afterlives of financialized farms, further ground financial investment in concrete rural spaces, and explore individual motivations and belief systems of its proponents more seriously.