Large-scale Land Transactions Research Articles

Land banking, land price and Ghana’s informal land markets: A relational complexity approach

Land banking practices have received little attention on how such practices shape informal land markets in developing countries. Drawing on a relational complexity framework, this study explores the land banking experience in Ghana’s informal land markets. This research conducted semi-structured interviews with over thirty participants from four communities within the Ghanaian informal land market. The analysis revealed that developers are banking large tracts of land as capital investments through land dispositions. The absence of development on these banked lands has created a situation where developers are gradually influencing land prices. The analysis also shows that developers have created complex ongoing relationships with customary land managers. This coalition relationship has shaped land prices through the displacement of state-mediated statutory powers for land exchanges. The study recommends revisiting of stakeholder discussions on the enforcement and monitoring of the processes required under the Ghanaian Lands Commission guidelines for large-scale land transactions.

Towards a science of ‘land grabbing’

In the past two decades, large-scale land transactions (LSLTs), commonly known as land grabs or large-scale land acquisitions, have been pursued by agricultural investors and host-country governments in Lower- and Middle-Income Countries (LMIC) to boost crop yield. Existing knowledge on LSLTs is highly diverse, generated by scholars taking a wide range of perspectives and frameworks. However, the global patterns of LSLT-related research and their potential shortcomings remain under-investigated. In this paper, we analyze 370 peer-reviewed papers on LSLTs to advance this field of knowledge towards a science of ‘land grabbing’. Our findings reveal that 1) research on LSLTs displays geographical imbalances; 2) global statistics do not fully capture the complexity of LSLTs on the ground; 3) different disciplinary interests and theoretical traditions result in different use of terms in referring to LSLTs and divergent impressions of their social consequences; and 4) the environmental consequences of LSLTs are under-studied relatively. We suggest that a better understanding of LSLTs could result from greater engagement with each discipline’s strength and epistemic frameworks.

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.

What Drives Landowners to Resist Selling Their Land? Insights from Ethical Capitalism and Landowners’ Perceptions

Foreign land grabbing is acknowledged as a phenomenon that generates disempowerment and dispossession of local farmers, human rights violations. Previous studies have revealed the lack of ethical benchmarks in foreign large-scale land transactions that raise moral concerns. It is evident that when resources are scarce and people depend on them, the balance between values and interests transforms itself into a dilemma. Within this context, the aims of the paper were to bring to the fore critical reflection on a more ethical perspective of large-scale land acquisitions and to extend the scant information on what factors determine landowners not to sell their land to foreigners to limit land grabbing. This context justifies the need for a critical reflection on a more ethical perspective of large-scale land acquisitions. Therefore, two objectives were set. The first one is to document the role of ethics in large-scale land transactions. Based on the land grabbing literature, authors selected a set of eight land grabbing narratives, most often interrelated and overlapping, that pose ethical considerations. The second objective is to reveal how well a set of variables can predict the “Resistance to sell” the land to foreigners even when an attractive price is offered. As ethics is a social construct, the analysis captured the stakeholders’ perspective on land grabbing. Therefore, a questionnaire was applied to a sample of 332 Romanian landowners from twelve randomly selected counties to reveal their perceptions. Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was used to observe how well a set of seven variables could predict landowners’ “Resistance to sell” their land to foreign buyers. The use of PLS-SEM was justified by the existence of single items and the need to examine many structural model relations. Results showed that the variables with the strongest contribution to the prediction of the dependent variable are the “Probability to join an association for farmers rights defense”, the “Importance of the land price offered by the potential foreign buyer”, and the “Perceived effect of agricultural land conversion to urban land”. Raising awareness on the importance of buyer attributes, increasing people’s perception of the negative effect of agricultural land conversion to urban land, or strengthening the state’s image as a necessary actor to limit land grabbing will increase landowners’ resistance to sell their land to foreigners. Finally, it can be inferred that, within this frame of discussion, ethics should be valued as a means to create economically viable and morally justifiable solutions for foreign large-scale land transactions.

Land-use changes associated with large-scale land transactions in Ethiopia

Land-use changes associated with large-scale land transactions in Ethiopia

Carbon emissions from the global land rush and potential mitigation.

Global drivers and carbon emissions associated with large-scale land transactions have been poorly investigated. Here we examine major factors behind such transactions (income, agricultural productivity, availability of arable land and water scarcity) and estimate potential carbon emissions under different levels of deforestation. We find that clearing lands transacted between 2000 and 2016 (36.7 Mha) could have emitted ~2.26 GtC, but constraining land clearing to historical deforestation rates would reduce emissions related to large-scale land transactions to ~0.81 GtC.

Capital, labor, and gender: the consequences of large-scale land transactions on household labor allocation

ABSTRACTContemporary large-scale land transactions (LSLTs), also called land grabs, are historically unprecedented in their scale and pace. They have provoked robust scholarly debates, yet studies of their gender-differentiated impacts remain more rare, particularly when it comes to how changes in control over land and resources affect women's labor, and thereby their livelihoods and well-being. Our comparative study of four LSLTs in western Ethiopia finds that the transactions led to substantial land use change, including relocation and decrease in size of smallholder parcels, loss of communally-held grazing lands, and loss of forests. These changes had far-reaching impacts on household labor allocation, the gendered division of labor, and household wellbeing. But their effects on women are both more adverse and more severe, expressed in terms of increased wage labor to make up for lost land and livestock, more time spent gathering firewood and water from increasingly distant locations, and an increased intensity of household responsibilities where male members underwent wage labor migration. These burdens led to negative psychological, corporal, and material effects on women living in and near transacted areas compared to their situation prior to transactions. This article both responds to the deficit in studies on the impacts of LSLTs on gendered livelihoods, labor relations, and wellbeing outcomes, and lays the groundwork for future research.

Improving Transparency and Reliability of Tenure Information for Improved Land Governance in Senegal

In current literature, certain scholars have stressed the role of the private sector in the process of revitalizing agriculture through agribusiness-led development. Others have underlined the global risks of poorly negotiated land acquisitions that disadvantage farmers and of nontransparent trade arrangements that create suspicion within local communities. Official and unofficial data whose relevance is frequently questioned, because they differ from actual conditions found on the ground, are often built upon these narratives. This acknowledgement points to the need for reliable data in order to support constructive debates on models of agricultural development. Senegal is experiencing similar controversies involving the dynamics of agribusiness development within the context of inadequate information on land acquisitions. In this paper, we first acknowledge the existence of past and current efforts to address investments in the agricultural sector. After critical analysis of these documents, we propose another way to monitor investments with survey tools that are embedded in participatory action-research processes and then provide information that can be used as a boundary object. We advocate the use of mapping tools to identify and monitor land processes, and the use of geospatial information to help identify an initial inventory of various sources of data on large-scale land transactions.

Human Rights Responses to Land Grabbing: a right to food perspective

This article approaches the debate on ‘contemporary land grabbing’ from a human rights perspective, focusing on one right that is particularly threatened: the right to food. It sketches an analytical framework grounded in international human rights law and the contribution such a framework can bring to the land-grabbing debate. Following a brief historical background on the right to food and its articulation in international human rights law, the paper expands on this by focusing on what can be called human rights responses to land grabbing from a right to food standpoint. The analysis considers the contributions of different actors in the human rights sphere and examines the role of the UN Committee on World Food Security and its recently adopted Voluntary Guidelines on the responsible governance of tenure of land, fisheries and forests. It also investigates how the phenomenon has been addressed by the UN human rights mechanisms, drawing on relevant practice of the UN treaty bodies and the Human Rights Council, with a focus on the Special Rapporteur on the right to food and the Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Cambodia. The engagement of regional human rights system with the issue of large-scale land transactions is also analysed.

Gender and ‘Land Grabbing’ in Sub-Saharan Africa: Women's land rights and customary land tenure

Jessica Chu seeks to enquire into the understanding of gender impacts with the new proliferation of cross-border, large-scale land transactions or global ‘land grabs’. There has been a lack of discussion of gender in considering land grabs, most notably in the World Bank's recent report and in the various proposed guidelines. However, by not having addressed the current debates on women's land rights, particularly in regard to the return of customary law, current proposed solutions will fail to address the gender inequalities propagated by the land grabs.