Beyond land grabs: new insights on land struggles and global agrarian change

ABSTRACT

The conjunction of climate, food, and financial crises in the late 2000s triggered renewed interest in farmland and agribusiness investments around the world. This phenomenon became known as the ‘global land grab' and sparked debates among social movements, NGOs, academics, government and international development agencies worldwide. In this introduction, we critically analyse the ‘state of the literature' so far, and outline four areas that are moving the debate ‘beyond land grabs'. These include: (1) the role of contract farming and differentiation among farm workers in the consolidation of farmland; (2) the broader forms of dispossession and mechanisms of control and value grabbing beyond ‘classic’ land grabs for agricultural production; (3) discourses about, and responses to, Chinese agribusiness investments abroad; and (4) the relationship between financialization and land grabbing. Ultimately, we propose new directions to deepen and even transform the research agenda on land struggles and agroindustrial restructuring around the world.

KEYWORDS:

• Global land grab
• contract farming
• agricultural labour
• control grabbing
• dispossession
• financialization

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Barry Gills and Kevin Gray for bringing us into Globalizations for this project, as well as Jun Borras, Jingzhong Ye, Ruth Hall, Ben Cousins, Sérgio Sauer, Sérgio Schneider, Bernardo Mançano Fernandes, Alexander Nikulin, Teodor Shanin (in memoriam), and the other members of the BRICS Initiative for Critical Agrarian Studies for their support, and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive critique of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This is not to deny that other scholars have made prominent contributions to this literature at this early moment from outside of these networks and journals (e.g. Carmody, 2011).

2 As evidenced by the references we cite, the Journal of Peasant Studies was and remains one of the preeminent forums for this scholarship and debate. Additional platforms that have published many of articles and hosted extensive debate on the phenomenon since 2008 include Geoforum, the Journal of Rural Studies, Political Geography, the Journal of Agrarian Change, Land Use Policy, World Development, Environment and Planning A and D, Antipode, Development and Change and the Review of African Political Economy. Various academic presses also launched book series on related themes, most prominently the Cornell University Press series on ‘Land: New Perspectives on Territory, Development, and Environment’.

3 The term ‘land grabbing’ is not always used in the Chinese literature when referring to domestic land issues, in part due to the ambiguity of ownership, contract and use rights in China, among other factors (Ye, 2015). Yet there is no shortage of empirical evidence and academic debate about land grabbing within China (Siciliano, 2014; Yep, 2013; Zhang & Donaldson, 2013; Zhang, 2015).

4 It is important to note that there are many detailed and nuanced studies concerning land issues and agrarian change in many different languages other than English. Unfortunately, proper engagement with this literature is beyond the scope of this introduction.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gustavo de L. T. Oliveira

Gustavo de L. T. Oliveira is Assistant Professor of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He works on global political ecology and critical geopolitics, focusing on agroindustrialization and transnational investments in land, infrastructure, and finance between China and Brazil. He has co-edited special issues of Political Geography, Globalizations, and the Journal of Peasant Studies, the latter having been republished as Soy, Globalization, and Environmental Politics in South America (Routledge 2018).

Ben M. McKay

Ben M. McKay is Assistant Professor of Development and Sustainability at the University of Calgary in Canada. His research focuses on the political economy and ecology of agrarian change in Latin America, agrarian extractivism, and food sovereignty alternatives. He is the author of The Political Economy of Agrarian Extractivism: Lessons from Bolivia (Fernwood, 2020) and co-editor of The Elgar Handbook in Critical Agrarian Studies (Edward Elgar, 2021) and Rural Transformations and Agro-Food Systems (Routledge, 2018).

Juan Liu

Juan Liu is Associate Professor of Political Ecology and Agrarian Studies at the College of Humanities and Development Studies, China Agricultural University (COHD-CAU) and a researcher at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB). Her research interests include political economy/ecology of agriculture, food and environment, migration and the left-behind population, land politics, etc.