Contextualising land grabbing: contemporary land deals, the global subsistence crisis and the world food system

Abstract

This article analytically contextualises the spate of contemporary land deals popularly known as ‘land grabbing’ by locating such deals within the processes that simultaneously underpin the capitalist restructuring of global agriculture and deepen the global subsistence crisis. The article situates contemporary land deals within the context of recent rises in food prices, offers a precise definition of land grabbing and reviews the global public policy response. It then offers an agrarian political economy analysis of contemporary corporate farmland acquisition and argues that land grabbing facilitates a broadening and a deepening of industrialised capitalist agriculture as a process of ‘intensification’ is ‘extensified’ on a world scale. This is done in order to sustain the cheap food necessary for capital accumulation. It is suggested that this will not solve the biophysical and social contradictions of industrialised capitalist agriculture and the food-based social exclusion which plagues the globe.

Résumé Cet essai analyse l'étendue de l'accaparement des terres au sein des processus qui soutiennent la restructuration capitaliste de l'agriculture globale et qui renforcent la crise alimentaire. Tout d'abord, ce travail situe ce phénomène dans le contexte de la hausse des prix des produits alimentaires, offre une définition précise de l'accaparement des terres et évalue la réponse de la politique publique globale. Ensuite, il présente une analyse d'une perspective d'économie politique agraire et affirme que cet accaparement des terres facilite un approfondissement capitaliste et industriel de l'agriculture globale. Ce processus « d'intensification » et « d'extensification » soutient un prix bas des produits alimentaires qui assure l'accumulation du capital. Ce travail suggère que ce dernier ne résoudra pas les contradictions biophysiques et sociales causées par l'approfondissement d'une agriculture globale capitaliste et industrielle et l'exclusion sociale qui en résulte.

Keywords:

• agrarian question
• food regime
• world food system
• land
• land grabbing
• peasants

Acknowledgments

My thanks to Cristóbal Kay, Deborah Johnston, Jens Lerche and Carlos Oya for encouraging me to write this article, to John Harriss for steering the essay to publication and to three anonymous referees who substantially improved the final version. This article would not have been possible without the encouragement of Ben White and the insurgent interventions of Jun Borras.

Earlier versions of this essay were delivered to seminars at Emory University, the University of Vermont, Saint Mary's University and Trent University in 2011, as well as the Community Movements conference in 2012.

Notes

A starting point from which to investigate and analyse the highly divergent and contextually specific political economy of localised land deals is the collection of papers presented to the pivotal International Conference on Global Land Grabbing, held in Brighton in April 2011 and available at http://www.future-agricultures.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=1547&Itemid=978. For an overview of the issues involved, from a set of divergent viewpoints, see the Forum on Global Land Grabbing (Journal of peasant studies, 38 (2), 2011). Finally, the Oakland Institute has produced a series of country case studies in Africa, which are available at http://www.oaklandinstitute.org/land-deals-africa/publications-overview.

My thanks to Claudio Cerquiglini of the Food and Agriculture Organisation for supplying me with the data in advance of its publication.

My thanks to Sarika Mathur of Global Policy Forum for the reference.

This website is http://www.responsibleagroinvestment.org.

This estimate is very widely quoted, but must be treated cautiously because it is based upon future global food consumption patterns that mirror current American food consumption patterns – and the US is the global center of food overconsumption.

I have summarised the seven principals; this is not a direct quote.

Pechlaner and Otero's (2010) ‘neoliberal food regime’ is similar to the conceptualisation of the corporate food regime used here.

My thanks to Tania Li for bringing this to my attention.

Ben White wrote this paragraph.

My thanks to Jennifer Clapp for sharing her files with me.