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Abstract
This paper explores the political processes that activists engaged in contesting land grabbing have triggered to connect claims across borders and to international institutions, regimes and processes. Through a review of cases of land-grab resistance that have led to project cancelation or suspension, I argue that contextual elements of the land grab and shifting geopolitics highlight the need for adaptation and refinement of models of transnational advocacy, historically structured in North–South patterns. For example, while some elements of the boomerang pattern of transnational advocacy are still relevant, changing realities call for new empirically enriched models. To this end, I outline two typologies of political contention that can help us conceptualize multi-scalar interactions between activists to demonstrate the impact of local resistances at larger scales – ‘the catapult effect’ and the ‘minefield effect’. This paper contributes to calls for further theorization to understand how feedback processes between international discourses, meso-politics and conflicts and resistance at local sites of production impact the implementation of contested land deals.
Acknowledgements
The manuscript was greatly improved based on comments and discussions with Jun Borras, Thomas Sikor, Jutta Kill, Henk Hobbelink, Joan Martinez-Alier, Nicolas Kosoy and Jennifer Clapp, as well as three anonymous reviewers from the Journal of Peasant Studies and feedback from colleagues in the EJOLT project. All errors are my own.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 GRAIN is a TAN that works at the intersection of agrarian and environmental justice. GRAIN’s mandate, according to its website is ‘to support small farmers and social movements in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems through independent research and analysis, building alliances and networking at local, regional and international levels’. This small organization had a role in debates on agricultural bio-piracy and peasant rights to seeds in the 1980s and has been considered a think tank for Via Campesina.
2 The IPC is an autonomous, self-managed global mechanism grouping some 45 peoples’ movements and NGOs involved with at least 800 organizations throughout the world. The IPC serves as a mechanism for information and training on issues regarding food sovereignty.
3 An alternate interpretation of this divide is to understand it as representative of long-standing ‘inside–outside’ strategies. ‘Insiders’ engage with institutionalized participation processes in an effort to influence them. Outsiders put pressure on these and other processes through mobilization, in an effort to amplify the voices of dynamic social movements on the outside to help create the space for innovative policy ideas on the inside.
4 The key measure that campaigners hope will tackle food commodity speculation is the imposition of limits restricting the number of positions that financial institutions can hold in commodity derivatives markets. Position limits place an upper limit – a quantitative ceiling – on the number of contracts other than bona fide hedging positions which an investor or combined group of investors may hold for a specific commodity.
5 Staritz and Küblböck (Citation2014) argue that recent commodity price volatility was not a consequence of the excessive volume of speculative trading, or ‘outsize’ derivatives transactions by single market actors, but a consequence of the cumulative trading practices of thousands of individual traders who were incentivized to exploit market fluctuations and push prices higher. If this is the case, the limits on positions will not have the desired effect.
6 Soft commodities are tropical agricultural commodities such as coffee, cocoa, cotton, grains, oilseeds, orange juice and sugar.
7 The pressure campaign against Herakles did not succeed in stopping the project; however, it had other consequences. In 2013 Bruce Wrobel, the chief executive officer, committed suicide. The trajectory of the Herakles Farms project and related financial difficulties seemed to be one factor; according to a CNBC article, he took criticisms of it ‘very personally’ (Delevingne Citation2014).
8 It seems the project has now been canceled, following years of sustained pressure.
9 BRICs is the acronym used for an association of five major emerging national economies: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.
10 MICs is an acronym for an undefined group of Middle Income Countries.
11 Interview with Henk Hobbelink of GRAIN.
12 Voices critical of governance and rights-based approaches to contesting land grabbing claim to base their arguments on a strategic assessment. Their fear is that the acknowledged limits of voluntarism in practice serve to transfer state prerogatives and duties to companies and private investors. Others argue that treaties/instruments are sometimes used to take international pressure off the signing countries, without actually implementing the agreement. Further, they argue that they can be used by companies and investors engaged in land grabbing who claim to be implementing good practices within their own corporate social responsibility strategies against campaigns and local defenders.
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Leah Temper
Leah Temper (PhD environmental sciences 2015, Masters economic history 2008, BA communications and journalism, 2005) is a trans-disciplinary scholar-activist specialized in ecological economics and political ecology based at the Institute for Environmental Sciences and Technology (ICTA) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She is a founder and co-director of the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice (www.ejatlas.org) and the PI of ACKnowl-EJ (Activist-academic Co-production of Knowledge for Environmental Justice). Previously she was scientific coordinator of the EJOLT Project (www.ejolt.org) and Director of USC Canada’s Seeds of Survival Program International, which supports farmer-led research in plant genetic resources, agro-biodiversity and agro-ecology in 10 countries. Email: [email protected]