Land Grabbing

What rural dwellers in the Global South experience as land grabbing, tends to be seen in the Global North as ‘agricultural investment’. The World Bank has been at the forefront of a drive to legitimate these investments, convening to win support for a code of conduct based on Responsible Agricultural Investment (RAI) principles. Many key civil society groups reject the proposal for a code of conduct, objecting to the top-down process by which it was formulated and arguing that it was more likely to legitimate than prevent land grabbing. Instead, these groups stood behind the FAO’s Voluntary Guidelines for Responsible Land Investment, which had been under development since the International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development in 2009 and had proved a much more inclusive process.

Call for papers: Landgrabbing II

March 2012

LDPI is organizing a second workshop on ‘Global Land Grabbing’ in October 2012 in New York. Among the keynote speakers is new Director-General of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization José Graziano da Silva. You are invited to send in papers that offer rigorous and innovative analysis.

The War on Colombia’s Poor

January 2012
Ross Eventon

The EU's proposed free trade agreement with Colombia will worsen the already serious human rights violations in the country, as its drive to access to cheap raw materials for European corporations means forcing local people off their land.

Global Land Grabbing and Trajectories of Agrarian Change: A Preliminary Analysis

December 2011
Jennifer Franco
Jun Borras

The politics of change in land use and in property relations linked to cases of land grabbing are not well understood, and yet are crucial to a deeper understanding of the phenomenon.

Seminar Land Grabbing in Uganda

December 2011

Land grabbing in Uganda: Forced evictions for suastainable European coffee – who cares?

Land tenure and International Investments in agriculture

August 2011
Jun Borras

In the midst of a raging famine in the Horn of Africa and continuing expansion of land grabbing across the Global South, a new and critical report has been released by the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition, of the Committee on World Food Security.

Conflict, poverty and marginalisation

July 2011
Amira Armenta

Since the 1990s, the Curvaradó and Jiguamiandó communities have specifically been the target of violence and subsequent displacement.

Meeting the challenge of feeding the world and cooling the Earth

July 2011
Jun Borras

Two papers analysing the recent experience of Latin America, and Cuba in particular, support arguments that a shift from industrial-large scale farming to small-scale farming can bring environmental, economic and political benefits.

Why so-called "Responsible Agricultural Investment" must be stopped

April 2011

Wealthy interests are pushing to normalise the concept of "responsible agricultural investment" but this corporate lingo masks the mass appropriation of land at the cost of local inhabitants (often forcibly removed), the destruction of livelihoods and the environment.

Small-scale farmers increasingly at risk from 'global land grabbing'

April 2011
Jun Borras
Ian Scoones, David Hughes

New research on the global rush for agricultural land shows that small-scale farmers will increasingly lose out to major corporations as land deals ignore local tenure rights.

The hidden impact of land deals in developing countries to be revealed

April 2011

The vacant land discourse, promoted by some land deals, is fundamentally flawed. Cases of deals made for land that is unclaimed, unused or unoccupied by local people is simply untrue.