Out of the kaleidoscope of different angles through which land grab can be analysed, the one elevating food security – and food sovereignty – as a crucial concern is amongst the most engaging and the less inquired, especially in its intertwining with policy elaboration.
As land is grabbed and earmarked in Africa for supposed development, there are nearly always implications for the water nearby, for local people's land and water rights and environmental sustainability.
Despite much optimism, there are clear indications that BRICS lacks the capacity to function as a powerful and innovative new force in the realm of global politics and governance.
A special issue of the Canadian Journal of Development Studies introducing a previously under-explored geographic region into the emerging land grab literature. Available for free till end of May.
Delegates of the 9th Asia European Heads of Government Meeting (ASEM9) may not have known that the luxury villas, in which they met, had displaced a thriving farming community. But the story of the land grab is all too familiar one and casts doubt on the commitment of Asian and European nations to work for food security and sustainable development.
Alternative development and crop substitution programmes seem to be a guise for the Chinese government to support large scale agro businesses in Northern Burma and Laos.
Across the world, ‘green grabbing’ – the appropriation of land and resources for environmental ends – is an emerging process of deep and growing significance. In recent years there has been a veritable explosion of scholarship examining the neoliberalization of environments, nature and conservation, drawing partly on older traditions of ecological/green Marxism and critical political ecology
The fluid nature of water and its hydrologic complexity often obscure how water grabbing takes place and what the associated impacts on the environment and diverse social groups are.
The World Bank’s policies for land privatisation and concentration, have paved the way for corporations from Wall Street to Singapore to take upwards of 80 million hectares of land from rural communities across the world in the past few years, they say in a collective statement released today at the opening of the World Bank’s Conference on Land and Poverty in Washington DC.
Small scale farmers and their allies are celebrating the International Day of Peasant's Struggle on April 17 2012, organising more than 250 actions all over the globe.
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 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.
We, women and men peasants, pastoralists, indigenous peoples and their allies, who gathered together in Nyeleni from 17-19 November 2011, have come from across the world for the first time to share with each other our experiences and struggles against land-grabbing.
Social movement representatives are in Rome this week for the final UN negotiations to adopt voluntary guidelines that would regulate the use and possession of land and other natural resources.
The free market approach to food security has depended too heavily on an unsustainable system of cheap food imports and high fossil-fuel consumption. It's time to counter this by supporting environmentally efficient small farms, and increasing investment in agro-ecological research.
The so-called “global land grab” continues the historic process of land enclosures described by Sir Thomas More in Utopia as “sheep eating men,” when English peasants were evicted from the commons to make room for private estates.
Jennifer Franco, Danny Carranza, Joann Fernandez (Rightsnet)
07 October 2011
Article
A Philippines biofuel project would appear to fit the World Bank's definition of a "win-win" scenario with its promise of jobs and conversion of 'idle land'. However a closer look unveils corporate manipulation, political corruption and exploitation of subsistence farmers that typically accompanies so-called "responsible investment"
