A new phase of ‘foreignization’ and land grabbing is occurring via value-chain relations in Bolivia. Exogenous forces from some BRICS and MICs are penetrating Bolivia’s countryside and drastically changing social relations of production, reproduction, property and power.

The new CONCORD and Hands on the Land publication ‘Investing for Development?’ examines the impacts of the EU’s investment regime on food security, the Right to Food and land governance.

This Guide is drawn from experience in the action research project “Bottom-up accountability initiatives and large-scale land acquisitions in Africa”. The project aimed to bring the international soft law instrument, the Voluntary Guidelines on Responsible Governance of the Tenure of Land, Fisheries, and Forests (the Tenure Guidelines or TGs), to rural communities and, together with them, to use the Guidelines to strengthen their tenure of land, fisheries and forests.

A series of infographics that expose the massive concentration of land in Europe. Over the last decade, the EU has lost a third of all its small farms, 3% of its farms now own 52% of farm land, and land inequality has become worse than wealth inequality.

New publication in French on the global land grab released

The recent political and economic liberalization in Burma/Myanmar, while indicative of some positive steps toward democratisation, has increased foreign and domestic investments and geared the economy toward industrialisation and large-scale agriculture. Land governance procedures and implementation tend to favour the more powerful and well-connected, with little protection mechanism for the majority smallholding farmers in the country.

The desperate search for ways to combat climate change gives rise to new mitigation policies and projects, such as the support of large-scale ‘sustainable ’ forestry plantations. However, climate justice and climate mitigation cannot be met as long as large-scale industrial plantations continue to marginalise small-scale indigenous forest users who actively protect biodiverse forests.

The concepts of “accumulation by dispossession” and “ocean grabbing” are applied to East Africa in order to explain the ongoing dispossession of small scale fisheries. The emergence of a corporate (sea) food regime can be traced, posing challenges for terrestrial food sovereignty via land grabbing and ocean grabbing.

Europe’s young and aspiring farmers will face increasing barriers to entry as land is rapidly concentrated in relatively few big farms. Land is even more unevenly distributed than wealth. A steep decline in Europe’s small farms is underway with damaging consequences for food security, employment, and development.

Who gets how much and what kinds of land, how, and for what purposes? These are the basic questions around the politics of land. The question of land politics has been resurrected in a big way recently, worldwide, and in ways significantly different from the past.

This new report shows how the 'rights-based approach' to fisheries governance is in fact a mechanism for depriving indigenous and subsistence fisherfolk of their traditional waters and transferring them to corporations and economic elites. It must be replaced with a human rights approach.

New land acquisitions or ‘global land grab'  are drawing upon, restructuring and challenging the nature of both governance and government. While ‘the state’ is often invoked as a key player in contemporary land deals, states do not necessarily operate coherently or with one voice.

Projects protecting Jakarta against floods are likely to damage the environment and could threaten the livelihoods of tens of thousands of people. The Dutch government, supporting these projects, should question how it balances its interest in supporting Dutch companies with its stated policies of sustainable and inclusive development. 

Communities in Cross River State, Nigeria are losing access to the forest lands on which they depend for their livelihoods.

While the overall amount of agricultural land in Europe is shrinking, it is also becoming increasingly concentrated in a few large landholdings and in the hands of relatively few big private business entities.

From 2000, onwards a growing trend of internationalization of Argentinian firms has emerged, with neighbouring countries as a main focus, particularly Brazil. Agricultural production (particularly "flex crops", such as soybean, linked to the new food-fodder-fuel complex) has constituted a central point of their business.

This fact sheet highlights the involvement of the EU in the global land grab, both directly through the involvement of European capital and corporations in the acquisition of land and indirectly through EU policies that commodify land.