Global Land Grabbing and Political Reactions ‘From Below’

Contemporary large-scale land deals are widely understood as involving the expulsion of people who, in turn, struggle instinctively to resist dispossession This is certainly true in many instances. Yet this chain of events evidently does not always occur: large-scale land deals do not always result in people losing the land, and many of those who face expulsion do not necessarily respond with the kind of resistance often expected of them. Indeed, much evidence shows that the nature of and responses to big land deals can (and do) vary across and within ‘local communities’. Taking off analytically from a relatively narrow selection of cases, the expulsion–resistance scenario is too often assumed rather than demonstrated, thereby leaving many inconvenient facts undetected and unexplained. This suggests a need to step back and problematise the variable and uneven responses ‘from below’ to land grabbing, both within and between communities. This paper offers an initial exploration into why poor people affected by contemporary land deals (re)act the way they do, noting how issues and processes unite and divide them. This helps explain variation in political trajectories in the context of land grabbing today. Across the globe today a major revaluation of land is underway, the result in part of a convergence of global dynamics (or ‘crises’) around food, energy/fuel, climate and finance, and leading to a resurgence of what some observers refer to as ‘land grabbing’. For others, certainly, ‘land grabbing’ is an unacceptable term for what they see as legitimate business transactions. For still others the large-scale (private) investment in rural spaces that these transactions might bring is needed, but at the same time can be risky, and so the term would apply only to those big land deals that fail to uphold criteria of ‘responsible investment’ and ‘good governance’. For the latter, one underlying assumption is crucial: that the solution to today’s multiple global crises lies in the putative discovery of vast quantities of previously overlooked, supposedly marginal, underutilised or empty land. The amount of such land is estimated to be a minimum of 445 million ha. (Re)framed in these ways, land is now increasingly (and conveniently) presented as ‘available’ for transformation into Saturnino M Borras Jr is at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), The Hague, The Netherlands. Email: [email protected]. Jennifer C Franco works on the Agrarian Justice Program,Transnational Institute (TNI), Amsterdam, The Netherlands. [email protected]: [email protected] Third World Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 9, 2013, pp 1723–1747 ISSN 0143-6597 print/ISSN 1360-2241 online/13/001723-25 2013 Southseries Inc., www.thirdworldquarterly.com http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2013.843845 1723 D ow nl oa de d by [ E ra sm us U ni ve rs ity ] at 0 3: 11 0 9 Ja nu ar y 20 14 new economic arrangements that, according to mainstream economic and political elites, are deemed necessary not just for ‘development’, but for the very survival of a growing human population. In this way, and against the backdrop of multiple global crises, land grabbing of various sorts is being actively reimagined in mainstream discourse as necessary and ‘responsible investment’. This attempt to make land grabbing seem acceptable has not gone uncontested, and many voices have been raising critical questions about both the phenomenon and the public relations makeover surrounding it. Initially behind, the academic community has started to catch up with the earlier efforts made by news media and NGOs seeking to raise public awareness and to engage in critical debate. Today there is a growing—but still limited—body of academic research that has contributed significantly to a better understanding of land grabbing. Complicated by its still-unfolding and fluid character, the study of land grabbing is further constrained by unresolved issues around how to define, and conduct research on, the phenomenon. One still underexplored dimension of contemporary land grabbing has to do with the political reactions ‘from below’—eg among groups of poor, vulnerable and marginalised people and peoples who are affected by large-scale land deals. How do those most affected actually perceive and react to these large-scale land deals and why? On this issue public debate is quite polarised. Whether for or against, there is a strong tendency to assume a priori, rather than to demonstrate, what the reactions of affected groups of people are or would be. On the one hand, those in favour of large-scale land deals generally assume that poor people would naturally want the opportunities that such investments are purported to bring. On the other hand, those opposed to the deals generally assume that if only those same poor people knew what they were really getting into, they would reject the deals outright. The problem is that evidence can always be marshalled for both sides, so it would seem that, while neither side can be ‘right’, neither side can be ‘wrong’ either. Stepping back from this political impasse, however, one can begin to see serious analytical shortcomings with both sides. Characterising both in our view is a shared, largely implicit assumption of the homogeneous nature of affected local communities: that the ‘local communities’ affected (or potentially affected) by these land deals exist in homogeneous spaces, and that at stake for the people who inhabit these spaces are very similar (if not identical) interests, identities and aspirations for the future. If there is one thing that the spectre of land grabbing has shown, however, it is that local communities are socially differentiated and consequently the impact on and within communities will likewise be differentiated, leading in turn to an array of diverse responses. It is not just that different people will be affected differently. Rather, what adds further complexity to the whole thing is that different people will perceive and interpret the experience differently, based on a whole range of variable and relative economic, political, social and cultural factors, conditions and calculations that are often not well understood and in any case would require much deeper inquiry than is often given. In short, the individual and collective political reactions of people and peoples affected by land deals cannot be taken for granted. SATURNINO M BORRAS & JENNIFER C FRANCO 1724 D ow nl oa de d by [ E ra sm us U ni ve rs ity ] at 0 3: 11 0 9 Ja nu ar y 20 14 Imagine two books of account, one listing all the reported land grabs and the other listing all the reported protests against land grabs. Comparing these two lists would probably reveal a curious thing: that they do not add up to the same total. This is obviously an imagined account, but there is evidently no automatic 1:1 ratio between land grabs and protest against them – otherwise we would have seen Cambodia or Ethiopia erupting in conflagrations of protest. It is clear that the reported protests against land deals are far fewer than the reported land grabs themselves. There may be a number of very interesting explanations for this discrepancy that warrant a closer look. First, some reported land deals ultimately do not (or will not) push through as initially planned or intended, but instead are redirected, abandoned mid-stream, cancelled, stalled or blocked, perhaps as a result of what Anna Tsing would call ‘frictional encounters’, or ‘the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference’. This is not so surprising in a politically charged context where what is often initially reported (or announced) in the media are the business agreements, rather than the actual transfers of control. Second, looking from another angle, it is likely that many protests go unseen, unrecognised and unreported. Maybe they are overlooked or dismissed as insignificant; or maybe they escape attention because of what James Scott calls the ‘friction of terrain’, or ‘geographical resistance’: often these places are not easy to reach or are completely out of range for those who want to report cases of resistance. Third, some combination of both sorts of scenarios is also possible. But in any case what is suggested here is that there is still much left to be unpacked on this score, and thus more systematic empirical research is warranted. This paper aims to contribute to this challenge by offering an initial discussion around a possible broad framework that can be useful in researching and understanding this topic more fully. While the ‘collective action problem’ in classical sociology tried to explain why it is that people mobilise to defend their interests, this article poses the opposite question, ie why people fail or refuse to mobilise in the face of attacks on their livelihoods. It builds on earlier critiques, including those by Marc Edelman, as well as on the rich scholarship on agrarian politics that has attempted to explain the trigger for peasant collective action. Another important starting point for this purpose is a reiteration of what we mean by ‘land grabbing’: the capturing of control of relatively vast tracts of land and other natural resources through a variety of mechanisms and forms, carried out through extra-economic coercion that involves large-scale capital, which often shifts resource use orientation into extraction, whether for international or domestic purposes, as capital’s response to the convergence of food, energy and financial crises, climate change mitigation imperatives, and demands for resources from newer hubs of global capital. Even though the term ‘land grabbing’ carries a lot of baggage and remains problematic, in our view it still has the advantage of 1) focusing attention on the core issues of politics and power relations; and 2) underscoring the dimension of extra-economic coercion involved in land deals. The contextual and definitional discussion above helps situate our discussion on political reactions from below. Against this backdrop many questions arise: what is the particular range of political reactions from below to land grabbing GLOBAL LAND GRABBING AND POLITICAL REACTIONS ‘FROM BELOW’ 1725 D ow nl oa de d by [ E ra sm us U ni ve rs ity ] at 0 3: 11 0 9 Ja nu ar y 20 14 in a given case? Why and how do various social groups react the way they do to particular types of land deals, and with what outcomes, in specific situations? What are the issues that unite and divide social groups? What are the political tensions and synergies within and between communities? How and to what extent are such political contestations (re)shaping the trajectory of global land deals? These are some of the questions that come to mind, and that have been left largely unanswered so far in the emerging body of literature on land grabbing. The remainder of this paper proceeds as follows: the next section explores the contested meaning of land and the role of the state. The following section discusses struggles against expulsion; the fourth section is on struggles for incorporation, the following one on struggles against land appropriation and concentration, and for redistribution and recognition; section six examines struggles across geographical and institutional spaces, before some concluding discussion is offered in the final section. Contested meaning of land and role of the state The contested meaning of land is a key starting point. On many occasions competing views about the meaning of land underpin land-based political contestations, but this is only implicitly suggested. Land has multiple meanings to different groups of people. For some, including the corporate world, it is a scarce factor of economic production valued in monetary terms, and measured partly in terms of yield. In this context it is a resource that is used to produce primary commodities such as food and timber for commercial purposes. For many agrarian communities, land is a resource base that guarantees subsistence, and provides a cushion from occasional external food price shocks by enabling them to produce some or all of the food they need for consumption. While land is indeed an important natural resource, it is a special one since it is also key to gaining access to other natural resources. One needs to control land in order to capture water, in order to extract subsoil resources, in order to calculate, capture and commoditise carbon, and so on. On some occasions, because land is not a movable investment asset, some form of land control is necessary in order to deny access to land to peasants so that they are forced to look for work—and/ or to capture the cheap labour through a variety of plantation set-up and/or contract farming schemes. For others still, including indigenous communities, land is also a territory where their ancestors lived as a people, and where they continue to live and reproduce as a people, engaging with their immediate natural environment. Others may value land principally because of its being a habitat for other species, a necessary host for biodiversity, a landscape, for its aesthetic beauty. To reduce the meaning and value of land to just one of these many functions oblivious of other overlapping meanings is absurd, and provokes or aggravates much of contemporary land-based political conflicts and contestations. Often heated debates and political conflicts appear unresolvable because the contesting parties are coming from different perspectives and talking about land from very different starting points. SATURNINO M BORRAS & JENNIFER C FRANCO 1726 D ow nl oa de d by [ E ra sm us U ni ve rs ity ] at 0 3: 11 0 9 Ja nu ar y 20 14 At the local level different groups are related to land, but they are linked to land differently. Some groups belong to landed elites with or without private titles. They can be private landlords, warlords, or narco-syndicates using land to launder money, or elite clans or local chiefs in charge of local allocation of land. Cashing in from land deals either by selling or renting out land can be, and in many places has become, a lucrative enterprise. Indeed there is a discernible pattern of an emerging class of what can be termed ‘land grabbing entrepreneurs’—they are the land brokers, speculators and scammers who have taken advantage of pre-existing institutional arrangement of land control in order to cash in on the ongoing global land rush. There are also capitalist landowners who may want to further transform their land either by directly capitalising on the emerging market or by forging partnerships with foreign companies looking for local partners, partly because of laws prohibiting foreign companies from purchasing land or from full ownership of a company, as in the case of Argentina. The latter is particular attractive to local partners who are ‘land rich and cash poor’ elites. Others depend on land for their livelihoods but do not have (formal) ownership and/or control of the land they work: tenants, farmers on public lands, indigenous communities, pastoralists, forest dwellers, or forest non-timber product gatherers. In some cases these groups of people may or may not be present in official state censuses to begin with. In many settings these relatively stable, broad patterns of social relationships to land are gender-based and ethnic-oriented. When land deals hit these communities, the impact is not uniform among these various groups. Some benefit, others do not; some are adversely affected, others are not. Concepts such as ‘local community’ and ‘local people’ are useful to our understanding of the phenomenon but only to a limited extent. These concepts conceal more than reveal the uneven and differentiated impacts of land deals on such communities and people. Conceptual lenses around class and other parallel and/or overlapping social divides are thus indispensable. The overlap and intersection between class and other identities are summarised and explained in Bernstein: ‘class relations are universal but not exclusive “determination” of social practices in capitalism. They intersect and combine with other social differences and divisions, of which gender is the most widespread and which can also include oppressive and exclusionary relations of race and ethnicity, religion and caste’. The cumulative impact of multiple forms of oppression over the course of a lifetime may have a lot to say about whether individuals or groups will mobilise around a particular issue. Other relevant dimensions are the geography, ecology and institutional character of land deals. Contemporary large-scale land deals privilege or target specific geographical locations: lands that are proximate to sources of water, existing roads and other transportation channels. Some land deals, specifically those that are linked to green grabbing, such as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+), specifically look for forested terrain. Others are more interested in the subsoil resources, with little regard for the communities that may happen to be sitting on top of a coal field, for instance. Finally, land deals are often directed to specific lands through state-created institutional maps: carved out tracts of land specifically reserved GLOBAL LAND GRABBING AND POLITICAL REACTIONS ‘FROM BELOW’ 1727 D ow nl oa de d by [ E ra sm us U ni ve rs ity ] at 0 3: 11 0 9 Ja nu ar y 20 14 for land deals such as the Economic Land Concessions (ELCs) in Cambodia, or the contemporary initiative in Gambella region in Ethiopia. Different state policies are implicated in land deals in different ways. What this implies is that traditional conceptual tools that are specific to particular geographic or institutional spaces may have only limited relevance in explaining political reactions from below. For example, a block of land may have been allocated for a land concession with a big agricultural company, at the same time that it has been identified as a mining site, at the same time that it has been declared as a REDD+ project site. These institutional overlaps, layerings and intersections partly shape the political calculations of affected social groups in deciding about their political actions: eg where and with which state agency to engage, which institutional space to bring their political struggle to, and which formal and informal institutional traditions and state policies to invoke to frame their demands as just, reasonable and/or legal. Amid such complexity it is rare to find local communities reacting and mobilising in relation to a land deal in a unified fashion. Some who have been expelled from their lands, or are being threatened with expulsion, resist land deals or mobilise to seek better compensation. At the same time there may be others who mobilise not to resist land deals—but to demand incorporation into the emerging enterprises either as workers or as contract farmers. Yet others may mobilise in order to demand improvements in the terms of their incorporation into these emerging investment enclaves (more working days, higher wages, better working conditions, fairer growership terms, and so on). Such differences can also create new or exacerbate existing political tensions between groups within and between communities. Political mobilisations for or against land deals by affected social groups do not emerge automatically, despite the changing objective conditions, a topic that has been the subject of research in agrarian studies and social movement/collective action studies for quite some time now. Some individuals and groups are able to resist through covert actions, more fluid and pervasive at times. Some groups are able to resist and succeed. Some mobilisations are localised and isolated, while others are able to link up with national groups. Still others are able to forge links between local, national and international actors and mount globally coordinated campaigns, the outcomes of which maybe varied. Ultimately groups that are able to galvanise broad unity within and between affected communities, able to recruit and mobilise influential allies from within their communities and beyond (including international actors), within and outside the state, and able to generate sympathetic media attention are likely to succeed, even if just partially, in their political struggles in the context either of struggle against expulsion or of adverse incorporation. The role of the state The history of the development of global capitalism is a history of varying combinations of state and capital alliances, where accumulation and dispossession have advanced and occurred hand in hand. As in past cycles of enclosures the state has a central role in facilitating contemporary global land SATURNINO M BORRAS & JENNIFER C FRANCO 1728 D ow nl oa de d by [ E ra sm us U ni ve rs ity ] at 0 3: 11 0 9 Ja nu ar y 20 14 grabbing. Therefore, it has to be a significant part of any analysis of the politics around land deals, even when it appears to be largely absent on the ground. In our examination of various cases of land grabbing, we observe that states engaged in systematic policy and administrative tasks aimed at capturing so-called ‘marginal lands’ and turning them into an investable commodity. Each task is a step towards eventual full capture of land control. Each task is inherently political. These are the operational mechanisms towards land dispossession. The tasks of the state include a combination or all of the following: 1) invention or justification of the need for large-scale land investments; 2) definition, reclassification and quantification of what are ‘marginal, under-utilized and empty’ lands; 3) identification of these particular types of land; 4) assertion of the state’s absolute authority over these lands; 5) acquisition or appropriation of these lands; and 6) re-allocation or disposition of these lands to investors. In most settings only the state has the absolute authority and the capacity to carry out these key legal–administrative steps to facilitate land deals. These mechanisms of land dispossession separately and altogether constitute varying shades and degrees of extra-economic coercion by the state. Often stories of such dispossession are indeed, in Marx’s words, written in ‘blood and fire’. More broadly there are three distinct but interlinked areas of state actions that are relevant in understanding contemporary land grabs: 1) a state simplification process; 2) the assertion of sovereignty and authority over territory; and 3) coercion through police and (para)military force to enforce compliance, extend territorialisation and broker private capital accumulation. First, in order to administer and govern, states engage in a simplification process to render complex social processes legible to the state. The creation of cadastres, land records and titles are attempts at simplifying land-based social relations that are otherwise too complex for state administration. This in turn brings us back to the notion of ‘available marginal, empty lands’. The trends in state discourse around land grabs seem to be: if the land is not formally titled or privatised, then it is state-owned; if the census does not show significant formal settlements, then these are empty lands or, if it does not show formal farm production activities, then these are unused lands. Second, beyond the economic benefits of land investment, land deals are also viewed as an essential component of state-building processes, where sovereignty and authority are extended to previously ‘non-state spaces’. Third, coercion and violence, usually with the use of police, (para)military and the courts to enforce compliance with state simplification projects and the broader state-building process, have accompanied land deals in various parts of the world. Based on the discussion above, Jonathan Fox’s formulation of the two permanent contradictory tasks of the state, namely, to facilitate capital accumulation but at the same time to maintain a historically determined minimum level of political legitimacy, provides a useful perspective on why and how the state engages with large-scale land deals, and why and how it is both part of the problem of and the solution to land grabbing. It will push and push hard for large-scale land deals and on most occasions is even the one directly engaged in the actual land grabbing—but occasional ‘brakes’ will be applied when the GLOBAL LAND GRABBING AND POLITICAL REACTIONS ‘FROM BELOW’ 1729 D ow nl oa de d by [ E ra sm us U ni ve rs ity ] at 0 3: 11 0 9 Ja nu ar y 20 14 character and extent of accumulation and dispossession processes threaten the legitimacy of the state. This explains the occasional moratorium on land deals and some forms of regulation, as in the cases of Cambodia and Ukraine (moratorium) and Tanzania (land deal-size ceiling) more recently, for example, with varying outcomes. It is in this broader and historical context that we should understand the political dynamics around the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Tenure Guidelines. Broad types of political conflicts and terrain of contestations Looking at the intersections of conflict and terrain of contestations will help us understand how poor people who engage in contentious politics understand their issue, identify their adversary, frame their demands, and choose the forms of their collective action. There are at least three intersections of political contestations within and between the state and social forces around current land grabbing that are relevant to our analysis, namely, poor people versus corporate actors, poor people versus the state, and poor people versus poor people. Poor people versus corporate actors tends to be more common in cases where the issue is about incorporation into an enterprise, or is about improvement of the terms of poor people’s inclusion (‘struggles against exploitation’-type of contestations). Issues are usually framed within demands for companies to make good on promised jobs, uphold labour standards, or improve the terms of growership arrangements. Increasingly, we also see in this type of conflict the rise of environmental issues: poor people taking issue against companies on pollution or chemical contamination issues. Poor people-versus-the state is much more common in cases involving actual or potential expulsion of people from their land, or terms of relocation and resettlement arrangements. It brings us back to the centrality of the role of the state in land appropriation discussed above (‘struggles against dispossession’-type of contestations). Poor people versus poor people—of interand intra-class types—are probably more common than the popular literature would acknowledge. This links back to the differentiated impacts of land deals on social groups within and between communities. In a community it is common to see mobilisations against a land deal parallel to counter-mobilisations in favour of the same deal. On many occasions we see political contestations around a particular land deal where contentious politics have multiple intersections—all three types discussed above are simultaneously at work. The two main types of struggles by working classes—struggles against dispossession (largely of ‘struggles against expulsion from the land’-type, as well as the broader, more encompassing type of ‘struggles in defence of the commons’) and struggles against exploitation (or ‘struggles against adverse incorporation’)—are more usefully examined in a relational way, rather than in isolation from each other. The key point is that it is not useful to casually claim that conflicts around current land deals are either just between ‘local communities’ and foreign companies, or between ‘local communities’ and the central government. The configuration of actors and the intersections, character and trajectory of political contestations are far more diverse and complex than casual claims in the current SATURNINO M BORRAS & JENNIFER C FRANCO 1730 D ow nl oa de d by [ E ra sm us U ni ve rs ity ] at 0 3: 11 0 9 Ja nu ar y 20 14