The Politics of Contemporary (Trans)national Commercial Land Deals: Competing Views, Strategies and Alternatives

The phrase ‘global land grab’ has become a catch-all framework to describe and analyze the current explosion of (trans)national commercial land transactions revolving around the production and sale of food and biofuels. Initially deployed and popularised especially by activist groups deeply concerned and opposed to such transactions from an environmental-agrarian justice perspective, the significance of the phrase has quickly moved beyond its original moorings, as it gets absorbed into mainstream development currents. Increasingly, the original stress on how many commercial land transactions are dispossessing rural communities and undermining fragile and diverse ecosystems, has shifted to an emphasis on the economic opportunities opened up by such land deals. While acknowledging the risks, this latter usage now minimizes them by outlining ways to avoid possible negative impacts, for instance, through such notionally ‘pro-poor’ land measures as the promotion of secure land tenure and efficient land governance. Taking off from the basic proposition that the very logic of corporate-driven food-biofuel production and consumption is exclusionary and unsustainable, this paper attempts to go beyond the confines of the mainstream development