Towards a Broader View of the Politics of Global Land Grab: Rethinking Land Issues, Reframing Resistance

The phrase 'global land grab' has become a catch-all framework to describe and analyze the current explosion of (trans)national commercial land transactions related to the production and sale of food and biofuels. Initially deployed and popularised by activist groups opposed to such transactions from an environmental and agrarian justice perspectives, the significance of the phrase has quickly moved beyond its original moorings, as it gets absorbed into mainstream development currents that push for 'win-win' arrangements and a 'code of conduct', which is critically examined in this paper. The remainder of our discussion concerns the political dynamics of changes in and struggles over land use and land property relations in the context of contemporary (trans)national land deals that target, principally though not solely, 'non-private' lands. We argue that the political dynamics around land are further exposing the inappropriateness of the aggressively promoted mainstream 'toolkit' of 'land governance'. And while we agree with much of the radical critique of the global land rush that it is likely to lead to massive enclosure and dispossession, we also raise the need for nuanced analysis (e.g. more class analysis) and careful empirical inquiry (e.g. less speculation). We then consider the possibilities of an alternative perspective, which for lack of a better term, we call here 'land sovereignty', as a potentially more inclusive and relevant conceptual, political and methodological framework.. Introduction The phrase 'global land grab' has emerged as the catch-all to describe the explosion of (trans)national commercial land transactions (and land speculation) that has been occurring in recent years around the large-scale production, sale, and export of food and biofuels. The emphasis on land grabbing builds on familiar, iconic images from the past of Northern companies and governments enclosing commons, dispossessing peasants and indigenous peoples, and ruining the environment in the South. It rightly calls attention to the actual and potential role of current land deals in creating a new cycle of enclosures 1 This is a revised version of the paper prepared for the Agrarian Studies Colloquium Series, Yale University, 30 October 2009. We thank the Colloquium participants, as well as Henry Bernstein, Ian Scoones and James C. Scott for their helpful comments. The section on the critique of the 'Code of Conduct' draws on Borras and Franco (2010a), while the section on the politics of changes in land property relations draws on Borras and Franco (2010b). and a Fellow of the Transnational Institute …