Land

Derek Hall

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745652771, 9780745652764
• eBook ISBN: 9780745663531
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Land is one of the world's most emotionally resonant resources, and control over it is fundamental to almost all human activity. From the local level to the global, we are often in conflict over the ground beneath our feet. But because human relationships to land are so complex, it can be difficult to think them through in a unified way. This path-breaking book aims to change that by combining insights from multiple disciplines to develop a framework for understanding the geopolitics of land today.

Struggles over land, argues Derek Hall, relate to three basic principles: its role as territory, its status as property, and the ways in which its use is regulated. This timely introduction explores key dimensions of these themes, including inter-state wars over territory, the efforts of non-governmental organizations to protect property rights and environments in the global South, and the 'land grabs' attempted by contemporary corporations and governments. Drawing on a wide range of cases and examples - from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to the Canadian Arctic, China's urban fringe to rural Honduras - the book provides new ways of thinking about the political dynamics of land in the 21st century.

This richly detailed and authoritative guide will be of interest to students across the social sciences, as well as anyone interested in current affairs and contemporary geopolitics.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

Huang’s saga

In August 2011, Chinese businessman Huang Nubo announced that his company, Zhongkun Group, intended to buy a large tract of land in north-eastern Iceland.¹ Huang’s intention was to invest more than US$100 million (including US$9 million for the land) to build an ecotourism resort that would feature among its attractions a luxury hotel, a golf course, a race track and hot-air balloon rides. Huang, who was described in media coverage as an adventurer and a poet, hoped that the resort would appeal to tourists from China and India keen to get away from their crowded city lives and experience solitude and wilderness. The site, in Grímsstaðir, offered plenty of both: 300 km² of land (about 0.3 per cent of Iceland’s territory) in a bleak and sparsely populated region just south of the Arctic Circle. To buy the land, however, Huang needed to do more than hand over the money. The deal required government approval not only because the proposed area included both private and state-owned land but because of a law restricting land sales to investors from outside the European Economic Area (EEA) from buying large amounts of land in Iceland. Huang duly applied for an exemption to this law.

Huang’s proposal split Icelandic opinion, and the ensuing debate raised profound questions about the place of land in Iceland’s national life and international relations. Proponents pointed out that Iceland was in desperate need of foreign investment as it struggled to recover from the devastating financial and currency crisis that had struck the country in 2008. Some felt that China would be an excellent source of such investment. Iceland’s president, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, stated pointedly that after the crisis ‘China and India lent Iceland a helping hand in many constructive ways, whereas Europe was hostile and the US was absent.’ Critics of the deal, on the other hand, raised concerns about selling such a large tract of national land to a foreigner. They also pointed to Huang’s past as a government official (in China’s Ministry of Construction and in the propaganda department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee) to argue that his bid should not be taken at face value as a private business proposition. Rather, they suspected that the geopolitical ambitions of the Chinese government lay behind the deal. With both land and sea ice receding in the Arctic, the region is seeing rapid growth in resource exploration and extraction, and the Arctic Ocean may soon become viable as a shipping route between Europe and East Asia. Icelandic officials have in fact been promoting their country as a logistics hub for Arctic resource exploration and shipping, and Chinese diplomatic activity related to the Arctic has been increasing. Critics thus saw in the proposed deal not an innocent ecotourism resort but a toehold for the Chinese government. Proponents countered that these claims were hard to square with the fact that the project would include no land with access to the coast. Huang, for his part, called the accusations absurd and emphasized the purely private nature of the deal – though he may have undermined his case by playing with his cat during a video interview, a move uncomfortably reminiscent of the James Bond villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld (not to mention Dr Evil in the Austin Powers movies).

The deal did not go through. In late November 2011, Iceland’s Minister of the Interior Ögmundur Jónasson announced that Huang’s application for an exemption from the law had been turned down. The ministry listed a number of criteria that non-EEA companies looking to buy land had to meet and found that the Zhongkun Group did not meet any of them. It also argued that the sheer amount of land involved meant that an exemption would set a dangerous precedent. Jónasson worried, too, about the ‘fire sale’ characteristics of the deal, stating that ‘When a nation is in distress and its currency is weak, that is the time to be on your guard against those who would attempt to buy our national resources cheaply.’ While the decision was the interior minister’s to make, the two governing parties had by now taken quite different stances on it, with the Left Greens (Jónasson’s party) opposed and the Social Democrats more in favour. The prime minister and the foreign and economic ministries joined President Grímsson in supporting the investment, and one Social Democrat MP described the rejection as ‘crazy’, ‘deplorable’ and ‘devastating’. A former finance minister argued in favour of the deal by invoking the reputation that Icelandic businessmen had acquired since the financial crisis, asking ‘Who would you prefer to own a large Icelandic farm: a poetry-writing, nature-loving Chinese businessman, or one of our homegrown criminal Viking raiders?’ The poet, meanwhile, lashed out at the rejection, claiming that he had not been made aware of the criteria cited by the Interior Ministry in turning down his application. He also made the broader point that this was far from the only example in recent years of western rejection of Chinese investment. Huang complained that ‘The Western world asks us to open the Chinese market without restrictions, but when it’s a question of their resources they close the door on us.’ Other commentators, however, rushed to point out that China forbids land sales not only to foreigners, but to its own citizens.

Combining as it does the ongoing fallout from the 2008 financial crisis, the rising economic power of China and western responses to it, and the politics of Arctic resource development and shipping in a warming world, Huang’s saga² dramatically illustrates the changes taking place in the global political economy in the early twenty-first century. The story also calls attention to the complex and multifaceted role that land plays in relations between countries. It highlights, for instance, a common debate over the purchase of land by foreigners. In Iceland as elsewhere, one side of this debate emphasizes the economic benefits that such investments are meant to bring (including job creation and contributions to government revenues), while the other focuses on the threats – economic, political and otherwise – they may pose. Starkly put, one side sees an idle resource that someone wants to put to productive use, while the other sees the alienation of part of the national territory. Such debates are not carried out in a legal vacuum: Iceland, like most countries, has laws and regulations governing the acquisition of land by foreigners.

The Grímsstaðir case also shows that concerns over land acquisition can be given extra impetus by the nationality of the would-be purchaser. This is far from the only large piece of land in a foreign country that Chinese investors have tried to purchase or lease in recent years. Arguments over Huang’s resort took place in the shadow of widespread concerns about a global ‘land grab’ in which transnational corporations and states are moving to take control over vast areas of land in foreign countries. The fact that some of these investments are being orchestrated by state agencies from non-democratic countries like China has deepened the nervousness that usually attends foreign purchases and long-term leases of land. Control over land, indeed, is wrapped up with anxiety over national security and geopolitics. In the Icelandic case, the worry is over China’s alleged drive to project power in the Arctic; elsewhere, the key issue may be the ability of countries to grow enough food to feed themselves, or the acquisition by foreigners of land in sensitive border areas.

Land and the human relationship with it are enormous topics, far too big to cover in a short (or even a long) book. I argue, however, that we can gain particularly valuable insights into contemporary dynamics around land by focusing on the transnational relationships associated with it. I define these as the efforts made by various actors to exert control over land across international borders, together with the cross-border politics and relationships (including corporate connections, activist networks and flows of ideas) that help to shape control over land. I argue as well that, in order to understand these dynamics, we need to recognize that they concern three different and very fundamental things. These are the relationships between land, authority and identity that create territory; regulation, or the governance of how land is held and used; and the control of specific pieces of land as property.³

Transnational dynamics around territory, regulation and property are far from new. In each of these areas, however, there are major changes afoot that this book seeks to explain. With respect to territory, the most important contemporary issues relate to the efforts of states to exert control of land both across borders and within their own, and the responses by other states and by non-state groups to those efforts. The aspects of these struggles that most demand our attention are the near-disappearance, since the late 1970s, of the redistribution of territory through interstate war; the complex politics of control over the extensive ‘frontier’ areas that exist within many states; and the rise of transnational movements pressing for recognition of indigenous rights to land. In the sphere of regulation, there has been an enormous increase in attempts by transnational actors to influence the rules that govern land use, especially in the South. Such attempts have been spearheaded by a remarkably wide range of groups, including states, international financial institutions (IFIs), transnational corporations (TNCs), non-governmental organizations (NGOs), organizations of the United Nations (UN), private foundations, and environmental certification organizations. These groups have sought to transform regulations regarding how property is held, the rights of indigenous peoples and environmental conservation. With respect to property, finally, the most high-profile recent changes have involved TNCs and states seeking to buy or lease land in other countries, and activists organizing transnationally to resist this ‘global land grab’. Transnational relations have also been central to the widespread expansion of conservation areas and of special economic zones in the South, both of which have seen changes in the property status of large amounts of land.

This introductory chapter lays the groundwork for the analysis of the transnational dynamics of territory, regulation and property in the chapters to come. In the next section, I ask what land is, and discuss some of the aspects of land that differentiate it from other resources and complicate efforts to understand it in a unified way (while also making the project an especially interesting one). The subsequent section explains the concepts of territory, regulation and property that underpin the book’s analysis. I then provide brief introductions to the main themes of the book’s topical chapters, themes which add up to an overview of the key issues involved in transnational struggles over land control today. The last section highlights other issues related to land control that the book does not address.

What is land, and how is it different from other resources?

Asking ‘what is land?’ may seem like an odd, and unnecessary, place to start. What could be more concrete and obvious than the ground beneath our feet? The Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of ‘land’ as ‘The solid portion of the earth’s surface, as opposed to sea, water’⁴ seems straightforward enough. But things are not so simple. There is, first, something peculiarly abstract about ‘land’ when you stop to think about it. If you were to remove all the vegetation and soil from a hectare of land, you would still have a hectare of land (though rather less productive and of rather lower elevation). If you continued on into the rock and minerals below and started removing them in turn, it is not clear how deep you would have to dig before there would no longer be ‘land’ there. Indeed, the OED definition means you cannot get rid of land in this way; for a given area to stop being land, you have to drown it. This abstract quality makes it difficult to visualize ‘land’ as such, as opposed to the soil and rocks that constitute land and the vegetation that sits on top of it, all of which can be carted away without diminishing land’s landness. Second, the OED’s seemingly clear definition of land as ‘not-water’ hides a good deal of ambiguity. Plenty of areas straddle the boundary between the solid and the liquid. River deltas, floodplains, tidal zones, seasonal ponds, marshes and swamps all combine land and water. New technology (like underwater drilling) and new legal frameworks (like the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea) have also increasingly led to parts of the seabed – unambiguously under water, all the time – being treated in many respects as land. The question of whether such areas should be considered ‘land’ – and, if so, when – is not settled by the objective physical definition in the OED but by human laws and regulations that determine how these areas can be used and held.

This book is part of a series on resources. Land, however, differs from other resources in fundamental respects. An overview of some of the key differences provides context for the approach to analysing land control outlined in the next section. The first difference is a very simple one that follows from the discussion in the previous paragraph: land does not move. Land is fixed in place and cannot be exported, or even relocated to the next town or down the road (even if, again, the soil and minerals that constitute land can be so moved). If you want to use land, it will not come to you – you have to go to it, or convince other people to go to it for you. For this reason, this book cannot take the common approach to studying resources of investigating the ‘commodity chain’ connecting the point of production or extraction with the point of consumption. We cannot follow land, as we can corn, coltan, coffee and cocaine, as it changes hands and is transformed on its journey to the final consumer. Partly for this reason, too, the phenomenon in which control of a resource is intensely concentrated at some point in the commodity chain does not apply to land. Fifteen companies control four-fifths of the world’s proven oil reserves, and 75–90 per cent of world trade in grains and oilseeds, like corn, soy and wheat, is in the hands of just four firms.⁵ While the control of land – in all the different senses of that term to be discussed in the next section – is highly unequal, it is not as unequal as this. No private company owns more than a minuscule portion of the earth’s surface, and even the territory of Russia, the biggest country by area, covers only around 11 per cent of the world’s roughly 149 million km² of land.

Land, second, is extremely heterogeneous. Many resources are seen to have a world market price that, while certainly a simplification (one common measure of the ‘price of oil’, for instance, actually refers to the price of West Texas Intermediate light sweet crude), is still a meaningful indicator that conveys information about what you could expect to pay for a barrel of oil, a bushel of wheat or an ounce of gold. The price of land is more like the price of labour. Land and labour both vary so dramatically in location and quality that the notion of a benchmark world price for a generic day’s work or hectare of land is nonsensical. One thousand hectares of land can be had in plenty of places for literally nothing (or less), while a few square metres in some downtown business districts can cost as much as – well, if you have to ask, you wouldn’t be able to afford it. There is no reason to expect that a spike or collapse in the price of land in one part of the world will be accompanied by similar movements elsewhere. Land price variations can verge on the bizarre. It has been estimated that if the people of Japan had sold all of their country’s land at the peak of a land-price bubble in the late 1980s, they would have been able to buy all the land in the rest of the world with the proceeds.

A third difference is that control over land is indispensable to almost all human activity. Some form of control over land is often (though by no means always) necessary for access to both non-renewable resources, like uranium, iron ore and coltan, and to renewable ones, like water, trees and soil. In terrestrial environments, land control is also wrapped up with control over ecosystems. Conservationists wishing to preserve biodiversity generally need to exercise some kind of control over land to do so. Land can also be a sink – a place to dump stuff that you no longer want. Finally and most basically, land provides space for human action, whether it be used for agriculture, housing, industry, infrastructure, tourism or what have you. Land, in short, is different because efforts to control it are woven together with almost everything that people do.

A fourth difference, and one that harks back again to the abstract nature of land, is that land is commonly rented. This is not true of other resources. It is difficult to think of circumstances (other than the staging of an avant-garde play) under which someone might want to borrow 12 tons of iron ore or 500 kilograms of fish. The reason holders of a piece of land are often willing to lend it to someone else is that land as such is not consumed through use in the way that other resources are, even if overuse can degrade or ruin land for specific purposes. Land that has been stripped of its fertility by grazing or cultivation, or polluted by mining or factory effluent, or even so badly irradiated that people can no longer go anywhere near it, is still land. Indeed, people not only rent land, they do so for very long periods. In agriculture, forestry and mining, land leases of periods like 30, 50 and 99 years are the norm. The Guinness brewery in St James Gate, Dublin, has been operating since 1759 under a 9,000-year lease. We will see in the next section of this chapter that leases (like ownership) can convey some or all of a wide range of different rights to make use of the land. A forestry concession, for instance, might include the right to plant, harvest and manage timber, but not to plant cotton or to extract sub-surface resources. One lease is not at all the same as another.

Finally, land differs from other resources as a result of the power and depth of the attachments people feel to it. This is true at the level of individuals and families, who may have strong emotional connections to the family home, farm, ranch, or cottage. It is true of the ties people can feel to the neighbourhood or village in which they live or in which they grew up. More importantly for this book, it is also true at the level of larger political and ethnic groups, which almost always understand some part of the earth’s surface to be their land or, in the terms I use here, their territory. Connections to and images of this land may form an important component of a group’s identity. People do, of course, relate to resources other than land in emotional and identity terms. All of a country’s resources, for instance, can be understood to comprise a part of the national patrimony; one has only to put the words ‘hands off’ in front of ‘our oil’, ‘our fish’ or ‘our water’ to see this. The depths of our emotional relationships to land, however, are unusual in this respect, and the consequences of this difference run through this book.

Territory, regulation and property

The different facets of the contemporary transnational politics of land that we encountered in Huang’s saga, and some of the discussion of how land differs from other resources in the preceding section, suggest that there are a number of forms of control over land. This diversity can be organized by highlighting territory, regulation and property as the three central elements of land control over which people struggle within and across international borders. While there are enormous literatures dealing with each of these three terms and a vast range of conflicting definitions, I use them in this book to mean specific things....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures and Tables
• Acronyms
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter One: Introduction
• Chapter Two: Interstate Struggles
• Chapter Three: Frontiers
• Chapter Four: Land Booms
• Chapter Five: Titling and Conservation
• Chapter Six: Social Movements
• Chapter Seven: Conclusion
• Selected Readings
• Notes and References
• Index