The New Enclosures: Critical Perspectives on Corporate Land Deals

Ben White, Saturnino Borras Jr., Ruth Hall, Ian Scoones, Wendy Wolford, Ben White, Saturnino Borras Jr., Ruth Hall, Ian Scoones, Wendy Wolford, Ben White, Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Ruth Hall, Ian Scoones, Wendy Wolford

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415823746
• eBook ISBN: 9781317976844
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias físicas
• Subtopic: Geografía

This collection explores the complex dynamics of corporate land deals from a broad agrarian political economy perspective, with a special focus on the implications for property and labour regimes, labour processes and structures of accumulation. This involves looking at ways in which existing patterns of rural social differentiation – in terms of class, gender, ethnicity and generation – are being shaped by changes in land use and property relations, as well as by the re-organization of production and exchange as rural communities and resources are incorporated into global commodity chains. It goes further than the descriptive 'what' and 'who' questions, in order to understand the 'how' and 'why' of these patterns. It is empirically solid and theoretically sophisticated, making it a robust and boundary-changing work. Contributors come from various scholarly disciplines. Covering nearly all regions of the world, the collection will be of interest to researchers from various disciplines, policymakers and activists.

This book was originally published as a Special Issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

The new enclosures: critical perspectives on corporate land deals

Ben White, Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Ruth Hall, Ian Scoones and Wendy Wolford

The contributions to this collection use the tools of agrarian political economy to explore the rapid growth and complex dynamics of large-scale land deals in recent years, with a special focus on the implications of big land deals for property and labour regimes, labour processes and structures of accumulation. The first part of this introductory essay examines the implications of this agrarian political economy perspective. First we explore the continuities and contrasts between historical and contemporary land grabs, before examining the core underlying debate around large- versus small-scale farming futures. Next, we unpack the diverse contexts and causes of land grabbing today, highlighting six overlapping mechanisms. The following section turns to assessing the crisis narratives that frame the justifications for land deals, and the flaws in the argument around there being excess, empty or idle land available. Next the paper turns to an examination of the impacts of land deals, and the processes of inclusion and exclusion at play, before looking at patterns of resistance and constructions of alternatives. The final section introduces the papers in the collection.

Introduction: land deals in political economy perspective

The contributions to this collection use the tools of agrarian political economy to explore the rapid growth of large-scale land deals in recent years – the phenomenon popularly known as ‘land grabbing’, the large-scale acquisition of land or land-related rights and resources by corporate (business, non-profit or public)¹ entities. The focus is on the ways in which ‘grabbing’ creates specific kinds of property dynamics, namely dispossession of land, water, forests and other common property resources; their concentration, privatization and transaction as corporate (owned or leased) property; and in turn the transformation of agrarian labour regimes.

Since many contemporary large-scale land deals remain at the speculative stage, it is too early to see their longer-term impacts on local populations and agrarian structures. How extensive are these land deals? Are they occurring on the margins, or resulting in a significant restructuring of agrarian settings? Several groups in recent years have tried to document the location and extent of land deals (Anseeuw et al. 2012, von Braun and Meinzen-Dick 2009, Cotula et al. 2009, GRAIN 2008, Oakland 2011, Oxfam 2011, World Bank 2010). Even if there were consensus on the definition of land grabs, and on the methodology of counting them, large land deals are typically shrouded in secrecy and no one really knows how much land has been acquired. Lorenzo Cotula has critically reviewed the available body of evidence, pointing to sources of both over- and under-estimation, but confirming that ‘the phenomenon is massive and growing’ (Cotula, 2012, this volume)².

A large scale land deal is often no more than a framework, under which concrete deals between agribusiness corporations and local governments for the purchase or leasing of designated areas may or may not emerge, and these deals in turn may not result until many years later in the actual enclosure of land, dispossession of its previous users and establishment of new production and labour regimes. Potentially, however, these deals open the way to a truly wide-ranging global ‘land reform’ – in this case, a regressive land reform where governments take land from the poor and give (or sell or lease) it to the rich.

Faced with the rapid spate of big land deals in recent years and in all continents, there is plenty of reason for researchers, activists and policymakers to be concerned with the immediate problems of dispossession, exclusion and adverse incorporation that local communities face. Besides these immediate issues however, there is also a need to look for deeper understandings of the phenomenon and its longer-term implications for agricultural and rural futures, in other words to disentangle the immediate and the more fundamental dynamics at work.

Building on and complementing other recent and forthcoming paper collections on specific aspects of land deals,³ this volume explores the complex dynamics of corporate land deals in a broad agrarian political economy perspective, with a special focus on the implications for property and labour regimes, labour processes and structures of accumulation. Among other things this can involve looking at ways in which existing patterns of rural social differentiation – in terms of class and gender, perhaps also ethnicity and generation – are being shaped by changes in land use and property relations, as well as by the re-organization of production and exchange as rural communities and resources are incorporated in global commodity chains. Also important (and sometimes forgotten by political economists) is the politics which steers all this: the role of mobilization, struggle or resistance in shaping, negotiating and challenging new land investments; the various competing policy and political narratives and discourses around the multiple crises of food, energy, climate and finance, and their impact on, or use in, land deal negotiations, the emerging or continuing dynamics of elite power and corruption, and the role of global land policies of international development agencies in facilitating and encouraging, or blocking and discouraging, land deals.

Although all the contributions to this collection are concerned with some aspect of large-scale land deals, the acquisition of land is not an end in itself. Some land deals (for example those made by hedge funds and pension funds) may be purely speculative, betting on rising global land values; investors put their money in land, as they might put it in gold, works of art, British Petroleum shares or pork-belly futures. Speculative investment aside however, the purpose of the great majority of corporate land grabs is to establish agricultural production (or other forms of extraction such as mining) on a large scale, and to guarantee access to its products. We are of course not the first to make this observation. As Marx noted in the remarks on the English enclosures in which he first coined the term ‘land grabbing’

Land grabbing on a great scale […] is the first step in creating a field for the establishment of agriculture on a great scale. Hence this subversion of agriculture puts on, at first, more the appearance of a political revolution. (Marx 1906 [1867] Capital. Vol. I., p. 470)

What does this ‘political revolution’ (or social-economic-political revolution) involve? And what concepts do we need to analyze and describe it, and at what levels? What kinds of analytical tools do we need to understand relations between the level of the larger circuits of global (agribusiness) capital, and changes happening at the level of local communities, and at the various intermediate levels between? These questions are the agrarian manifestation of the more general issue that all social sciences have to confront: how do we frame and grasp the relations and dynamics between the local and the global, the individual, group and wider society, between ‘actors’ and ‘structures’? And more specifically, how do global or national corporations and investors hope to organize the production and delivery of export crops? What alternatives are available to them in commanding land and labour? These issues can mostly be explored using very simple questions, and simple language, as in Bernstein’s much-quoted ‘Marxian haiku’⁴ on key questions in agrarian political economy: ‘who owns what? who does what? who gets what? what do they do with it?’ (Bernstein 2010, 22). To these questions we would add two more: ‘what do they do to each other? (How do social classes and groups in society and within the state interact with each other?)’, to capture the relational and political side of property and labour regimes, labour processes and structures of accumulation, and ‘How do changes in politics get shaped by dynamic ecologies and vice versa?’, emphasising the political-ecological context of land deals.

Then of course we need to go further than these descriptive (‘what?’ and ‘who?’) questions, in order to understand the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of these patterns. These questions, we think, can be approached with the help of a nested hierarchy of ‘umbrella’ concepts: the (global) agro-commodity regime; (global) commodity chains or value chains, and (agrarian) labour regimes.

Food and other agro-commodity regimes⁵ are political regimes of global value relations (Araghi 2003), which take on particular forms in different eras. The contemporary context of neo-liberal globalization means not just increasing worldwide connections, but a project to organize those connections in a certain way:

The globalization project is an attempt to fashion the world around a central principle through powerful political and financial institutions. …
an emerging vision of the world and its resources as a globally organized and managed free trade/free enterprise economy pursued by a largely unaccountable political and economic elite. (McMichael 2000, 241, 354)

Of course we (and McMichael) are not the first to make this observation.

Chased around the world by its burning desire for ever-expanding markets, the bourgeoisie has no choice but to settle everywhere; cultivate everywhere; establish connections everywhere … in a nutshell, it creates the world in its own image. (Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848)

Literally before our eyes the world’s agriculture […] is being more and more drawn into the circulation of the world economy, and the centres of capitalism are more and more subordinating it to their leadership. (Chayanov 1966 [1925], 257)

The food regime concept, developed initially by Friedmann and McMichael (1989), allows us to refocus ‘from the commodity as object to the commodity as relation, with definite geo-political, social, ecological and nutritional relations at significant historical moments’ (McMichael 2009, 63). Analysis of evolving agro-commodity regimes thus has to encompass many levels, from local to global, if like Chayanov we hope to understand ‘the social threads that bind Sidor Karpov’s farm, lost in the Perm’ forests, to the London banks and oblige him to feel the effects of changes in the pulse rate of the London stock exchange’ (Chayanov 1966 [1925], 257). These commodity-specific ‘social threads’ are nowadays analysed as global commodity chains: ‘… all the activities that connect the production of commodities with their final consumption […] and the actors and institutions, relations and practices, that structure those journeys’ (Bernstein 2010, 125). The local producers, distant consumers and many other agents linked in these chains all claim a share of the ‘added value’ at various points in the chain, and their inclusion or exclusion and the strength of their claims are highly influenced by the exercise of power at various levels.

At the local end of these value chains, labour regime analysis is a useful tool for analyzing agrarian structures and comparing them across space and time, and identifying points and processes of contestation, conflict and negotiation. Henry Bernstein’s definition – ‘specific methods of mobilizing labour and organizing it in production, and their particular social, economic and political conditions’ (Bernstein 1988, 31-2) – emphasizes that the emergence of specific labour regimes is not inevitable but the product of politics.⁶ A modern and flexible agrarian political economy also incorporates, in its exploration of these dynamic relationships and processes, both material and ideological aspects, as well as dimensions that were relatively neglected in classical agrarian studies such as the dynamics of gender, ethnicity, livelihoods diversity, mobility and rural-urban links.

In the following sections we examine the implications of this agrarian political economy perspective on large-scale large deals. First we explore the continuities and contrasts between contemporary processes and historical experiences, before examining the core underlying debate around small- versus large-scale farming futures. Next, we unpack the diverse, overlapping causes of land grabbing today in different contexts, highlighting six overlapping mechanisms. The following section turns to assessing the crisis narratives that frame the justifications for land deals, and the flaws in the argument around there being ‘excess’, ‘empty’ or ‘idle’ land available. Next the paper turns to an examination of the impacts of land deals, and the processes of inclusion and exclusion at play, followed by brief observations on regulation, resistance and constructions of alternatives. The final section introduces the papers in the collection.

Historical dimensions: continuities and contrasts

… what is so new […] about ‘land grabbing’? Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and English colonizers were heavily engaged in both land grabbing and the creation of private property […] The ways officials implemented land controls differed from one colony to another, or differed by crop, by region of a colony, or by legal logic, and often changed over colonial times. What is new in the land grabs today are the new mechanisms of land control, their justifications and alliances for ‘taking back’ the land, as well as the political economic context of neoliberalism. (Peluso and Lund 2011, 672)

Most regions of the global South, as well as the global North, have a long history of land ‘grabbing’ on a large scale. In the North, the best-known episodes have been the European and particularly the British enclosures. But we should also recall the dispossession of the native peoples of North America and Australasia, and, arguably, some historical episodes of forced socialist collectivization. In many regions of the global South land was first grabbed by pre-colonial rulers in chronic territorial wars with each other, then by colonial governments and increasingly by foreign or domestic corporations. Through the nineteenth century, outright sale by colonial powers of large tracts of land held under customary tenure was quite common, but this was often prohibited or limited by later colonial legislation so that long, renewable leases became the norm. Liz Alden Wily (2012, this volume) argues that the current spate of land deals is ‘less a new phenomenon than a significant surge in the continuing capture of ordinary people’s rights and assets by capital-led and class-creating social transformation’. Using the examples of the Irish and English enclosures of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, the North American dispossession of native populations, and the three great African land rushes of 1885-1915, 1919-1939, and 1945-1955, she underlines one key common aspect of all these land-grabbing episodes, the legal manipulations that ‘render untitled (but traditionally occupied and used) lands as unowned, and the state, by default, their legal owner’ (Wily 2012, this volume).

In the late-colonial and post-colonial decades both governments and civil society groups in many countries attempted to correct some of these historical distortions by land reforms or other means of breaking up large private or corporate estates and their redistribution to smallholders. Some of these initiatives were modest reformist measures intended to stem the radicalisation of the rural poor as a political force, as in Kenya’s Swynnerton Plan of 1954, while others were adopted by newly independent post-colonial states engaged in nationalist projects of indigenisation (El-Ghonemy 2001, Heyer et al. 1981, 102–103, Sorenson 1967). The World Bank also was a major proponent of the breakup of large corporate plantations in favour of small farmer based agricultural development strategies through the second half of the twentieth century. Radical land reforms, in the context of revolutionary regime change, saw the division of large privately-owned land-holdings and their redistribution to tenants and landless workers, sometimes with the goal of creating a stable and productive mass of relatively homogeneous ‘family farms’ (Ghose 1983), and in other cases as a first step towards eventual socialist collectivisation.

Paradoxically, all these policies are now being reversed as governments and international development organisat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• 1. The new enclosures: critical perspectives on corporate land deals
• 2. The international political economy of the global land rush: A critical appraisal of trends, scale, geography and drivers
• 3. The land grab and corporate food regime restructuring
• 4. Situating private equity capital in the land grab debate
• 5. Global resource grabs, agribusiness concentration and the smallholder: two West African case studies
• 6. Looking back to see forward: the legal niceties of land theft in land rushes
• 7. New investment, old challenges. Land deals and the water constraint in African agriculture
• 8. Patterns of agrarian transformation in Ethiopia: State-mediated commercialisation and the ‘land grab’
• 9. The next Great Trek? South African commercial farmers move north
• 10. Land grabbing in Latin America and the Caribbean
• 11. Agrarian structure, foreign investment in land, and land prices in Brazil
• 12. Oligarchs, megafarms and land reserves: understanding land grabbing in Russia
• 13. The land question: special economic zones and the political economy of dispossession in India
• 14. Land expropriation and displacement in Bangladesh
• 15. Gendered experiences of dispossession: oil palm expansion in a Dayak Hibun community in West Kalimantan
• 16. Plantation rubber, land grabbing and social-property transformation in southern Laos
• 17. Large-scale land deals from the inside out: findings from Kenya’s Tana Delta
• 18. Tree plantations, politics of possession and the absence of land grabs in Vietnam
• Index