The conjunction of climate, food, and financial crises in the late 2000s triggered renewed interest in farmland and agribusiness investments around the world. This phenomenon became known as the âglobal land grabâ and sparked debates among social movements, NGOs, academics, government and international development agencies worldwide. In this introduction, we critically analyse the âstate of the literatureâ so far, and outline four areas that are moving the debate âbeyond land grabsâ. These include: (1) the role of contract farming and differentiation among farm workers in the consolidation of farmland; (2) the broader forms of dispossession and mechanisms of control and value grabbing beyond âclassicâ land grabs for agricultural production; (3) discourses about, and responses to, Chinese agribusiness investments abroad; and (4) the relationship between financialization and land grabbing. Ultimately, we propose new directions to deepen and even transform the research agenda on land struggles and agroindustrial restructuring around the world.
Introduction: state of the literature
Over a decade has passed since a spike in food and commodity prices articulated with the global financial crisis to trigger a massive wave of farmland investments worldwide. The first set of publications on this topic (from 2008 to around 2012) was largely based on public announcements, and focused on identifying the drivers of large-scale acquisitions of farmland, calling special attention to capital-rich/resource-poor countries such as China, South Korea, and the Gulf states making investments in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America (Cotula et al., 2009; FAO, 2011; GRAIN, 2008; HLPE, 2011; IFPRI, 2009; Oxfam, 2011; World Bank, 2010). It largely turned on accusations by social movements, NGOs, and critical scholars that large-scale land acquisitions, led primarily by international investors, were poised to displace peasants, undermine local food security/sovereignty, and drive deforestation in a rush for profits and resources, while prominent multilateral development agencies and less critical scholars raised the prospect that renewed interests in agricultural investments could bring much-needed finance for underdeveloped countries and regions (ibid.) Since this first moment, academic research has played a key role articulating these debates about the âglobal land grabâ. This work has often been organized through high-profile international conferences, such as the Land Deal Politics Initiative (LDPI) meetings at the University of Sussex in 2011 and at Cornell University in 2012, and special issues of major journals of agrarian studies, particularly the Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS) (Borras et al., 2011; Peluso & Lund, 2011; White et al., 2012; see also, Borras et al., 2012a), which incorporated much research from scholars in the LDPI network.1
After this first wave of scholarship consolidated the critique of the âglobal land grabâ originally set by social movements, questioning the pro-investment narratives of certain multi-lateral institutions and NGOs, a second wave of publications began to emerge from around 2012 to 2014 that exposed a more complex reality. Some scholars began to raise questions regarding the significance of land grabs and if there is anything new about them, and as some high-profile large-scale land deals collapsed others began to call for research that goes âbeyond the hypeâ generated by the first wave of literature on the global land grab to a more nuanced approach (Amanor, 2012; Amanor & Moyo, 2008; Franco et al., 2013; Zoomers & Kaag, 2014). Hence, scholars began to scrutinize journalistic claims more carefully, and debate the methodological frameworks and theoretical scope of research on land grabbing (Edelman et al., 2013; Fairbairn et al., 2014). The complicity of conservation agencies and discourses was revealed (Fairhead et al., 2012), the significance of not only land but also water for agroindustrial investments was identified (Mehta et al., 2012), and land grabbing for mineral extraction, urban development, and infrastructure construction were also brought into debate, showing that âfood crisisâ alone does not fully condition the phenomenon (Geenen & Hoenke, 2014; Kröger, 2014; Levien, 2012; Pedlowski, 2013). In-depth research began to expose the role of state actors and local elites from the Global South to temper the exclusive focus on international investors (Keene et al., 2015; Oliveira, 2013; Wolford et al., 2013), and critiques of the pro-investment narrative gained traction as the limitations of global governance were exposed (Borras et al., 2013; Goetz, 2013; Margulis et al., 2013; Voget-Kleschin & Ott, 2013). In short, a more complex set of actors, interests, and local-global dynamics appeared to be at play, and this called for further, more empirically rich and theoretically nuanced research. In our assessment, the most important contributions from this second wave of scholarship are the methodological challenges that were identified in the first wave of the âland grab debate,â in particular: questioning the epistemology of major land-deal databases, the focus and assumptions of much of the literature that foreign investors and large-scale land deals represented the bulk of the phenomenon, and calling for more fieldwork-based case studies that could advance political and academic debates with more sound evidence and more nuanced conceptualization of ongoing agrarian transformations. One of the most prominent collections of such methodological debates was edited by Scoones et al. (2013), including significant contributions by Edelman (2013) and Oya (2013) in addition to their editorial introduction. In addition to JPS, the citations above also illustrate how such research was often collected in special issues of Development and Change, the Canadian Journal of Development Studies, Third World Quarterly, the Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, Water Alternatives, and Globalizations itself.
Since then, a third-wave of empirically-rich research began to emerge that answers that call for better methodology and more nuanced theorization, revealing not only the advancement of agribusiness capital but also the political reactions âfrom belowâ (Hall et al., 2015), the rise of flex crops and commodities (Borras et al., 2016), the articulation of farmland investments with gender, generational, and climate change politics in particular regions (Corbera et al., 2017; Park & White, 2017; Schoenberger et al., 2017), and the crucial role of financial capital from the Global North in the dynamics of major land acquisitions worldwide, including speculative mining ventures (Ehrnström-Fuentes & Kröger, 2018; Goldstein & Yates, 2017; Kröger, 2016; Visser et al., 2015). This third-wave of debate about the âglobal land grabâ continues to flourish across various forums, including all the journals mentioned above, and in several more journals of geography, environmental studies, agrarian studies, and political economy, and increasingly in full monographs as well, some of which we cite in the sections below.2
As this new empirical research emerges, both political and theoretical arguments evolve with the changing dynamics of capitalist globalization. These include calls to deepen and expand research âbeyond land grabbingâ as originally conceived (e.g. Pedersen & Buur, 2016), focusing especially on new forms of commodification of land driven not by agriculture alone, foreign investments, and illegal dispossession, but rather the legal concentration of land by financiers, industrial and mining companies, domestic agribusinesses, and smaller-scale farmers themselves, examining the structures of power and authority that promote, condition, and may prevent land grabs and concentration, and tracing the reconfiguration of land rights over time with a broader geographical coverage. A themed issue of Geoforum entitled âBeyond Land Grabbingâ (ibid.) articulated this call most explicitly. However, it only contained an introductory editorial and three articles, all reviews of the literature until then, calling for further empirical research in these specific directions. The BRICS Initiative for Critical Agrarian Studies (BICAS), from which we drew most of the papers for this special issue, is one of the main forums where cutting-edge research has been advanced to answer precisely this call, reframing debates from optimistic celebrations of the ârise of the BRICSâ as an alternative to imperialism from the Global North, and simplistic critiques of âneo-colonialismâ from emerging economies across the Global South, towards a critique of global agrarian transformations that places socio-ecological struggles at the core of analysis (Oliveira & McKay, 2021).
Globalizations has been a key platform for the evolution of this literature, hosting an influential special issue at the turning point of the debate in 2013 on âLand Grabbing and Global Governanceâ (volume 10, issue 1; Margulis et al., 2013), and many more articles since then that contributed fieldwork-based and theoretically innovative advances to this literature. This includes some in the recent special issue âBRICS and MICS: Implications for Global Agrarian Transformationâ (volume 15, issue 1; Cousins et al., 2018) that demonstrate...
