Several developing countries are not only the destination of large-scale land deals, but also the source of new investments. South-South land grabbing challenges traditional conceptions in political economy, and raises questions as to whether these arise from or produce different dynamics than ‘North-South’ deals.
This panel will consider cases of Brazilian deals in Bolivia, Vietnamese deals in Lao PDR, (?) deals in Ghana, and South African deals in Congo, Mozambique and Malawi, in order to reflect on the degree to which there are new and distinctive intra-regional dynamics of land grabbing in the present era. The authors consider regional integration and regional institutions as forms of legitimation of regional powers’ expansionary interests, and explore empirically how the interests of domestic, regional and international investors intersect.
Chair: Dzodzi Tsikata, University of Ghana
- Ruth Hall, Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), University of the Western Cape, The next Great Trek: South African commercial farmers move north (Presentation)
- Joseph Ariyo and Michael Mortimore, Land deals and commercial agriculture in Nigeria (Presentation)
- Lee Mackey, PhD candidate, Dep’t Urban Planning, School of Public Affairs, University of California-Los Angeles, Legitimating Foreignization in Bolivia: Technology and the Social Relations of Brazilian Landowning in Santa Cruz, Bolivia (Presentation)
- Miles Kenney-Lazar, PhD Student, Clark University, Graduate School of Geography, Dispossession, semi-proletarianization, and enclosure: primitive accumulation and the land grab in Laos