Land deals take many divergent institutional forms, ranging from large estate agriculture based on wage labour, to outgrower and contract schemes, with many permutations in between, (including options for food crop production alongside biofuel feedstocks). This panel explores the varied institutional forms and the social relations they are producing, in the oil palm industry in Indonesia and Colombia, and in the expanding biofuel and fruit industries in Ghana.

The cases to be presented consider the socially differentiated impacts of these different forms, the wider political interests that shape them, and implications for dispossession and for (adverse) incorporation into new modes of accumulation. A common concern across the papers is to consider the degree to which institutional alternatives to corporate estates offer a solution to problems of displacement and economic exclusion of local producers, or merely alter their form.

Chair: Kojo Amanor, University of Ghana

• Claude Fortin, graduate student, Saint Mary’s University, Canada, The Biofuel Boom and Indonesia’s Oil Palm Industry: The Twin Processes of Peasant Dispossession and Adverse Incorporation in West Kalimantan (Presentation)
• Mark Maughan, graduated from University of Cambridge, Land grab and oil palm in Colombia (Presentation)
• Dzodzi Tsikata and Joseph Yaro, ISSER, University of Ghana, Land Market Liberalization and Trans-National Commercial Land Deals In Ghana Since The 1990s (Presentation)