Future Agricultures Consortium

Sunday, May 26th

Land Grabs II: 17-19 October, USA

Landgrabconf The second international academic workshop on ‘Global Land Grabbing’ will be held on 17-19 October 2012 at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, USA. This event is presented by the Land Deal Politics Initiative (LDPI) and the Cornell Department of Development Sociology. Among the confirmed keynote speakers is the new Director-General of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and Brazilian academic, José Graziano da Silva.

This conference is a follow up to the highly successful 2011 conference, Global Land Grabbing, held 6-8 April at the Institute for Development Studies at the University of Sussex, Brighton, England.

At the first Land Grabbing conference, 120 papers were presented that sketched the broad outlines of land grabs happening across the globe. A convergence of factors has been driving a revaluation of land by powerful economic and political actors. This is occurring across the world, but especially in the global South. As a result, there has been a dramatic rise in large-scale land deals unfolding worldwide. The phrase ‘global land grab’ has become a catch-all phrase to describe this explosion of (trans)national commercial and government-driven land transactions revolving around the production and sale of food and biofuels, conservation and mining activities.

Agenda

The purpose of the 2012 conference is to continue deepening and broadening our understanding of global land deals. An overriding concern of the conference is with agrarian change: what changes in broad agrarian structures are emerging? Are land deals motivated by new forms of agrarian capitalism or repeats of the past? What is the nature and extent of rural social differentiation – in terms of class, gender, ethnicity – following changes in land use and land property relations as well as organizations of production and exchange? At the same time, we have remained open to broader topics around land grab intersections with political economy, political ecology and political sociology, and are convening a series of parallel sessions on a range of themes.

Conference website

The conference has its own website which includes the schedule, logistics, downloadable papers and media information:

www.cornell-landproject.org

The Future Agricultures website will also carry selected blogs, video and other media outputs from the event.

Featured video

5 Ways to rethink land grabs

Our conception of land grabs and global discussions are informed too much by contentious, large-scale land deals in Africa and too little by examples from other regions (such as Latin America). This has led to many unfounded assumptions about the nature of land grabs. In this short interview, Dr. Saturnino (Jun) Borras of LDPI fleshes out 5 such perspectives from which land-grabbing could be viewed afresh.

TheWaterChannel

Land Theme Projects

Featured Publications

Working Paper: Plantations, Contract Farming and Commercial Farming Areas in Africa: A Comparative Review by Rebecca Smalley, 2013

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This working paper assesses the historical experience of three farming models that have figured in recent investments in sub-Saharan Africa: plantations, contract farming and commercial farming areas.

The paper concentrates on the involvement of, and effects on, rural societies in and around the area where the schemes were located. It looks mainly at sub-Saharan Africa but also considers case studies from Latin America and Asia.

Policy Brief: The Green Belt Initiative and Land Grabs in Malawi by Blessings Chinsinga and Michael Chasukwa, 2012

Malawi's Green Belt Initiative (GBI) aims to offer land to local and international investors, in order to increase agricultural production, productivity, incomes and food security. But it may also be facilitating 'land grabs' from smallholder farmers. This policy brief looks at the political economy of the GBI and some concerns with its effects.

LDPI Working Papers

A series of working papers on land deals in Africa and elsewhere, funded by the Land Deal Politics Initiative (LDPI)

Global Land Grabbing II

An international conference on how land deals are changing farming, social difference and politics in Africa and beyond

17-19 October 2012
Cornell University, USA

More information

Research Objectives

Overall focus

The politics of policy underlying transnational commercial land deals in Africa

Key Questions

What international and national policy processes influence transnational commercial land deals in Africa?
What competing discourses, interests and power relations define struggles over transnational land deals in different places?
Who wins and who loses from such land deals, in terms of gender, class, ethnicity?

Theme Contact

Ruth Hall Theme Coordinator

Theme Partners

Links

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Land Grab Media Coverage (14)
- Malawi: Without land reform, small farmers become "trespassers"
  FAC researcher Blessings Chinsinga is quoted in this article about farmers ejected from land they had previously been allowed to farm.
- BBC: Zimbabwean Farmers Working Nigerian Land
- Geographical: A new colonial carve-up?
  Wealthy countries have been buying up huge tracts of land in developing countries and paying billions of dollars for the privilege. But do the local people ever benefit? Mark Rowe investigates
- New-ag : Land grab or development opportunity?
  African farming is in desperate need of investment. Without it, given the pressures of an increasing population, exhaustion of soils and minimal farm infrastructure, millions of smallholder farmers seem condemned to low productivity.
- G20-Agriculture: Hundreds of organizations say STOP farm land grabbing!
  Hundreds of civil society organisations will launch a global appeal against farmland grabbing during the G20 meeting on Agriculture in Paris on June 22 - 23.
- Guardian: US universities in Africa 'land grab'
  Institutions including Harvard and Vanderbilt reportedly use hedge funds to buy land in deals that may force farmers out
- BBC News Zimbabwe land reform 'not a failure'
  Zimbabwe's often violent land reform programme has not been the complete economic disaster widely portrayed, a new study has found.
- IDS: Zimbabwe's land reform ten years on: new study dispels the myths
  Study published which asks what has happened in 10 years since large areas of Zimbabwe's commercial farm land were invaded by land-hungry villagers
- Nature: Soya Scrutiny
  A partnership to encourage sustainable farming in Brazil may not be as green as it seems
- Guardian Small-scale farmers increasingly at risk from 'global land grabbing'
  While investment is critical for agriculture, the rush into long-term land leases is a dramatic step with many risks and substantial social and environmental costs
- Guardian: South Africa’s white farmers are moving further north
  Other countries believe their agricultural expertise can kickstart an agrarian revolution across the African continent
- BBC: Hedge funds 'grabbing land' in Africa
  Hedge funds are behind "land grabs" in Africa to boost their profits in the food and biofuel sectors, a US think-tank says.
- Hedge funds create volatility in global food supply with land grabs across Africa
  Financial backers – including U.S universities and pension funds – are lured by high returns and turn a blind eye to theft of land, displacement of people
- The Economist: When others are grabbing their land
  Evidence is piling up against acquisitions of farmland in poor countries
News Articles from The Zimbabwean (6)
General Land Links (5)

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