Download or read book Beyond the Global Land Grab written by Gustavo de L. T. Oliveira and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-17 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 "global land grab", and sparked vibrant debates among social movements, NGOs, international development agencies and various government agencies and academics worldwide. This book addresses four key areas that are moving the debate "beyond land grabs". These include the role of contract farming and differentiation among farm workers in the consolidation of farmland; the broader forms of dispossession and mechanisms of control and value grabbing beyond "classic" land grabs for agricultural production; discourses about, and responses to, Chinese agribusiness investments abroad; and the relationship between financialization and land grabbing. The chapters in this edited volume propose new directions to deepen and even transform the research agenda on land struggles and agro-industrial restructuring around the world. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers interested in development studies, agrarian changes and land struggles. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Globalizations.
Download or read book The Global Land Grab written by Annelies Zoomers and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-02-13 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The last two years have seen a huge amount of academic, policy-making and media interest in the increasingly contentious issue of land grabbing - the large-scale acquisition of land in the global South. It is a phenomenon against which locals seem defenceless, and one about which multilateral organizations, such as the World Bank, as well as civil-society organizations and action NGOs have become increasingly vocal. This in-depth and empirically diverse volume - taking in case studies from across Africa, Asia and Latin America - takes a step back from the hype to explore a number of key questions: Does the 'global land grab' actually exist? If so, what is new about it? And what, beyond the immediately visible dynamics and practices, are the real problems? A comprehensive and much-needed intervention on one of the most hotly contested but little-understood issues facing countries of the South today.
Download or read book Global Land Grabs written by Marc Edelman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-22 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the 2008 world food crisis a surge of land grabbing swept Africa, Asia and Latin America and even some regions of Europe and North America. Investors have uprooted rural communities for massive agricultural, biofuels, mining, industrial and urbanisation projects. ‘Water grabbing’ and ‘green grabbing’ have further exacerbated social tensions. Early analyses of land grabbing focused on foreign actors, the biofuels boom and Africa, and pointed to catastrophic consequences for the rural poor. Subsequently scholars carried out local case studies in diverse world regions. The contributors to this volume advance the discussion to a new stage, critically scrutinizing alarmist claims of the first wave of research, probing the historical antecedents of today’s land grabbing, examining large-scale land acquisitions in light of international human rights and investment law, and considering anew longstanding questions in agrarian political economy about forms of dispossession and accumulation and grassroots resistance. Readers of this collection will learn about the impacts of land and water grabbing; the relevance of key theorists, including Marx, Polanyi and Harvey; the realities of China’s involvement in Africa; how contemporary land grabbing differs from earlier plantation agriculture; and how social movements—and rural people in general—are responding to this new threat. This book was published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.
Download or read book The Global Land Grab written by Maria Margaretha Antonia Kaag and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The last two years have seen a huge amount of academic, policy-making and media interest in the increasingly contentious issue of land grabbing the large-scale acquisition of land in the Global South. It is a phenomenon against which locals seem defenceless, and one about which multilateral organizations such as the World Bank as well as civil-society organizations and action NGOs have become increasingly vocal. This in-depth and empirically diverse volume taking in case studies from across Africa, Asia and Latin America takes a step back from the hype to explore a number of key questions: does the global land grab actually exist? If so, what is new about it? And what, beyond the immediately visible dynamics and practices, are the real problems? The Global Land Grab is a comprehensive and much-needed intervention on one of the most hotly contested but little-understood issues facing Global South countries today."
Download or read book The Global Land Grab written by Maria Margaretha Antonia Kaag and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Land Grabbing written by Stefano Liberti and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2013-11-19 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To the governments and corporations buying up vast tracts of the Third World, it is ‘land leasing’; to its critics, it is nothing better than ‘land grabbing’ – the engine powering a new era of colonialism. In this arresting account of how millions of hectares of fertile soil are stolen to feed wealthy westerners thousands of miles away, journalist Stefano Liberti takes readers on a tour of contemporary exploitation. It is a journey encompassing a Dutch-owned model farm in Ethiopia; a conference in Riyadh, where representatives of Third World governments compete to attract Saudi investors; meetings in Rome where the fate of nations is decided; and the headquarters of the Movement of Landless Workers in São Paulo. Since the food crisis of 2007–8, when the cost of staples such as rice and corn went through the roof, the race to acquire land in the southern hemisphere has become more intense than ever. Land Grabbing is the shocking story of how one half of the world is starved to feed the other.
Download or read book The Great African Land Grab written by Lorenzo Cotula and published by Zed Books Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-07-11 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past few years, large-scale land acquisitions in Africa have stoked controversy, making headlines in media reports across the world. Land that only a short time ago seemed of little outside interest is now being sought by international investors to the tune of hundreds of thousands of hectares. Private-sector expectations of higher world food and commodity prices and government concerns about longer-term national food and energy security have both made land a more attractive asset. Dubbed ‘land grabs’ in the media, large-scale land acquisitions have become one of the most talked about and contentious topics amongst those studying, working in or writing about Africa. Some commentators have welcomed this trend as a bearer of new livelihood opportunities. Others have countered by pointing to negative social impacts, including loss of local land rights, threats to local food security and the risk that large-scale investments may marginalize family farming. Lorenzo Cotula, a leading expert in the field, casts a critical eye over the most reliable evidence on this hotly contested topic, examining the implications of land deals in Africa both for its people and for world agriculture and food security.
Download or read book Governing Global Land Deals written by Wendy Wolford and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-09-30 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays in Governing Global Land Deals provides new empirical and theoretical analyses of the relationships between global land grabs and processes of government and governance. Reframes debates on global land grabs by focusing on the relationship between large-scale land deals and processes of governance Offers new theoretical insights into the different forms and effects of global land acquisitions Illuminates both the micro-processes of transaction and expropriation, as well as the broader structural forces at play in global land deals Provides new empirical data on the different actors involved in contemporary land deals occurring across the globe and focuses on the specific institutional, political, and economic contexts in which they are acting
Download or read book Land Grabbing and Migration in a Changing Climate written by Sara Vigil and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-02-27 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a theoretical and empirical examination of the links between environmental change, land grabbing, and migration, drawing on research conducted in Senegal and Cambodia. While the impacts of environmental change on migration and of environmental discourses on land grabs have received increased attention, the role of both environmental and migration narratives in shaping migration by modifying access to natural resources has remained under-explored. Using a variegated geopolitical ecology framework and a comparative global ethnographic approach, this book analyses the power of mainstream adaptation and security frameworks and how they impact the lives of marginalised and vulnerable communities in Senegal and Cambodia. Findings across the cases show how environmental and migration narratives, linked to adaptation and security discourses, have been deployed advertently or inadvertently to justify land capture, leading to interventions that often increase, rather than alleviate, the very pressures that they intend to address. The interrelations between these issues are inherent to the tensions that exist, in different contexts and at different times, between capital accumulation and political legitimation. The findings of the book point to the urgency for researchers and policymakers to address the structural causes, and not the symptoms, of both environmental destruction and forced migration. It shows how acting upon environmental change, land grabs, and migration in isolated or binary manners can increase, rather than alleviate, pressures on those most socio-environmentally vulnerable. This book will be of interest to students, scholars, and practitioners working on the topics of land and resource grabbing and environmental change and migration. The book will also be of interest to those analysing political ecology transitions in Africa and Asia, as well as to those interested in novel theoretical and methodological frameworks.
Download or read book The Land Grabbers written by Fred Pearce and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2012-05-29 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Wall Street, Chinese billionaires, oil sheiks, and agribusiness are buying up huge tracts of land in a hungry, crowded world. An unprecedented land grab is taking place around the world. Fearing future food shortages or eager to profit from them, the world’s wealthiest and most acquisitive countries, corporations, and individuals have been buying and leasing vast tracts of land around the world. The scale is astounding: parcels the size of small countries are being gobbled up across the plains of Africa, the paddy fields of Southeast Asia, the jungles of South America, and the prairies of Eastern Europe. Veteran science writer Fred Pearce spent a year circling the globe to find out who was doing the buying, whose land was being taken over, and what the effect of these massive land deals seems to be. The Land Grabbers is a first-of-its-kind exposé that reveals the scale and the human costs of the land grab, one of the most profound ethical, environmental, and economic issues facing the globalized world in the twenty-first century. The corporations, speculators, and governments scooping up land cheap in the developing world claim that industrial-scale farming will help local economies. But Pearce’s research reveals a far more troubling reality. While some mega-farms are ethically run, all too often poor farmers and cattle herders are evicted from ancestral lands or cut off from water sources. The good jobs promised by foreign capitalists and home governments alike fail to materialize. Hungry nations are being forced to export their food to the wealthy, and corporate potentates run fiefdoms oblivious to the country beyond their fences. Pearce’s story is populated with larger-than-life characters, from financier George Soros and industry tycoon Richard Branson, to Gulf state sheikhs, Russian oligarchs, British barons, and Burmese generals. We discover why Goldman Sachs is buying up the Chinese poultry industry, what Lord Rothschild and a legendary 1970s asset-stripper are doing in the backwoods of Brazil, and what plans a Saudi oil billionaire has for Ethiopia. Along the way, Pearce introduces us to the people who actually live on, and live off of, the supposedly “empty” land that is being grabbed, from Cambodian peasants, victimized first by the Khmer Rouge and now by crony capitalism, to African pastoralists confined to ever-smaller tracts. Over the next few decades, land grabbing may matter more, to more of the planet’s people, than even climate change. It will affect who eats and who does not, who gets richer and who gets poorer, and whether agrarian societies can exist outside corporate control. It is the new battle over who owns the planet.
Download or read book The Wealth of the Commons written by David Bollier and published by Levellers Press. This book was released on 2014-05-23 with total page 752 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We are poised between an old world that no longer works and a new one struggling to be born. Surrounded by centralized hierarchies on the one hand and predatory markets on the other, people around the world are searching for alternatives. The Wealth of the Commons explains how millions of commoners have organized to defend their forests and fisheries, reinvent local food systems, organize productive online communities, reclaim public spaces, improve environmental stewardship and re-imagine the very meaning of "progress" and governance. In short, how they've built their commons. In 73 timely essays by a remarkable international roster of activists, academics and project leaders, this book chronicles ongoing struggles against the private commoditization of shared resources - often known as market enclosures - while documenting the immense generative power of the commons. The Wealth of the Commons is about history, political change, public policy and cultural transformation on a global scale - but most of all, it's about individual commoners taking charge of their lives and their endangered resources. "This fine collection makes clear that the idea of the Commons is fully international, and increasingly fully worked-out. If you find yourself wondering what Occupy wants, or if some other world is possible, this pragmatic, down-to-earth, and unsentimental book will provide many of the answers." - Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and The Durable Future
Download or read book Global Land Grabbing and Political Reactions from Below written by Marc Edelman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-08-15 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the 2007-2008 food and financial crises triggered a global wave of land grabbing, scholars, activists and policy practitioners assumed that this would be met with massive peasant resistance. As empirical evidence accumulated, however, it became clear that political reactions ‘from below’ to land grabbing were quite varied and complex. Violent resistance, outright expulsions, everyday ‘weapons of the weak’ and demands for better terms of incorporation into land deals were among the outcomes that emerged. Readers of this collection will encounter a multinational group of scholars who use the tools of social movements theory and critical agrarian studies to examine cases from Argentina, Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Mozambique, Uganda, Mali, Ukraine, India, and Laos, as well as the Rio +20 Sustainable Development Conference. Initiatives ‘from below’ in response to land deals have involved local and transnational alliances and the use of legal and extra-legal methods, and have brought victories and defeats. This book was first published as a special issue of The Journal of Peasant Studies.
Download or read book Global Land Grabs written by Marc Edelman and published by . This book was released on 2016-06-08 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in Global Land Grabs take the debate over land grabbing to a new stage, scrutinizing claims of earlier research, probing historical antecedents of today's land grabbing, examining large-scale land acquisitions in light of international human rights and investment law, and considering anew longstanding questions in agrarian political economy about forms of dispossession and accumulation and grassroots resistance. This book was published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.
Download or read book Tourism Land Grabs and Displacement written by Andreas Neef and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-09 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the global scope of tourism-related grabbing of land and other natural resources. Tourism is often presented as a peaceful and benevolent sector that brings people from different cultural backgrounds together and contributes to employment, poverty alleviation, and global sustainable development. This book sheds light on the lesser known and much darker side of tourism as it unfolds in the Global South. While there is no doubt that tourism has been an engine of economic growth for many so-called developing countries, this has often come at the cost of widespread dispossession and displacement of Indigenous and non-indigenous communities. In many countries of the Global South, tourism development is increasingly prioritised by governments, businesses, international financial institutions and donors over the legitimate land and resource rights of local people. This book examines the actors, drivers, mechanisms, discourses and impacts of tourism-related land grabbing and displacement, drawing on more than thirty case studies from Latin America and the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia, the Middle East and the Southwest Pacific. The book provides solid grounds for an informed debate on how different actors are responsible for the adverse impacts of tourism on land rights infringements, what forms of resistance have been deployed against tourism-related land grabs and displacement, and how those who have violated local land and resource rights can be held accountable. Tourism, Land Grabs and Displacement will be essential reading for students and scholars of land and resource grabbing, tourism studies, development studies and sustainable development more broadly, as well as policymakers and practitioners working in those fields.
Download or read book Grabbing Back written by Alexander Reid Ross and published by AK Press. This book was released on 2014-06-09 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Land grabs are a global phenomenon of our times, driven by the ever increasing demands of both global corporations and the governments with which they are allied. But as this powerful and timely book demonstrates, ordinary citizens, small farmers and ordinary citizens around the world are standing up to defend their own with passion and ingenuity, and they are recording successes that are both extraordinary and inspiring." —Oliver Tickell, Editor, The Ecologist. Climate change ravages the earth, while wealthy elites try to grab as much of the world’s diminishing resources as possible. As Vandana Shiva writes, land is life. But land, and the struggle to possess it, is also power—colonial and corporate power, to be sure, but also the power of the dispossessed to rise up and call for an end to the global land grab. Grabbing Back maps this struggle, bringing together analyses that uncover the politics of cultivation and control. In this unprecedented collection, on-the-ground activists join forces with critically acclaimed scholars to document the commodification and consumption of space, from foreclosed homes to annihilated rainforests, from ecotourism in Sri Lanka to the tar sands of Montana, and to outline the strategies and tactics that might the destruction. With contributions by Vandana Shiva, Noam Chomsky, Max Rameau, Grace Lee Boggs, Michael Hardt, Ahjamu Umi, Ben Dangl, and many others. More Praise for Grabbing Back: “Part of the reason that knowledge about the current global land grab is so uncertain is the paucity of perspectives and analysis in defining the problem. This book fills the gap admirably.” —Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved "The acquisition, control, and exploitation of land, as well as the simultaneous dispossession of land-based and peasant communities, is central to the processes of both colonialism and capitalism. As Fanon reminds us, egalitarian governance and stewardship of land is fundamental to the struggle for liberation and self-determination for all oppressed peoples. This makes Grabbing Back a necessary study for anticapitalist and anticolonial movements." —Harsha Walia, author of Undoing Border Imperialism "Grab back this sparkling mosaic of essays as a treasure of our new-old knowledge commons. Together these pieces replace dichotomies with dialectics, making explicit the inseparability of land and collective life. Together they restore the vital concept of social ecology in resistance to relentless and increasingly apocalyptic capitalism, with emphasis on its second contradiction: its impossibility on a finite resource base." —Maia Ramnath, author of Decolonizing Anarchism “As the forces of thanatos leave no stone unturned in their quest to dominate the entire planet, this anthology provides a much needed antidote. Weaving together accounts from around the world, the authors advocate building grassroots movements aimed at subverting capital’s incessant assault on our lives and land.”—George Katsiaficas, author of Asia’s Unknown Uprisings “Never perhaps has the land question been so crucial for anti-capitalist movements, as we are witnessing a global process of enclosure that privatizes lands, waters, forests, displacing millions from their homes, and placing monetary gates to what we rightly considered our commonwealth. It is essential then that we understand what motivates this drive and its effects in all their social and spatial dimensions. Grabbing Back takes us through this process, identifying the “reasons” and actors behind this global land-grab and, most important, introducing us to the struggles that people are making across the world to resist being evicted from their lands and to reclaim the earth. ” —George Caffentzis, Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa
Download or read book Land Grabs in Asia written by Connie Carter and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-05-01 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although there is no universally accepted definition of the term "land grabbing", ordinary people whose livelihoods are adversely affected by land grabbing know exactly what it is. It involves the physical capture and control of land and homes, including the usurpation of the power to decide how and when these will be used and for what purposes – with little or no prior consultation or compensation to the displaced communities. This thought-provoking book defines land grabbing, and examines aspects of the land grabs phenomenon in seven Asian countries, researched and written by country-specific legal scholars. The book provides unique perspectives on how and why land grabbing is practised in China, India, Pakistan, Cambodia, Malaysia, Myanmar and Indonesia, and explores the surprising role that law plays in facilitating and legitimizing land grabs in each country. In contrast to most of the literature which law focuses on foreign investors’ rights under international law, here the focus is on domestic laws and legal infrastructures. Finding that Asian States need to move beyond existing regimes that govern land to a regime that encourages more equitable land rights allocation and protection of stakeholders’ rights, the book urges further research in the nexus between the use of law to facilitate development. Land Grabs in Asia is the first book to explore land grabbing in multiple jurisdictions in Asia. As such, it will appeal to students and scholars of law and development, law and society, and international relations, as well as being essential reading for development policy-makers and government ministers.
Download or read book Fields of Gold written by Madeleine Fairbairn and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-15 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fields of Gold critically examines the history, ideas, and political struggles surrounding the financialization of farmland. In particular, Madeleine Fairbairn focuses on developments in two of the most popular investment locations, the US and Brazil, looking at the implications of financiers' acquisition of land and control over resources for rural livelihoods and economic justice. At the heart of Fields of Gold is a tension between efforts to transform farmland into a new financial asset class, and land's physical and social properties, which frequently obstruct that transformation. But what makes the book unique among the growing body of work on the global land grab is Fairbairn's interest in those acquiring land, rather than those affected by land acquisitions. Fairbairn's work sheds ethnographic light on the actors and relationships—from Iowa to Manhattan to São Paulo—that have helped to turn land into an attractive financial asset class. Thanks to generous funding from UC Santa Cruz, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.
