Reframing the land grab debate: The need to broaden and deepen the agenda

Abstract

This article does not present new evidence about the land rush, but reveals the urgent need of broadening the debate by including a few key issues that are so far neglected. Transnational land acquisitions are a logical outcome of globalisation and neoliberal policies resulting in processes of disembedding land from local societies. Control over land is decreasingly vested in territorially defined communities or societies, and increasingly dictated by global actors and processes, leading to a patchwork of locally disembedded land holdings responding to different translocal network logics. Global actors play an increasingly important role in reserving spaces for global goods, securing food, preserving biodiversity and mitigating climate change in widely dispersed localities. The resulting fragmentation is not conducive for inclusive and sustainable development at the local level. Findings are based on ongoing research on the consequences of transnational land acquisitions in Africa, Asia and Latin America.