Land deals are not always land grabs

The concept of land grabbing is not always useful if you want to understand what is going on in developing countries. This was the main message at a seminar Land Acquisitions and Development Strategies in Africa and Southeast Asia at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) 21 May 2014.

“Land grabbing” is used as a particular way of framing investments into land and agriculture; it’s catchy and has helped highlight potential pitfalls related to the increased levels of investments in developing countries.

Taken at face value,”land grab” conveys the idea of land being seized by investors by force or through illicit means. Much academic land grab literature depicts the current rush to acquire land as a response to the multiple crises in contemporary capitalism that became apparent in the spikes in food prices from around 2007. But many cases that are designated ‘land grabs' do not fit this understanding as they are too small, from the wrong period, carried out for the wrong purposes, carried out by the wrong actors or through the wrong means.

Tom Laverswas among the first scholars to show that states and governments most often play a key role in facilitating large-scale investments. At the seminar he presented his work on Agricultural investment in Ethiopia: Analysing the political economy of the ‘land grab’, in which the motivations behind the Ethiopian government’s decision to integrate a range of capitalist agricultural investments into the existing small-holder led agricultural development strategy was emphasized. The switch to an investment-led development strategy was made primarily to increase exports and to promote local processing of agricultural products.

Derek Hall, Associate Professor at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada, presented his work on Land Grabs and Crop Booms in Southeast Asia. In his presentation he also inquired into the ways in which the land grab concept has been defined in the (mostly neo-Marxist) academic literature on the topic. Whereas he did not advocate for the abandonment of the concept altogether he did advice that it should be applied with more prudence than is often the case.

The seminar was organised by PhD candidate Anders Riel Müllerand postdoc Rasmus Hundsbæk Pedersen in cooperation with Lars Buur, Associate Professor at Roskilde University, as part of their work on large-scale investments into natural resources.