IDS | 25 March 2011
Saturnino Borras and Ruth Hall
A new report is released this week to coincide with the forthcoming international conference on the global land grab to be held at IDS, University of Sussex. The Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS) Forum on global land grabbing, with three leading commentators, debates the sometimes hidden impacts of land deals and sets the scene for wider debates at the upcoming conference. To access the FREE articles: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=g935339693
Klaus Deininger, a senior economist at the World Bank examines the risks associated with single owners of large land holdings and the institutional reforms needed to make land deals successful. Olivier de Schutter, the UN Rapporteur for the Right to Food and Professor of Law and Human Rights at the Catholic University of Louvain, promotes small family farms and human rights in the context of contemporary debates on land grabbing. And Tania Murray Li, Canada Research Chair and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, examines how land deals can lead to dispossession and “rural exclusion”.
Land deal risks.
For land deals to be successful, Klaus Deininger promotes government-sponsored institutional support laid out in the 2010 ‘Principles of Responsible Agricultural Investment’. He also notes how a lack of reliable information about land deal opportunities, actual transfers, and the impact of large-scale investments can lead to negative impacts. He examines risk and how potentially large land sizes change hands, may be concentrated in just a few countries, and how there appears to be particular land deal interest in countries with weak governance. But he also notes that when risks are present, heightened investor interest may also provide opportunities.
Olivier de Schutter by contrast is critical of the World Bank-led position about ‘managing risks while harnessing opportunities’ and in his work as UN Special Rapporteur, he has put forward a proposal for ‘Minimum Human Rights Principles’ to the UN Human Rights Council.
Limits to regulation.
Tania Murray Li critiques land deal mainstream thinking and brings labour consequences to the centre of her analysis. She highlights how land deal dispossession leaves some without shelter, food or the means of (re)production. Like Olivier de Schutter, she is not convinced by arguments in favour of a ‘code of conduct’ to make land investments ‘pro-poor’. Rather, she argues that, where safeguards have been effectively put in place for the rural poor, they have been the result of political organisation and social mobilisation: “Without such struggles, and such settlements, even the most assiduous regulatory regime has no purchase”, she argues.
Building on these contributions, the ‘Global Land Grab’ conference discussions will focus on livelihoods, governance, political economy, environment and politics of land deals. By assessing evidence from cases from across the world, the conference aims to elaborate the emerging contours of the new global land grab, asking what are the key drivers, who are the winners and losers, and what can policymakers, activists and citizens do about it.
All three contributors to the JPS Forum will be contributing to the forthcoming conference, and their inputs – alongside 120 others from across the world - can be followed on the conference website: www.future-agricultures.org/land-grab.html.
Saturnino Jun Borras is at the Institute of Social Studies in the Hague and Ruth Hall is a research at the Institute of Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies in South Africa and convenes the land theme under the Future Agricultures Consortium. Together with Ian Scoones at IDS, they are founder members of the Land Deals Politics Initiative which is organising the Global Land Grab conference.
