Large-scale land deals are increasingly common in some developing regions. What happens to the poor people who are already there? And what happens to women?
T
he food price crises of recent years have unleashed a global land rush.
Between 2000 and 2010, foreign inves- tors negotiated to lease or acquire at least 71 million hectares of land—an area slightly larger than France—in other countries. Nearly half of this total is in Africa. A recent International Land Co- alition (ILC) report, Land Rights and the Rush for Land, to which IFPRI contrib- uted, says the number and size of recent deals point to the “unprecedented scale of the land rush over the past decade.”
For some people, these land deals rep- resent attractive opportunities to inject much-needed capital into the agricultural sector of poor developing countries. For others, the deals are a disturbing trend in which investors from wealthy countries snap up land in poor countries for their own benefit, displacing and threatening the livelihoods of smallholder farmers and other local people who use the land.
“What happens to the local people is the litmus test,” says Ruth Meinzen-Dick, a senior research fellow at IFPRI. Many of the hundreds of land deals have not
The Ups & Downs of L 0.6 2000 14 0.3 2001 0.4 2002 0.3 2003 0.6 2004 2.7 2005 0.5 2006 1.6 2007 3.5 2008 Source for figure and map: W. Anseeuw, L. Alden Wily, L. Cotula, and M. Taylor, Land Rights and the Rush for Land (Rome: International Land Coalition, 2012). 6.9 1.9 2009 2010 Millions of hectares under negotiation for lease or acquisition
been examined in sufficient detail— sometimes because investors deny access to researchers—but current empirical evidence suggests that skepticism about the deals is warranted. “In the first IFPRI policy brief on this topic in 2009 [“Land Grabbing” by Foreign Investors in Develop- ing Countries], we laid out the potential benefits and risks, but there are now so many cases of how these deals have harmed local people that, if anyone wants to say these can be beneficial, the burden of proof is on them to show that they are, in fact, beneficial,” says Meinzen-Dick.
Whose Land? In rural areas, land may appear to be available for acquisition when actually it serves as the foundation for local liveli- hoods. Land that looks unused may be where locals graze their animals, gather firewood, or collect medicinal plants. Smallholder farmers often do not hold formal title to their land, but may have effectively owned it for years under customary or indigenous tenure arrange- ments. “I think a lot of the foreign inves-
tors are going in without full awareness of the costs and the complexities,” says Meinzen-Dick.
When legal systems requiring formal land titles are introduced into societies where customary tenure arrangements have been used for generations, the results don’t automatically protect the rights of existing landowners, particularly the rural poor— instead, they often serve the interests of governments and elites. As the recent ILC report notes, laws may fail to recognize land owned under customary tenure as real property and deem this land untitled, allowing governments to claim it as state property. Even those holding formal titles may have their land expropriated by the government in order to serve the “public interest,” such as the need for more for- eign investment in rural areas.
Women Left Out Land deals often have different impacts on men and women. Poul Wisborg of the Norwegian University of Life Sciences,
Ian Johnson
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