Land Squeeze

* Report: Land Squeeze. What is driving unprecedented pressures on farmland and what can be done to achieve equitable access to land? Bina Agarwal, Joji Cariño et al. IPES Food, 2024

URL = https://ipes-food.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/LandSqueeze.pdf

Description

"The financial crash and food price crisis of 2007-2008 unleashed a huge wave of land grabs. Investors, agri-food companies, and sovereign wealth funds succeeded in appropriating large swathes of farmland in the Global South. The ‘land rush’ tailed off post-2013, but the pressures never went away. Ten years on, the world is now facing a multi-dimensional land squeeze. This time around, the threats are arguably even greater, as land grabs proliferate into new and obscure forms, and farmers and communities are squeezed from all sides.

This land squeeze is eroding meaningful access to and control over land for farmers, pastoralists, Indigenous Peoples, and marginalized groups. These pressures are critically undermining small-scale food producers’ livelihoods, and pushing them towards a dangerous tipping point – posing grave threats to food security."

Excerpt

WHO AND WHAT IS DRIVING THE LAND SQUEEZE?

Susan Chomba, Shalmali Guttal, et al. :

“We identify four trends that are driving the land squeeze and exacerbating land inequality around the world:

1. LAND GRABBING 2.0

Large swathes of land are being swallowed up each year – and land ownership transferred from farmers to financial actors – through new waves of ‘land grabs’. The food price spikes that accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine have revived “feed the world” narratives, sparking a renewed push to secure land for export commodity production, with agribusinesses, investors and foreign governments finding new ways to unlock and appropriate farmland.

• Governments are facing renewed calls to deregulate their land markets and adopt pro-investor policies. In Africa and Asia, large swathes of land are being appropriated through ‘special economic zones’ and ‘growth corridors’, in the context of expanding bilateral trade and investment agreements (including South-South deals).

• In parallel, ‘water grabs’ and ‘resource grabs’ are on the rise, i.e. land deals focused on securing control of critical resources and rapidly extracting value from them (e.g. through water-intensive cash cropping). These deals occur at various scales, with smaller deals going under the radar despite major impacts on smallholders and local communities.

• Powerful actors are flooding into increasingly financialized land markets. Agricultural investment funds rose ten-fold from 2005 to 2018, and now regularly include farmland as a stand-alone asset class, with US investors doubling their stakes in farmland since the pandemic. Meanwhile, agricultural commodity traders are speculating on farmland through their own private equity subsidiaries, while new financial derivatives are allowing speculators to accrue land parcels and lease them back to struggling farmers – driving steep and sustained land price inflation.

• A major push to digitize land registers is underway in the Global South. Although intended to strengthen land tenure, these processes could end up feeding financial markets with data and exacerbating land grabs.

• A rising number of land grabs are abandoned along the way, with land typically sold on to new investors – and lasting damage to local communities and land tenure systems.

2. GREEN GRABBING

Land is an important carbon sink and home for biodiversity. But as environmental goals are enshrined in international environmental agreements, interest in land-based conservation, carbon removal and offsetting is rising fast – unleashing a new wave of ‘green grabs’, which now account for around 20% of large-scale land deals. Governments and large corporations are appropriating huge swathes of land through top-down conservation schemes that exclude local land users and small-scale food producers – those bearing the brunt of climate change – including carbon and biodiversity offsets, ‘biodiversity net gain’ initiatives, and large-scale (non-biodiverse) tree planting schemes.

• Governments have pledged to allocate land areas equivalent to total global cropland – almost 1.2 billion hectares of land– for ‘carbon removal’ initiatives alone. • Carbon and biodiversity offset markets are facilitating huge land transactions and bringing farmland and forests under the control of major polluters. By 2023, carbon offset markets were already valued at USD 414 billion globally, a figure projected to rise to USD 1,800 billion by 2030. Fossil fuel giant Shell has set aside more than USD 450 million for offsetting projects. Some 25 million hectares of land have been snapped up by a single ‘environmental asset creation’ firm, UAE-based Blue Carbon, through agreements with the governments of Kenya, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Zambia, and Liberia.

• Under the guise of ‘nature-based solutions’, business-as-usual investments and top-down conservation schemes are being advanced – raising concerns that powerful actors will use new global biodiversity goals (the ‘30 by 30 target’) to push through massive green grabs.

• Land and resources are also being appropriated for biofuels and green energy production – including water-intensive ‘green hydrogen’ projects, and the conversion of farmland to solar parks – creating risks and trade-offs for local food production.

3. EXPANSION & ENCROACHMENT

Huge areas of land are also being taken out of agriculture – often coercively – and repurposed for extractive industries and mega-developments, in a context of rapid and often unsustainable economic expansion. In particular, a global mining boom – driven by rising demand for critical minerals – is ramping up the pressures on farmland.

• Mining projects accounted for 14% of recorded large-scale land deals over the past ten years, swallowing up some 7.7m hectares of farmland.

• These land conversions are particularly damaging for food producers and communities – regularly sparking mass displacement, land conflicts, and wholesale degradation of surrounding environments.

• Instead of protecting communities, dubious investment laws protect the polluters: for example, several transnational companies successfully sued the Colombian government for attempting to halt a large-scale mining project.

• Meanwhile, in Asia and Africa in particular, prime farmland continues to be lost to rising urbanization and mega-infrastructure developments.

4. FOOD SYSTEM RECONFIGURATION

Alongside the persistent and proliferating threats of land grabbing, rampant agri-food sector consolidation, the ongoing spread of industrial agriculture, and concomitant diet shifts are rapidly degrading land and eroding farmers’ and communities’ control over their land and how it is used.

• The integration of smallholders into corporate value chains (e.g., through contract farming schemes) is allowing agri-food companies to gain effective control over farmland and impose production choices and conditions – often locking farmers into unsustainable land use and precarious livelihoods.

• High input costs, spiraling land prices, and boom-bust cycles are endemic in corporate-controlled industrial food systems. These dynamics are creating systematic economic precarity for farmers – effectively forcing them to ‘get big or get out’.

• Increasingly techno-centric, capital-intensive, and chemical input-intensive modes of agriculture are driving the upscaling of farms and consolidation of farmland – especially now through digitalization of agriculture."

(https://ipes-food.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/LandSqueeze.pdf)