Land Grab

Land grab (also called large-scale land acquisitions [LSLA] or large-scale land transaction [LSLT]) refers to the appropriation of large tracts of land by private or, at times, public investors and agribusinesses. Public awareness of land grabbing spiked after surging global food prices in 2007 spurred significant farmland investments from rich countries in the Global South, igniting protest and media outrage over the threat to peasant and Indigenous land rights and food sovereignty. While international social movements and the media have largely focused on land grabbing for the purpose of producing agricultural commodities, there are many other drivers of land grabbing, including acquisitions for purported environmental ends, such as conservation and biofuel production—a phenomenon known as green grabbing. Land grabs are advanced through a series of ideological myths, including the fallacy of supposedly empty, unproductive, excess land waiting to be transformed into jobs, sustenance, and income. People are “erased” from the landscape through rhetorical and technological tools. Discourses render land “marginal” and “uninhabited,” while satellite imagery and cartographical projects manufacture and codify the notion that territory without infrastructure or agriculture is unproductive, open, and available for investors to forge new, ostensibly ecologically sound markets or to professedly address global food insecurity. Land grabs are not a recent chapter of humanity; rather, they have unfolded across epochs, from precolonial land grabs after territorial wars to the dispossession of native peoples throughout the Americas. Anthropological engagement with land grabbing is as old as the discipline, and research on the topic has appeared under a variety of labels, including studies of agrarian change, enclosure, and dispossession. This article is not exhaustive of this rich academic history; rather, a deliberate selection of studies has been made presenting a snapshot of scholarly work that explicitly names land and green grabbing since the 2007 media spike, with contextual nods to foundational theory from agrarian studies. This bibliography transcends mere cataloging; it theorizes the major processes, actors, and narratives entwined in land grabbing alongside a sampling of case studies of land grabs for extraction, agriculture, conservation, and tourism.