In  my last blog post , I referred to the talk by Professor Saturnino M. (“Jun”) Borras titled “Land Politics, Agrarian Movements and Scholar-Activism.”. Towards the end of the post, I had noted that I shall blog on alternative views and my differences with Professor Borras. I shall refer to each theme taken up by Professor Borras and discuss them separately. In this post, I try to discuss his views on land politics.

Professor Borras starts with the argument that “land politics today are more diverse than its conventional notion during the past century.” He thinks so primarily because of the “current global landgrabbing phenomenon”. Who is grabbing land? He says:

new corporate land grabbers, both transnational and domestic, non-corporate but pervasive individual land buyers (entrepreneurs, speculators, brokers, renters, scammers, swindlers), as well as financial entities that include pension funds, supermarket chains and “food empires” (as Jan Douwe van der Ploeg calls them), and layers of non-traditional agricultural investors, ranging from auto companies to livestock processors, plus big conservation groups.

The term “grabbers” implies the presence of coercion and force in such land deals. This assumption leads many writers, including some Marxists, to characterise global land deals as part of the process of “accumulation by dispossession.” But writers like Professor Borras also see “land grab” as something more than changes in ownership/possession of land. Elsewhere, a primer on global land grab by the Transnational Institute has quoted the work of Professor Borras and noted that:

The global land grab is . . . an epitome of an ongoing and accelerating change in the meaning and use of the land and its associated resources (like water) from small-scale, labour-intensive uses like subsistence agriculture, toward large-scale, capital-intensive, resource-depleting uses such as industrial monocultures, raw material extraction, and large-scale hydropower generation – integrated into a growing infrastructure that link extractive frontiers to metropolitan areas and foreign markets. (https://www.tni.org/en/publication/the-global-land-grab)

When writers like Professor Borras refer to “land grab,” they have a series of assumptions in mind. They assume that, prior to “land grab,” the grabbed land holdings were small; practised subsistence agriculture; used minimum levels of capital; were multiple-cropped and not mono-cropped; and not linked to metropolitan and foreign markets.

There are multiple questions here. What is “land grab”? When is a land deal a “grab”? What proportion of total land area is “grabbed”? And are the assumptions related to lands “grabbed” real? We need clarity.

But to begin with, irrespective of the definitions used and areas involved, the “land grab” that Professor Borras speaks of is largely limited to parts of Africa. Beyond Africa, too, one is aware that  there are cases  where significant foreign investments in land are reported, such as in Argentina and Brazil. Yet, Africa remains the centre-piece of the “land grab” story. How can a phenomenon limited largely to parts of Africa redefine land politics across the developing world? What impact does the African “land grab” have on land relations in rural India or rural China? Professor Borras is silent on such questions, and seems to superimpose a view based on the African experience on rural areas across the globe.

Even within his discussions on African “land grab”, Professor Borras is silent on another important question. What impact does the “land grab” in rural Africa have on existing agrarian relations in the continent? Have traditional power relations with respect to land in Africa been overturned or redefined by “land grabs” and transformed into a dichotomy between investors and labourers? Professor Borras does not deal with these issues.

What is “land grab”?

Some scholars call the emerging phenomenon a “global land rush” (see Locher 2015). According to Locher, whose Ph.D dissertation on the Tanzanian land rush is a dispassionate and objective review of the topic, the term “land grab” necessarily implies the use of “illegality and force” and hence may wrongly include cases of “a just transfer of land.” As a result, all forms of land transfer are wrongly assumed to be by force. Locher further argues, quoting other studies, that there is not just one land rush; what we see is the outcome of “multiple converging processes” that can be termed “commercial pressures on land.” As “land grab” is often defined as land acquisitions of size more than 1000 ha, only acquisitions of land by foreign investors are included and smaller investments in land by domestic players are excluded. Investments by domestic players are often “potentially similar or greater in impact than transnational land deals.” As a result, land acquisitions are also wrongly assumed to be primarily multinational capital led. Locher goes on to argue that land grab is often also defined as acquisitions of land in the global South alone; this leaves out the considerable investments in land in western countries. As a result, these land acquisitions are also wrongly assumed to be a feature of southern countries. Finally, Locher argues that a portion of land acquisitions – called “green grabs” – represent appropriation of land for environmental conservation, such as biodiversity parks and ecotourism. Clearly, these do not form a part of the processes that Professor Borras defines “land grabbing” as representing.

It is, thus, important that the definition of “land grab” be laid out with precision. It is also important to appreciate that all land transfers may not represent grabs. And all grabs may not be for the purposes of resource-depletion.

How much is “land grab”?

There is also much confusion regarding the area of land “grabbed”. According to Locher, the data on global land rush are of “limited quality,” and most sources of data rely on media reports and NGO case studies. She says: “There are arguably both over- and under-estimates of land deals” and the media often tend to over-estimate. In some cases, data include cases where the deals that were discussed or signed but never realised or implemented as well as double-reporting of the same land deal under two names. When Locher and Sulle (2013) distinguished land deals in Tanzania under four heads – announced, ongoing, concluded, and discontinued – the figures on area they estimated were lower than corresponding figures in popular databases.

According to a detailed study in five African countries commissioned by the FAO, IIED and IFAD in 2009, the estimated percentage of land suitable for rainfed crops that were allocated to investors between 2004 and 2009 were as follows: Ethiopia (1.39 per cent), Ghana (2.12 per cent), Madagascar (2.29 per cent), Mali (0.6 per cent), and Sudan (0.46 per cent). Thus, not more than 2 per cent of the land suitable for rainfed crops were allocated to investors in these five African countries between 2004 and 2009. However, the study cautions readers against assuming that these shares are small; according to them, even if the shares may appear small, the investments involved in these deals were very high; in all the five countries together, it amounted to US$ 919,981,235.

Who “grabs”?

There is another view in the literature on land grab: that most land deals are by private multinational companies. However, the FAO/IIED/IFAD study showed that state-controlled entities were significant players in the African land deals; examples were Zad Holding Company (a state-owned firm from Qatar), Dubai World (a government-controlled conglomerate), and a number of Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) like Wuhan Kaidi and COFCO. This is not to deny the significant presence of private multinational capital in African land deals, but only to underline that state-owned entities are also key players in the sphere. In the FAO/IIED/IFAD study, of the total public and private investment in land in Ethiopia, Ghana, Madagascar and Mali between 2004 and 2009, about 60 per cent was accounted for by entities wholly or partly owned by governments.

An important point made by the above FAO/IIED/IFAD report is also that global land deals are “not a new phenomenon”. The report notes:

In the past, land was commonly acquired by foreign investors, for instance to produce rice (Lonrho) and rubber (Firestone). At a smaller scale, South African farmers have been acquiring land in Zambia, Mozambique and Tanzania for decades. Large domestic players have also acquired land in the past, for example to produce pulp (e.g. Mondi in South Africa). This makes it even more difficult to establish whether the past few years have witnessed an acceleration in land acquisitions (by project numbers or overall land area) based on media reports alone.

Recognising complexity

Careful studies of global land deals, thus, show a more complex situation than in Professor Borras’ rather straight-forward and one-sided characterisation. First, any analysis of the extent of land involved in the global land deals is marred by poor databases. It has been shown that the actual extent of land involved in many land deals is lower than what is reported by the media. Secondly, it is not clear if all global land deals are facilitated by force; in many cases, exchanges are between willing buyers and sellers. Thirdly, in many cases, the participants in the land deals are not private multinationals, but state-owned enterprises in West Asia and China. Fourthly, not all land deals reported are for resource-depletion; many land deals are also for environmental conservation purposes.

In Asia, or even Latin America (even as there are some examples), such land deals do not figure as prominent influencing variables in the analysis of agrarian relations or agricultural growth. The example of Special Economic Zones (SEZ) in India is often cited in studies as examples of “land grab”. Indeed, most cases of land acquisition in India have involved force, public and private, and the nature of dispossession of the poor from land has been met with large protests. Yet, the extent of land involved in the acquisitions for SEZs remains limited. Data from the Indian government show that there were 531 “formally approved”, and 143 “in-principle approved” SEZs, in India. The total area of land to be covered by all these SEZs (in-principle included) was 1885 sq km. As a share of India’s total land area, this was 0.06 per cent, and as a share of India’s total cropped area, this was 0.12 per cent. Even if we had added all the 270 “notified” SEZs to this group, the total area rose only by 314 sq km. Such scales can hardly constitute reasons to redefine the “land question” in a country like India.

Thus, while I agree with Professor Borras’ premise that “land politics today are more diverse,” I question the position that the “current global landgrabbing phenomenon” is the primary feature of the phenomenon. Caution may be warranted with regard to some of Professor Borras’ generalisations on the new land politics, as well as the conceptual lessons he draws.

The key challenge to agrarian transformation in large parts of the global South continues to be crucially linked to rural agricultural land politics, and the potential for land reform. Generalisations as by Professor Borras should not divert political and scholarly attention from the urgent task of resolving the agrarian question. In countries like India, the development of capitalist relations in agriculture has a long history, beginning from the colonial period. Even in the absence of widespread land reform, the green revolution and other forms of state intervention have helped advance capitalist relations of production in agriculture. In the new era of globalisation and declining state support, capitalist relations in agriculture, though uneven in spread and depth, have continued to advance. The ensuing continuity in the differentiation of peasantry and the tendencies towards landlessness and proletarianisation are themes that “scholar-activists,” or “activist-scholars” (why not?), cannot ignore.

I shall blog soon on a few other aspects of the lecture by Professor Borras.