An Invisible Crisis: New Dimensions of Land Grabbing
More and more land is being taken away from farmers and communities and they are faced with adversaries of overwhelming power - increasingly on the basis of environmental and climate protection.
For many people, ‘land grabbing’ is synonymous with the large-scale land acquisitions that took place after the 2007-2008 financial crisis. In the ‘land rush’ that followed the crash, investors, agri-food companies, and sovereign wealth funds took control of huge swathes of farmland in the Global South – with catastrophic impacts for farmers and communities.
Since then, land grabbing has been out of the headlines and largely absent from global debates. But coercive appropriation of land is just as big a problem today. As IPES-Food found in its 2024 report, the land rush has now become a multi-dimensional global land squeeze: land grabs are proliferating into new and obscure forms, farmers’ and communities’ access to land is being undermined in various ways, and land is being polluted and degraded on an unprecedented scale.
Below are eight key elements of today’s land squeeze:
1. Large-scale land grabs peaked a decade ago – but the pressures on farmland are rising again.Although occurring at a slower rate since 2013-2014, large-scale land deals have continued year-on-year, with huge cumulative effects. Since 2000, land around twice the size of Germany has been subject to transnational deals worldwide.* And while global databases register the major deals, they do not capture the whole picture of land grabbing today. As described below, land grabs are now occurring at a range of scales, and in increasingly opaque forms (e.g. carbon offsetting schemes). Further, the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine have sparked high food prices and revived “feed the world” narratives and calls for a reinvestment in agriculture. Although these developments are still playing out, land grabbing clearly remains a major threat to farmers and communities – and another upsurge may be imminent.
2. Africa is still a land grabbing hotspot, while land inequality is greatest in Latin America. Since the Land Matrix Initiative began, Africa has seen more transnational land deals than any other region. Around 27% of the transnational land grabs concluded since 2019 have taken place in Africa, up from 21% in 2016-2019,* and the biggest and most contentious land grabs of recent years have targeted African countries. For example, Blue Carbon, a Gulf-based carbon offsetting firm, recently snapped up some 25 million hectares of land in five African countries, covering a staggering 10% of Liberia’s surface area and 20% of Zimbabwean land.
Latin America is a hotspot for domestic land grabs, which are contributing to huge land inequality across the region, where 10% of farms control as much as 75% of farmland. Urbanization and infrastructure-driven land loss is particularly acute across Africa and Asia (especially South-east Asia). Eastern Europe – a major land grabbing hotspot post-2008 – remains a key target for transnational investors, and has seen land prices triple over the last 15 years.
3. Agribusinesses are ramping up their control of land, water, and resources – sometimes under the radar. The intensive production of export crops remains the prime goal of agribusiness-led land grabs. The majority of recent deals have seen land converted to resource-hungry feed crops and export commodity crops – particularly palm oil, sugar cane, maize, rubber, soybean, and cattle. But there are also some notable changes. ‘Water grabs’ are on the rise, with investors looking to secure control of critical resources and rapidly extract value from them. This is happening in areas that are already water scarce, including drought-stricken parts of Latin America. A recent 39-country analysis found that over 2005-2015, investors generally targeted land with preferential access to surface/groundwater, exacerbating water scarcity and generating competition for water in 67% of cases – often with negative impacts for smallholders.
Another notable change is that today’s land grabs tend to be smaller, sometimes going under the radar. In other cases, agribusinesses are able to gain control of land by integrating smallholders into value chains, e.g. through ‘contract farming’ schemes in which farmers technically still own the land, but agribusinesses have full control over production choices. While these schemes are nothing new, farmers have less and less bargaining power: Recent mega-mergers have seen the emergence of agribusiness giants and corporate monopolies on an unprecedented scale.
4. ‘Green grabs’ are the biggest emerging threat to farmers and communities. While action on the climate and biodiversity crises is critically needed, governments and businesses are appropriating huge swathes of land for top-down environmental schemes – and these ‘green grabs’ represent some 20% of total land grabs today.* Shockingly, governments have pledged to allocate a combined land area equivalent to total global cropland for ‘carbon removals’, and over half of these plans involve mass tree-planting and risk interfering with the livelihoods of small-scale farmers and indigenous peoples.
Despite these risks, and growing evidence that they fail to deliver actual emission cuts, carbon offsetting schemes are expected to more than quadruple in value to $1,800 billion by 2030 – and biodiversity offsets are also on the rise. Some forms of green energy production are generating additional competition for land and resources. For example, the EU plans to import 10 million tons of ‘green hydrogen’ by 2030, primarily from North Africa, but the production of this so-called ‘clean fuel’ requires considerable amounts of land and water, posing major risks to the livelihoods of local farmers and pastoralists.
5. A global mining boom is placing huge 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 land globally. Demand for sand and gravel is growing rapidly with rising urbanization, and sand mining is now responsible for more illegal extraction than even the fossil fuel sector. In Assam and other states in India, sand mining is destroying biodiversity, altering river courses, and eroding and polluting farmland.
Rising demand for ‘transition minerals’– cobalt, copper, lithium, and zinc among others – is also fuelling the mining boom and ratcheting up pressures on farmland. A 2023 report by the Business and Human Rights Resource Center found that over 90 corporations mining minerals for clean/renewable energy production have been associated with human rights violations over the past decade, including pollution of lands and violations of communities’ right to free, prior and informed consent.
6. Urbanization and mega-infrastructure developments continue to swallow up farmland in Africa and Asia. According to UNCCD projections, up to 3.3 million hectares of the world’s farmland will have been swallowed up by expanding megacities over the 2000-2030 period, with 80% of land loss occurring in Asia and Africa., Large-scale infrastructure projects are also impacting smallholders and rural communities. Since 2003, construction and infrastructure development alone have been responsible for 16% of gross cropland loss globally, and as much as 35% in Southeast Asia. In recent years, global watchdogs have documented numerous human rights abuses linked to the seizure of smallholders’ and peasants’ land in Africa and Asia in connection with road construction, trade hubs, and other developments under China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
7. Land grabs are being facilitated by a new wave of deregulation and pro-investor policies. The harmful modes of development described above are being facilitated by a renewed push to liberalize economies in the Global South – including the rebranding of controversial initiatives that contributed to the post-2008 land rush. For example, the World Bank continues to incentivize governments to open up land markets: The contentious Doing Business Index has been rebranded as Business Ready (B-Ready), with indicators that continue to reward countries for lifting restrictions on domestic or foreign firms to own or lease land.
Increasingly, governments are reclassifying land as ‘idle’ or ‘under-utilized’ and reallocating it to investors. For example, under the $50 billion Gulf-backed ‘Green Pakistan Initiative’, some 2,000 hectares of so-called ‘deserted’ land has allegedly been grabbed and repurposed for commercial agriculture. Access to prime farmland is also being fast-tracked through ‘Special Economic Zones’, which are on the rise in Africa – and are regularly linked to land grabs and rights violations. Further, special protections are being offered to investors to encourage them to move forward with potentially risky land deals. More than 1000 Investor-StateDispute Settlement (ISDS) clauses have been introduced into trade and investment agreements since the year 2000. By 2019, agriculture was in the top ten sectors subject to investment arbitration claims in Africa, with investors now receiving hefty compensation for discontinuation of land transactions.
8. New forms of speculation and financialization are bringing huge capital flows into land markets. Financial speculation is nothing new in land markets – but it is now happening on an unprecedented scale. Agricultural investment funds rose ten-fold from 2005 to 2018, and now regularly include farmland as a stand-alone asset class. By 2023, 960 active funds specialised in food and agricultural assets managed over $150 billion. US investors have doubled their stakes in farmland since the pandemic. Meanwhile, carbon offsetting markets are also bringing powerful new actors into land markets. For example, fossil fuel giant Shell has set aside more than $450 million for buying up offsets. Although the financialization of land markets may not lead directly to land grabs, it is driving steep land price inflation and undermining the ability of small-scale farmers to stay on the land, as well as preventing new farmers from entering the sector. In the UK, an influx of investment from pension funds and private wealth contributed to a doubling of farmland prices from 2010-2015, while Canada has seen 30 consecutive years of land price increases amid rampant real estate speculation. And through new financial derivatives, speculators are accruing and consolidating land parcels into bigger holdings, hiking up the prices, squeezing smaller farmers out of land ownership – and then leasing the land back to them.
Old Threats in a New Landscape
Today, therefore, land grabbing remains a major, evolving threat. It is part of a broader set of pressures that are forcing farmers and communities off the land. In the fifteen years since the ‘land rush’, global land prices have doubled, and land inequality has surged in all world regions – with 1% of farms now controlling 70% of global farmland. Smallholder livelihoods have been continually and critically weakened, and an increasingly powerful agri-food sector has tightened its grip on food systems and farmland.
It is therefore more crucial than ever to document the latest land grabs, to sound the alarm on the global land squeeze, and to explore the urgently-needed strategies – local and global – to restore equitable, meaningful, and secure land access for all.
*Figures calculated by IPES-Food (2024), based on data from the Land Matrix Initiative
