This paper seeks to answer the question: how does land become grabbable and local people relocatable? It focuses on the historical and current conditions of land tenure that enable land grabbing. While recognising the important contributions thus far made by the critical literature on land grabbing, this paper moves forward towards understanding specific processes that befall before land is grabbed and its original users relocated.

By creating a land commission, the Kazakh authorities managed to bring down the protest rallies in 2016, when, under pressure from citizens, the government was forced to abandon the sale and lease of land to foreigners. The goal of the national patriots was achieved, but the key issue for the citizens remained unresolved – the mechanism and procedures for the return of land to the people of Kazakhstan, sold by the authorities as a result of massive corruption deals and now belonging to oligarchs – “land barons”, has not been created by law.

Cette étude est le troisième volet d’une série consacrée à l’accès à la terre, thématique centrale du programme 2017-2021 d’Entraide et Fraternité. Les deux premiers volets ont été consacrés en 2018, à Madagascar et en 2019, aux Philippines.

Over the past several decades, land investments have dramatically increased to meet global food and biofuel demands, produce industrial commodities, protect environments and develop urban centres. Scholars and media actors have labelled this phenomenon “land grabbing”, owing to its many negative impacts. Since existing knowledge was generated from individual case-studies, global land grabbing patterns are relatively underexamined, and broader extrapolations of results to inform land grabbing theories are limited.

Foreign land grabbing is acknowledged as a phenomenon that generates disempowerment and dispossession of local farmers, human rights violations. Previous studies have revealed the lack of ethical benchmarks in foreign large-scale land transactions that raise moral concerns. It is evident that when resources are scarce and people depend on them, the balance between values and interests transforms itself into a dilemma.

The webinar Rolling back social and environmental safeguards in the name of COVID-19, organized by Forest Peoples Programme, the Tenure Facility,  Middlesex University, the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic and the Land Portal Foundation, took place on Thursday, February 18, 2021.

Global leaders increasingly recognize that land rights for indigenous and local communities are a prerequisite for achieving national and international goals for forest governance, food security, climate mitigation, economic development and human rights.

A 22 minute video about one of the biggest cases of agricultural land grabbing in Senegal: 20,000 hectares;first allocated to Senhuile-Sénéthanol;now known as Les Fermes de la Téranga. The Italian investors Tampieri Financial Group pulled out of the project in 2017 and the new owners – Agro Industries Corp;based in the tax haven of the Cayman Islands – arrived in 2018.

Grassroots innovations, understood as bottom-up experiments on more socio-ecologically sound practices, have been a primary focus in civic-oriented studies on transformative pathways to sustainability. However, grassroots innovation studies often adopt a socio-technical systemic approach, whereby grassroots actors’ aspirations, mobilization efforts, and visions beyond the scope of certain socio-technical transitions are largely left off.

This crucial report demonstrates how states and other actors are using the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to roll back social and environmental safeguards. In doing so, they are eroding the rights of indigenous peoples in the five most tropically forested countries of the world

The rapid progress in digital information and communication technologies  (ICTs) comes with both fresh opportunities and new challenges for different sectors and actors adopting the new solutions that become available over time. Since the mid-2000s, the global land governance community has piloted a series of open data and transparency initiatives largely based on such digital innovations, aiming at increasing accountability and counteracting corruption in the land sector, both at the local and global level.

Land Grabbing Or Rice Sector Development Opportunity?

Palm oil is an important commodity contributing to livelihoods of many communities, GDP of governments and the achievement of several sustainable development goals (SDG) including no poverty, zero hunger, and decent work and economic growth. However, its cultivation and continuous expansion due to high and increasing demand has led to many negative effects and subsequent calls to make production sustainable. To this end, information is needed to understand the negative and positive impacts on both the environment and human wellbeing to respond appropriately.