The globally driven acquisition of land puts rural farmers across the globe at risk and Africa is the hotspot of global land grabbing. Shows the ongoing work of the Remote Sensing Research Group (RSRG);University of Bonn;to map land grabbing events in Southern Africa;with examples from Mozambique and Zambia. Provides an overview of current land grabbing databases;their lack of spatial information and how remote sensing datasets can overcome this lack when being used to detect large scale agricultural production schemes.

DESPOJANDO PARA ALIMENTAR AL GIGANTE:CHINA Y EL AGRONEGOCIO EN CHILE
Alexander Panez Pinto *

The Annual Country Reviews reflect upon current land issues in the Mekong Region, and has been produced for researchers, practitioners and policy advocates operating in the field. Specialists have been selected from Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam to briefly answer the following two questions:

1. What are the most pressing issues involving land governance in your country?

2. What are the most important issues for the researcher on land?

Date: 7 mars 2019

Source: Farmlandgrab, FIAN Belgium

FIAN Belgium publie un nouveau rapport "Accaparement de terres et huile de palme en Sierra Leone : analyse du cas SOCFIN à la lumière des droits humains".

Résumé

For people around the world, land is more than a commodity to be bought and sold, de

In economics, land has been traditionally assumed to be a fixed production factor, both in terms of quantity supplied and mobility, as opposed to capital and labor, which are usually considered to be mobile factors, at least to some extent. Yet, in the last decade, international investors have expressed an unexpected interest in farmland and in land-related investments, with the demand for land brusquely rising at an unprecedented pace.

A wave of commercial investments in the natural resource sectors has rekindled debates about the place of contracts in the interface between economic governance and control over natural resources.

In economics, land has been traditionally assumed to be a fixed production factor, both in terms of quantity supplied and mobility, as opposed to capital and labor, which are usually considered to be mobile factors, at least to some extent. Yet, in the last decade, international investors have expressed an unexpected interest in farmland and in land-related investments, with the demand for land brusquely rising at an unprecedented pace.

The government of (post)socialist Laos has conceded more than 1 million hectares of land—5 percent of the national territory—to resource investors, threatening rural community access to customary lands and forests. However, investors have not been able to use all of the land granted to them, and their projects have generated geographically uneven dispossession due to local resistance.

Land grabbing has transformed rural environments across the global South, generating resistance or political reactions “from below”. In authoritarian countries like Laos, where resource investments are coercively developed and insulated from political dissent, resistance appears absent at first glance. Yet, it is occurring under the radar, largely outside transnational activist networks. In this article, we examine how resistance can protect access to rural lands in contexts where it is heavily repressed.

This study investigated the implications of large-scale land concessions in the Red River Delta, Vietnam, and Northeast Cambodia with regard to urban and agricultural frontiers, agrarian transitions, migration, and places from which the migrant workers originated.

Increasing global demand for natural rubber began in the mid-2000s and led to large-scale expansion of plantations in Laos until rubber latex prices declined greatly beginning in 2011. The expansion of rubber did not, however, occur uniformly across the country. While the north and central Laos experienced mostly local and smallholder plantations, rubber expansion in the south was dominated by transnational companies from Vietnam, China and Thailand through large-scale land concessions, often causing conflicts with local communities.