Madeleine Fairbairn. Fields of Gold: Financing the Global Land Rush

Abstract

In the late-aughts, a surge of transnational investment in farmland became a major driver of land dispossession and concentration, agrarian protest, and ultimately scholarship. Although geographers and other social scientists had studied various forms of land dispossession for decades,1 those who entered the topic through this new wave of transnational farmland investment quickly advanced terms like “the global land grab” or the “the global land rush”, while alarmed NGOs sought to quantify it based on “deals” signed between investors and host governments. Since land grabbing was not, of course, new, such constructions begged the question of what, if any, relationship existed between these transnational investments in farmland qua farmland and other longstanding forms of rural land dispossession for mining, industry, and urban real estate – all of which also appeared to be increasing and changing in character in many regions during the neoliberal period. Then there was the problem of whether all of these transnational farmland “deals” actually involved “grabs”, which implies coercive dispossession. Since many evidently did not and farmers continued to lose land in many other ways, another vein of scholarship pushed back against the growing focus on coercive “land grabs” with the finding that dispossession could be driven by the market (Li 2014; Vijayabaskar and Menon 2018), though the dynamics of this process – land concentration and agrarian differentiation – had already been the bread and butter of “the agrarian question” for over a century (Kautsky 1988; Lenin 1964; Patnaik 1990). Further debates over whether land grabs constituted “primitive accumulation” (Marx 1977) or “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey 2003) often created