The Invisible Grabbing Hand

Chapter 5 explores the translocal nature of agriculture and land use. Introducing a translocal ecology lens, it examines the hitherto largely unexplored linkages between land grabs, natural resource depletion, labour migration and translocal mobility, demonstrating how the socio-economic processes associated with translocal livelihoods engender changing patterns of land use that are key factors in state and corporate land acquisition. Moreover, as mass migration changes the nature of the rural economy, those excluded from or unable to access the modern sector are changing their use of non-farm resources in turn, leading to degradation of fish stocks and non-timber forestry products. Finally, the role of translocal livelihoods and economic processes in agri-business and mining will be explored, in order to highlight how large scale ecological changes disproportionately impact the translocal poor.