THE GLOBAL LAND GRAB:

An Analysis of Extant Governance Institutions

Phoebe Stephens Introduction Headlines such as In Corrupt Global Food System Farmland is the New Gold and Land Grabs in Poor Countries Set to Increase reflect the urgent tone of a recent surge in media coverage on the global land grab.1 At first glance it appears that mainstream media is experiencing collective amnesia by decrying large-scale investments in foreign land. It only takes a very cursory examination of colonial and imperial history to realize that scrambles for rich lands have underpinned geopolitics for several hundred years. However, this paper takes the position that both the driving forces behind current land investments and proposals to manage their most deleterious effects combine to make todays global land grab distinct from those of the past.

Although there is considerable research regarding the connection between land grabs and globalization processes, little has been written about the land grab phenomenon from a global governance perspective. This paper has three objectives, namely to (i) probe the global processes that have led to the current global land grab; (ii) contribute to the literature by identifying the governance responses that have surfaced in the wake of this new phenomenon; and (iii) assess the characteristics of mainstream governance approaches to land grabs.

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The discussion opens by defining globalization. This theoretical groundwork will illuminate how incentives for land grabbing are based in an economic interpretation of globalization. Next, a description of the global land grab is provided to highlight the global processes involved in the current rush toward farmland. The dominant global governance institutions aimed at disciplining land grabbing are then introduced, followed by a review of the multiple voices that influence the policymaking process. Rather than one specific institution governing land grabs, a messy configuration of regimes, or a regime complex, governs land grabs. This paper applies the notion of a regime complex to the extant governance institutions surrounding land grabs. Finally, through an analysis of mainstream institutional responses, I argue that severe deficiencies exist within conventional approaches to the governance of land grabs. A more realistic assessment of the motivating factors behind land grabbing is necessary to adequately reign in forces that hinder poverty alleviation and rural development in targeted countries.

Globalization and Global Governance Globalization is a term applied to a range of contemporary processes; here, globalization is understood as the emergence of a global marketplace. For Labont and Schrecker, globalization is a process of greater integration within the world economy through movements of goods and services, capital, technology, and (to a lesser extent) labour, which lead increasingly to economic decisions being influenced by global conditions2 The decade of the 1970s is often associated with the emergence of the contemporary global marketplace. Despite the seemingly ad hoc nature of globalization, 1

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the interconnections materializing at this time were not inevitable. Rather, they were the result of deliberate political choices such as the active support of trade liberalization and financial deregulation measures.3 The perceived soundness of these measures served to further entrench them over the coming years and by the 1990s, powerful Western governments promoted an intellectual blueprint based on the indisputable benefits of free markets and private ownership.4 Thus, a neoliberal paradigm has informed the course of globalization over the past several decades.

The Global Land Grab Borras and Franco define the global land grab as a catch-all framework to describe and analyze the current explosion of (trans)national commercial land transactions related to the production and scale of food and biofuels.5 The implications of land grabs are diffuse. There is not one uniform local experience to draw upon but in terms of the impacts on small-scale farmers in targeted countries the results are viewed as problematic. History indicates that these types of investments will either have the effect of driving farmers off their land in search of alternative work (often non-existent or under-employment), or turning farmers into a class of workers on large-scale plantations with a high risk of human rights violations.6 Moreover, as subsistence farming is the foundation of many developing country communities, land grabs could restrict peoples access to vital resources and plunge already poor populations further into poverty.

Land grabbing has occurred for hundreds of years as cornerstones of colonial and neocolonial practices: European colonialism encouraged the takeover of foreign farmland 2

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to produce crops like tea and tobacco for domestic consumption during the 19th century and neocolonialism echoed these structures by pushing foreign fruit companies to set up large plantations in Central America and Southeast Asia in the 20th century. While acknowledging similarities to historical trends, many scholars, analysts and activists believe that the current land grab is undeniably peculiar. A first indication of this departure is the spectacular increase in investment in agricultural land that occurred in the latter half of 2008. It is estimated that between 1997-2007, 1.9 million hectares (ha) of land was expanded for cultivation. However, over the course of just a few months in 2008, foreign investors expressed interest in approximately 56 million ha of land with agricultural potential.7 However, what truly differentiates the present trend of large-scale land acquisitions from those of the past is its connection to three major crises of this decade: the global financial crisis, the food crisis, and the energy crisis.

A perfect storm: the financial, food and energy crises There are three main reasons why land is being grabbed on a global scale: to secure alternative energy sources, to strengthen domestic food security in importdependent countries and to increase the financial returns of large investors.8 The latter two motivating factors essentially represent two sides of the same coin. Volatility in commodity markets has, on the one hand, troubled countries that are heavily reliant on food imports and, on the other, signaled profit making opportunities to financial investors.9 The 2007-2008 financial crisis had a dramatic impact on food prices and the value of agricultural land due to the interconnectivities between financial deregulation and 3

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commodity exchanges. Indeed, Ghosh argues that, the global food crisisis not something that can be treated as discrete and separate from the global financial crisis.10 The sustained price hikes in commodities from 2002-2007 were accompanied by a financialization of commodity markets, which is explained as a growing presence of financial investors on commodity futures exchanges.11 Ghosh describes how policies introduced in the early 2000s opened up commodity exchanges to new financial players who had previously been blocked from entry due to regulation that prevented market manipulation.12 When the financial crisis hit with the antecedent collapse of the U.S. housing and derivative markets, investors were left searching for new areas in which to channel their funds. As is pointed out by the World Bank, the financial crisis encouraged a rediscovery of the agricultural sector by multiple actors.13 Cotula and Vermeulen also note how the upward trend in commodity prices has increased returns on investment in production.14 This has translated into greater interest in owning land or owning shares in companies that are involved in the production end of the value-chain. The influx of speculative investments by hedge funds, pension funds and banks in commodity markets led some to argue that they were directly linked to a sharp increase in the prices of staple crops. However, as the severity of the crisis increased, investors could not sustain the same degree of speculative investment, and commodity prices quickly experienced a sharp decline by mid-2008.15 In sum, the volatility of commodity prices has exposed the food security vulnerabilities of heavily import-dependent countries and the financial crisis drew financial investors attention to the profit making opportunities presented by relatively unproductive, cheap land. These factors converged to increase purchases of land in the developing world. 4

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The same forces that led to higher and volatile food commodity prices are also behind unstable oil prices. The final element of this perfect storm that created favorable conditions for land grabbing is the increasingly important role of biofuels as an alternative to fossil fuels. The governments of the US, EU and Brazil have been actively promoting the production of biofuels since the 1990s.16 By promoting policies geared toward biofuel production, these states have increased incentives for land grabbing. Corporations and other investors have been investing in biofuel production on a global scale with substantial investments in the global South.17 For instance, estimates calculate that the EU relies on more than five million ha of land for biofuel production in the developing world.18 The processes of land grabbing for biofuel development vary across locales. Typically, internationally funded interests broker deals with state officials or large landowners involving little or no contact with small-scale farmers who are working the land. Peasants enjoying customary rights to the land are often illegally evicted, having to settle for less fertile land or struggle to find alternative employment. Those who stay work on biodiversity-poor land as landless laborers. For example, in the Polochic Valley in Guatemala, local communities are being forced off their land to make way for biofuel production.19 Growing interest in biofuels has impacted the global food supply, as it has led to the allocation of land to produce biofuel crops and also diverted existing food production toward biofuels.20 Ghosh believes that the constraints that biofuels have placed on the supply of agricultural land for food production has been one of the most important contributing factors for high food and grain prices.21 The preceding discussion highlights the various global forces at play in the rush toward agricultural land in the developing world. The neoliberal underpinnings of these 5

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processes have led to what McMichael deems commodity fetishism, the commodification of food and fuel, which has worked to reframe agricultural land as a highly desirable target for foreign investment.22 The recent surge in large-scale land acquisitions is firmly grounded in complex globalization processes and thus presents formidable challenges to effective global governance. As Headey et al. note, biofuels are here to stay, and energy and food prices have adjusted to a higher equilibrium, albeit with larger volatility.23 This suggests that the driving forces behind the global land grab are not abating and signals the need to discipline the frictions arising from globalization.24

The global land grab: irredeemable disaster, risk or opportunity? Despite recognition that a global land grab phenomenon is underway, little consensus on how to effectively evaluate, and thereby govern, global land grabs exists. Non-state actors have drastically different interpretations about the impacts of, and prospects presented by, global land grabbing. Groups like the Via Campesina that represent poor peasants and small-scale farmers in developing countries believe that the global land grab poses disastrous consequences for the wellbeing of communities, ecosystems and the climate: Land grabbing even where there are no related forced evictions denies land for local communities, destroys livelihoods, reduces the political space for peasant oriented agricultural policies and distorts markets towards increasingly concentrated agribusiness interest and global trade rather than towards sustainable peasant/smallhold production for local and national markets.25 Development agencies and think tanks such as the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), the World Bank, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United 6

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Nations (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) realize that there have been extremely negative consequences associated with the recent surge of land grabbing: the displacement of local populations; a reduction in food security; environmental damage; loss of livelihoods; social polarization and political instability.26 Additionally, these agencies have identified the secretive manner in which land deals are often conducted along with the targeting of countries with weak land tenure rights for investments as drawbacks.27 The International Federation of Agricultural Producers (IFAP), which represents the interests of middle-income farmers in the developed world, also takes a more pro-land grab stance.28 IFAPs position on land grabbing can be traced to the strength of commercial interests amongst its membership.29 Rather than calling for a moratorium on land grabbing, supporters believe that if managed correctly, large-scale land acquisitions can be win-win. Discourse plays a powerful role in this debate. When land grabs are framed as risks there is an inherent recognition that if certain conditions are met, they can be transformed into opportunities. This judgment effectively legitimizes global land grabs. All that remains to be determined is how to ensure that land grabs benefit all sides through effective governance measures.

The Global Governance of Land Grabs A fundamental characteristic of global governance is the rise of non-state actors in regulating issues that traditionally have been dealt with by state governments.30 As McMichael notes, the (neoliberal) institutional setting has shifted from a state-centric to a global social landscape.31 Expanding on this observation, Borras Jr. and Franco 7

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highlight how the shifting perceptions of the roles of civil society, the market and states have led to the emergence of a corporate social responsibility agenda.32 This new approach to governance has opened up decision-making from a limited group of elite state members to participation from variety of actors. In addition to this shift, which has intensified the complexity of the policy process, the density of international institutions has increased as a response to the emergence of global problems.33 Although regulation of the global land grab is nascent, this paper contends that this is an issue that will not be governed by a distinct, elemental regime, but rather by an intermingling of institutions.

As Chanda aptly points out, Globalization has been with us since the dawn of history, but the notion of trying to govern the interconnections that it has produced is a more recent phenomenon. Governance has thus developed slowly, lagging far behind the trade, travel, and interaction wrought by globalization.34 Accordingly, the reactive nature of global governance institutions is also evident with respect to land grabs. Discussions regarding the regulation of land grabs have developed more slowly than the phenomenon itself. Two noteworthy reports have been released over the last two years that identify visions for how land grabs ought to be managed: Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment that Respects Rights, Livelihoods and Resources and Rising Global Interest in Farmland: Can it yield sustainable and equitable benefits? The former is a collaborative effort between the FAO, IFAD, UNCTAD, and the World Bank while the latter is solely a World Bank publication. These high profile players recommend a soft law approach to regulating land

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grabs through Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investments (PRAI), reflecting the growing popularity of instituting voluntary schemes in the face of global problems.35

The PRAI report intended to open up the discussion over regulating land grabs for commentary, suggestions, further research and analytical input from a wide variety of stakeholders including civil society organizations, multilateral and bilateral donor agencies, and all major investor categories.36 The authors hoped that the major recipient countries of these investments would support the recommendations and help implement them on the ground. The seven PRAI include: Respecting land and resource rights; ensuring food security; ensuring transparency, good governance, and a proper enabling environment; consultation and participation; responsible agro-investing; and social and environmental sustainability.37 Ultimately, the goal of the PRAI is to be translated into an agreement on codes of good or best practices and actions for investors, governments, donors and international agencies, at different levels.38

The World Bank report addresses criticisms about the PRAI that charge the principles with promoting investor interest rather than helping vulnerable countries insulate themselves from the negative impacts of land grabbing.39 The report thus seeks to identify how stakeholders can increase smallholder productivity and improve local livelihoods.40 It believes that land grabs can contribute to poverty alleviation through three mechanisms: payments for the lease and purchase of land; the generation of employment for wageworkers; and new opportunities for contract farmers.41 The authors of the report believe that governments in target countries, investors, civil society, and 9

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international institutions must be actively incorporated into the decision-making process in order to achieve positive outcomes with respect to land grabbing.

The Bank calls on recipient countries to improve administrative structures, provide infrastructure, clarify and secure local rights, and protect critical natural resources.42 Investors are considered to be highly sensitive to reputational risk and are thus expected to engage in activities that minimize social dislocation and environmental destruction. Industry-driven initiatives that promote best practices are deemed desirable in this context, however, the involvement of host states is also perceived as necessary to ensure the initiatives operate effectively on the ground. Civil society organizations (CSO) are called upon to educate local communities on their rights; provide specific assistance in negotiation and monitoring; and perform a watchdog function to draw attention to noncompliance with existing policy or globally agreed norms.43 Finally, the Bank regards international organizations as performing a bridging function that encourages stakeholders to agree on a standard set of principles.44

The PRAI and World Bank reports represent clear attempts at regulating land grabs through typical global governance methods. The blurring of the public and private spheres demonstrates the reliance on civil society actors to perform roles that were traditionally expected of states as well as through the reliance on investors to selfregulate. Another prominent actor to consider in the global governance of land grabs is the Committee on World Food Security (CFS), whose mandate is to improve the global governance of food and consists of all FAO member states, non-governmental 10

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organizations, international agencies and the private sector.45 In October 2010, the CFS launched an inclusive process to consider the PRAIs. The CFS is slated to develop a set of voluntary guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land and Other Natural Resources and will likely refer to the PRAI as a guiding framework.46 The consultation process is underway and stakeholders are beginning to draft position pieces in order to impact the direction of the guidelines.

Despite mainstream progress toward governing land grabs, multiple alternate perspectives have surfaced, aimed at influencing the rapidly evolving policymaking process. For groups who are concerned about poverty alleviation and rural development, the mainstream approaches are short-sighted. For instance, Olivier De Schutter, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to food, believes that increased investments in agriculture will encourage the development of a market for land rights and promote a shift toward export-oriented agriculture.47 Such a transition, he thinks, is unlikely to support rural development and poverty alleviation, as it will encourage the development of large-scale, mechanized forms of agriculture, which tend to employ fewer farmers than traditional agricultural methods. As such, De Schutter proposes an alternative program for agricultural investment, which he first presented to the Human Rights Council in December 2009 and was aimed at influencing the discussion of land grab regulation at a forthcoming G8 summit.48 De Schutter asks that land-related investments respect eleven minimum human rights principles so states are not tempted to consider large-scale agricultural investments from a purely economic standpoint.49 Some of these recommendations include ensuring investment agreement revenues benefit local 11

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populations, promoting labor intensive farming systems, and requiring that investor obligations are clearly defined and enforceable.50 According to Li, the human rights approach has, the potential to get closer to the structural dynamics of impoverishment by forcing governance institutions to think more broadly about the impacts of land deals, and to consider the impacts on livelihoods for current and future generations, rather than focusing narrowly on the technicalities of a particular deal.51

CSOs have also taken a human rights approach to the governance of land grabs. In March 2011, CSOs representing farmers, nomadic pastoralists, indigenous peoples, fisherfolk, women, youth, and urbanites drafted proposals for the FAO Guidelines on Responsible Governance of Land and Natural Resource Tenure.52 These CSOs argue that, [i]n order to have a clear normative standard about what responsible governance is, the Guidelines should be based on the universal human rights framework.53 During the same timeframe, other CSOs representing farmers organizations, unions, religious

organizations, non-governmental organizations and other social movements gathered at the World Social Forum 2011 in Senegal to develop the Dakar Appeal Against the Land Grab.54 This appeal represents a significant departure from the other perspectives mapped above. These CSO groups call on parliament and national governments to immediately cease all massive land grabs current and future and return the plundered land; they demand that governments, the Regional Unions of States, FAO and other national and international institutions immediately implement the commitments that were made at the International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development; and that states, regional organizations and international institutions guarantee peoples right to land and 12

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support family farming and agro-ecology.55 One major downside of the Appeal is that it leaves no room to manipulate land deals to bring benefits to all involved.

It is evident that a broad range exists with regards to the positions various stakeholders are taking in response to the global land grab. Although, these views may be considered equally legitimate from an academic standpoint, in the context of a world defined by neoliberal globalization, those that align more closely with mainstream neoliberal norms, such as the PRAI, are more likely to prevail within dominant global governance institutions.

The land grab regime complex The preceding discussion regarding the various approaches to the governance of land grabs displays the difficulty of decomposing individual institutions surrounding problems that are global in nature.56 According to Raustiala and Victor, the proliferation of international regimes has led to a messy configuration through which various issues are governed, labeled the regime complex.57 A regime complex is an array of partially overlapping and nonhierarchical institutions governing a particular issue-area.58 Raustiala and Victors depiction of the regime complex provides an effective framework for the study of messy configurations of global institutions. Three general characteristics apply to regime complexes: path dependence; forum shopping; and the adoption of broad, aspirational rules. These characteristics help explain how issues are governed globally and why particular institutions gain traction within global governance systems.

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Raustiala and Victor maintain that because institutions do not develop in a vacuum, they exhibit path dependency. This is explained as extant arrangements in the various elemental regimes will constrain and channel the process of creating new rules.59 Indeed, the World Bank explicitly recognizes how institutions in other sectors as well as at different levels of governance will interact with and inform regulations over land grabbing. It identifies the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), the African Unions Framework and Guidelines on Land Policy, the Equator Principles, and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development Investment Guidelines as providing fruitful models for the governance of land grabs. These models also involve the governance of resource use across territorial boundaries and have the potential to create significant environmental and social externalities.60 De Schutter points to the Agreement on Trade-Related Investment Measures as well as regional trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement as disallowing countries to impose performance requirements on foreign investors.61

Clearly, innumerable preexisting regimes have informed the character of dominant approaches such as the PRAIs and the World Bank report. Aside from the institutions listed above, the rules for land grabbing are bound by deeply entrenched norms. Most notably, the land grab debate takes place within a neoliberal paradigm. Three constraints that are rooted in neoliberal norms illustrate how path dependency may impact the governance of land grabs. First, institutional arrangements have evolved around land rights, which promote neoliberal ideals such as efficiency in credit and in land markets.62 It is argued that the Western based concepts of property rights have 14

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largely informed the PRAIs as their emphasis is on securing tenure and land rights in order to achieve win-win deals.63 A second constraint placed on the development of the land grab regime includes the growing legitimacy of public-private partnerships, or the increasing perception of the merits of transnational private authority. Again, this emphasis is a reflection of what Sadler and Lloyd call a theoretical framework of rolling-out neoliberalization.64 A third consideration is the emerging biofuels complex. The biofuels complex reproduces a global ecology, whereby planetary resources are to be managed through the application of the market paradigm to the environment (market environmentalism), reinforcing a growing metabolic rift, and the separation of people and nature.65 The treatment of land as a commodity, an attitude that is being accelerated by global land grabbing, is an aspect of neoliberal policymaking that has increasingly encouraged market mechanisms to be the sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment.66

Forum shopping is another conjecture of regime complexes. In the disaggregated decision-making model typical of global governance, actors are able to seek out their negotiating forum of choice. It is evident that powerful agribusinesses or hedge funds will likely opt to support the principles espoused by the World Bank as opposed to those developed at the World Social Forum, for example. The World Bank has a track record of encouraging similar types of large-scale investment. Indeed, De Schutter points out that, since the structural adjustment policies of the 1990s, it has consistently encouraged developing countries to favor inward foreign investment by cutting down administrative requirements and consultations that might slow down or restrict investments.67 Li 15

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believes that the World Banks work on land tenure and titling over the last two decades has centered on creating a favorable legal environment for investors and that the World Banks focus has been to encourage investment to rural areas that investors have thus far avoided because they are too risky.68 Logically, powerful corporations and states involved in the investment side of land grabs are going to lend legitimacy to the PRAIs which allow them to continue business as usual in an only slightly modified way. Meanwhile, more radical forums that reject neoliberal policies tend to become marginalized because their views are primarily attractive to those who are sidelined in the current global system.

Finally, regime complex theory contends that, when the legislative agenda is complex and contested, lawmakers often adopt broad, aspirational rules delegating to the process of implementation exactly how these rules will be interpreted and applied in practice.69 Similarly, the World Bank report makes general calls to states, investors, civil society and international institutions as to how to improve the regulation of land grabs and defers the task of working out the details of these policies to the implementation process. The PRAIs are equally vague, and are critiqued by De Schutter for not being embedded in a political analysis of how they might actually work in practice.70

Concluding Remarks According to Scholte, globalization is a highly political process, global links are venues of conflict and cooperation, hierarchy and equality, opportunity and its denial.71 The foregoing analysis makes evident the power struggles associated with increasing 16

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transplanetary and supraterritorial connections typical of neoliberal globalization. Despite decision-making becoming increasingly disaggregated in our current era, accountability still remains in states hands, which can hinder far-reaching goals such as poverty alleviation and rural development.

The data show that most large-scale investments occur in areas that have poor governance records and weak land rights protection.72 However, the PRAIs and the World Bank report emphasize the responsibilities of host governments to ensure that land-grabs are not harmful to local populations and generate wide scale benefits. Due to this overreliance on host countries to strengthen governance institutions, the implementation of the PRAIs and the World Bank report is deemed unlikely. In response to the World Bank report Li warns, The formidable list of problems connected with large-scale land acquisitions that are identified in the reportproblems that derive from the capacity of national and transnational capital in cahoots with rapacious regimes to wreak havoc on rural peoples livesare reduced to weaknesses in the institutional and policy framework, technical issues that can be addressed in the short term. This is a fantastic proposition.73 States that are the primary targets of investment are unlikely to have the capacity to strengthen their institutions or implement the governance conditions that the dominant approaches perceive as necessary to benefiting local communities.74 In some cases it is conceivable that states are also unwilling to uphold PRAIs, particularly if state governments themselves are reaping financial benefits from these deals and competing with neighboring countries for investment, thus being encouraged to engage in race to the bottom behavior. 17

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The preceding analysis suggests that understanding the value of land, not as a commodity, but as a lifeline for the poorest rural households, should inform the direction of emerging governance institutions around land grabs.75 The importance of establishing robust international rules and standards for land grabs is described by Cotula and Vermeulen as serving a broader, and extremely pressing goal. It is seen as a necessary step that, the international community, including UN and Bretton Woods institutions as well as international NGOs and concerned governments must take to reinvigorate confidence in multilateralism.76 In order to be effective, these rules must be punitive enough to hold non-state actors and foreign governments to account. In their current form, the PRAIs and the World Bank report are disingenuous in their assumptions that host states will be able to implement the necessary changes to safeguard themselves against land grabbing. If, as they claim, increasing smallholder productivity and improving local livelihoods are their ultimate goals, they must engage in an honest assessment of the situation. This would involve taking global power dynamics into account and addressing the systemic factors that are placing the development prospects of local communities at risk. Such an approach would require supporting alternatives to neoliberal governance models.

Endnotes
1

Stephen Leahy, In Corrupt Global Food System Farmland is the New Gold, All Africa, January 14, 2011 and Hilaire Avril, Land Grabs in Poor Countries Set to Increase, All Africa, September 8, 2010. 2 Ronald Labont & Ted Schrecker, Introduction: Globalizations Challenges to Peoples Health, in Labont, Schrecker, Corinne Packer, and Vivian Runnels, Globalization and Health: Pathways, Evidence and Policy (London: Routledge, 2009), 3. 3 Ibid.

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4 5

Ibid. Saturnino M. Borras Jr. and Jennifer Franco, Towards a Broader View of the Politics of Global Land Grab: Rethinking Land Issues, Reframing Resistance, Netherlands: Initiatives in Critical Agrarian Studies, 2010: 2. 6 Daniel Shepard and Anuradha Mittal, The Great Land Grab: Rush for Worlds Farmland Threatens Food Security for the Poor, (Oakland: The Oakland Institute: 2009), 11. 7 Klaus Deininger et al., Rising Global Interest in Farmland (Washington: World Bank, 2011), xxxii. 8 Seized! The 2008 land grab for food and financial security GRAIN, accessed March 20, 2011, http://www.grain.org/briefings_files/landgrab-2008-en.pdf 9 The Global Economic Crisis: Systemic failures and multilateral remedies United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, accessed March 20, 2011, http://www.unctad.org/en/docs/gds20091_en.pdf, 23. 10 Jayati Ghosh, The Unnatural Coupling: Food and Global Finance Journal of Agrarian Change (10) 1 (2010): 72. 11 United Nation Conference on Trade and Development, 23. 12 Ghosh, The Unnatural Coupling, 78. 13 Deininger, Rising Global Interest in Farmland, 1. 14 Lorenzo Cotula and Sonja Vermeulen, Deal or no Deal: the outlook of agricultural land investment in Africa, International Affairs (85) 6 (2009): 1237. 15 Ghosh, The Unnatural Coupling, 79. 16 Peter Dauvergne and Kate J. Neville, Forests, food, and fuel in the tropics: the uneven social and ecological consequences of the emerging political economy of biofuels Journal of Peasant Studies (37) 4 (2010): 635. 17 Borras Jr., The Politics of Biofuels, Land and Agrarian Change. Journal of Peasant Studies (37) 4 (2010): 577. 18 Ibid., 577. 19 Annie Bird, Biofuels, mass evictions and violence build on the legacy of the 1978 Panzos Massacre in Guatemala, accessed on August 3, 2011, http://farmlandgrab.org/post/view/18354 20 Ghosh, The Unnatural Coupling, 73. 21 Ibid., 72. However, there is a considerable degree of contention regarding how much biofuels have contributed to rising food prices. Dauvergne and Neville point out that some sources attribute rising food prices to biofuels by as little as two percent while the World Bank has found a 75 percent correlation. 22 McMichael, Agrofuels in the Food Regime, 609. 23 Derek Headey, Sangeetha Malaiyandi and Shengagn Fan, Navigating the Perfect Storm: Reflections on the Food, Energy, and Financial Crises, (Washington: IFPRI, 2007): v. 24 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An ethnography of global connection (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2005). 25 Stop Land Grabbing Now GRAIN. Accessed on April 1, 2011, http://www.grain.org/o/?id=102. 26 Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment that Respects Rights, Livelihoods and Resources FAO, IFAD, UNCTAD and World Bank Group, Accessed on April 1, 2011, http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTARD/214574-1111138388661/22453321/Principles_Extended.pdf . 27 Deininger et al., Rising Global Interest in Farmland, xiv. 28 Saturnino M. Borras Jr. and Jennifer Franco, Towards a Broader View of the Politics of Global Land Grab: Rethinking Land Issues, Reframing Resistance ICAS May 2010, 5. 29 Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Philip McMichael and Ian Scoones, The politics of biofuels, land and agrarian change: editors introduction, Journal of Peasant Studies (37) 4 (2010): 585. 30 Scholte 2002 and Fuchs 2005. 31 Philip McMichael, Agrofuels in the Food Regime, Journal of Peasant Studies, (37) 4 (2010): 612. 32 Saturnino M. Borras Jr. and Jennifer Franco, From Threat to Opportunity? Problems with the Idea of a Code of Conduct for Land-Grabbing, Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal, 13 (2010): 507. 33 Kal Raustiala and David G. Victor, The Regime Complex for Plant Genetic Resources, International Organization (58) (2004): 277. 34 Nayan Chanda, Runaway Globalization Without Governance Global Governance, 12 (2008): 119.

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Jennifer Clapp, The Privatization of Global Environmental Governance: ISO 14000 and the Developing World, Global Governance 4 (1998): 295. 36 Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment that Respects Rights, Livelihoods and Resources, 20. 37 Deininger et al., Rising Global Interest in Farmland, xxvii. 38 Ibid., 21. 39 Deininger et al., Rising Global Interest in Farmland, 3. 40 Ibid., 129. 41 Tania Murray Li, Centering Labor in the Land Grab Debate Journal of Peasant Studies, (38) 2 (2011): 281. 42 Deininger et al., Rising Global Interest in Farmland, 131. 43 Ibid., 137. 44 Ibid., 138. 45 Olivier De Schutter, How not to Think of Land-Grabbing: Three Critiques of Large-Scale Investments in Farmland Journal of Peasant Studies (38) 2 (2011): 255. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., 250. 48 Human Rights Principles to Discipline Land Grabbing United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to food, accessed on April 2, 2011. http://www.srfood.org/index.php/en/component/content/article/127human-rights-principles-to-discipline-land-grabbing. 49 Ibid. 50 Olivier De Schutter, Large scale land acquisitions and leases: a set of core principles and measures to address the human rights challenge, accessed on August 3, 2011, http://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/FA1574FD32C92E67492575D3001AE2FAFull_Report.pdf 51 Li, Centering Labour, 292. 52 Civil Society Organizations Proposals for the FAO Guidelines on Responsible Governance of Land and Natural Resources Tenure FIAN, accessed on April 3, 2011. http://www.fian.org/resources/documents/others/cso-proposals-fao-land-guidlines/ 53 Ibid. 54 Dakar Appeal Against the Land Grab Via Campesina, accessed on March 25, 2011. http://www.viacampesina.org/en/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1040:dakar-appealagainst-the-land-grab&catid=23:agrarian-reform&Itemid=36 55 Ibid. 56 Institutions are understood in a broad, informal sense and they can take the form of norms, practices or guidelines. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid., 279. 59 Raustiala and Victor, The Regime Complex, 279. 60 Deininger et al., Rising Global Interest in Farmland, 137-139. 61 Ibid. 62 Gershon Feder and David Feeny, Land Tenure and Property Rights: Theory and Implications for Development Policy, World Bank Economic Review (5) 1 (1991): 135. 63 De Schutter, How Not to Think of Land Grabbing, 265. 64 David Sadler and Stuart Lloyd, Neo-liberalising corporate social responsibility: A political economy of corporate citizenship Geoforum (40) 4 (2009): 613. 65 Saturnino M. Borras Jr et al., The Politics of Biofuels, Land, and Agrarian Change: Editors Introduction Journal of Peasant Studies (37) 4 (2010): 578. 66 Karl Polayni, The Great Transformation, (Boston: Beacon Hill Press: 1957), 73. 67 De Schutter, How Not to Think of Land Grabbing, 254. 68 Li, Centering on Labour, 293. 69 Rastialia and Victor, The Regime Complex, 280. 70 De Schutter, How Not to Think of Land Grabbing, 210. 71 J.A., Scholte, What is Globalization? The Definitional Issue Again, Centre for the Study of

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Phoebe Stephens

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Globalization and Regionalisation Working Paper (109) 2 (2002): 31. Klaus Deininger, Challenges posed by the new wave of farmland investment The Journal of Peasant Studies (38) 2 (2011): 217. 73 Li, Centering on Labour,292. 74 De Schutter, How Not to Think of Land Grabbing, 264. 75 De Schutter, how Not to Think of Land Grabbing, 274. 76 Cotula and Vermeulen, Deal or No Deal, 1246.
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