Rural Sociology 79(1), 2014, pp.

34–55
DOI: 10.1111/ruso.12021
Copyright © 2013, by the Rural Sociological Society

Rethinking Land Grab Ontology*

Philip McMichael
Department of Development Sociology
Cornell University

Abstract The current bout of land annexation expresses a particular

moment in modern history—specifically the condensation of a series of
linked crises. Arguably the world is at an ecological tipping point, and how
land resources are managed now is of paramount concern. Of course, land
management has variable meaning, with quite different ontological conse-
quences. The difference registers in the distinct visions expressed, for
example, by the World Bank and the United Nations Human Rights Rappor-
teur, Olivier de Schutter, regarding the implications of the land grab for
global food security. While the bank proposes responsible investments in
“land acquisition,” the rapporteur argues that this is a way of “responsibly
destroying the world’s peasantry.” The former, concerned with governing the
rights of capital, expresses a form of neoproductivism, signaled in the concept
of “sustainable intensification” increasingly underwritten by agribusiness. The
latter, concerned with protecting the material rights of rural inhabitants,
expresses an ontology centered on the sustainability of agroecological
methods used by farmers who know and value their landscapes. More than
simply alternative visions, these represent different responses to the com-
bined food, energy, and climate crises, informing quite distinctive ontologies
concerning the relationship between “food security,” environmental crisis,
and land management, which I address in this article in terms of the “ecology
of food security.”

Introduction
The so-called global land grab, as many have noted, is hardly anything
new. The modern world is embedded in massive land grabs starting
with colonial and settler projects. Nevertheless, the current bout of land
annexation expresses a particular moment in modern history—
specifically the condensation of a series of linked crises, manifesting in
the food price inflation of 2007–2008. At the time, food export bans and
a land rush for food and fuel crops ensued, circumventing the “free
market” organized through the World Trade Organization (WTO) mul-
tilateral trade structure (McMichael 2013a). Arguably the world is at an
ecological tipping point, and how land resources are managed now is of
paramount concern. But land management has variable meaning, with
quite different ontological implications.

* I am grateful to two anonymous reviewers for constructive comments on an earlier

draft.
 Rethinking Land Grab Ontology — McMichael 35

The difference registers in the distinct visions expressed, for example,

by the World Bank and the United Nations Human Rights Rapporteur
regarding the implications of the land grab for global food security.
While the bank proposes responsible investments in “land acquisition”
(2010) justified in terms of securing property rights for wealth genera-
tion (see de Soto 2000), the rapporteur argues that this is a way of
“responsibly destroying the world’s peasantry” (de Schutter 2010). The
former, concerned with governing the rights of capital, projects a new
concern with food security based on restructuring “underutilized” land
in the global South to expand yields via global value chains organized by
agribusiness. The latter, concerned with protecting the material rights of
rural inhabitants, expresses an ontology centered on the sustainability of
agroecological methods used by farmers who know and value their
landscapes. More than simply alternative visions, these represent differ-
ent responses to the combined food, energy, and climate crises that
define our era. At the same time, they project competing modes of
governance of the phenomenon of land grabbing (Borras, Franco, and
Wang 2012).
In the larger context, if development was about improving on the
past, it now concerns managing the future. The dominant development
paradigm views management of the future as a planetary operation, an
intensified “global ecology” involving rational planning of planetary
environmental spaces (Sachs 1993). The 2005 Millennium Ecosystem
Assessment (MEA) echoes this in how it represents the centrality of
agriculture to ecosystem management:

Agricultural expansion will continue to be one of the major

drivers of biodiversity loss well into the twenty-first century.
Development, assessment, and diffusion of technologies that
could increase the production of food per unit area sustainably
without harmful trade-offs related to excessive consumption of
water or use of nutrients or pesticides would significantly lessen
pressure on other ecosystem services. (2005:22)

While land management is key to protecting biodiversity, the MEA

advocates what has come to be known as “sustainable intensification” as
the appropriate response. This is a new trope expressing the impasse
faced by perceived needs for increased food production and degrading
ecosystems. The conventional paradigm holds that biodiversity is best
conserved by increased productivity on existing agricultural lands so that
extant natural habitat can remain relatively undisturbed. This view is
associated with the conservation ethic, and complements contemporary
consolidation of monocropping industrial agriculture, advocated in
36 Rural Sociology, Vol. 79, No. 1, March 2014

transgenic visions of future land management. An alternative view, asso-

ciated with the food sovereignty movement writ large, advocates that
rather than separate production and conservation, spatially, agricultural
production should preserve biodiversity in situ, and approximate the
functioning of the local natural system (Perfecto, Vandermeer, and
Wright 2009). The ontological distinction here concerns the difference
between viewing nature as external to agricultural production and
viewing natural processes as integral to farming practices. In conse-
quence, it is a distinction between deepening or repairing the metabolic
rift—the disruption of natural cycles and processes by modern agricul-
ture (see, e.g., Schneider and McMichael 2010).
The importance of this ontological distinction concerns not simply
how but also on whose behalf to manage the future. Olivier de Schutter
echoes this in his comment to the UN: “The question ‘for whose
benefit?’ is at least as important as the question ‘how to produce more?”
(2008). Further, insofar as de Schutter champions smallholder agroecol-
ogy, this vision affirms the claim by La Vía Campesina in its recent
Declaration of Rights of Peasants—Women and Men: “. . . that small-scale
peasant agriculture, fishing, livestock rearing can contribute to mitigate
the climate crisis and to secure a sustainable food production for all”
(2009:6).
This ontological divide breaks over the “food security” question. Food
security has been pursued under the auspices of the WTO “free trade”
regime and managed by private firms, exacerbating ecosystem degrada-
tion via a productivist model of food production (McMichael 2003).
Given reports such as the MEA, global food security proponents now
embrace “sustainable intensification” as a form of neoproductivism
driven by questions of output but in the context of a rising ecological
sensibility (see Almås and Campbell 2012). At the same time, the report
of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science, and
Technology for Development (IAASTD 2008) evidences a rising scien-
tific consensus that agroecology practiced by farmers (rather than
agroindustrial units) is more sustainable in terms of food provisioning
and ecosystem replenishment, so long as it is adequately supported.1
The ontological divide is overdetermined by the “environmentalist’s
paradox,” that is, “why is human well[-]being increasing as ecosystem
services degrade?” (Peterson 2010). In 2005, the MEA identified conse-
quences of this paradox:

1
See also Badgley et al. (2007).
 Rethinking Land Grab Ontology — McMichael 37

Over the past 50 years, humans have changed ecosystems more

rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of time in
human history, largely to meet rapidly growing demands for
food, fresh water, timber, fiber, and fuel. This has resulted in a
substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on
Earth. . . . These problems, unless addressed, will substantially
diminish the benefits that future generations obtain from
ecosystems. (2005:1)
The implicit message is that modern agriculture externalizes its envi-
ronmental relations. But this paradox is more complicated than it
appears. Just as modern social thought has abstracted the environ-
ment, so the “paradox” abstracts the social relations underlying the
accumulation of “human well[-]being”—in particular the relations
involved in the process of “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey
2003:45). In the abstraction of human well-being, the formulation of
this paradox conveniently obscures the consequences of sequestering
natural resources to service such well-being as there is. And this invari-
ably affects the ability of forest dwellers, smallholders, and fisherfolk to
sustain their material conditions as land and natural resources are
commandeered for well-being in the global marketplace. Degrading
the environment often means degrading the “lifeworlds” of land dwell-
ers, undermining their right to farm the land and the possibility of
ecological farming practices (which can contribute to human well-
being). Such abstraction carries over into the politics of the current
land grab.
The current land grab generates a divisive politics as follows:
(1) land acquisition is necessary to ensure future food supplies via land
improvement, and for the World Bank, agriculture (particularly African)
can be reinvigorated in a mutually beneficial win-win-win compact of
investors, farmers, and host states; (2) land acquisition needs gover-
nance instruments to regulate land claims and environments and ensure
sustainable production; and (3) “land sovereignty” should guide land
acquisition, either through investments determined by farming commu-
nities themselves or via “counterenclosure” movements to privilege
farming over agroindustry as small producers (re)occupy land to bring it
into social production, following the example of Brazilian Movimento dos
Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) (Borras and Franco 2012). The
third option is the democratic option, sometimes in alliance with the
second option to confirm and stabilize new producing communities.
Implicit in such positioning is a fundamental ontological issue con-
cerning the relationship among “food security,” environmental crisis,
and land management, which I call the “ecology of food security.” By this
38 Rural Sociology, Vol. 79, No. 1, March 2014

I mean the socioecological relations of food production, and the terms

within which these relations are understood and practiced.

The Ecology of Food Security

Currently, “food security” is understood in market supply terms. This is
in stark contrast to its public role in informing postwar trade politics,
when agriculture was isolated from protocols of the General Agreement
on Tariffs and Trade regarding liberalizing trade in manufactures and
raw materials (Almås and Campbell 2012). National farm sectors were
expected to provision local populations, supplemented with food aid
programs.
In the context of food shortages and famines in the early 1940s, the
United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) was estab-
lished with a mandate to stabilize world agriculture and establish global
food security. The FAO’s role was to foster and manage food supplies to
this end—although the United States soon overrode multilateralism with
its own exceptional bilateral food aid regime (Friedmann 1982). But the
initial vision of the FAO, put forward at its second session, in 1946, was
notable for its expression of human rights and its programmatic content
(perhaps presaging the later, neoliberal version of food security and
market rights):

The raising of the levels of living of rural populations calls for

the improvement of agriculture, rural industrialization, large-
scale public works, and social and educational services in the
countryside, and the raising of the levels of living of many
different races and peoples. This in turn requires a reorienta-
tion of world agriculture and of world trade in which food
will be treated as an essential of life rather than primarily as
merchandise. (quoted in Phillips and Ilcan 2003:435)

This vision interpreted “feeding the world” as an international endeavor

to transcend the colonial-era extraction of food from the colonies for
export to Europe. It conformed to the stipulations of the UN’s Universal
Declaration of Human Rights (1948), and echoed the demands of orga-
nized labor for improved levels of consumption. However, at the same
time this vision was founded in a reductionist scientific representation of
agricultural modernization: “new imaginations of people, places and
food were premised on the acceptance of a scientific approach that
permitted the comparison of otherwise distinct contexts and subjected
local knowledges to the supremacy of scientific images of, and universal
claims for, food and agriculture” (Phillips and Ilcan 2003:436).
 Rethinking Land Grab Ontology — McMichael 39

These claims were manifest in agrotechnologies and dietary and

nutritional sciences (Lang 2005), depending on the continuation of
class-based relations of food production and consumption, and realized
through the operation of global food markets—in other words, in oppo-
sition to the FAO’s vision of (partially) decommodifying food. And just
as “feeding the world” licensed a universal “scientific agriculture,” so
“development” licensed representing postcolonial societies as “underde-
veloped” and “poor,” rationalizing neocolonial interventions to gain
access to strategic resources and markets within the context of the Cold
War. As a result, the FAO facilitated the expansion of the U.S. capitalist
empire, sabotaging in the process its public vision of food “as an essential
of life rather than as merchandise.”
In 1974, at the height of a new world food crisis—precipitated by
U.S.-Soviet grain deals that, along with the oil price shock, inflated
food prices—the original conception of food security was reiterated by
FAO’s director-general, Addeke Boerma: “Food is not like any other
commodity. If human beings have a right to life at all, they have a right
to food” (quoted in Jarosz 2009:50). Amid charges that the FAO was
incapable of foreseeing and managing the crisis, the successor director-
general, Edouard Saouma (1976–93), pledged to decentralize and
reform the FAO. This was in the context of geopolitical tensions exac-
erbated by radical decolonization movements and a brief assertion of
Third World solidarity via the Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Countries and the New International Economic Order—tensions that
spilled over into the FAO. The countries of the Organization for Eco-
nomic Cooperation and Development, threatened by decolonization,
used the food and oil crises to weaken the FAO’s international food
and agriculture institutional mandate. They substituted a “patchwork
of politically-expedient intergovernmental agencies including the
International Fund for Agricultural Development . . ., the World Food
Programme . . ., the Consultative Group on International Agricultural
Research . . ., the World Food Council (now defunct) and a strength-
ened agricultural agenda at the World Bank” (ETC 2009). This
resulted in the FAO (a one-country–one-vote institution) being weak-
ened by an institutional complex representing donor countries. The
original FAO vision disappeared by 1986, when the World Bank rede-
fined food security as the ability to buy food (Jarosz 2009:51). That
same year, the Uruguay Round began, resulting in the formation of
the WTO in 1994 and the institutionalization of the free trade regime
necessary to the market vision of “food security.”
Currently, the FAO’s Committee on World Food Security (CFS) and
UN Human Rights office are recovering the rights to food vision, this
40 Rural Sociology, Vol. 79, No. 1, March 2014

time around linking it to smallholder land rights. While the FAO’s

initial mandate was to protect the smallholder, the difference today lies
in the CFS’s advocacy of agroecological methods.2 This expresses a
definite ontological shift. How has this come about? Arguably, the
answer lies in the current crisis of capital accumulation, involving
the conjunction of energy, food, financial, and climate crises. While
each crisis has its own logic, they are all interrelated, theoretically and
historically.
Abstractly, capital accumulation is premised on the exploitation of
labor and nature. The genesis of this relationship lies in the metabolic
rift, that is, the disruption of nutrient cycles on the land, as capital
colonized agriculture (Foster 1999; Moore 2011). For Marx, such
“urbanization of the countryside” released labor as a commodity, and
established the conditions for the separation of modern production
from its natural underpinnings (the “metabolic rift”). Agriculture was
subordinated increasingly to capital, with commodified inputs that over
time have performed the function of “biophysical override” (Weis 2010),
masking soil fertility decline with increasing fertilizer application, for
example. And agricultural output, in turn, has fueled modern industry
with raw materials and wage foods. In this sense capitalism is a “food
regime” insofar as its reproduction depends on foodstuffs provisioning
necessary to the reproduction of its labor force (Araghi 2003). And so it
is with energy, as human labor is continually replaced by fuel-powered
machinery and fossil fuels.3 In this sense, the urbanization of the coun-
tryside represents the subordination of landed property to capital, with
modern agriculture serving industry as host and source of commodity
inputs and outputs, respectively. In essence, capitalism combines the
exploitation of both labor and land. It is from this relationship that
Moore derives the concept of capitalism as a “world-ecological regime”
(2011:2), and Araghi derives the concept of “global value relations,”
through which he analyzes the food regime as a project dedicated to
ecological reductionism in order to reduce the cost of labor with cheap-
ened food (2003:41).
On both counts, capital’s production of commodities has depended
on increasing access to natural resources (land and fossil fuels). Both
authors maintain that the capitalization of nonhuman nature over
time, to fuel capital accumulation, depends on drawing down Earth’s

2
Note, however, the recent division within FAO, with Director-General Jose Graziano da
Silva contradicting this refocusing on smallholders (GRAIN 2012).
3
Note: “Global value relations are thus a world-historically concrete combination of food
and oil regimes” (Araghi 2009:123).
 Rethinking Land Grab Ontology — McMichael 41

“ecological capital”—for Araghi this is “surplus nature,”4 and for Moore

this represents the “under-reproduction of nature” (2011:28), in the
sense that capital’s predatory relationship with the natural world exhibits
forms of exhaustion of certain resources and processes. While these
concepts are distinct, together they speak to the current dilemma. At
first remove, capital’s dependence on surplus nature refers to the occu-
pation of natural spaces and processes at the expense of future sustain-
ability. Here Araghi signals the possibility of an absolute exhaustion of
ecosystem “services.” Moore uses his notion of underreproduction of
nature to account for processes of the relative exhaustion of ecosystem
services, via progressive colonization of new frontiers of accumulation as
temporary solutions to accumulation crises. In this sense, Moore argues
that capital continually defers exhaustion of nature through the under-
reproduction of ecosystems in particular frontiers, until such time as the
frontier option disappears (absolute exhaustion).
Arguably, the current crisis combines each of these understandings. It
is expressed phenomenally in food price inflation, which has triggered
concerns about food security, both short and long term. While short-
term concerns stem from rising hunger rates, long-term concerns focus
on food supply (in the context of projected population growth to mid-
century).5 At the same time, a series of recent reports—such as the MEA
(2005) and the IAASTD report (2008)—have linked a deepening envi-
ronmental crisis to industrial agriculture (i.e., the environmentalist
paradox). These two evident crises (food and environment) are linked
in the current land grab.
Most causal accounts of the “food crisis” identify biofuels and finan-
cial speculation as the key drivers (Berthelot 2008)—with biofuels dis-
placing crop land and investment in agrofutures inflating food prices
(Kaufman 2010). The expansion of biofuels in the 2000s has intensified
the urbanization of the countryside, as capital has sought a new fron-
tier of accumulation (Houtart 2010). To the extent that food and fuel
crops are interchangeable “flex crops” (Borras et al. 2012:6), such fron-
tier cropping has a speculative dimension. In the context of declining
industrial productivity and an increasingly vulnerable financial deriva-
tives market, investment capital shifted significantly into speculative

4
Thus, “Surplus nature is the potential surplus labor time of the future. Surplus nature
can be distinguished from ‘necessary nature,’ which signifies sustainable transformation of
nature” (Araghi 2009:121).
5
Thus the World Bank extrapolates future (unsustainable and inequitable) trajectories:
“To meet projected demand, cereal production will have to increase by nearly 50 percent
and meat production 85 percent from 2000 to 2030. Added to this is the burgeoning
demand for agricultural feedstocks for biofuels” (2007:8).
42 Rural Sociology, Vol. 79, No. 1, March 2014

ventures in land, food and biofuels, venture capital investment in biofu-

els increasing 800 percent between 2004 and 2007 (Holt-Giménez
2007:10).
Behind the investment attraction, the biofuel phenomenon repre-
sents, through policy mandates and subsidies, a double recognition: of
peak oil and the need to find a green energy supplement supply to also
reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Immediate deferral of energy
constraints (exhaustion of nature) drives biofuel production, repre-
sented as a “transitional fuel,” despite International Energy Agency esti-
mates that by 2030 biofuels will “barely offset the yearly increase in global
oil demand” (Holt-Giménez 2007:3), and all renewables, including
biofuels, will amount to only 9 percent of global energy consumption
(GRAIN 2007:6).
This scenario underscores Moore’s point that capital accumulation is
at once an ecological crisis-generating and crisis-attenuating formation,
and further, that the contradictory relation between humans and non-
human nature “forged through the globalization of value relations” finds
“common ground in the inner contradiction of the value form
itself—between value and use-value” (2011:10). That is, peak oil, as the
abstraction of nature as commodity confronted with the real historical
limits of fossil fuel deposits, presents as an exhaustion (underreproduc-
tion) of extrahuman nature at one remove, only to be supplemented
with another energy source as a crisis-attenuating strategy. The dialectic
between attenuation and generation of crisis, enabled and driven by the
abstraction of the value relation dynamic (externalizing natural limits or
the reproduction of natural cycles)6 is dramatically evident in the nega-
tive environmental impact of biofuels.7
In consequence, the biofuel phenomenon stands at the intersection
of food and environmental insecurity. Displacing food crops with fuel
crops that exacerbate environmental concerns—on the ground and in
the atmosphere—encourages us to problematize the reductionism of
global value relations. And this in turn invokes the ontological question,
namely, how to address the relationship between food security and
environmental crisis in practical policy terms. One might observe, refer-
ring to Araghi (2009) and Moore (2011), that biofuels underreproduce
6
Moore’s, and Araghi’s, notion of the underreproduction of nature, while an important
ontological intervention to underline the socioecological dialectic, discounts the
autonomy of natural regeneration processes and cycles.
7
That is, the conversion of rain forests, peat lands, savannas, or grasslands to produce
biofuels in Brazil, Southeast Asia, and the United States “creates a ‘biofuel carbon debt’ by
releasing 17 to 420 times more CO2 than the annual greenhouse gas . . . reductions these
biofuels provide by displacing fossil fuels” (Fargione et al. 2008:1237). Further, as industrial
crops, biofuels intensify soil and water degradation via dependence on chemical inputs.
 Rethinking Land Grab Ontology — McMichael 43

nature in cycles of relative exhaustion at the same time as concerns about

absolute exhaustion inform such “green” policies. In other words,
biofuel production represents a misguided attempt to legitimize a new
round of capital accumulation in the name of sustainability. Since by
some measures industrial agriculture is already responsible for about a
third of GHG emissions, land grabbing for fuel crops is a case of recy-
cling the problem as solution.

Land Commodification Ontology

Such myopia illustrates the ontology of global value relations, in com-
pelling a market response to the exhaustion of a “use value” such as oil,
a market response, represented as “green,” that further degrades bio-
physical processes on which life depends. This conventional reflex is
termed “ecological modernization,” encouraging the internalization of
externalized costs to establish the true price of commercial agriculture—
but still within the terms of the productivist paradigm, namely prioritiz-
ing value creation in the organization of agriculture. The focus on the
value form (price, interest) has reached new levels in the increasing
fungibility of industrial agriculture via a combination of bioeconomic
development (interchangeable food, feed, fuel, biomass production)
and financialization of land acquisition strategies (see McMichael 2012).
And of course economies of scale, within a productivist paradigm, are
compelling—as the World Bank asserts in its report on land acquisition
(Deininger and Byerlee 2011a:31):

recent innovations in breeding, zero tillage, and informa-

tion technology . . . make supervision easier. By facilitating
standardization, they allow supervision of operations over large
spaces, reducing owner-operator advantages. Pest-resistant and
herbicide-tolerant varieties reduce the number of steps in the
production process and the labor intensity of cultivation. The
scope for substituting information technology and remotely
sensed information on field conditions for personal observation
to make decisions increases managers’ span of control. Also,
importing countries’ increasingly stringent requirements on
product quality and food safety throughout the supply chain
increase the advantages of large-scale production and an inte-
grated supply chain. Establishing such a supply chain can be
more difficult under smallholder production models.

However, economies of scale depend on a price form metric. Such a

metric removes the question of the viability of industrial agriculture
44 Rural Sociology, Vol. 79, No. 1, March 2014

from its historical and ecological moorings. In terms of the crucial

energy-intensive character of capital-intensive agriculture Moore notes:

The flipside of such profligate energy consumption was a

greater than eightfold increase in the labor productivity of
advanced capitalist agriculture between 1945 and the mid-1980s.
What the more-or-less conventional green critique is unable to
explain is how this colossal inefficiency is not merely an output
of the system, but constitutive of it. For this peculiar valuation of
wealth as abstract social labor—labor productivity—favors social-
ecological developments that reward the rapid exhaustion of
nature (including human nature), so long as external supplies
can be secured. (2011:18–19, emphasis added)

Within an episteme of commodity fetishism, this may hardly be peculiar,

simply perverse. And it relates directly to our central question regarding
the juxtaposition of food security and land management. Insofar as
conventional neoliberal responses to the food crisis identify food supply
as the problem and high-input agriculture as the solution (in reference
to the productivity of the green revolution), there is a premium on
avoiding the increasingly evident negative environmental feedback of
that revolution (Pimentel and Pimentel 1990; Pingali 2012; Shiva 1989).
In this context, discourses of sustainable intensification have prolifer-
ated (FAO 2010; Royal Society 2009). According to the Royal Society:

Food security is one of this century’s key global challenges.

Producing enough food for the increasing global population
must be done in the face of changing consumption patterns, the
impacts of climate change and the growing scarcity of water and
land. Crop production methods must also sustain the environ-
ment, preserve natural resources and support livelihoods of
farmers and rural populations around the world. (2009:1)

Pretty (2010:1) defines sustainable intensification in relatively

neutral terms: “producing more output from the same area of land while
reducing the negative environmental impacts and at the same time
increasing contributions to natural capital and the flow of environmen-
tal services.” The FAO has a more nuanced response, suggesting agro-
ecological methods by “promoting management practices built on
natural ecosystem processes and the enhancement of knowledge,
in order to restore systems and increase efficiencies of resource
use (natural/human/economic). . . . Our focus is on farmers and
policy makers to help provide increased awareness of the diversity of
choices for adapting practices and technologies, through encouraging
 Rethinking Land Grab Ontology — McMichael 45

partnership and capacity building at multiple levels” (2010). Monsanto’s

new agricultural technologies (crop breeding techniques combined with
biotechnology) claim to lead to “more production on less land, and
collectively reduce the amount of resources needed per unit of produc-
tion” (quoted in Abergel 2011:267). And Greenpeace asserts that the
“language of sustainable intensification is essentially an attempt by agri-
business to repackage the same old chemical cocktails under a green
veneer” (Oram 2012). Marco Contiero, of EU Greenpeace, remarks that
for over a decade biotech companies have made claims about miracle
crops that would resist droughts, tolerate salt, and fix nitrogen or use
water more efficiently:
Yet, despite decades of research and advertisements, no such
GM plants have been invented or commercialized. . . . On the
one hand, this technology has been developed for, and is eco-
nomically profitable only within, the GHG intensive industrial
agricultural system, which it intrinsically promotes. On the other
hand, resource-intensive plantations of genetically identical
plants are the most vulnerable farming systems to erratic
weather conditions. (2012)
Finally, Nature editorially advocates a second green revolution, described
by Britain’s Royal Society as the “sustainable intensification of global
agriculture”:
Such a revolution will require a wholesale realignment of pri-
orities in agricultural research. There is an urgent need for new
crop varieties that offer higher yields but use less water, fertiliz-
ers or other inputs . . . and for crops that are more resistant to
drought, heat, submersion and pests. Equally crucial is lower-
tech research into basics such as crop rotation, mixed farming of
animals and plants on smallholder farms, soil management and
curbing waste. (“How to Feed a Hungry World” 2010:531)
From these summary statements it is clear that sustainable intensifi-
cation can mean different things to different parties. Perhaps the most
useful perspective is that of Elisabeth Abergel, who situates this debate
within the terms of the climate emergency, noting that “by defining
climate-related environmental stress narrowly along technoscientific
possibilities and the isolation of biological traits, biotechnology research
into CC fails to radically alter our reliance upon the conventional agri-
food paradigm” (2011:261). She qualifies the crisis conjuncture, noting
that climate change discourse enables the embedding of ecological rela-
tions in market logic (262). This encourages the “technologization of
nature” as the defining feature of what Moore might call a strategic
46 Rural Sociology, Vol. 79, No. 1, March 2014

“attenuation of crisis” by a new “technological accumulation regime”

that “controls and drives scientific innovation for the purposes of
enabling market penetration into all individual and collective aspects of
life” (Abergel 2011:262). The new regime in turn “provides the means
through which the properties of living systems become appropriated via
titles, patents, governance and other quasi-legal instruments within a
neo-liberal trade regime that ensures the generation of capital” (262).
Thus, what Abergel terms “neo-productivism” involves the “reorgani-
zation of boundaries between science and agriculture as well as a new
understanding of the status of food crops and agricultural practice” and
represents a refining of the ontology of the productivist paradigm and its
application to land commodification. The refinement is signaled in her
claim for the embedding of ecological relations in a market logic,
whereby biocapitalism “organizes dispossession” via its ability to convert
nature to the environment, as intellectual capital (Abergel 2011:263). The
outcome, “bio-value,” represents the ontological goal of “sustainable
intensification” as advanced by agribusiness, namely a “smart agricul-
ture” designed for a new bioeconomy, and premised on annexing land
deemed underutilized.
While the World Bank indicates a certain neutrality regarding large-
scale land investment versus small owner-operated farms (Deininger and
Byerlee 2011b:42), its “value-chain” approach endures (World Bank
2007), meaning that high-input “smart” agriculture is the priority (see
Patel 2012). In this respect, it is telling that the bank’s report on land
acquisition addresses “environmental sustainability” from the perspec-
tive of reducing negative contextual natural impacts rather than address-
ing the compositional ecological vulnerabilities inherent in industrial
agriculture’s practices of “bio-physical override” (Weis 2007). From this
perspective, its strategic national development governance reproduces
an “environmental modernization” approach to land management:

For example, transfers between parties may widen preexist-

ing social inequalities, produce greenhouse gas emissions, or
reduce local access to water because of toxic runoffs. In some
cases, poor people displaced from their farms migrate to the
frontier, where they cut down the forest to cultivate virgin land.
Regulation at the national and project level will be needed to
align the incentives of private agents with the public interest.
Increased awareness of the importance of environmental issues
has led to increased emphasis on environmental safeguards
in national laws and in voluntary schemes promoted by
industry associations (such as the Forest Stewardship Council).
(Deininger and Byerlee 2011a:119–20)
 Rethinking Land Grab Ontology — McMichael 47

As Borras and Franco note, with reference to the bank’s Responsible

Agricultural Investment (RAI) principles for land governance, this soft-
law ameliorative approach to corporate self-regulation “diverts attention
from what is wrong with the economic development model it aspires to,
and from the key role of land in the model. It also diverts our attention
away from coming to terms with how rural poor people’s land (and
water) rights, interests and concerns must be prioritised and promoted, and
not just recognised and protected” (2012:3, emphasis added). The con-
sequence is that the land commodification ontology, in considering land
as a factor of production to create wealth (in the form of food, fuel, and
“multiplier effects”), rather than ecological (and therefore social) wealth
in itself, addresses environmental concerns as “externalities” to be
managed as if nature and its processes are external to farming the land.

Land Sovereignty Ontology

An alternative “land sovereignty” ontology begins with the premise,
stated in the IAASTD report (2008), that “business as usual is not an
option”—questioning industrial agriculture and transgenic food (and
fuel) as solutions given that markets fail to adequately value environmen-
tal and social harm. It also underlines the growing consensus of the
greater overall productivity (and sustainability) of small-scale biodiverse
farming (Badgley et al. 2007).8 Thus an IAASTD contributor noted: a
“half-hectare plot in Thailand can grow 70 species of vegetables, fruits
and herbs, providing far better nutrition and feeding more people than
a half-hectare plot of high-yielding rice” (quoted in Leahy 2008). Simi-
larly, studies in Mexico found “a 1.73 ha plot of land has to be planted
with maize monoculture to produce as much food as one hectare
planted with a mixture of maize, squash and beans. In addition, the
maize-squash-bean polyculture produces up to 4 t per ha of dry matter
for plowing into the soil, compared with 2 t in a maize monoculture”
(Altieri and Toledo 2011:596).
Marco Contiero’s alternative to agribusiness “sustainable intensifica-
tion” echoes the IAASTD goals:

Global research and development programmes must aim at

enhancing the resilience of farming systems as a whole instead
of increasing the resilience of a single crop. The winning strat-

8
The FAO Report of 2002 asserted: “Organic agriculture performs better than conven-
tional agriculture on a per hectare scale, both with respect to direct energy consumption
(fuel and oil) and indirect consumption (synthetic fertilizers and pesticides)” with high
efficiency of energy use (quoted in Ching 2008).
48 Rural Sociology, Vol. 79, No. 1, March 2014

egy is to maximize yields over the years, both good and bad ones,
by decreasing the chances of farming systems to fail during bad
years. . . . Ecological farming is much more resistant to erratic
weather than conventional agriculture. Agro-ecological prac-
tices such as cover crops, agroforestry and terrace bunds in
Central America were found to be more resilient to the impacts
of Hurricane Mitch than conventional farms. (2012)

IAASTD maps out a general strategy to strengthen food system resil-

ience in the face of environmental crises—including promoting agroeco-
logical practices with “triple-bottom-line” goals: full-cost accounting to
incorporate energy, health, and environmental costs and, importantly, a
rights-based framework rather than a market-centric organization of the
agrifood system. In order to strengthen and secure small farming,
IAASTD recommends altering institutional arrangements to ensure agri-
cultural multifunctionality by shifting to “nonhierarchical development
models,” building trust and valuing farmer knowledge and natural and
agricultural biodiversity, as well as seed exchange and common resource
management systems (2008:5, 7). This approach dovetails with the argu-
ment that it is an “obvious principle that natural areas will be successfully
protected over the long run only when they are embedded within . . .
economies that provide for greater levels of economic diversity, resil-
ience, security and political participation. An essential tool . . . is the
integration of productive agriculture with conservation” (Perfecto et al.
2009:124).
This much was advocated by Olivier de Schutter, addressing the UN
Commission on Human Rights in March 2011: “Agriculture should be
fundamentally redirected towards modes of production that are more
environmentally sustainable and socially just. . . . [Agroecology] helps
small farmers who must be able to farm in ways that are less expensive
and more productive. But it benefits all of us, because it decelerates
global warming and ecological destruction” (2011a). Research has
shown small farms are climate friendly, treating soils with organic fertil-
izer that absorbs and sequesters carbon more effectively than industrial
agriculture, such that “the conversion of 10,000 small- to medium-sized
farms to organic production would store carbon in the soil equivalent to
taking 1,174,400 cars off the road” (Altieri 2008). These kinds of obser-
vations inform the politics of land sovereignty insofar as land rights are
necessary to stabilize and sustain “agriculture with farmers.”9 In this
respect, land is viewed not through a commodity lens but rather through

9
“Agriculture with farmers” inverts the criticism made by La Via Campesina of industrial
agriculture: “agriculture without farmers.”
 Rethinking Land Grab Ontology — McMichael 49

an ecological, cultural, and multifunctional lens as the basis of (rela-

tively) labor-intensive, low-input, agroecological farming. Further, the
territorial identity of land is critical here, as contemporary land grabbing
targets institutional property relations (state, public, communal) rather
than the privately held lands formerly targeted for redistribution
through conventional land reform (Borras and Franco 2012). In this
respect the land sovereignty movement is protective as well as redistribu-
tive, advocating preservation of land access for producers for whom land,
forests, and waterways constitute collective lifeworlds. Its ontology
derives from such recognition, reframing rights in collective terms (to
self-determining equitable food systems) rather than the original liberal
conception of individual rights, where obligations for their protection
center on states rather than private and transnational actors (Claeys
2013:2).
The now-reformed FAO Committee on Food Security, with its new
emphasis on representing civil society voices—especially small food pro-
ducers and poor urban consumers (McKeon 2011), is walking a tight-
rope between a land sovereignty ontology, anchored in land and
territorial rights, and countering the bank’s RAI with its own Voluntary
Guidelines regarding investment in agriculture. Whereas the RAI seeks
to regulate land investment for the purposes of orderly (legitimate)
transactions, the Voluntary Guidelines are designed to strengthen rec-
ognition of customary property tenure, address gender inequity, and
progressively realize “the right to adequate food in the context of
national food security” (Guffens and Kroff 2012:3). The former contin-
ues the mantra of “feeding the world” (those with the ability to buy
food), while the latter substitutes a food system ontology privileging
domestic production over international food trading (reversing the
WTO priority). De Schutter’s recommendation to target domestic pro-
duction to reduce food dependency follows his observation that there
are “approximately 500 million small-scale farmers in developing coun-
tries making them not only the vast majority of the world’s farmers but,
taking into account their families, responsible for the well-being of over
two billion persons” (2011b:13).
The point of refocusing on small farmers is obvious enough from
the perspective of the ecology of food security. Since peasants feed a
substantial portion, possibly a majority, of the world’s population,10 a

10
There are various estimates: the European Trade Commission estimates “peasants”
produce 70 percent of the world’s food (ETC 2009); McCalla asserts that 90 percent of the
world’s food is consumed where it is produced, with rural producers consuming 60 percent
of their food (1999:3); and Public Citizen and the food sovereignty movement assert that
90 percent is peasant produced: “Family farm- and peasant-based production for domestic
50 Rural Sociology, Vol. 79, No. 1, March 2014

land-food sovereignty project is necessary to stabilize and support that

activity (especially as the geography of hunger is predominantly rural
and southern). Such a project would stem the tide of migration from the
countryside to overburdened cities in a jobless growth era of neoliberal
economics, and build ecosystem resilience via democratic methods of
conservation farming (see Perfecto et al. 2009). It would problematize
urban romanticism, reversing the modernist presumption that farmers
are historical anachronisms, recentering farming as the contemporary
(rather than past) foundation of civilization (Wittman, Desmarias, and
Wiebe 2010). This has been the political frame of the food sovereignty
movement, and insofar as food sovereignty traverses the urban-rural
divide, it can be reformulated in terms of land sovereignty, to take into
account the needs of urban populations in an era of rural and urban
land grabbing.
Land sovereignty represents a call for a “peoples’ counter-
enclosure.” As Borras and Franco put it: “Land sovereignty goes
beyond viewing land just as a resource to also considering land as ter-
ritory and as landscapes. This embraces struggles by indigenous move-
ments, rural labourers, urban activists and social movements North and
South who have sometimes been excluded by traditional land reform
campaigns” (2012:1). In a sense, the food-land sovereignty movements
represent a Polanyian countermovement with a difference—whereas
Polanyi’s double movement problematic concerned protection against
the market, the twenty-first century countermovement concerns pro-
tection against the reduction of life (habitats, food, natural cycles) to
“biovalues” to justify land annexation in the interests of fungible com-
modities (food, feed, and fuel) and conservation emission offsets
(McAfee 2011). Whereas the earlier countermovement was oriented
toward public regulation of markets, the recent countermovement is
oriented toward a civilizational goal of regulation of social life by eco-
logical principles. This is the ontological difference. And it means that
the world is moving beyond the era of nation-state building, where
countermovements were concerned with labor, gender, and civil rights
in the modern state. Today’s countermovements, drawing on this
legacy, refocus on more fundamental historical questions of living sus-
tainably on Earth (McMichael 2005).

purposes is responsible for approximately 90% of the world’s food production, much of
which does not even pass through markets. On the other hand, international agriculture
trade represents only about 10% of the world’s agricultural production” (Public Citizen).
See also http://ag-transition.org/?p=1769.
 Rethinking Land Grab Ontology — McMichael 51

Conclusion
In the post–food crisis moment alternative visions emerge in mutual
contention regarding land management, around the question of
whether biodiversity and agricultural productivity are mutually exclusive.
Arguably the underreproduction of nature informs these visions, and
yet, in the juxtaposition offered here, their solutions are ontologically
distinct. The neoproductivist vision supports an expanding land grab,
led by agribusiness within the terms of renewing legitimacy via the
promiscuous concept of “sustainable intensification.” In this scenario,
land is managed for a dual purpose: for an agriculture serving global
food supply chains and bioeconomic goals of reducing dependence on
fossil fuel as an energy source for the nonagricultural economy. The
particular ontology here is that of supporting a global market that serves
the interests of a minority of the world’s population,11 and, in doing so,
treating land as an economic resource rather than as socioecological
wealth. This ontology thus continues the underreproduction of nature.
The land sovereignty vision, by contrast, seeks to restore farming as an
energy converter, rather than an energy consumer, as critical to building
resilience on the land, in addition to advancing the rights of smallhold-
ers to reproduce society through food provisioning and environmental
stewardship.
The struggle over market-based versus rights-based goals is complex.
Ultimately it devolves upon value. Where market-based goals are justified
in terms of objectified values, expressed in the price form, rights-based
goals express subjective values including cultural knowledge. In agrifood
systems, the market approach commodifies farming practices by expro-
priating farmer knowledge and recycling it in the form of commercial
agroinputs (Kloppenburg 1988). This is the essence of the value-chain
agricultural project under way in Africa in particular (McMichael
2013b; Patel 2012:40). The rights approach, by contrast, starts with
recognizing the rights of farming communities to their skills and collec-
tive knowledge, as territorially embedded. Farming practices are not
simply about cultural identity, they are also about the ecological content
of this collective knowledge. Such socionatural interaction is place spe-
cific and cannot be objectified in the price form. The value lies in the
reproductive process, not in placeless productive inputs and outputs. In
this sense monocultures with agroinputs elide the ecosystem dimension
of land and landscapes. Their sustainability requires the cumulative

11
Hoogvelt has estimated only 20 percent of the global population is “bankable,” with
another 30 percent in insecure employment, and a remaining 50 percent already excluded
(2006:164).
52 Rural Sociology, Vol. 79, No. 1, March 2014

experimental knowledge and commitment of producers to realize their

true value.
The current land grab registers a tipping point in earthly cycles. While
the historical reflex of capital, when faced with a relative exhaustion of
ecosystem services, has been to enclose new frontiers, it is now clear that
crisis deferral is no longer viable, and that the world faces an absolute
exhaustion of ecosystem services. In this sense, prosecuting the land grab
as a form of land management (via regulation of agribusiness by prin-
ciples of RAI) in order to sustain global consumption patterns is an
outmoded ontology. This much is recognized by an emergent ontology
of land sovereignty dedicated to restoration of natural and social rights
to reproduce humanity adequately and ecologically. The point of distin-
guishing land grab contention in these terms is, ultimately, to under-
score the significance (and fragility) of the threshold humanity faces.
The politics are by no means straightforward (see Borras et al. 2012;
Edelman and James 2011; Holt-Giménez and Shattuck 2011), but the
importance of shifting tracks is no less urgent.

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