Big Ag’s global land grab is huge, growing, and “extending its reach to new frontiers,” according to a new report from the international non-profit GRAIN.
A follow-up to its October 2008 analysis—which “exposed how a new wave of land grabbing was sweeping the planet”—GRAIN’s latest publication paints a “disturbing” picture, showing that “while some deals have fallen by the wayside, the global farmland grab is far from over.”
Indeed, GRAIN’s 2016 data set documents 491 large-scale land grabs taking place over the past decade, covering over 30 million hectares of land in 78 countries. While the total area covered by such agricultural investments has declined by five million hectares over the past four years, the number of financial deals to secure the land has increased.
And, the report notes:
Moreover, while “food security-driven land grabbing” has subsided in recent years, “plain old profit-driven agribusiness expansion is now the dominant agenda,” GRAIN states.
For example, the analysis reads:
Just last week, a report (pdf) from the Rainforest Action Network and other groups detailed how palm oil plantations—in addition to destroying rainforests, forcing local communities from their land, and contributing to greenhouse gas emissions—engage in “a pattern of egregious labor violations” across the globe.
But there is cause for hope, GRAIN concludes, highlighting “the tremendous resistance growing to counteract these deals.”
In fact, its report states: “Resistance against land grabs is at the forefront of many of today’s struggles for social, political and economic transformation, putting corporations and governments colluding complicit with land grabbing on the defensive.”
Speaking to such battles, the international peasant movement La Via Campesina declared on Tuesday:
“We must redouble our resistance efforts to ensure that more lands can stay under the control of food producing communities,” GRAIN writes.
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