The Land Grabbers

The Land Grabbers

Author: Fred Pearce

Publisher: Beacon Press

Published: 2012-05-29

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0807003255

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

How Wall Street, Chinese billionaires, oil sheiks, and agribusiness are buying up huge tracts of land in a hungry, crowded world. An unprecedented land grab is taking place around the world. Fearing future food shortages or eager to profit from them, the world’s wealthiest and most acquisitive countries, corporations, and individuals have been buying and leasing vast tracts of land around the world. The scale is astounding: parcels the size of small countries are being gobbled up across the plains of Africa, the paddy fields of Southeast Asia, the jungles of South America, and the prairies of Eastern Europe. Veteran science writer Fred Pearce spent a year circling the globe to find out who was doing the buying, whose land was being taken over, and what the effect of these massive land deals seems to be. The Land Grabbers is a first-of-its-kind exposé that reveals the scale and the human costs of the land grab, one of the most profound ethical, environmental, and economic issues facing the globalized world in the twenty-first century. The corporations, speculators, and governments scooping up land cheap in the developing world claim that industrial-scale farming will help local economies. But Pearce’s research reveals a far more troubling reality. While some mega-farms are ethically run, all too often poor farmers and cattle herders are evicted from ancestral lands or cut off from water sources. The good jobs promised by foreign capitalists and home governments alike fail to materialize. Hungry nations are being forced to export their food to the wealthy, and corporate potentates run fiefdoms oblivious to the country beyond their fences. Pearce’s story is populated with larger-than-life characters, from financier George Soros and industry tycoon Richard Branson, to Gulf state sheikhs, Russian oligarchs, British barons, and Burmese generals. We discover why Goldman Sachs is buying up the Chinese poultry industry, what Lord Rothschild and a legendary 1970s asset-stripper are doing in the backwoods of Brazil, and what plans a Saudi oil billionaire has for Ethiopia. Along the way, Pearce introduces us to the people who actually live on, and live off of, the supposedly “empty” land that is being grabbed, from Cambodian peasants, victimized first by the Khmer Rouge and now by crony capitalism, to African pastoralists confined to ever-smaller tracts. Over the next few decades, land grabbing may matter more, to more of the planet’s people, than even climate change. It will affect who eats and who does not, who gets richer and who gets poorer, and whether agrarian societies can exist outside corporate control. It is the new battle over who owns the planet.


Land Grab

Land Grab

Author: Keri Vacanti Brondo

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2013-06-06

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 0816530211

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This is a rich ethnographic account of the relationship between identity politics, neoliberal development policy, and rights to resource management in native communities on the north coast of Honduras. It also answers the question: can “freedom” be achieved under the structures of neoliberalism?


Black Women Against the Land Grab

Black Women Against the Land Grab

Author: Keisha-Khan Y. Perry

Publisher:

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780816683246

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Focusing on the Gamboa de Baixo neighborhood in Salvador, Brazil's city center, Black Women against the Land Grab explores how black women's views on development have radicalized local communities to demand justice and social change. Keisha-Khan Y. Perry describes the key role of local women activists in the citywide movement for land and housing rights.


The Great African Land Grab?

The Great African Land Grab?

Author: Lorenzo Cotula

Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.

Published: 2013-07-11

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 1780323123

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Over the past few years, large-scale land acquisitions in Africa have stoked controversy, making headlines in media reports across the world. Land that only a short time ago seemed of little outside interest is now being sought by international investors to the tune of hundreds of thousands of hectares. Private-sector expectations of higher world food and commodity prices and government concerns about longer-term national food and energy security have both made land a more attractive asset. Dubbed ‘land grabs’ in the media, large-scale land acquisitions have become one of the most talked about and contentious topics amongst those studying, working in or writing about Africa. Some commentators have welcomed this trend as a bearer of new livelihood opportunities. Others have countered by pointing to negative social impacts, including loss of local land rights, threats to local food security and the risk that large-scale investments may marginalize family farming. Lorenzo Cotula, a leading expert in the field, casts a critical eye over the most reliable evidence on this hotly contested topic, examining the implications of land deals in Africa both for its people and for world agriculture and food security.


The Global Land Grab

The Global Land Grab

Author: Annelies Zoomers

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2014-02-13

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 1780328966

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The last two years have seen a huge amount of academic, policy-making and media interest in the increasingly contentious issue of land grabbing - the large-scale acquisition of land in the global South. It is a phenomenon against which locals seem defenceless, and one about which multilateral organizations, such as the World Bank, as well as civil-society organizations and action NGOs have become increasingly vocal. This in-depth and empirically diverse volume - taking in case studies from across Africa, Asia and Latin America - takes a step back from the hype to explore a number of key questions: Does the 'global land grab' actually exist? If so, what is new about it? And what, beyond the immediately visible dynamics and practices, are the real problems? A comprehensive and much-needed intervention on one of the most hotly contested but little-understood issues facing countries of the South today.


Global Land Grabs

Global Land Grabs

Author: Marc Edelman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-22

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 1317569504

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Since the 2008 world food crisis a surge of land grabbing swept Africa, Asia and Latin America and even some regions of Europe and North America. Investors have uprooted rural communities for massive agricultural, biofuels, mining, industrial and urbanisation projects. ‘Water grabbing’ and ‘green grabbing’ have further exacerbated social tensions. Early analyses of land grabbing focused on foreign actors, the biofuels boom and Africa, and pointed to catastrophic consequences for the rural poor. Subsequently scholars carried out local case studies in diverse world regions. The contributors to this volume advance the discussion to a new stage, critically scrutinizing alarmist claims of the first wave of research, probing the historical antecedents of today’s land grabbing, examining large-scale land acquisitions in light of international human rights and investment law, and considering anew longstanding questions in agrarian political economy about forms of dispossession and accumulation and grassroots resistance. Readers of this collection will learn about the impacts of land and water grabbing; the relevance of key theorists, including Marx, Polanyi and Harvey; the realities of China’s involvement in Africa; how contemporary land grabbing differs from earlier plantation agriculture; and how social movements—and rural people in general—are responding to this new threat. This book was published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.


Beyond the Global Land Grab

Beyond the Global Land Grab

Author: Gustavo de L. T. Oliveira

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-11-17

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 1000478440

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The conjunction of climate, food, and financial crises in the late 2000s triggered renewed interest in farmland and agribusiness investments around the world. This phenomenon became known as the "global land grab", and sparked vibrant debates among social movements, NGOs, international development agencies and various government agencies and academics worldwide. This book addresses four key areas that are moving the debate "beyond land grabs". These include the role of contract farming and differentiation among farm workers in the consolidation of farmland; the broader forms of dispossession and mechanisms of control and value grabbing beyond "classic" land grabs for agricultural production; discourses about, and responses to, Chinese agribusiness investments abroad; and the relationship between financialization and land grabbing. The chapters in this edited volume propose new directions to deepen and even transform the research agenda on land struggles and agro-industrial restructuring around the world. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers interested in development studies, agrarian changes and land struggles. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Globalizations.


Jacksonland

Jacksonland

Author: Steve Inskeep

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2016-05-17

Total Pages: 450

ISBN-13: 014310831X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

“The story of the Cherokee removal has been told many times, but never before has a single book given us such a sense of how it happened and what it meant, not only for Indians, but also for the future and soul of America.” —The Washington Post Five decades after the Revolutionary War, the United States approached a constitutional crisis. At its center stood two former military comrades locked in a struggle that tested the boundaries of our fledgling democracy. One man we recognize: Andrew Jackson—war hero, populist, and exemplar of the expanding South—whose first major initiative as president instigated the massive expulsion of Native Americans known as the Trail of Tears. The other is a half-forgotten figure: John Ross—a mixed-race Cherokee politician and diplomat—who used the United States’ own legal system and democratic ideals to oppose Jackson. Representing one of the Five Civilized Tribes who had adopted the ways of white settlers, Ross championed the tribes’ cause all the way to the Supreme Court, gaining allies like Senator Henry Clay, Chief Justice John Marshall, and even Davy Crockett. Ross and his allies made their case in the media, committed civil disobedience, and benefited from the first mass political action by American women. Their struggle contained ominous overtures of later events like the Civil War and defined the political culture for much that followed. Jacksonland is the work of renowned journalist Steve Inskeep, cohost of NPR’s Morning Edition, who offers a heart-stopping narrative masterpiece, a tragedy of American history that feels ripped from the headlines in its immediacy, drama, and relevance to our lives. Jacksonland is the story of America at a moment of transition, when the fate of states and nations was decided by the actions of two heroic yet tragically opposed men.


The Great Land Grab

The Great Land Grab

Author: Michael Bachelard

Publisher:

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 141

ISBN-13: 9781864470314

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Presents the facts of why the Wik and Mabo judgements of the High Court were so momentous, and why Labor passed the Native Title Act in response.


Governing Global Land Deals

Governing Global Land Deals

Author: Wendy Wolford

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-09-30

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 1118688244

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This collection of essays in Governing Global Land Deals provides new empirical and theoretical analyses of the relationships between global land grabs and processes of government and governance. Reframes debates on global land grabs by focusing on the relationship between large-scale land deals and processes of governance Offers new theoretical insights into the different forms and effects of global land acquisitions Illuminates both the micro-processes of transaction and expropriation, as well as the broader structural forces at play in global land deals Provides new empirical data on the different actors involved in contemporary land deals occurring across the globe and focuses on the specific institutional, political, and economic contexts in which they are acting