1st Edition

The New Enclosures: Critical Perspectives on Corporate Land Deals

    This collection explores the complex dynamics of corporate land deals from a broad agrarian political economy perspective, with a special focus on the implications for property and labour regimes, labour processes and structures of accumulation. This involves looking at ways in which existing patterns of rural social differentiation – in terms of class, gender, ethnicity and generation – are being shaped by changes in land use and property relations, as well as by the re-organization of production and exchange as rural communities and resources are incorporated into global commodity chains. It goes further than the descriptive ‘what’ and ‘who’ questions, in order to understand the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of these patterns. It is empirically solid and theoretically sophisticated, making it a robust and boundary-changing work. Contributors come from various scholarly disciplines. Covering nearly all regions of the world, the collection will be of interest to researchers from various disciplines, policymakers and activists.

    This book was originally published as a Special Issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

    1. The new enclosures: critical perspectives on corporate land deals Ben White, Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Ruth Hall, Ian Scoones and Wendy Wolford 2. The international political economy of the global land rush: A critical appraisal of trends, scale, geography and drivers Lorenzo Cotula 3. The land grab and corporate food regime restructuring Philip McMichael 4. Situating private equity capital in the land grab debate Shepard Daniel 5. Global resource grabs, agribusiness concentration and the smallholder: two West African case studies Kojo Sebastian Amanor 6. Looking back to see forward: the legal niceties of land theft in land rushes Liz Alden Wily 7. New investment, old challenges. Land deals and the water constraint in African Agriculture Philip Woodhouse 8. Patterns of agrarian transformation in Ethiopia: State-mediated commercialisation and the ‘land grab’ Tom Lavers 9. The next Great Trek? South African commercial farmers move north Ruth Hall 10. Land grabbing in Latin America and the Caribbean Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Jennifer C. Franco, Sergio Go´mez, Cristo´bal Kay and Max Spoor 11. Agrarian structure, foreign investment in land, and land prices in Brazil Se´rgio Sauer and Sergio Pereira Leite 12. Oligarchs, megafarms and land reserves: understanding land grabbing in Russia Oane Visser, Natalia Mamonova and Max Spoor 13. The land question: special economic zones and the political economy of dispossession in India Michael Levien14. Land expropriation and displacement in Bangladesh Shelley Feldman and Charles Geisler 15. Gendered experiences of dispossession: oil palm expansion in a Dayak Hibun community in West Kalimantan Julia, with Ben White 16. Plantation rubber, land grabbing and social-property transformation in southern Laos Miles Kenney-Lazar 17. Large-scale land deals from the inside out: findings from Kenya’s Tana Delta Rebecca Smalley and Esteve Corbera 18. Tree plantations, politics of possession and the absence of land grabs in Vietnam Thomas Sikor

    Biography

    Ben White is Emeritus Professor of Rural Sociology at the International Institute of Social Studies. His research focuses on agrarian change and the anthropology and history of childhood and youth, particularly in Indonesia. He is a founding member of the Land Deal Politics Initiative

    Saturnino M. Borras Jr. is Associate Professor at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), The Hague. He is also Adjunct Professor at China Agricultural University and Fellow of the Transnational Institute (TNI) and Food First. He is the Editor in Chief of the Journal of Peasant Studies, and is a founding member of the Land Deal Politics Initiative.

    Ruth Hall is Associate Professor at the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. She coordinates the land theme of the Future Agricultures Consortium, is Reviews Editor of the Journal of Peasant Studies, and is a founding member of the Land Deal Politics Initiative.

    Ian Scoones is a Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. He is joint coordinator of the Future Agricultures Consortium and co-director of the STEPS Centre. He is a member of the editorial collective of the Journal of Peasant Studies and a founding member of the Land Deal Politics Initiative.

    Wendy Wolford is the Robert A. and Ruth E. Polson Professor of Development Sociology at Cornell University. She is author of This Land is Ours Now: Social Mobilization and the Meanings of Land in Brazil (Duke Press, 2010) and is a member of both the editorial collective of the Journal of Peasant Studies and the Land Deal Politics Initiative.