ABSTRACT
The magnitude and speculative nature of land transactions following the advent of energy, food and climate crises have surprised observers. Some analysts have suggested that up to as much as 227 million hectares (ha) have been sold, leased or licensed in large-scale land deals over the last decade (Oxfam 2011). This ‘new bubble’ involving speculative investments and large-scale land acquisitions (or ‘land grabs’) has inflated as investors seek to exploit new market opportunities for food crops, industrial cash crops and bio-energy production along with new enclosures of forest land for carbon sequestration (De Schutter 2011, Deininger 2011). Careful analysis, however, suggests that we need to avoid taking these figures at face value. To be sure, it is tempting to lump together disparate land transactions as ‘land grabs’. This might suggest a kind of teleology: large corporations take over
This article is a product of collaboration between the authors within the framework of the research cluster ‘JARAK: the commoditization of an alternative biofuel crop in Indonesia’ as part of the program ‘Agriculture beyond Food’, with financing from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences (KNAW), the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), and the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies ( KITLV). We would like to thank Jan Michiel Otto, our JARAK colleagues, Carol Warren, Bec Donaldson and two reviewers for their valuable comments. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the International Conference on Global Land Grabbing at Institute of Development Studies, Sussex University, April 2011.
