ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the land/green grab through the lens of neoliberal governance mechanisms. These elaborate principles and partnerships to commandeer land, labor and ecosystems as new commodities serve to usurp and concentrate resource control in the name of rational planning for human survival, promoting private power through public authority. African farmers, representing a substantial remnant of the world’s peasantry, became the new object of development overnight, with the promise of public-private partnership investment to improve productivity via agro-industrialization. The costs of “biophysical override” have risen with prices of inputs amplified by rising energy costs and agribusiness conglomeration. The scale of the ghost acre phenomenon is distinctive to this juncture and brings about a series of public-private partnerships. Market rule is more than simply the protection of economic interests or private property rights, rather “it acts to canonize these rights, to make them inalienable and unassailable” from notions of public good.
