ABSTRACT
During mid-2000, the unprecedented interest in agro-industrial development triggered a series of large-scale land acquisitions in Peru. This happened in tandem with similar processes globally, many of which targeted land of lower quality (usually referred to as marginal land) for the production of industrial crops. Upon the promotion of a series of new normative and institutional frameworks financed through International Financial Institutions (IFI), the national and regional governments in Peru welcomed agribusinesses in the coastal desert and the Amazon rainforest of the country. On the coast, thousands of hectares of land were planted with sugarcane for ethanol, while oil palm and cocoa spread in the Amazon basin. This chapter adopts a political ecology lens to analyze how these interventions (both at the policy and the acquisition level) implied transforming nature to craft land value for commercial gain. By critically discussing two case studies in the coastal area and the Amazon region, we demonstrate how new nature formations asserted the irrelevance of nature, environmental complexity, and local communities in these parts of Peru. The findings suggest that a diverse set of formal, semi-formal, and informal mechanisms and material conditions favored the transformation of commercially “irrelevant” land to agricultural land with significant market value. Understanding land value making sheds light on the functioning of increasingly complex transnational land grabbing associated with industrial crops.
