The Land Question in the Twenty-First Century

Introduction: A New Global Land Rush

Of the major social and economic trends of the twenty-first century—a long and distinguished list that includes extreme and widening inequality, the growing concentration of capital and consolidation of industries, massive movements of migrants and refugees across national borders, the destabilizing acceleration of technological change—land grabs may be the most overlooked contemporary crime and source of crisis. Land theft is not a popular topic of discussion in the Western media, particularly in the United States. There are clear cultural and historical reasons for this. There is the history of dispossession and the language that accompanied it, defined by its notions of progress and destiny. The historical record attests to several overlapping narratives that work together to whitewash the violent appropriation of the land. We find the hallowed language of religious authority, set forth in papal bulls, positioned alongside supposedly cold and neutral economic claims related to highly contingent ideas of productivity and improvement. More practically and immediately, the West benefits tremendously from ready access to huge swaths of foreign land at bargain-basement prices (in some cases, not even a dollar, as we shall see). So it will suffice to say that few in the Western world have any understanding of the scale of this massive, forcible transfer of land from some of the world’s poorest people to some of the world’s richest.

The first decade of the new millennium saw dramatic increases in global food prices, as historically high demand collided with lower outputs caused by droughts, higher input costs (energy in particular), and rampant price speculation. As major food-exporting countries sought to retain more of their stock, many countries looked to invest in agricultural land as a way to regain some control over their food supplies. During the food crisis of 2007 and 2008, food commodity prices spiked, with the International Food Policy Research Institute reporting that between January 2004 and May 2008, “rice prices increased 224 percent, wheat prices increased 108 percent, and corn was up 89 percent.” Conservative estimates put the number of hungry people at the time at 1 billion. Historical episodes of massive-scale theft of the most productive and culturally important lands have been recreated around the world this century as financial capital searches for productive investment opportunities.

Despite its near absence from the public conversation, land theft has been structurally integral to the system of empire overseen by the United States government today. While the legal and practical tools of such dispossessory efforts are always unique to their time and place, they have followed a familiar pattern, one in which state power plays a decisive role. The imperial state is the mechanism through which capital’s crimes are sanctified: “Both colonialism and imperialism (colonialism-like oppression without physical colonies) always involve land theft. . . . In addition, both forms of expropriation of the Global South by the Global North invariably mean an expansion of military operations, which are extraordinarily harmful to land, air, and water.”

Twenty-First Century Land Transfers

Attempts to study contemporary land deals are complicated by a pervasive lack of transparency and reliable information, with many known transfers disappearing in official records. Given that many known, large-scale land deals are conspicuously absent from government documentation, there are well-founded fears among critics of these deals that many “may be deliberately obscured given their highly political nature.” For example, one study (discussed further below) notes a 400,000-hectare transfer from Sudan, reported in news coverage, but “missing from the Sudanese government’s official public statistics.” Still, under anyone’s calculus, the scale of the land-grab problem globally is astonishing. An Oxfam study found that in the decade between 2001 and 2011:

[F]oreigners have acquired nearly 230 million hectares of farmland (the size of Western Europe), with most of this land being obtained since 2008. According to the World Bank, 60 million hectares’ worth of deals were announced in 2009 alone. The amount of relinquished land in poor nations, says Oxfam, equates to an area the size of London sold off every six days.

Since the beginning of the new millennium, the land that has been transferred from the Global South to the West alone is measured in tens of millions of hectares. This refocus meant a systematic divestment from smallholder farming throughout the world. But land grabbing today is a truly global phenomenon that is not confined to “the financially-constrained countries in the Global South.” In 2010, a group of scholars founded the Land Deal Politics Initiative to address and better understand “the rising number of large-scale land deals taking place around the world.” Their hope was that “the LDPI would build a broad network of researchers and activists concerned with the implications of land grabbing for rural areas and people.” The authors note that this initiative was partly a response to a 2011 World Bank report examining the rising demand for and importance of land for the production of food, cash crops, and biofuels. This World Bank paper suggested that “underperforming” land might be consolidated to produce greater yields. To many, this is a familiar reiteration of the traditional arguments around the improvement of underutilized land. The rhetoric used to justify twenty-first century land grabs is strikingly similar in this way to the kinds of claims and philosophical stories told by the European powers during the Age of Discovery, as we shall see. It may not be immediately apparent how important this notion of productivity was to the cultural and philosophical edifice that legitimated the stealing of American land in that period. This idea provides the foundation for the claim that land that is not sufficiently productive should be treated as a waste and as vacant—open to new claims over it. Critics of contemporary land grabs have observed that they are frequently justified as efforts to improve and cultivate the land.

In the spring of 2011, Boston University’s Pardee Center published a paper by Rachel Nalepa, The Global Land Rush: Implications for Food, Fuel, and the Future of Development. The paper discusses the “media frenzy” around the rush of “big investors from rich nations” to secretively acquire vast swaths of “sovereign land belonging to the poor.” The study charts the unprecedented release of foreign direct investment as capital fixed its eye on arable lands in the first years of the twenty-first century: FDI directed to global agriculture tripled between the early ‘90s and the middle of the aughts, according to the World Bank, increasing from $1 billion to $3 billion every year. In just one year, in 2009, agricultural land deals amounted to 45 million hectares—an area about the size of Spain.

And while global institutions like the World Bank and the United Nations have treated the intense interest in such land acquisitions as “win-win” scenarios that would jumpstart economic development and growth in the target states, scholars and activists have raised concerns about the ability of local institutions to withstand the power of foreign capital. Many of the target countries lack the robust institutional capacity necessary to protect the land rights and livelihoods of the people whose survival has depended historically on their access to and use of the land. Given the tragic outcomes of so many major, recent land transfers, it has become increasingly difficult to see them as “more than a large-scale resource transfer from the poor to the rich.” Indeed, the best evidence strongly suggests that the global land grab of recent years has produced “adverse short-term effects that call into question whose notion of ‘development’ is being served through these concessions.”

In one of the more flagrant expressions of rigged deals that alienate a country’s land without the input of its people, South Korea, through Daewoo, almost took control of about half of the arable land in Madagascar. As the Pardee Center paper notes, South Korea’s plan was to reduce its dependence on the Americas by buying Malagasy land in small increments; the South Koreans had adopted the imperial imaginations of their overlords in Washington. The Malagasy people themselves had not been informed or consulted, and Daewoo indicated that it expected to pay nothing for the land. “The breaking of this story helped lead to the overthrow of the Malagasy government a few months later, and woke the world up to an outrageous new trend of global land grabbing for agricultural production.” In 2009, tens of thousands of Malagasies took to the streets in protest, hundreds dying in the fight against this attempted giveaway of their land, their most important inheritance and the center of their livelihood.

The people succeeded in ousting the country’s president, Marc Ravalomanana, who had overseen the deal and ordered the country’s military to fire on unarmed protesters. The South Korea scandal follows a familiar playbook in which a small cohort of local elites is bought and co-opted by a richer and more powerful foreign country. Local populations are excluded from these transactions as their land is concentrated in fewer hands and faraway hands. People without access to land, the means of survival for billions, are backed into a corner, subject to the dictates of capital, however arbitrary or inhumane. The economic system we have today is simply unimaginable without extreme consolidations of landholdings. Complex, scattered, disputed land titles were combined at a faster and faster pace as capitalism proceeded.

Historical Context & Predicates

Our received wisdom boasts of the many miraculous benefits of capital accumulation. Only rarely do we care to recall the historical episodes implicated in the monstrous formations of capital we know today. While it may be that there is a question about how capital might accumulate or could accumulate, there can be no question about how it didaccumulate. The development of the economic system required amassed capital on a scale that had previously been inconceivable. It is important for contemporary readers to understand that it was not and is not possible to create a system like capitalism—a system defined by penniless masses selling their labor for a wage, then purchasing the necessities of life as commodities—without first systematically and legally dispossessing them of the use and access to land that was among their historical prerogatives. To drive the vast majority of people into urban poverty and squalor required foreclosing all other formerly available options. That the modern world’s campaigns of dispossession were given the imprimatur of law and religion is vital: in the words of German philosopher Max Stirner, “The state practices ‘violence,’ the individual must not do so. The state’s behaviour is violence, and it calls its violence ‘law’; that of the individual, ‘crime [Verbrechen].’”

Law professors who teach the core first-year course in property law often employ the metaphor of a bundle of sticks to describe the collections of discrete rights and obligations associated with real property: one may have all of the sticks in the bundle, or she may have only limited rights, such as an easement that gives her the right to use a customarily used path to cross over a tract of land, a narrowly limited, nonpossessory right. Often, when we are discussing the concept of private property, we are tacitly or unwittingly equating all private property with something like fee simple absoluteownership, that is, the kind of title that gives its holder all of the possible sticks, total, unshared control out into the future. But the common law system of property rights is extremely complex and historically contingent, and feudal social and economic arrangements gave peasants a wide variety of traditional rights that could no longer be reconciled with the needs of the property owning class. In holding possession of their means of subsistence, the peasantry had enjoyed an important protection against the forces of market competition. The traditional messiness of property rights—with its overlapping interests of possession, access, and use—was in the process of being simplified and streamlined to accord with capitalist rationality. As Ellen Meiksins Wood writes in “The Agrarian Origins of Capitalism”:

These pressures to transform the nature of property manifested themselves in various ways, in theory and in practice. They surfaced in court cases, in conflicts over specific property rights, over some piece of common land or some private land to which different people had overlapping use-rights. In such cases, customary practices and claims often directly confronted the principles of “improvements”—and judges often recognized reasons of improvement as legitimate claims against customary rights that had been in place as long as anyone could remember.

It has been necessary to challenge the validity of the idea that the land exists to be productive for capital, under a test of productivity structured and overseen by the owners of capital. If it is at all appropriate to establish a test for the land in such a way, then a fair, complete one would reckon the land in terms of its relationships with the people who rely on it and the ecosystems with which it is intertwined. The land holds a sacred importance for many peoples, as central to their cultural identities. Capital’s definitions of productivity and development are one-dimensional: is this land sufficiently profitable to distant capitalists? As long as this measure is moving in the right direction, the West can call it “growth,” regardless of the costs to local populations, which are conveniently left out of the model.

The major powers of the present, the United States chief among them, have never stopped making versions of these claims about productivity in their policies for spurring growth in the South, as they continue the imperious application of rubrics designed to serve their financial goals. Global land monopoly thus explains, in part at least, the phenomenon of poor and developing countries making major exports of food even as their own people go hungry and starve to death. The rationales are the same as those that gave the Western hemisphere to the European powers during the so-called Age of Discovery: the total output of the system is used to justify the theft and starvation that are often unregistered costs on the balance sheet. When this period of “discovery” is discussed honestly, it is an age defined by conquest, plunder, and slavery, indispensable to the foundations of global capitalism. As Karl Marx writes in Volume I of Capital:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation.

The contemporary conversation around global land ownership and use patterns reflects the old idea that indigenous infidels have neither the concepts nor the practical ability to own and manage their own homeland. They wouldn’t make productive use of it, of course. It is never asked when and how the West came to its power to determine for other countries their stage of development, such as to make claims about how to help them become more “productive” under capitalism. The peoples of the Americas were deemed incapable of owning anything; they were part of nature or an extension of it and thus were to be dominated. From the end of the fifteenth century, the Vatican had blessed future crimes in advance, propounding a Doctrine of Discovery that erased the peoples of the Americas before they were even encountered. The Church placed only one true limit on the Spanish crown’s power to steal land and resources:

With this proviso however that none of the islands and mainlands, found and to be found, discovered and to be discovered, beyond that said line towards the west and south, be in the actual possession of any Christian king or prince up to the birthday of our Lord Jesus Christ just past from which the present year one thousand four hundred ninety-three begins.

If they argued amongst themselves about the demarcation of territories, the princes of Europe never doubted that the land belonged to them. Governments and legal scholars would continue to rely on this doctrine for centuries; indeed, it would be more than five centuries before the Vatican would issue a formal repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery on March 30, 2023. Only a rarified few legal precedents have held on for as long. Formal disavowals notwithstanding, the legacy of this legal doctrine is all around us today. It is critical for Americans to understand that even if the U.S. government fulfilled only the bare minimum of its obligations under its agreements with the tribes, it would owe them trillions of dollars. In July 2024, the Truth, Restoration, and Education Commission of Colorado published a reportdetailing the staggering magnitude of the theft from the state’s indigenous tribes. The experience of the Colorado tribes demonstrates the exclusive and dispossessory nature of capitalism as an observed phenomenon: as the report notes, the fair market value of the land stolen from them is about $1.7 trillion. The mineral rights have reaped more than a half a trillion on their own, all owed under any rational legal theory to Colorado’s tribes. This is the experience of just one state; extrapolated, the land and other resources stolen from them could easily total in the tens of trillions of dollars. The processes and ideological systems used to justify the looting of the Americas were extended domestically in Europe to prepare the way for the tyranny of capital. In England, for example, approximately 7 million acres—amounting to about one-sixth of the country—were converted from common land to private property between 1760 and 1870. The power of capital was able to accomplish land theft on an unprecedented scale at astonishing speed. As Simon Fairlie put it, “However necessary this process might or might not have been for the improvement of the agricultural economy, it was downright theft.” In the twenty-first century, many areas of the Global South are locked in struggle under enclosures that recall those in England centuries ago.

Loss of Language & Culture

Land monopolization is strongly associated empirically with losses of language and cultural diversity, as the culture of the acquiring people comes to dominate over and replace the local cultures. These tendencies are propelled also by a number of related social trends including the continued rise of worldwide media companies (mostly American) and the commercialization and homogenization of culture, massive migrations of people fleeing war and hunger, urbanization, and the fact that the majority of media content is published and consumed in English. The loss of global cultural diversity is a loss of imaginative capacity; our languages and cultures are the media through which we cogitate, transfer ideas, and solve social problems, the tapestry on which we account for our social order.^[1] We conceptualize the world and categorize phenomena within it through words, and the languages we speak inevitably carry both descriptive and normative claims about the world. This line of arguments is often associated with the work of Edward Sapir (1884–1939) and Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941) and the idea of linguistic relativity. While a complete review of the literature on linguistic relativity is beyond the scope of the current discussion, there is a clear causal nexus that connects language diversity and patterns of global land holdings: as land is stolen and concentrated in fewer hands, a process of cultural homogeneity and language loss follows. When we lose a language, the global community must absorb the irretrievable loss of a worldview and a philosophical tradition. We lose access to its unique insights, tools, and ways of formulating the connections and tensions underlying the complex social problems we face.

The importance of language to our social reality of course cuts both ways, as anthropologist Manvir Singh recently pointed out in The New Yorker: English is “the most widely used language in the history of humanity,” spoken by “an estimated 1.5 billion people—roughly one in every five human beings.” And much of the world is in a rush to further increase that number, in a process of “collusion” with the spread of English, whereby it is pursued for “the opportunities it promises.” Professor Singh tells the story of a new goddess introduced in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, the country’s largest by population. The Dalit writer and activist Chandra Bhan Prasad proposed a new temple and deity to be consecrated in honor of the English language, venerated as a font of empowerment and even Dalit liberation from “centuries of oppression” in their relegation to “a feudal subaltern standing” in society. The Goddess English is decidedly Western in her dress and symbolism, intentionally redolent of the Statue of Liberty, grasping a pen and the Constitution of India, her platform the bulky monitor of a personal computer. Here, the English language is not the tool of the colonizer and oppressor, but the passcode to social and economic freedom and equality in a transformed world.

Yet we cannot easily escape one “worry about the spread of English: the prospect of cognitive hegemony. Languages … influence how we perceive and respond to the world. The idiosyncrasies of English—its grammar, its concepts, its connection to Western culture—can jointly produce an arbitrary construction of reality.” All languages do this: produce an arbitrary construction of reality. Beyond the loss of social vibrancy and beauty associated with the global cultural homogenization, there are practical reasons to lament any reduction in the number of unique worldviews and systems of knowledge production. As local cultural traditions, languages, and dialects fade and disappear, social power begins to concentrate in the ruling class of the now-dominant culture; the penetration of English, its spread through the world with dizzying speed, has meant the ever-growing dominance of English-speaking elites, particularly Americans. This cultural hegemony is both a cause and a result of American military and economic imperialism—they can’t be separated from one another historically, just as they cannot be separated from the history of European colonialism.

The global land question is among the most urgent of our time, deeply tied to histories of conquest and colonialism. Unchecked transfers of land from the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people to dominant states and corporations accelerates a deepening crisis of inequality and dispossession and bleaches the world of its cultural and linguistic heritage. To confront these destructive forces requires a critical reconsideration of our ideas of progress and development and the legal frameworks applied to property tenure. Efforts at reform must prioritize local autonomy and control over the land, as both an economic goal and a means of preserving cultural and linguistic diversity.

Notes.

^[1] It’s important to note that when we discuss language today, we use arbitrary, unscientific categories just as a matter of course: “For example, German and Dutch are much closer to one another than various dialects of Chinese are.”

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