Land expropriation and displacement in Bangladesh

This paper examines land grabbing in Bangladesh and views such seizures through the lens of displacement and land encroachment. Two different but potentially interacting displacement processes are examined. The first, the char riverine and coastal sediment regions that are in a constant state of formation and erosion, are contested sites ripe for power plays that uproot small producers on their rich alluvial soils. The second examines new patterns of land capture by elites who engage gangs, corrupted public servants and the military to coerce small producers into relinquishing titles to their ever more valuable lands in and near urban areas. These historically specific and contingent land grabs draw attention to in situ displacement, where people may remain in place or experience a prolonged multi-stage process of removal. This contrasts with ex situ displacement, a decisive expulsion of people from their homes, communities and livelihoods. In both the char and peri-urban case, we signal new forms of collective action in response to involuntary alienation of land resources in a rapidly and violently transforming political economy. We conclude with a caution against naturalizing displacement, casting it as an ‘inevitable’ consequence of changing weather conditions in the former and population dynamics in the latter.     

Controlling land they call their own: access and women's empowerment in Northern Tanzania

Formal rights to land are often promoted as an essential part of empowering women, particularly in the Global South. We look at two grassroots non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working on land rights and empowerment with Maasai communities in Northern Tanzania. Women involved with both NGOS attest to the power of land ownership for personal empowerment and transformations in gender relations. Yet very few have obtained land ownership titles. Drawing from Ribot and Peluso's theory of access, we argue that more than ownership rights to land, access – to land, knowledge, social relations and political processes – is leading to empowerment for these women, as well as helping to keep land within communities. We illustrate how the following are key to both empowerment processes and protecting community and women's land: (1) access to knowledge about legal rights, such as the right to own land; (2) access to customary forms of authority; and (3) access to a joint social identity – as women, as ‘indigenous people’ and as ‘Maasai'. Through this shared identity and access to knowledge and authority, women are strengthening their access to social relations (amongst themselves, with powerful political players and NGOs), and gaining strength through collective action to protect land rights.     

Globalisation and the foreignisation of space: seven processes driving the current global land grab

The current global land grab is causing radical changes in the use and ownership of land. The main process driving the land grab, or ‘foreignisation of space’, as highlighted in the media and the emerging literature is the production of food and biofuel for export in the aftermath of recent food and energy crises. However, there are several other processes driving the land rush. In this article I argue that an analytical framework that focuses on only one or two processes that drive the global land grab offers a narrow perspective on this complex process. It will be unable to take into account the full range and extent of agrarian and social changes that occur in light of the land grab and their strategic implications for poor people's livelihoods. An important starting point is to identify the broad processes driving the current land rush, and trace their structural and institutional origins. To do so, I identify and examine seven factors that are giving rise to radical changes in landownership and land use in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Finally, ‘codes of conduct’ as proposed by several quarters in the context of global land grab are unlikely to work in favour of the poor.     

Why green grabs don't work in Papua New Guinea

In recent years, private companies have acquired long-term leasehold titles to more than five million hectares of what was formerly customary land in Papua New Guinea (PNG), but hardly any of this land has been devoted to production of the four green commodities in which PNG might have some comparative advantage – sustainable palm oil, bio-ethanol, biodiversity and carbon credits. Nearly all of it is dedicated to so-called ‘agro forestry’ projects that appear to be short-term salvage logging projects justified by the promise of a purely virtual form of large-scale agricultural production. I argue that the ‘agro foresters’ have been more successful than the green investors because of a set of political and institutional factors that distinguish PNG from many of the other countries where land grabbing has become the order of the day.     

Rural women migrant returnees in contemporary China

This essay focuses on the experiences of female returnees in rural–urban migration in contemporary China. Based on in-depth interviews with women migrants, returnees, their family members, friends and fellow villagers in both sending and receiving areas, the research examines rural migrant women's return migration process. It investigates rural migrant women's decision-making in the process, the ways women returnees construct their lives in the countryside, their identity negotiation as returnees and the impact of patriarchy on women's experiences of the return and resettlement process. The author argues that despite women's active involvement in migration and the ‘empowerment and agency’ gained through migration, the patriarchal power relations within rural households remain intact and continue to shape rural female returnees' life in their villages.     

Seeing land deals through the lens of the ‘land–water nexus’: the case of biofuel production in Piura,Peru

ABSTRACT

This contribution examines two large-scale land acquisitions on Peru’s northern coast, using a ‘land–water nexus’ approach. The establishment of large sugarcane monocultures resulted in a massive transfer of land and water rights from smallholders to biofuel companies. Using Ribot and Peluso’s theory of access, we demonstrate that this transfer of rights was enabled by the convergence of neoliberal land and water reforms and the presence of the two investors. This constellation (1) altered smallholders’ bundles of rights; and (2) created sharp imbalances that radically changed access to land and water, not only through changing bundles of rights, but also, and maybe more significantly, through widening the gaps between smallholders’ and biofuel companies’ bundles of powers. Using Hall et al.’s powers of exclusion approach, we identify the processes both underpinning and resulting out of the changing access relations analyzed in this study. Changes to Peru’s water governance may accentuate power asymmetries between investors and smallholders, constraining locals’ access to increasingly scarce water.     

Tree plantations,politics of possession and the absence of land grabs in Vietnam

Viewed from the lens of ‘land grabs’, Vietnam's fast-growing tree plantations look like an anomaly; many of them are tiny, owned and operated by rural households. In contrast, private companies and transnational corporations have not been able to get much of a foot into Vietnam's plantation sector. This paper identifies the practices and processes underlying the apparent anomaly. On the basis of fieldwork in four villages, it points to the concrete mechanisms by which households have gained access to land, finance, and wood markets. Government policy emerges as a critical factor enabling household access, not in the sense of a coherent policy package but understood as sedimented outcomes of everyday processes of state formation over the past three decades. A central element in contestations over the state is what I call ‘politics of possession’: possession, referring to entitlement and control, has been closely tied to ideas about the state. The paper uses these empirical observations to contribute towards theoretical understandings of land grabs and exclusion. Land grabs may have to say as much about dynamics of state formation as processes of commodification and market expansion.     

Land grabbing and the making of an authoritarian populist regime in Hungary

ABSTRACT

How do authoritarian populist regimes emerge within the European Union in the twenty-first century? In Hungary, land grabbing by oligarchs have been one of the pillars maintaining Prime Minister Orbán’s regime. The phenomenon remains out of the public purview and meets little resistance as the regime-controlled media keeps Hungarians ‘distracted’ with ‘dangers’ inflicted by the ‘enemies of the Hungarian people’ such as refugees and the European Union. The Hungarian case calls for scholarly-activist attention to how authoritarian populism is maintained by, and affects rural areas, as well as how emancipation can be envisaged in such a context.     

Landless but not assetless: female agricultural labour on the road to better status,evidence from India

Women's share of agricultural wage employment is rising across the Indian sub-continent. Studies examining this process of feminisation tend to be divided along the lines of an ideological debate following either the ‘poverty-push’ or the ‘demand-pull’ argument. This debate, however, has largely ignored the institution of patriarchy. In this study we revisit the debate with a focus on gender relations. The study is based on data collected from 291 households in the state of Andhra Pradesh. We find that, despite increased labour market participation, women's household status, her wages and working conditions remain acutely depressed. Women labourers with access to productive assets, however, are effectively expanding their agency within both the household and the labour market. Their experiences, we argue, have implications for transformative policies.     

Who gains from contract farming? Dependencies,power relations,and institutional change

ABSTRACT

The paper highlights the mechanisms through which outgrower contract farming creates dependencies at the local level. Using sugarcane case study in Malawi, we show that dependencies are created through redefinition of use rights to customary land and through the redefinition of cash flows into outgrower communities. Through this two-dimensional process, corporations can secure access to land, exert control over local communities and transform the local social relations of reciprocity serving as the pillars of resistance. Our results indicate that contract farming changes rural agrarian relations, transforms local family institutions by carefully selecting a few household members with influence into the scheme and selectively dispossessing the poor community members.     

Large-scale land deals from the inside out: findings from Kenya's Tana Delta

Although there is alarm over the global land rush, many plans for the large-scale transformation of land acquired by investors remain on the drawing board. Based on a study of two land deals in Kenya's Tana Delta, this paper considers the processes by which blueprint designs are amended or delayed through the involvement of local actors. It demonstrates that even top-down acquisition of land by powerful state-linked actors with the support of policy discourse can be stalled by the rural poor, particularly if the latter have strong customary claims and links to wider opposition. At the same time, large-scale land acquisition is not automatically opposed by local people, who may see land deals as an opportunity to safeguard access to resources and to support their development expectations. The paper also suggests that although consultation and the existence of recognised property rights appear to result in fairer project designs, land deals are likely to reflect the decision-making power of an elite that is not fully informed. The conclusion affirms the need for more nuanced, place-based analyses of large-scale land deals, taking into account tenure arrangements, resource access mechanisms, land management discourses and the role of cross-scale agency and alliances in building support for, or opposition to, such deals.     

A note on persistence and polarisation

Increased opportunity of productive employment in the market due to the process of polarisation is unlikely to be an important reason for the stability of land ownership of the small holders in Bangladesh. It is argued that the stability is achieved by destabilising the ‘household’ itself. The relative stability of small owners is also due to the fact that in Bangladesh a larger proportion of them belong to the young household category than the households in the rich groups. In fact, a comparison between land ownership at the inception of the households with their land ownership at a fixed point in time may not be useful in understanding either the stability of households or the process of polarisation.     

Land grabs and primitive accumulation in deltaic Bangladesh: interactions between neoliberal globalization,state interventions,power relations and peasant resistance

This essay provides theoretical and empirical analysis of the interrelationships between land grabs, primitive accumulation and accumulation by dispossession (ABD) in the context of capitalist development. Evidence from a multi-class peasant formation in deltaic Bangladesh indicates that land grabs have been propelled by interactions between neoliberal globalization, state interventions, power relations and peasant resistance. Key roles have been played by illegal violence and de-linking of poor peasants from production organization and clientelist relations providing access to land. Establishment of a shrimp zone for export production has led to systematic eviction of the poor, backed by state power. Poor peasant resistance has shifted towards overt forms involving coalition-building and collective action. It is argued that the concept of primitive accumulation can subsume both market and non-market mechanisms as well as voluntary and involuntary transactions involving different degrees of intentionality, inclusive of deliberate dispossession, unintended consequences and negative externalities. Primitive accumulation and ABD correspond to distinct historical phases of capitalism and are subsumable under a generic concept of ongoing capitalism-facilitating accumulation. The dynamics of ‘actually existing capitalism’ display a two-way and recursive causal relationship in which continuing primitive accumulation is as much a consequence of expanding capitalist production as its precondition.     

Impacts of land and agricultural commercialisation on local livelihoods in Zambia: evidence from three models

By examining three different models of commercial agriculture – a plantation, a commercial farming area, and an out-grower scheme – we observe heterogeneous impacts on different segments of rural communities. Each produces gender and generational differentials in employment and other income-earning opportunities. Our study supports the hypothesis that the plantation model typifies the ‘enclave’ economy that is poorly integrated into the surrounding communities and the local economy. While out-grower schemes have often been favourably compared to plantations, our evidence on the Magobbo sugarcane out-grower scheme points to the contrary: its block farming model consolidates smallholdings and creates a peasant-shareholder class. Shareholder ‘out-growers’ receive dividends from what is essentially an extension of the plantation. This accumulation for a few also produces land scarcity and fragile semi-proletarianised livelihoods for others. By contrast we find that the commercial farming model, while based on an elite form of large-scale commercial farming, does provide benefits to surrounding areas, through employment and local economic linkages.     

Power and dispossession in the neoliberal food regime: oil palm expansion in Guatemala

ABSTRACT

Guatemala’s palm oil production has surged in line with the global demand for biodiesel and vegetable oil production. While corporate land grabs have been a popular concept in agrarian studies, we emphasize the integral roles of the state and racially-charged political power relations, enhanced by the neoliberal food regime. These power relations, with racism at their core, foster land control grabs occurring alongside the rise of the palm oil industry. Their effects extend beyond merely the dispossession of land. The oil palm expansion and related dispossessions mostly benefit the international markets and the wealthy ruling class comprised of creole descendants and affluent ladinos. The soaring industry has given rise to human rights violations and a lack of access to or control of various resources, such as food and water. Based on fieldwork, we show that dispossessed Guatemalans, especially the indigenous, experience rising poverty, domestic food shortages and an influx of foreign foodstuffs as the meagrely paid work in the oil palm sector is only available for the few.     

Grounds for self-government? Changes in land ownership and democratic participation in Chinese communities

Do variations in land ownership affect people’s democratic participation? Quantitative, cross-country research on this topic suffers from the non-comparability of regulatory systems and cultures, and the use of crude indicators to identify participation. This study attempts to overcome these methodological problems, by employing indicators of procedural and substantive participation in a structured, diachronic comparison of qualitative data from five sites in China – an authoritarian state, which, however, requires residents of urban communities and villages to participate in ‘self-government’. It examines whether and why changing land from collective ownership to state ownership, and residents’ compensated acquisition of cash and secure, fungible assets, strengthens or weakens participation in self-government. In the research sites, collective land ownership is found to stimulate participation in self-government. Transformation of the land to state ownership and people’s acquisition of private property weakens participation. The robust results of the study support the direction of a causal argument that collective land ownership is conducive to democratic participation. These findings imply that scholars and policymakers should consider the potentially adverse political consequences of changing land ownership. A further implication is that, absent substantial political reform, an urbanized China might be less rather than more democratic at the community level.     

The contested nature of Afro-descendant quilombo land claims in Brazil

In Brazil, Afro-descendant quilombola communities were for the first time in history recognised as legal rights-holders to land in the 1988 constitution – 100 years after the abolition of slavery. Drawing on fieldwork in the quilombo Bombas in the state of São Paulo, and a review of relevant literature, this contribution explores the historical trajectory of the constitutional quilombo provision and how it has been translated into practice. Combining a discussion of the use of self-identification and the concepts of ‘regulation’, ‘force’, ‘market’ and ‘legitimation’ when analysing the dynamics of access and exclusion, we show how struggles over land are simultaneously enacted in controversies over the meanings of quilombola identity and its implications.     

Credit Constraints and Distress Sales in Rural India: Evidence from Kalahandi District,Orissa

The literature on the rural credit market in India (and elsewhere) has generally assumed that peasant farm households are rationed in their access to subsidized formal credit. Because of a lack of infrastructure and poor access to institutional credit, such farmers are exploited by means of an interlocked market connecting informal credit to the sale of paddy. The resulting gap, between the sale by a borrower of paddy at a predetermined low price, and the price of this commodity on the open market, constitutes the amount of what is termed a distress sale. The latter is itself influenced by the bargaining capacity (or lack thereof) of the peasant farmer who borrows on the informal market. Also of importance in determining whether or not a cultivator is compelled to resort to the informal credit market – and thus into an interlocked arrangement – is the need for additional liquidity to meet production costs and/or household consumption, as well as the monopsony nature of the paddy market. Data from Kalahandi district in Orissa suggest that access to formal credit is limited in rural areas although there exists a high demand for it, that a high degree of credit rationing by the formal lender occurs, and that poor implementation by the state of minimum support price policy all contribute to the need for informal loans and its attendant interlinkage.     

Workers,state, and development in Brazil: powers of labour,chains of value

This paper examines the significance of landscape and memory in peasant–state relations in Eritrea since independence in the early 1990s. During this period, people were being resettled around cultivable land in the western lowlands as a means of recuperating land and society after prolonged warfare. Projects of statemaking in Eritrea, involving both refugee resettlement and agrarian development, have drawn from a national narrative of lost fertility and deforestation caused by generations of colonial extraction and violence. This paper explores how shared memories of environmental change, an ecological nostalgia, become a means through which people from diverse ethno-linguistic, religious, and regional backgrounds come together to imagine a collective future based in creating livelihood from farm land. However, as people reclaim remembered landscapes and face the challenges of rebuilding communities and livelihoods during a time of tense political and economic change, their ideas of a shared future diverge from state-led projects of nation-building. This article argues that ecological nostalgia legitimises state interventions into rural livelihoods but also provides a means for people to speak and critique the state under conditions of increasing fear and silencing.     

We demand work! ‘Dispossession’, patronage and village labour in Bibiyana,Bangladesh

ABSTRACT

This paper critically appraises the usefulness of idioms and theories of ‘dispossession’ to describe changes taking place in rural Bangladesh, where rapid industrialization and ‘development’ have led to profound shifts in the agrarian economy. On the basis of long-term fieldwork in north-eastern Bangladesh, where the multinational company Chevron operate a large gas field, I argue that rather than political and economic struggles in the area involving access to land, it is access to work which is now all important for livelihoods and, as such, has become the basis for local patronage and political power. Theories of ‘accumulation by dispossession’, still widely cited in the anthropology of neo-liberal development in South Asia, are thus of limited help in explaining the changes and continuities which animate local political and economic struggles.