LGAR - Land grabs, the agrarian question and the corporate food regime

Authors

  • A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi Professor, Department of International Development Studies Trent University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.94

Keywords:

food regimes, land grabbing, agrarian question

Abstract

Over the last decade civil society organizations and activist-scholars have pointed to “land grabbing” as one of the central issues to have emerged in the world food system. In particular, land grabbing was identified as a new and immediate international development issue by the non-governmental organization GRAIN in 2008 (www.farmlandgrab.org). Since that time land grabbing has generated a voluminous literature of a highly variable quality—some scholarship is outstanding and some is shoddy (Oya, 2013). This contribution seeks to clarify what constitutes land grabbing and why it takes place, as well as the key challenge that scholars and civil society activists face in confronting land grabbing in the context of the question of feeding the world. The central argument is that when a structuralist political economy is used to interpret the land grab phenomenon, it becomes analytically clear that contemporary land deals demonstrate that dispossession by displacement, or what has historically been known as the “so-called primitive accumulation”, has been resurrected as an accumulation strategy of global capitalism witnessing, for the first time in decades, the limits to the market. It is an accumulation strategy that cannot, however, deliver food justice or deal with the climate emergency.

Author Biography

A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi, Professor, Department of International Development Studies Trent University

Haroon Akram-Lodhi teaches agrarian political economy at Trent University in Peterborough, Canada. A Fellow of Food First, the Institute for Food and Development Policy in Oakland, his most recent book is Hungry for Change: Farmers, Food Justice and the Agrarian Question. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Journal of Development Studies

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Published

2015-09-08

How to Cite

Akram-Lodhi, A. H. (2015). LGAR - Land grabs, the agrarian question and the corporate food regime. Canadian Food Studies La Revue Canadienne Des études Sur l’alimentation, 2(2), 233–241. https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.94