Since 2000, the world has experienced a large, sudden increase in large-scale transnational land transactions. State-owned and private corporations, as well as private investors of agricultural land have purchased or (where land is not saleable) acquired long-term leases on large swathes of land for food, biofuel and (more recently) clean energy production. At their most extreme, these transactions result in illegal dispossession of land and forcible transfer of the population living there. The majority of these transactions are more nuanced in their design and impacts, however. Governments, seeking foreign investment for development and an infusion of capital, sell or lease government land to large corporations for food or energy plantations. Foreign direct investment (FDI) of this sort, as with all foreign investment, has long been considered a boon to countries seeking economic growth, diversification and development. Consequently, most (but not all) of these transactions take place between investors based in the United States, Europe and wealthy East Asian states, and regions with large amounts of rural land that is relatively less-developed, such as sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, Central and South America and Eastern Europe.

Despite its promises, however, large-scale land investment deals have resulted in increased inequality, widespread displacement of people and the destruction of natural resources. In many of these rural areas, indigenous communities and small agricultural villages have been living and subsisting on that land for centuries. Most of these traditional farmers do not have formal titles, even if they are available, and so the government can easily (and even inadvertently) sell the land, making them de facto trespassers on their own property. Even efforts at land reform through title and registration schemes have left local communities with increasingly tenuous and uncertain claims to their land.

The presence of these land “grabs,” so named for their negative impacts on local populations, as a source of investment is hardly new, and arguably is simply part of the economic and social transformation in many developing countries. In recent years, though, a sudden, large demand for rural land has been driven in part by the commodity boom of the mid-2000s, as well as by an ideological shift to promote foreign investment of all kinds, and global crises in finance and climate.