LAND GRABBING KEEPS ME AWAKE - Essay Example

With global reports confirming the world’s peaking oil, among other greater risks such as persistent hunger partly contributed by anthropogenic climate change, the putative existence of ‘reserve agricultural land’ in the global south, particularly in Africa and the Latin America, has been labeled the lifeline, thus the dramatic revaluation and the subsequent haste to acquire and control large swathes of land for agro-industrial, large-scale resource extraction initiatives and food security (McMichael, 2012).

Buoyed by the idea that long-term landholdings are the only avenue to assuage continuous supply of their needs, ‘finance-rich, resource-poor’ countries are aggressively funding the acquisitions in government to government deals that leaves the poor even more worse off than ever. While the surge in the transnational commercial land deals ringing in massive ‘private and non-private’ lands to the dispossession of the global poor are guided by the neoliberal policies under the supervision of WTO, the trade-offs seem far off a just order, for the rules only but favors the big Brother, thus the accelerated land grabbing, more so in Africa where unutilized land is considered plentiful and labor are relatively cheap.

In spite of the title deeds issued by most African, Latin American and Asian countries indicating ownership, land remains the property of the state. Accordingly, the state possesses all the rights to do whatever it desires, including utilizing as a bait to attract foreign investments (Houtart 2010). Ironically disturbing is the very fact that Africa, a continent that faces hunger the most, takes the lion’s share of the dubious land deals that exacerbates their local food insecurity further, for arable lands leased in large scale to foreigners only produce food and other products for export purposes.

Small scale farmers hitherto