Healthy land, healthy planet

We are seeing three phenomena that are relatively new and certainly growing in importance. The first is the financialisation of the market for agricultural land with more and more purely financial actors –  investment funds, hedge funds, banks – interested in using land as an asset …  the price of which is bound to continue to rise. The second is increased competition between food, feed, fuel and fibre. More and more land is used to feed animals, is produced for agro-fuels production, or is used to grow forests, to obtain carbon credits. 

The third phenomenon we see is what we call 'green grabbing'. In the name of gaining these carbon credits – seen as a market-friendly tool to combat climate change – more and more speculators buy land to be rewarded for capturing carbon by transforming that land into forests meant to capture carbon. Most of the recent land squeeze described in the report is the result of this larger phenomenon. 

It has been estimated that about 1.2 billion hectares – the equivalent of total global cropland - is what would be needed to fulfil all governments' pledges for land-based carbon removal.  The first and most major impact [of this] is increased competition for land, which will price out many communities and small-scale farmers from being able to access that resource. That is potentially counterproductive because the reality is that we can cultivate land in ways that respect and enhance agro-biodiversity. 

[Growing land inequality] is a result not only of the increased price of land – so that only major economic actors or financial speculators are able to acquire large areas of farmland. It is also the result of a common –  but mistaken – prejudice that the larger the production unit is, the larger the area of land under cultivation is, the more efficient the production will be.

In fact, many studies show the exact opposite. Small-scale farming can be extremely efficient in its use of resources and in its ability to produce high levels of output per hectare under cultivation. The prejudice is that small-scale farming is not economically viable and will not be able to feed the world, which is extremely problematic.

Our estimate is that about twice the size of Germany has already been subjected to transnational land deals globally since 2000. That doesn't even include the land grabs that are purely domestic in which major domestic economic actors seize land from local communities because of their superior purchasing power and because they can gain in this auctioning process when land is treated as a commodity.

We are witnessing the extinction of small-scale farming. The more agriculture is capital-intensive, the more ecological logic will be set aside in favour of a logic that is purely economic and driven by the need to increase profits made per hectare. That is very problematic for more sustainable types of farming. … It leads to more concentration, to the most powerful economic actors dominating the agricultural landscape, and to making it very difficult to transition towards agroecology.

Carbon neutrality – the switch to zero emissions economies  – will be impossible without land that is healthy [and] without soils that are able to function as carbon sinks, for soils to absorb excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and compensate for the emissions. This is only possible if you have ways of farming that maintain and, indeed, enhance the biological life in the soils. [This] means practising rotating farming schemes, mixed cropping schemes, [and] agroforestry using leguminous plants intersecting with other cultures. 

But  agroecology is more difficult to develop if you are pushed by market forces to have to squeeze out of the land as much value as possible. That is the danger we are facing.

We need to remove speculative capital and financial actors from land markets, and get land back into the hands of farmers. We need to equip rural communities with the tools, to finance, [and] access markets and local logistics, allowing them to take care of the land they have access to and can share between their members. We have many examples of land being treated as a commons, managed and governed by the local communities. We have more and more experiences of group farming – of community-based management of land and water resources – that show that this is viable. 

The right to land is extremely important for the enjoyment of a full range of economic and social rights. Land is a resource which can allow communities to be much more resilient in the face of shocks. Access to land is a source of food security. It improves the health of communities. It improves the ability of communities to resist the ups and downs of the economy because they will be less dependent on other sources of revenue to meet their basic needs. For many communities throughout the global south, it is a really important source of resilience to have access to land and to be protected from the risks of land grabbing.