Land Squeeze

Land is critical to the lives, livelihoods, and food security of millions of people across the world. But a series of unprecedented pressures on global farmland are driving a “land squeeze” that is worsening land inequality, rural poverty, and food insecurity.

Farmers, Indigenous Peoples, peasants, and pastoralists are losing their land, and losing their culture, livelihoods, and rural traditions, while young farmers face huge barriers to access farmland.

The financial crash and food price crisis of 2007-2008 unleashed a huge wave of land grabs. Investors, agri-food companies, and sovereign wealth funds succeeded in appropriating large swathes of farmland around the world. The ‘land rush’ slowed down after a few years, but the pressures never went away. 

Just over a decade later, the world is now facing a multi-dimensional land squeeze, affecting every region worldwide, with land inequality growing fastest in central-Eastern Europe, Latin America, and South Asia. Land prices have nearly doubled globally since 2008, and tripled in Central Europe. Globally, 1% of the world’s largest farms control 70% of the world’s farmland. 

This time, the threats are even greater, as land grabs proliferate into new and obscure forms, and farmers and communities are squeezed from all sides.

IPES-Food identifies four trends driving this land squeeze and exacerbating land inequality around the world: 

1. Land Grabbing 2.0:

• Powerful governments, financial actors, speculators, and big agribusinesses are gaining control over land through new waves of land grabbing – since 2000, land around twice the size of Germany has been snatched up in transnational deals around the world.
• Land is increasingly being turned into a financial asset, at the expense of small and medium scale farming. Agricultural investment funds rose ten-fold from 2005 to 2018, and now regularly include farmland as a stand-alone asset class, with US investors doubling their stakes in farmland since the pandemic.
• The COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukraine war reignited the “feed the world” narrative, prompting agribusinesses and investors to secure land for export commodity production and urging governments to deregulate land markets and adopt pro-investor policies.
• ‘Water grabs’ and ‘resource grabs’ are increasing, focusing on controlling critical resources for rapid value extraction. 87% of land grabs occur in regions of high biodiversity.

2. Green Grabbing:

• Some governments and businesses are using global environmental goals to justify a new wave of top-down conservation and carbon offsetting schemes that exclude local land users and food producers.
• Huge swathes of farmland are being snapped up for these “green grabs”, which account for 20% of large-scale land deals.
• Governments have collectively pledged to allocate land areas equivalent to total global cropland for ‘carbon removal’ initiatives – and over half of these pledges risk interfering with small-scale farmers and Indigenous Peoples.
• Carbon and biodiversity offset markets are facilitating massive land transactions, bringing major polluters into land markets. One fossil fuel multinational, Shell, has set aside more than USD 450 million for offsetting projects. A single ‘environmental asset creation’ firm, UAE-based ‘Blue Carbon’, has signed agreements for some 25 million hectares of land for carbon projects in five African countries.
• Land is also being appropriated for biofuels and green energy production – including water-intensive ‘green hydrogen’ projects that pose risks to local food production.

3. Expansion and Encroachment:

• Land is being taken out of agriculture and repurposed for extractive industries and mega-developments. For example, urbanization and mega-infrastructure developments in Asia and Africa are claiming prime farmland.
• Driven by rising demand for critical minerals, a global mining boom is consuming vast tracts of farmland, leading to displacement, conflicts, and environmental degradation. Mining projects accounted for 14% of large-scale land deals over the past ten years.
• Instead of protecting communities, dubious investment laws are protecting polluters: for example, several transnational companies successfully sued the Colombian government for attempting to halt a large-scale mining project.

4. Food System Reconfiguration:

• Industrial agriculture is spreading globally: input-intensive feed crop monocultures and factory farms are straining resources, rapidly degrading farmland, and squeezing out smallholders.
• Agribusiness giants are pursuing monopolistic practices that drive up costs for farmers and undermine their control over their land and food production. 
• These dynamics are creating systematic economic precarity for farmers – effectively forcing them to ‘get big or get out’.

The global land squeeze is threatening millions of livelihoods, food security, and biodiversity. If left unaddressed, current trends could push this crisis to a tipping point for food systems – deepening land inequality, exacerbating rural poverty and rural exodus, and squeezing more sustainable forms of small and medium scale farming permanently out of business. This could push agriculture irrevocably towards unsustainable and polluting industrial models. 

Addressing this crisis requires bold and transformative action by policymakers.

The IPES-Food panel calls for: 

• Building integrated land, environmental, and food systems governance to halt green grabs, recentre communities, and ensure a just transition. This must put community-based approaches at the heart of climate and biodiversity action, including helping communities to map and defend their own land.
• Removing speculative capital and financial actors from land markets, to get land back into the hands of farmers – including capping land acquisitions, giving farmers first right of refusal, and cracking down on bogus land-based carbon offsets. 
• Support for alternative forms of land ownership and access for small and medium farmers – including innovative group ownership and financing models.
• A new deal for farmers and rural communities to secure their livelihoods and their control over land – with fair prices, adequate social security and pensions, and incentives to adopt agroecological practices. Where land inequality is deeply entrenched, a new generation of land and agrarian reforms is needed to give land back to communities.

 Climate & Biodiversity

 Corporate Power

 Equity & Health

 Climate & Biodiversity

 Corporate Power

 Equity & Health