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Over the last decade or so unprecedented amounts of land have been concessioned, leased or sold by developing country governments at bargain basement prices to new investors with the support and funding of international financial institutions and hedge funds. “

Africa is the site of most of these new investments in land because land is cheaper in Africa than anywhere else. This is possible because it is customary land that is expropriated and whose prices are arbitrarily set by governments in negotiations with the investors which typically do not include any consultations with or prior informed consent of the affected communities. Again this is possible because landholders under customary tenure regimes are considered to be merely in possession of the land without any real legal status in most African countries.

Agrarian labour relations are based on specific land-labour utilization relations that are created principally through land dispossession. Land ownership is central to the emergence of these agrarian labour relations . Land owners are typically hirers of labour while the landless are forced to sell their labour power.

We regularly read in the press that Saudi Arabia ↑ has purchased enormous areas of crop land for rice production, and several members of the government possess large areas of land in some of Burkina Faso’s most fertile areas without even being farmers! The recently adopted land tenure law is encouraging the development of these destabilising trends.

Let me give an example. In 1999, a rural Burkinabé woman, Nagbila Aisseta, accepted ↑ the Hunger Project Africa Prize awarded to the 'women farmers of Africa'. She was a poor woman aged 35 who had not left her village since birth, had never entered a car, knew nothing at all of modern life, but who, little by little, had developed initiatives to create a large organisation involved in livestock farming, agriculture, and market gardening to tackle malnutrition in her area. She was invited to receive her prize at a ceremony at the United Nations headquarters and asked to submit her speech prior to the event in the national Mooré language. It was to be translated into English, which she did not speak, for another person to read out during the ceremony. But she said “No. If it is me that has received the prize then I should speak directly to those who gave it to me. The way I was brought up, when you thank someone you thank them directly, without a go-between.” She asked the United Nations to find a Burkinabé interpreter who could understand both Mooré and English in order to ensure simultaneous interpretation. And this is how it was done. She knew her rights -  in this case the right to speak!

The second, usually supported by numerous farmers’ groups and non-profit organizations like La Via Campesina, the Oakland Institute, GRAIN and Food First, believe that these land grabs are exploitative and colonialist, kicking people off of their land and decreasing food security for “host” countries.

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that in order to feed the anticipated 9.1 billion people in 2050, agricultural production worldwide needs to increase by 70 percent. Historically, the response to global hunger has focused on food aid and agricultural investment in chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and increasingly, genetically engineered seeds. More recently, governments of wealthy countries lacking in fertile, arable land or abundant water supplies have begun to buy or lease large tracts of land in poorer countries for agricultural production and export.

He emphasized the importance of land sovereignty and investments in smallholder agriculture to food security and indigenous identity, but also spoke about how foreign deals could be a “win-win” solution for those involved. He highlighted the need for more community-investor partnerships which “don’t require large-scale transfer of land rights. What is important is that they should be long-term. That they should balance profit with social responsibility. And they should be supported by governments, civil society organizations, and the private sector, to ensure that they are mutually beneficial.”

“Our ancestors settled here in 1903. We considered the land ours until 1947 when the colonial government suddenly seized it as private state property, arresting anyone cutting down trees for firewood or to build”, explains Adjap tribal chief, Marcellin Biang.

In Akom I, chieftain Luther Abessolo says his subjects are increasingly lazy as a result of the prevailing tenure insecurity. “We live in utter uncertainty because the government can decide to seize our land at short notice anytime. Our people lack motivation to cultivate the land”, he tells Think Africa Press.

Less fortunate, however, are some 14,000 villagers in Cameroon’s southwest whose existence – as well as that of numerous endangered floral and faunal species – is under threat. US-owned agribusiness, Herakles Farms, is razing some 73,000 hectares of dense natural forests for a $600 million oil palm plantation despite local objections.

Western governments and associated think-tanks began to test publicly the idea of intervening militarily in a small peripheral country and ex-colony, this time under the pretext of the “right to protect” Zimbabweans from a crazed tyrant.

Mamdani’s article set out from a simple premise: that Zimbabwe’s deeply unequal and racialized agrarian relations were historically unjust and unsustainable. Restating this premise was significant, because during the course of the crisis the foundation of the debate kept shifting to other issues, such as good governance, productivity, or even historiography. Mamdani went on to argue that the radical land reform of recent years has had various casualties, including the rule of law, farmworkers, urban land occupiers, and agricultural production. But even so, he argued, the land reform has been historically progressive and is likely to be remembered as the culmination of the anti-colonial struggle in Zimbabwe.

Even scholars on the Left, such as Patrick Bond and Horace Campbell, joined in to dismiss the threat of external intervention as mere Mugabe rhetoric and to dispute really existing imperialism in the country. Despite their evident ideological heterogeneity, they converged instantly around a shared focus on personalities rather than the issues and resorted also to underhanded methods of argumentation (as noted by David Johnson).

When it was released in 2005, Reclaiming the Land was a significant and timely intervention in the political economy of peasant studies. The work remains relevant for contemporary deliberations. In a plenary session that celebrated the book’s anniversary, Yeros placed the work historically, discussing its emergence during a context of powerful rural resistances—among them the Zapatistas in Mexico and armed struggles for land in the Philippines—and in the wake of Zimbabwe’s “Fast Track” land reform program.

Paterniani explained some of the intricate and resisting practices of re-homing through a case study of one abandoned apartment complex in São Paulo. People occupying the complex came together to express a strong collectivity based on their co-habitation. They organized themselves politically and logistically by devising rotating schedules for cleaning public spaces and creating an incentive points-based system to increase participation in public, political events. Painted on one of the walls of the apartment complex are the words, “The one who does not struggle is dead.” The collective of families came together to re-home a place that had been abandoned by financialized capitalism and yet deemed unlawful for habitation.

Ricardo Jacobs spoke about “an urban proletariat with peasant characteristics” in Cape Town, South Africa. His work with 185 households who occupy urban land for livestock grazing shows that the expected (Marxist) break between urban people and land did not occur, even though people are engaged in wage labor. While not expressed in the same way, Bill Martin’s discussion of Black urban farming in Detroit, Michigan likewise revealed “an urban proletariat with peasant characteristics.”