The Dispute Over Land on a World Scale. The Role of States and the Mechanisms of Land Grabbing in the Global South

COSTANTINO, MARÍA AGOSTINA

International Latin American Studies Review

Centre for Latin American Studies (CESLA)

Año: 2019

1641-4713

In recent years, the phenomenon known as "land grabbing" has been generalized in the countries of the global South, where capitals from the central countries settled to acquire land and massively exploit local natural resources. From the perspective of dependency theory, this implies a further way of transferring value from the dependent countries to the central countries and a deepening of the mode of dependent external insertion on the former in the global accumulation of capital.In spite of this common characteristic, the land grabbing phenomenon has particular characteristics in the different regions. The objective of this paper is to analyze the characteristics that this phenomenon has had in the different regions of the world in terms of the following dimensions: (i) the mechanism that investors carry out to acquire land, taking into account the type of land tenure (that is, if it is private, state or community land); (ii) the role of the State in the grabbing process; and (iii) the origin of the main external investors in each region.