Background
Global economic and policy trends have emerged that boost the commercial value of land and investors' interest in land worldwide. Long-term increases in food consumption (and thus demand and prices) and increasing consumption of agrofuels are creating new demands for large tracts of agricultural land. Even carbon-trading mechanisms are placing a commercial value on standing forests and rangelands that have previously been marginal to commercial production. Coinciding with the liberalisation of trade, competition for land is more and more played out directly between local land users, national economic elites, and transnational investors. Many transnational investors are private companies, but a significant number are financed by sovereign funds with the aim of achieving food security for the investing country by producing food for export back to their own populations.
Despite the magnitude of this phenomenon, most evidence is currently indicative or anecdotal. There is as yet very little systematic monitoring of these trends, research into the impacts, or exploration of the opportunities that may be created for rural development. These trends pose both a threat and an opportunity to the rural poor, who will increasingly lose their land rights, triggering further marginalization and impoverishment. Dispossession is particularly likely to occur where their land tenure rights are weak and unrecognized. Most at risk are groups such as women, pastoralists, indigenous people and others dependent on customary and common-pool resource rights that are insecure and undocumented. The vulnerability of these groups is often compounded by corruption that can accompany large scale land transfers. There is already evidence of the displacement of poor resource-users by agro-fuel production, while others may lose access to resources, such as rangelands and forests, which may constitute an important safety net and livelihood source for marginalized groups. On the other hand, where poor people have secure land use rights, these same trends may actually offer opportunities for development.
