‘Global land rush’ (2020) 24’ x 36’ by Filipino activist painter Boy Dominguez TNI | 18 May 2026
Land grabs: wider, ongoing and expanding
by Jun Borras
The Oklahoma land run of 1889, the guano land rush of the 19th and 20th centuries, the California gold rush of the 19th century, and the land rush in Gambella in Ethiopia from 2008 onwards involved corporations and individuals seeking and making new land frontiers. Both were fuelled by spectacular claims about empty lands and resources that could be turned into vast fortunes. These iconic land and resource grabs were not isolated cases, in history and in world geographies. Land rushes and land grabs are recurring processes in global capitalism’s endless land frontier-making.
The contemporary land grabs (here we include water grabbing and ocean grabbing) have been much more extensive than previously estimated. Their social, economic, political and ecological impacts are not contained within the blocks of land administratively and legally demarcated for the land deals.
Land grabs are ongoing and likely to accelerate and expand. One driving force for this market-based climate actions. As in every cycle of land and resource rushes, at some point land deals continue but are no longer perceived as land grabs because they were normalized, and thus, invisibilized. When this happens, the already difficult struggles against land grabs and dispossession become even more so.
A key task therefore is to unearth the various ways in which different types of land grabs occur, how normalization happens, and how to struggle against these. It is for this reason that Jun Borras and Jenny Franco, together with Yunan Xu, Lorenza Arango, Moges Belay, and Tsegaye Moreda guest-edited a Special Issue of Globalizations journal, “The Spectacular land rush and its consequences”. The Special Issue has 10 articles, almost all of which are Open Access. These country case studies from Africa, Asia, and Latin America are seen from a global perspective. In their introductory paper, the editors concluded that while the highest estimate of the contemporary land grab scope placed at a quarter of a billion hectares is generally seen as an over-estimation, the authors in the Special Issue see it as an under-estimation. How and why is explained in their theoretical and methodological framing paper. A key step is differentiating the notion of land grabs from the concept of land rush. This conclusion requires us to rethink about the strategy in the struggle against land grabs and dispossession. The already difficult political task of building organized resistance against global land grabbing thus becomes even more so, for three reasons.
Ruins and webs
Many of the colonial and imperial era interconnections have persisted long after formal and direct colonial and imperial rule had ended. One of these enduring links is the cycles of land grabbing. At the heart of these evolving transnational connections is global capitalism in its uneven development. It is the idea of endless and limitless economic growth under capitalism that, in turn, requires an incessant global land frontier-making in search of cheap raw materials and labour. This requires grabbing control over lands and territories, usually from Indigenous Peoples, peasants, pastoralists and fishers.
Historically, commodities like sugarcane required the racialized and violent capturing of land and labour. Distant land and labour across Africa, Caribbean, and Europe were profoundly interlinked through such a commodity. Land grabs have persisted, and they remained interconnected globally. For example, soya from the Amazon region producing feed commodities consumed by cows in the Netherlands producing dairy sold to all corners of the world. In this way, the political economy and ecology of land use change in the Amazon, Netherlands and various corners of the world can only be fully understood through their complex interrelations. We see the same webs of land use change interconnections when we look at other commodities produced or extracted from one site, processed in another site, consumed in yet another site: palm oil, sugarcane and maize, or rare earth. All of these are part of every story of land grabs and flex crops. And if we include green grabs, like carbon sequestration projects such as REDD+, the extent and interconnections across places and societies are far more extensive.
At the height of international media reporting about the land rush, the highest estimate of the total hectarage affected by land grabbing was a quarter of a billion hectares of land. Some argued this was an over-estimation because many of the land deals in these projected sites were not operational or pursued. But the studies compiled in the Globalizations Special Issue show that this was not an over-estimation, but rather, an under-estimation. To put it into context, the total hectarage of cultivated land in world is more or less 1.5 billion hectares.
Dispossession and displacement are the most commonly identified negative impacts of land grabs, but there are others: including environmental destruction, especially because of the massive deforestation, and thus, greenhouse gas emissions, many of these land deals have caused; biodiversity loss; and massive disturbance in the human/nature relations resulting in ecological destruction.
Global
The global land rush and associated land grabbing are truly global, both as sites of land grabbing and as to the origin of land grabbers. This is a very different perspective compared to the early views suggesting that land grabbing was happening mainly in what is termed as ‘resource rich, finance-poor countries’, especially in Africa, such as Ethiopia and Mozambique. Subsequent studies show that land grabs were equally widespread in Latin America and the Caribbean and Asia, as well as in North America and Europe, and even inside China depending on how we understand land grabs.
Moreover, early reports on land grabs spotlighted the origin countries of land grabbers as the Gulf States, South Korea and China. But it did not take long for the international community to realize that the origins of land grabbers involve both the former colonial powers of Europe and North America. In 2015, the European Parliament commissioned a study on land grabs in EU, and in 2016, it commission a study on the EU-registered companies that are implicated in international land grabbing. Pensions funds in Europe and North America have been implicated in land grabs. This includes Harvard University and TIAA (Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America), as well as ABP in the Netherlands. Earlier, in 2013, the Transnational Institute (TNI) and European Coordination of Via Campesina (ECVC) published a study of 13 countries in Europe where land grabbing and land concentration have become a serious issue.
Invisibilization
The first report about global land grabs was in 2008, by the NGO Grain. Immediately afterwards, the issue gained massive media attention. At some point, perhaps around 2017, media reporting on it began to rapidly decline. Media reports feed into the spectacularization agenda by speculators, in a mutually reinforcing manner: media reports on spectacular land deals; land deals were spectacular partly because of media reports. The sharp decrease in the spectacle was also the result of this dual process: subsiding media interest, and vice versa. In her paper, Lorenza Arango examined the case of Altillanura in Colombia, and showed how spectacle and spectacularization work in unleashing a massive force of land grabbing – with all the hyperbolic claims of how this vast Colombian savanna was the new El Dorado – drawing some world-famous billionaires to come to this region to check it out.The decline in media reports does not mean land grabs have stopped or ceased to exist, or have declined. The spectacle in the land rush was over, and land grabbing continues, but it is no longer interesting for media to report. In this situation, land grabs are increasingly invisibilized. This invisibility of land grabbing is not because of the disappearance of or decrease in land deals; instead, it reflects the normalization of land grabbing through the routinization and institutionalization of mechanisms and processes of land control grabbing. Natacha Bruna and co-authors explain in their paper on Mozambique that despite the (temporary) failure of the hyper-projected enterprises in vast tracts of land, the grabbed lands never reverted back to the villagers, or the vast territory promised by government to be reallocated to big capital was never recommitted back to the ordinary villagers who protested against such state-con conceived large-scale land investment plan.
Pin pricks
More – not less – than a quarter of a billion hectares of land affected by global land grabbing. That is our conclusion. One of the reasons why we are confident to argue that the estimated quarter of a billion of hectares of land affected by land grabbing was an under-estimation was because such estimates were based on databanks that track mainly large-scale land investments. It is methodologically valid and important. But it misses a large part of the reality in the global land rush.
The global land rush unleashed a bewildering array of capitalists, aspiring capitalists, speculators, scammers and swindlers who find the possibility of windfall through small and medium scale land deals – driven by the same logic and spectacle that drive large-scale land investments. For example, the estimated quarter of a million acres of banana plantation in Kachin state in Myanmar happened through small-scale land transactions, as demonstrated in the paper by Doi Ra. Many of these lands were the homes, forest and farm plots embedded in village customary land systems, that villagers were forced to leave behind when they had to suddenly flee outbreaks of armed conflict -- thereby joining the ranks of ‘internally displaced persons’ (IDPs) due to war and militarization. Land brokers then swooped in offering a few dollars per hectare per year as lease rentals. In his paper, Sai Sam Kham shows that the massive transformation of many landscapes in Northern Shan State in Myanmar from biodiverse swidden agriculture into sedentary maize monoculture was not through large-scale corporate land grabs but through small-scale land deals. Many of the peasants involved in this transformation used to be mobile cultivators who were offered formal land registration or advance payments for modern production using artificial fertilizers and chemicals. In both cases from Myanmar, land grabs were like pin pricks – involving a half hectare or so in each instance, but when aggregated were just as phenomenal as a few instances of large-scale land deals. Itayosara Rojas Herrera points out that a significant part of land grabs in the Colombian Amazon happened precisely through pin prick land accumulation, and not involving large-scale corporate land acquisitions.
Elsewhere, there are medium-scale land deals that could involve 50 to 200 or so hectares per transaction benefitting an aspiring capitalist farmer or entrepreneur. When tallied together, their total land area can be more extensive than large-scale land deals combined, as Moges Belay shows in the case of Ethiopia. It is true that in Ethiopia, there are iconic large-scale land grabs that made it to the headlines of international media, such as the infamous Karuturi case in Gambella that the late multi-awarded journalist John Vidal had reported about. But the subsequent medium-scale land grabs unleashed by the land rush turned out to be far more extensive than combined total land area of corporate large-scale land grabs.
In these pin prick and medium-scale land grabs, we are not referring to the everyday land accumulation under global capitalism. We are referring to pin prick land grabs directly triggered by the global land rush. All of these are not captured by conventional land deals data-banking, and subsequent land governance policy debates. Organized resistance against these kinds of land deals is difficult to find.
Failed land grabs?
The Karuturi company originally got 300,000 hectares of land in Gambella, Ethiopia in 2008. This was later scaled down to 100,000 hectares. The company cleared the forest, bulldozed the land that are central to the livelihoods of pastoralists of ethnic minority communities. It started production, but then after a few years, stopped operation. In Cambodia, as studied by Xu et al., the Hengfu sugar company managed to get around the 10,000-hectare size limit to land deals, and consolidated a total of 43,000 hectares. The land is part of a territory used by an indigenous community. The land area was cleared and bulldozed, an extensive sugarcane plantation emerged, and a huge sugar mill established. A few years, it stopped operation.
There are many cases like these two land deals worldwide. In Myanmar, for example, the projected enterprises in the grabbed lands (estimated to be more or less 3 million acres) never materialized. In fact, many land investors were interested only in extracting timber, and after getting what they wanted, they left the land abandoned. In some cases, some sections of the community might informally find their way back into the land and reclaim portions of it, which is what Ndesanjo and Engström explain happened in the case of Tanzania. But more generally, these lands never revert back to the villagers. This was the case in Karuturi and Hengfu land deals.
These land deals are loosely referred to as failed land deals, failed land grabs, or non-operational land grabs. After major reports of the stoppage of the enterprise operation, we do not hear anything about these cases any more. This is one of the bases of the argument that estimates of the scope of land deals were over-estimated because many were failed land deals. But Karuturi and Hengfu, and three-fourths of the land deals in Myanmar – despite the failure of the projected capitalist enterprises – were perfect land grabs: lands never reverted back to the villagers. It is necessary and urgent to put the spotlight back to these widespread cases worldwide in order to help the dispossessed in their struggles to regain their land. Despite what is implied by what they are called, these so-called ‘failed’ land deals nonetheless do have concrete socio-economic and environmental impacts. In the Karuturi case, wild animals started to attack villagers goats and cattle after their natural forest habitat were bulldozed and cleared. Much of the failed land deals in Myanmar are scenes of deforestation. In the case study by Rojas in the Colombian Amazon, water supply to villagers was destroyed, causing more suffering for the villagers now forced to search for new sources of water further afield.
Resistance
The political reactions from below to land grabs are diverse, as Hall et al. demonstrated. Organized and overt forms of resistance are rare. Such resistance requires many elements before the dispossessed are able to get organized and engage in defiant confrontation against their oppressors. Among the elements needed for organized protests to emerge are the availability of external allies as well as favourable media reports. Thus, while there were reports about many instances of resistance against land grabbing, we do not see contentious protests and resistance by the affected local communities in every land grab.
The already difficult political task of organizing resistance and protests against land grabs has become even more difficult for three reasons:
(1) The pervasive form of land grabs, that is, pin prick and medium-scale land deals – when seen from individual instances are never seen as land grabs and worth any political attention. Organizing so many villagers -- each of them with very small parcels of land implicated -- is not easy, and using the usual logic deployed in campaigns against big corporate land grabs with extra-economic coercion will not work in this type of land grabs.
(2) The perception of a category of so-called failed land deals has undermined the momentum of earlier political campaigns against land grabs. It is not easy to start gathering allies and motivating media reports on a story that was already abandoned.
(3) The routinization of widespread land deals that included attempts at settling land grabs which are essentially political through administrative processes, such as minimum compensation (for being dispossessed), providing alternative resettlement or relocation, and wider campaigns for formalization of land claims so that villagers can enter into negotiations with land investors. Such routinization resulted in the subsequent invisibilization of land grabs: land grabs continue to happen but many of the shapers of public opinion no longer consider these as land grabs, but as routine land transactions.
Even more dangerous future
We are in a tricky political conjuncture and dangerous historical moment in relation to the latest cycle of global land grabbing. It is tricky because it is not straightforward to bring a popular global perception that indeed land grabs are wider and ongoing. It is even more dangerous because it is likely that global land grabs are likely to expand as global capitalism requires an incessant land frontier-making to support its absurd idea of endless and limitless profit-making. Just in the climate action front, many of the market-based solutions requires access to and control over land, to recast and reallocate land control from ordinary villagers and Indigenous Peoples to corporate capital. For example, the latest discussion in the Conference of the Parties (COP) in Belem in 2025 about land-based market solutions to climate change, including the so-called Tropical Forest Forever, will require the recasting of the politics of land in at least a billion hectares of land – without actually addressing the causes of climate change.
The source of hope in this situation is that there is a huge potential for widening cross-class, cross-sectoral and internationalist alliance against global land grabbing – composed of agrarian, climate, environmental and labour justice social movements and their allies.