The Support to Responsible Agricultural Investments (S2RAI) Project promotes internationally recognized principles and guidelines to ensure food and land tenure security for communities in the context of large-scale commercial land investment as well as strengthen the institutional frameworks and coordination structures at federal and regional levels in relations to responsible agricultural investment in Ethiopia.

In advance of the release of the World Bank’s 2019 Enabling the Business of Agriculture (EBA) report;the Oakland Institute exposes the Bank’s new scheme to privatize land in the developing world. It details how the Bank’s prescribed reforms;via a new land indicator in the EBA project;promotes large-scale land acquisitions and the expansion of agribusinesses in the developing world. Initiated as a pilot in 38 countries in 2017;the land indicator is expected to be expanded to 80 countries in 2019. The project is funded by the US and UK governments and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Proponents of large-scale agriculture have put forward a multitude of reasons to support the advancement of this approach to farming. Large-scale agriculture is seen as the only way to “modernise” and “develop” the land;to close the yield gap;and to ensure food availability. Furthermore;socio-economic outcomes are assumed to be higher under the management of large-scale farming operations than on small-scale farms. This study reviewed scientific literature on the microeconomic and social effects of large-scale land acquisitions in Sub-Saharan Africa.

This paper analyzes the adoption behavior of smallholder farmers using comparable plot-level duration data for Kenya and The Philippines. We find that adoption behavior is strongly linked to the process of land ownership transfer. This relationship is found both for data from Kenya and The Philippines and is robust to the inclusion of observed and unobserved village, household, plot, and time factors.

Large-scale land acquisition projects by foreign investors, also known as “land grabbing,” raise difficult questions about the processes of valuing land in Sub-Saharan Africa that the current literature does not sufficiently explore. Land acquisitions can help developing countries like Tanzania achieve their economic and development goals. Nonetheless, it can also threaten local livelihoods and well-being due to displacement, lack of access to natural capital, and conflicts between land users.

This Country Assessment (CA) for Azerbaijan is prepared under the ADB Regional Technical Assistance (RETA) 7433: Mainstreaming Land Acquisition and Resettlement Safeguards in the Central and West Asia Region. The RETA objective is to foster more effective infrastructure development in the region through the improvement of land acquisition and resettlement (LAR) practices.This country assessment entailed an analysis of project documents, a review of national legislation and questionnaires/interviews with representatives of state agencies, and LAR-affected communities.

L’accaparement des terres au Tchad est un phénomène nouveau, massif, et accumulateur visant le contrôle de large partie de terres riches agricoles. Le contexte tchadien correspond plus ou moins aux critères globalement admis pour définir l’accaparement des terres : la taille des emprises, les acteurs (passifs ou actifs), le contrôle des procédures, la légalité des acquisitions et l’utilisation des terres cédées. Les investisseurs étrangers se sont encore peu intéressés au foncier agricole tchadien. Le phénomène est porté par une classe d’investisseurs locaux.

This publication serves as an introduction to a collection of articles published in the African Studies Review. It discusses the implications of as well as the question through what actors, processes, and relationships land deals become stalled or partially implemented. The reviewed articles draw on long-term, in-depth ethnographic research of land deals in Senegal, Tanzania, and Zambia. 

After more than ten years of hectic debates on international ‘land grabs’, academic interest in collapsed land deals or projects with unexpected results is growing. According to the Land Matrix, Tanzania is one of the target countries for such deals, with a number ‘abandoned’ or delayed and projects whose status is unknown. Labelling land deals as ‘failed’ poses conceptual and methodological challenges as long as the criteria for ‘failure’ are undefined.

The land rush has remained, and is likely to remain, a significant global phenomenon despite waning international media attention. The scope of the phenomenon is likely to be wider than previously thought.