In terms of scale, the land rush has unleashed the interlinked categories: corporate large-scale, non-corporate pin prick and medium-scale land grabs. For the local population, the latter two types are ubiquitous parts of the land rush, yet these tend to be invisible to media and academic researchers. These are land ‘control grabbing’ done in a variety of ways: legal and illegal, openly or by stealth, with or without use of extra-economic coercion, stealing or leasing, and mostly small-scale in terms of land area – but when aggregated, the total area of land could be quite extensive. These transform rural societies intensively and extensively, often causing the demise of agrarian societies in the manner of death by a thousand cuts. Because of their often amorphous character, these instances of control grabs are not capturable by databases on land deals. Highlighting this type of land grabs helps us re-centre our analysis on the nature of the land rush, and the workings of global capitalism.

Introduction

Contemporary global land grabbing has been one of the most significant issues in contemporary global capitalism and how extractivism has unfolded during the past two decades (McKay et al., Citation2021; Neef et al., Citation2023; Oliveira et al., Citation2021; Wolford et al., Citation2024; Ye et al., Citation2020; Zoomers, Citation2010).Footnote1 Attempts to define land grabbing have not elicited consensus among observers of land grabs. We build on the notion of political economy of land ‘control grabbing’ (Peluso & Lund, Citation2011).

The dominant land grabs literature that emerged during the past decade or so has been focused on large-scale land acquisitions that are often corporate-driven. These are formally bounded cases: geographically, with specific cadastral scope of the land being enclosed, usually those from 1,000 hectares and above; sectorally, with specific land and commodity use of the land being categorized, such as for food production, rare earth mining and carbon sequestration; legally, which pertains to a specific legal arrangement under various formal institutional arrangements (purchase, lease, joint venture, and so on); temporally, which means limiting the scope of inquiry to the start date of the land deal up to the time of one’s databank or analysis of the case, and; institutionally, in terms of regulation in which national and/or international regulatory institutions are deployed to categorize and examine a particular case.

Corporate operational and ‘failed’ large-scale land deals

Demarcation of land deal cases – case by case, plot by plot, land title by land title, prospector by prospector – is important in making such land acquisitions legible for purposes of large-scale databanking, media reporting, advocacy work by civil society organizations, and state regulation, as well as for ease and feasibility of academic research inquiry. Demarcation in this way also allows for quantification of land deals, something that is taken as important in weighing the significance of land transactions in politics and economy, or in raising funds for civil society advocacy work. Such demarcation also enables categorization of land deal status, namely, operational and non-operational (or ‘failed’) land deals. These two categories have captivated the interest of land grab observers over time, leading to diverse and competing conclusions as to what these terms mean and imply, or why and how large databases on land deals are useful or not. Our view is that this approach to tracking and examining corporate land deals is relevant and important, both the databanking approaches used to track and aggregate these (with caveats on some weaknesses and flaws of the crowd-sourcing approach to databanking), and analyses and studies that use such datasets. Using this data and method allow us to understand the character, pace, condition, trajectory, and impact of global land grabbing – but only partially and depending on how we frame our research questions. Corporate land deals can be differentiated in to two categories: operational and non-operational. Operational land deals are corporate land deals that were concluded and in which capitalist enterprises have been established. Non-operational land deals are land deals that were concluded, but for various reasons capitalist enterprises were not pursued, or were pursued but were later stalled or stopped. On some occasions, the operational and non-operational status of the enterprises are partial, and thus, in some cases, this question of operational and non-operational status is a matter of degree. It is important to emphasize the empirical and analytical distinction between the land deal and the capitalist enterprises that emerge, or not, from a land deal site; these two are distinct even when they are related. Thus, when the term ‘failed land deals’ is used but there is no qualifier as to which of the two (land deal or capitalist enterprise) has failed, then it does not help clarify the issue at hand, empirically or analytically. It can very well be that a capitalist enterprise has failed, but the land deal or land grab was successful and had been completed (Borras et al., Citation2022; see also Baird, Citation2020; Broegaard et al., Citation2022; Chung & Gagne, Citation2021; Cochrane et al., Citation2024, for other similar cases).

In addition, to the two types of land deals in terms of status, it is important to understand the three of types of land deals in terms of scale: namely large-scale corporate land deals (explained above), small-scale pin prick, and neither-big-corporate-nor-pinprick land deal. The latter can exist without a land rush, as history of capitalism in different societies show; yet, they could also unfold in the context of a land rush.

Pin prick land grabs

By ‘pin prick’ land grabs we mean those typically small-scale, scattered, often by stealth and almost invisible instances of land grabbing that when aggregated can become large-scale in terms of the capital involved: widespread and ubiquitous and thus large-scale in geographic terms (Borras & Franco, Citation2024). The notion of scale here is relative: small-scale can mean two to two hundred hectares of land depending on local social structures and institutions and the conditions of an unfolding land rush (Land Matrix starts with land deals from 200 ha. and bigger). By stealth here is also relative: they can be obvious for everyone to see in the local communities where such processes happen, but due to their scattered nature, these individual instances may not be that apparent to outsiders. Yet, combined, these small-scale instances of land grabbing may do what corporate land grabs do: change land use and land control extensively. Pin prick land grabbing instances often happen without the direct involvement of corporations, are most commonly driven by powerful individuals or non-corporate groups. In many communities where this category has unfolded, the agrarian and ecological transformations that it caused to happen are far-reaching, for example transforming customary swidden agriculture-based agroecological zones into monotonous monoculture landscapes based on individual property and farm operation, or transforming a nomadic pastoralist community`s vast grazing area of meadows and forest into a single vast monoculture or a collage of small and medium capitalist agricultural or industrial forest enterprises. Where these pin prick land grabs happen, they can lead to the undermining of the integrity of a pre-existing agroecological zone, the basis of human/nonhuman life in a particular socio-agroecological system. It is essentially the death of agrarian communities by a thousand cuts.

Pin prick land grabbing happens all the time, everywhere, under a generalized commodification of nature and land within global capitalism. This type of everyday accumulation is well studied in agrarian and development studies more generally. But what we are specifically focused on in our study is the pin prick land grabbing directly associated with the contemporary land rush, which is in turn associated with financialization of agriculture, food and nature (Clapp & Isakson, Citation2018; Fairbairn, Citation2020; Ouma, Citation2016). These can either be a direct off-shoot of the land rush, or simply run in parallel to corporate-driven land grabs. This category is under-studied in the contemporary scholarship on land grabbing, with only a few exceptions including Friis and Nielsen (Citation2016), Beban and Gorman (Citation2017) and Xu (Citation2020).

Non-corporate medium-scale land grabs

The third type is the in-between category, namely, neither large-scale corporate nor pin prick: medium-size land deals that have the elements of both corporate big land deals and non-corporate pin pricks. These are lands that could be in the range of two hundred to one thousand ha, but are mainly driven by individual aspiring capitalist farmers or cattle ranchers. This may not be as widespread as pin prick, but in settings where they gained ground, such as Ethiopia and Colombia, their combined area can be extensive. This type of land size and investment is an organic element in capitalist development of agriculture in most societies. But our interest in this paper is to see how existing processes in this land category coincided or were triggered in part by the land rush (this is the same interest we have on pin pricks). Land accumulation and land grabbing, big/corporate and smal-scale/non-corporate happen during a land rush – but these also happen during non-land rush periods.Footnote2

Co-constitutive corporate and non-corporate large, medium and pin prick land grabs

The matrix of land transactions (status and scale) not only exist simultaneously, but that the three are co-constitutive of one another in the context of a land rush. It is relevant to differentiate ‘land rush’ from ‘land grabbing’. For us, a land rush is that ‘chaotic, relatively short-lived historical juncture marked by a sudden surge in demand for land, accompanied by an extremely speculative and competitive, often violent and convulsive transition from one set of rules on commodity and land politics to another` (Borras & Franco, Citation2024, p. 3). In the case of both land prospecting by land grabbers and investment prospecting by those who claim authority over vast tracts of land, there will be uncertainty about where, when, and how much land is feasible for capitalist investments. It is partly this uncertainty that triggers the combined speculation and spectacularization, causing key actors in the land rush to try to get ahead of everyone to get lands or to secure investors. There is thus a tendency to deliberately make hyperbolic projections about land supply and investment possibilities that ultimately leads to many of the projected land deals fizzling out once the reasonable and feasible level and extent of land and investments starts to settle. It is for this reason that many cases of land deals are bound to not be pursued, and in the cases of initially concluded land deals, enterprises are bound to be cancelled, withdrawn or scaled down.

The other effect of a land rush is that a wide array of actors, often non-corporate, join the bandwagon of the land scramble. The fevered frenzy. They are individual scammers, swindlers, speculators, brokers, middlemen, and entrepreneurs who are attracted to and seduced by the same promise of a windfall that attracted corporate participants in the land rush. These actors operate illegally or legally, by stealth or openly, by force or with consent. These are the pin prick and the neither-big-corporate-nor-pinprick medium-size land grabs. These land transactions include distress sales, land brokering, theft, coercion, swindling, contract grower arrangements, etc., and are a key element of the frenzied land rush, yet they have rarely been examined in the context of the latter. Historically, this has been observed in the so-called ‘Wild West’ around the California gold rush and construction of the modern California agriculture conjuncture (McWilliams, Citation2000 [orig. 1935]; Holliday, Citation1999; Ngai, Citation2021).

Pin prick and medium-scale land grabs in the context of a land rush can be understood in four ways. First, in capitalism, commodification of nature, especially land, is underway worldwide, albeit unevenly spatially and temporally (O`Connor, Citation1989). Before the surge that defines a land rush, there are already pin prick and medium-scale land transactions. These are then converted to become a key element, and scaled up with great momentum, in a land rush. Second, state-enabled and directed commodification of land can happen through corporate large-scale or small-scale non-corporate processes. Both of these categories have a faster pace and wider reach, and are subsumed by generalized speculation, during a land rush. Third, a state-initiated commodification of land ‘from above’ through large-scale land grabs is watched by, and triggers, speculation not only among the targeted corporate actors but among the general public as well. Particular individuals are lured by the spectacle of the land rush (Tsing, Citation2000) and join the process in various capacities – as land buyers, speculators, brokers, moneylenders, adjudicators, surveyors, map makers, cadastre recorders, con artists who make fake documents and notaries, and all sorts of scammers, swindlers and thieves. Some of these aspects were documented and examined by Sud (Citation2014) on land brokers and Levien (Citation2021) on ‘land mafia’ in India.

The implication of our argument is that in fact we cannot fully account for and understand land grabbing without accounting for the full status/scale matrix of land grabs. The implication of this is that analyses of processes and impacts of land grabbing – and the land rush – to be comprehensive, have to go beyond the specific corporate cases demarcated spatially, sectorally, legally, temporally and institutionally. This does not deny the relevance and significance of land plot-by-land plot analysis of demarcated cases; it only means that if we want to understand the system-wide impacts of land grabbing and its location in capitalism, then we need to go beyond the demarcated scope of specific cases, and focus on a broader landscape, or agroecological zone, at least.

We build our argument with evidence from empirical cases of non-corporate medium-scale and pin prick land grabbing in Myanmar, China, Ethiopia and Colombia, based on fieldwork by co-authors during the period of 2015–2023 through multiple field visits. This paper is best read together with the different contributions to the Globalizations journal Special Issue ‘The specutacular land rush and its consequences’ for deeper empirical support and wider conceptual perspective.

Review the full study here