Over the last decade civil society organizations and activist-scholars have pointed to “land grabbing” as one of the central issues to have emerged in the world food system. In particular, land grabbing was identified as a new and immediate international development issue by the non-governmental organization GRAIN in 2008 (www.farmlandgrab.org). Since that time land grabbing has generated a voluminous literature of a highly variable quality—some scholarship is outstanding and some is shoddy (Oya, 2013). This contribution seeks to clarify what constitutes land grabbing and why it takes place, as well as the key challenge that scholars and civil society activists face in confronting land grabbing in the context of the question of feeding the world. The central argument is that when a structuralist political economy is used to interpret the land grab phenomenon, it becomes analytically clear that contemporary land deals demonstrate that dispossession by displacement, or what has historically been known as the “so-called primitive accumulation”, has been resurrected as an accumulation strategy of global capitalism witnessing, for the first time in decades, the limits to the market. It is an accumulation strategy that cannot, however, deliver food justice or deal with the climate emergency.

Les chercheurs doivent citer ce travail comme suit :

• Akram-Lodhi, A. H., (2025), "LGAR - Land grabs, the agrarian question and the corporate food regime", HSSCommons: (DOI: 10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.94)

  Copy Citation | Export metadata as... | JSON | CSV | RO-Crate | BibTex | EndNote

1. agrarian question
2. food regimes
3. land grabbing

Original publication: Akram-Lodhi, A. Haroon. "LGAR - Land grabs, the agrarian question and the corporate food regime." Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des études sur l'alimentation, vol. 2, no. 2, 2015, pp. 233-241. DOI: 10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.94. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des études sur l'alimentation. Copyright © the author(s). Work published in CFS/RCÉA prior to and including Vol. 8, No. 3 (2021) is licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY license. Work published in Vol. 8, No. 4 (2021) and after is licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY-SA license. For details, see creativecommons.org/licenses/.