Death of agrarian societies by a thousand cuts: ‘Pin prick’ land grabs and the land rush

A key element in the global land rush is the everyday ‘pin prick’ land grabs and accumulation that appear everywhere in the context of a land rush. For the local population, these are ubiquitous parts of the land rush, yet these tend to be nearly invisible to media and academic researchers. These are ‘control grabbing’ of land and nature done in a variety of ways: legal and illegal, openly or by stealth, with or without use of extra-economic coercion, stealing or leasing, resulting in expulsion or subsumption, some through contract farming others through joint ventures, usually involving non-corporate grabbers, and mostly small-scale in terms of land area – but when aggregated altogether at a landscape, the total area of land could easily be bigger than corporate
land deals. It transforms rural societies intensely and extensively, often bringing demise to particular agrarian societies in the manner of death by a thousand pin pricks. Because of their amorphous character, these instances of control grabs are not captured or are not capturable by databases on land deals. Thus, database-oriented and corporate land deal-centric studies miss out on a key element of the land rush. Bringing in this type of land grabs helps us re-center our analysis on the nature of the land rush, and the more complete workings of global capitalism.