Death of agrarian societies by a thousand cuts: non-corporate ‘pin prick’ and medium-scale land grabs

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

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.