The Land Question

Thoughts on oligarchy, part XIII

The twenty-first century has witnessed global land theft on an unprecedented scale, particularly in the years directly following the historic events of 2008. Overlapping crises of the financial, food, water, and energy systems, among others, led to a frantic global land rush that took hundreds of millions of hectares of arable land from some of the poorest people in the world. The pattern of global landholdings is extremely concentrated. A paper published in 2021 noted that “[t]he largest 1% of farms in the world (those larger than 50 ha) operate more than 70% of the world’s farmland,” a situation that poses a looming threat to global food security. Today, while approximately 84 percent of the world’s individual farms are smaller than two hectares, these amount to little more than one-tenth of the total land dedicated to farming. This means that the land owned by the top 1 percent of farms surpasses the total held by millions of smallholders the world over.

At the peak of the land rush following the food crisis in 2007 and 2008, a single year in 2009 saw transactions worth almost 60 million hectares of farmland; to give you a sense of how much land this is, California’s total size (that is, not only its arable land) is about 42 million hectares, with Texas at about 70 million hectares. By 2011, an Oxfam briefing paper reported that 227 million hectares, which is about the size of Western Europe, had been transferred in a ten-year period from 2001. Efforts to empirically quantify land theft have produced numbers all over the map, even for relatively short periods within the past couple of decades. Discrepancies owe to a number of factors. Particularly when researching deals in countries whose political and legal systems lack transparency, reliable information is often unavailable. Lower ranges typically signal reliance on databases that count only those deals officially recognized by government actors, whereas higher values like Oxfam’s 2011 number also bring in data from civil society groups, nonprofits, the press, etc. By anyone’s measure, state-sanctioned land theft is a global crisis and goes by many names, none of which are politically neutral.¹

The American land reformer and individualist anarchist Joshua K. Ingalls argued that people forced from their land were “excluded from their rightful patrimony,” and for that reason could not be in a position to enter a rational contract.