The land grab and corporate food regime restructuring

Abstract

Land grab appears to be a phenomenal expression of deepening contradictions in the corporate food regime. In particular, the end of cheap food (signaled in the 2008 ‘food crisis’) has generated renewed interest in agriculture for development on the part of the development industry, matched by a rising interest in offshore land investments, driven by governments securing food and fuel exports and financiers speculating on commodity futures and land price inflation. This paper interprets these developments as illusory solutions to a fundamental accumulation crisis of the neoliberal project. While this new (and final?) enclosure registers a restructuring of the food regime, as its geopolitical relations and productive content re-centers on Southern land and an emergent bioeconomic imperative, it is likely to only buy time (and space) in the short run for political and economic elites and a global consuming class. In the longer run, the attempt to resolve food regime contradictions by a spatial fix may well be catastrophic.

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