Centering labor in the land grab debate

Abstract

Placing labor at the center of the global ‘land-grab’ debate helps sharpen critical insights at two scales. At the scale of agricultural enterprises, a labor perspective highlights the jobs generated, and the rewards received, by people who work in and around large farms. This approach guides my critical reading of the report prepared by a World Bank team that argues for large-scale land acquisition as a way to reduce poverty. Using data from within the report itself, I show why poverty reduction is a very unlikely result. I develop the argument further by drawing on research in colonial and contemporary Indonesia, where large-scale plantations and associated smallholder contract schemes have a long history. A labor perspective is also relevant at the national and transnational scale, where it highlights the predicament of people whose labor is not needed by the global capitalist system. In much of the global South, the anticipated transition from the farm to factory has not taken place and education offers no solution, as vast numbers of educated people are unemployed. Unless vast numbers of jobs are created, or a global basic income grant is devised to redistribute the wealth generated in highly productive but labor-displacing ventures, any program that robs rural people of their foothold on the land must be firmly rejected.