Land-grabbing in Africa

Abstract

Land-grabbing in Africa refers to the purchase or acquisition of use rights to produce food, biofuels or animal feed. Over the last 20 years, private, foreign investors and governments have often secured African land as investments, or to help meet their own national food security and biofuel needs (Daniel and Mittal, 2009). Although widely acknowledged as a global phenomenon, land-grabbing is particularly prevalent in Africa given the continent’s favourable biophysical resources and its lack of existing large-scale, industrialised agriculture and plantations compared to other continents (Anseeuw, 2013; Cotula et al., 2014). Many Africa governments, some with weak land tenure regulations and..