Food prices have been hitting all-time highs month after month in the past two years. In fact, recent estimates suggest that the real prices—actual price compared to people’s capacity to buy them—are at their highest now than at any other time in modern history.
And the fallout is catastrophic, especially for the rural poor. People today are more likely to die from hunger than from the coronavirus.
Hunger has been on the rise even before the pandemic, with one in nine people globally experiencing going to bed on an empty stomach. The current neoliberal food system has not only failed to eradicate hunger but has worked against the food producers and the most vulnerable.
Ironically, most of those who experience hunger are the food producers themselves—landless peasants, rural women, smallholder farmers, indigenous peoples, fisherfolk, agricultural workers, Dalits, and pastoralists.
The global rise in land inequality, land concentration in the hands of the wealthy, and landlessness have made rural food producers the most vulnerable to hunger, food price shocks, conflict, and poverty. Over two-thirds of the world’s extreme poor are small farmers, agricultural workers, and landless peasants.
Smallholder farmers account for 84% of all farms worldwide yet operate only around 12% of all agricultural land. Meanwhile, landlords—owning the largest 1% of farms in size—operate over 70% of the global farmland. This increasing inequality results in rural demise and a rise in landlessness among farmers.
Land in the hands of TNCs and landlords is not only a threat to the lives and livelihood of farmers but is also a threat to biodiversity and climate adaptation. Yet, “new” land-based solutions touted by the policymakers facilitate if not encourage more land acquisition and land inequality.
Worse, these landgrabs and forced evictions often come with militarism, culture of impunity, draconian laws, and rampant human rights violations.
Today, we are in the midst of a perfect storm brewing the “new wave” of landgrabs—ongoing and looming, directly dispossessing peasant communities of their lands, rights, and dignity.
Landgrabbing has been on the rise in the past few years, facilitating the greater concentration of land in the hands of a few elites, especially in the Global South.
As it stands, there are seven important factors or impetuses that are facilitating this “new wave” of landgrabs redolent to the 2008-2012 land rush.
First, the rise in food prices is not only a direct assault on the capacity of poor people to eat thrice a day but is pushing land meant for food to become more valuable. In fact, in the past two years alone when food prices reached a 10-year record high and are rising, rich countries are snapping up food futures and making preferential deals with food-producing countries.
By the end of 2021, China through its grain trade TNC COFCO has hoarded over half the world’s grain reserve—up to 69% of the global maize supply in the first half of 2022.
Considering that over two-thirds of those in extreme poverty are landless farmers, smallholder farmers, and agricultural workers, the untenable rise in food prices is a double whammy for the rural poor.