Land Grabbing and Environmental Crime

Land grabbing and environmental crime intersect wherever large-scale land acquisitions, whether by domestic elites, foreign investors, or state actors, displace existing land users and convert land to intensive commercial use in ways that violate customary rights, environmental regulations, or both. The phenomenon gained substantial international attention following a wave of large-scale agricultural and resource extraction land deals beginning in the mid-2000s, often targeting land in developing nations with weak tenure security and limited capacity to resist externally driven land use change. Green criminology treats land grabbing as a distinctive case for examining how legal ambiguity itself can facilitate environmental harm, since much land grabbing occurs through transactions that are technically lawful under formal property law even as they violate customary rights and produce substantial ecological damage. The discussion that follows examines the definitional and legal ambiguity surrounding land grabbing, patterns and drivers of the practice, its environmental and social consequences, and the theoretical accounts explaining its persistence.

Introduction

Large-scale land acquisitions accelerated substantially following the 2007 to 2008 global food price crisis, which prompted food-importing nations and private investors to pursue overseas agricultural land as a hedge against future price volatility and supply insecurity. Saturnino Borras and Jennifer Franco’s influential analysis of global land grabbing and agrarian change trajectories documents how this wave of acquisitions concentrated heavily in regions with weak formal land tenure documentation, where customary land use rights held by local and indigenous communities often lacked the legal recognition necessary to resist externally negotiated land transfers (Borras & Franco, 2012).

The term land grabbing itself carries contested meaning within the scholarly literature, since the practice spans a considerable range from transactions involving genuine, if imbalanced, negotiation with affected communities to outright forcible displacement conducted with minimal or fraudulent consultation. James Fairhead, Melissa Leach, and Ian Scoones’s analysis of what they term green grabbing extends this framework to acquisitions conducted explicitly for conservation or environmental purposes, arguing that even land acquisitions framed as environmentally beneficial can replicate the same displacement dynamics documented in more conventional agricultural and extractive land grabbing (Fairhead, Leach, & Scoones, 2012).

Defining Land Grabbing and Its Legal Ambiguity

Land grabbing lacks a single agreed legal definition, complicating both empirical measurement of its scale and any straightforward criminological classification of the practice as criminal or merely harmful. Saturnino Borras and Jennifer Franco’s analytical framework distinguishes land grabbing from ordinary land transactions primarily through the presence of significant power asymmetry between the acquiring party and the affected land users, an asymmetry that can render a transaction exploitative even when it satisfies the formal legal requirements of the jurisdiction in which it occurs (Borras & Franco, 2012). This power-asymmetry-based definition places land grabbing squarely within green criminology’s broader harm-based analytical tradition, since it treats the practice as criminologically significant independent of its formal legal status.

Customary land tenure systems, under which many indigenous and rural communities have historically held and managed land without formal title recognized by national legal systems, create a particular vulnerability to land grabbing, since land nominally classified as unowned or state-owned under formal law may in practice be occupied and actively used by communities whose claims receive no legal protection. Rob White’s transnational environmental crime scholarship situates this tenure gap within a broader pattern in which legal categories developed within one governance tradition, typically reflecting colonial-era property law, fail to recognize land use arrangements organized under entirely different customary principles (White, 2011).

The line between legal and illegal land acquisition becomes particularly difficult to establish when acquisitions proceed through formally compliant processes that nonetheless involve inadequate consultation, coerced consent, or corrupt facilitation by officials empowered to approve land transfers. This definitional ambiguity means that a considerable share of land grabbing, even when producing outcomes indistinguishable in practice from outright illegal seizure, may never generate criminal liability under the formal legal frameworks governing the affected jurisdiction.

Piers Beirne and Nigel South’s edited volume on green criminology situates this legal ambiguity problem within the field’s broader foundational concern with harms that escape formal criminal classification despite producing consequences comparable to conventionally recognized crime, treating land grabbing’s definitional contestation as illustrative of a pattern recurring across multiple green criminology subject areas rather than as a problem unique to land acquisition specifically (Beirne & South, 2007).

Patterns and Drivers of Land Grabbing

Agricultural land acquisition represents the most extensively documented category of land grabbing, driven substantially by food-importing nations and private agricultural investors seeking to secure production capacity outside volatile international commodity markets following the 2007 to 2008 food price crisis. Saturnino Borras and Jennifer Franco’s empirical mapping of these acquisitions found substantial concentration in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, regions combining relatively favorable agricultural conditions with comparatively weak formal land tenure protection for existing land users (Borras & Franco, 2012).

Resource extraction, including mining and increasingly biofuel production, constitutes a related but analytically distinct driver of large-scale land acquisition, often overlapping geographically with agricultural land grabbing given that regions attractive for extraction frequently also possess agricultural potential that acquiring parties may pursue simultaneously through diversified land use plans. David Rodríguez Goyes and Nigel South’s analysis of green criminology’s engagement with Latin American land dispossession documents how extractive industry land acquisition in the region has frequently proceeded alongside, rather than instead of, agricultural conversion, compounding displacement pressure on affected communities (Goyes & South, 2016).

Conservation-driven land acquisition, encompassing the green grabbing phenomenon James Fairhead, Melissa Leach, and Ian Scoones identified, adds a further dimension in which land is acquired explicitly for environmental protection or carbon offset purposes, yet can replicate the same displacement dynamics documented in conventional land grabbing when affected communities are excluded from land they had previously used for subsistence or cultural purposes (Fairhead, Leach, & Scoones, 2012). This conservation-framed acquisition complicates straightforward environmental narratives that treat land protection and community welfare as necessarily aligned interests.

Environmental and Social Consequences

Environmental consequences of land grabbing vary considerably depending on the acquisition’s intended use, ranging from large-scale monoculture agricultural conversion that can deplete soil quality and reduce biodiversity relative to prior land use patterns, to extractive operations generating pollution and habitat destruction comparable to other corporate environmental crime categories examined throughout this discussion. Tim Boekhout van Solinge’s research on deforestation and land use change documents how land grabbing frequently facilitates forest clearance beyond what the acquiring party’s stated land use plan would formally require, since access infrastructure developed for the primary acquisition purpose often enables subsequent unauthorized expansion into adjacent forested areas (Boekhout van Solinge, 2010).

Displacement of existing land users generates social consequences extending well beyond the immediate loss of land access, including disruption of subsistence livelihoods, loss of cultural and spiritual connections to specific land areas, and in many documented cases, violent conflict between displaced communities and either the acquiring party’s security personnel or state security forces deployed to enforce the transfer. Rob White’s eco-global criminology situates these social consequences within a broader environmental justice framework, arguing that land grabbing’s harms fall disproportionately on populations already marginalized within their national political and economic systems, compounding rather than creating new patterns of inequality (White, 2011).

Long-term food security consequences for affected regions have generated particular scholarly concern, since land acquisitions oriented toward export production for the acquiring nation or investor can redirect agricultural capacity away from local food needs even in regions already experiencing food insecurity, a dynamic critics have characterized as directly contrary to the food security rationale often cited to justify the original acquisition.

Theoretical Explanations for Land Grabbing

Political economy frameworks explain land grabbing as a predictable consequence of global capital seeking new avenues for accumulation as previously accessible investment opportunities become saturated, with land in weakly governed regions representing a comparatively underexploited asset class attractive to both private investors and food-insecure state actors. Saturnino Borras and Jennifer Franco’s agrarian change framework situates this dynamic within longer historical patterns of capital’s geographic expansion into new territories whenever existing accumulation opportunities face diminishing returns, treating contemporary land grabbing as a continuation rather than a novel departure from this historical pattern (Borras & Franco, 2012).

Treadmill of production theory, associated with Paul Stretesky, Michael Long, and Michael Lynch, extends to land grabbing through its account of how continuous economic growth pressure drives expansion into previously unexploited territory as existing production capacity reaches its limits, positioning land grabbing as a spatial manifestation of the same structural growth imperative documented across other corporate and state environmental offending examined throughout this discussion (Stretesky, Long, & Lynch, 2013).

Postcolonial and critical legal frameworks emphasize how land grabbing frequently exploits property law structures with origins in colonial-era governance, under which land use systems organized according to indigenous and customary principles were systematically excluded from formal legal recognition. David Rodríguez Goyes and Nigel South’s analysis argues that contemporary land grabbing in many respects continues this colonial pattern under new economic actors, since the same legal categories that facilitated historical dispossession continue to enable contemporary large-scale land acquisition with minimal formal legal obstacle (Goyes & South, 2016).

Conclusion

Land grabbing and environmental crime together illustrate how legal ambiguity itself can function as a facilitating condition for substantial environmental and social harm, since much documented land grabbing proceeds through formally compliant transactions that nonetheless produce displacement and ecological damage comparable to more clearly illegal environmental offending examined elsewhere in this discussion. The phenomenon’s acceleration following the 2007 to 2008 food price crisis, combined with its extension into conservation-framed green grabbing, demonstrates how diverse economic and even environmental motivations can converge on similar patterns of displacement and dispossession.

Theoretical accounts ranging from political economy to treadmill of production theory and postcolonial legal analysis offer complementary explanations for land grabbing’s persistence, each highlighting different structural conditions that continue to make land in weakly governed regions attractive for large-scale acquisition regardless of the acquiring party’s stated purpose. Continued attention to the tenure security gaps that enable this practice remains essential to any sustained reduction in the harm land grabbing has been documented to produce.

References and Further Reading

Beirne, P., & South, N. (Eds.). (2007). Issues in green criminology: Confronting harms against environments, humanity and other animals. Willan Publishing.
Boekhout van Solinge, T. (2008). Deforestation crimes and conflicts in the Amazon. Critical Criminology, 16(4), 265–277.
Boekhout van Solinge, T. (2010). Equatorial deforestation as a harmful practice and a criminological issue. In R. White (Ed.), Global environmental harm: Criminological perspectives (pp. 20–36). Willan Publishing.
Borras, S. M., & Franco, J. C. (2012). Global land grabbing and trajectories of agrarian change: A preliminary analysis. Journal of Agrarian Change, 12(1), 34–59.
Brack, D. (2003). Illegal logging and the illegal trade in forest and timber products. International Forestry Review, 5(3), 195–198.
Brisman, A., & South, N. (2014). Green cultural criminology: Constructions of environmental harm, consumerism, and resistance to ecocide. Routledge.
Burns, R. G., Lynch, M. J., & Stretesky, P. B. (2008). Environmental law, crime, and justice. LFB Scholarly Publishing.
Fairhead, J., Leach, M., & Scoones, I. (2012). Green grabbing: A new appropriation of nature? Journal of Peasant Studies, 39(2), 237–261.
Faure, M. G. (2017). The revolution in environmental criminal law in Europe. Virginia Environmental Law Journal, 35(3), 321–356.
Goyes, D. R., & South, N. (2016). Green criminology before “green criminology”: Amnesia and absences. Critical Criminology, 24(4), 503–519.
Lynch, M. J., Long, M. A., Stretesky, P. B., & Barrett, K. L. (2017). Green criminology: Crime, justice, and the environment. University of California Press.
Pellow, D. N. (2007). Resisting global toxics: Transnational movements for environmental justice. MIT Press.
Ruggiero, V. (2013). The crimes of the economy: A criminological analysis of economic thought. Routledge.
Ruggiero, V., & South, N. (2013). Green criminology and crimes of the economy: Theory, research and praxis. Critical Criminology, 21(3), 359–373.
Situ, Y., & Emmons, D. (2000). Environmental crime: The criminal justice system’s role in protecting the environment. Sage Publications.
Skinnider, E. (2011). Victims of environmental crime: Mapping the issues. International Centre for Criminal Law Reform and Criminal Justice Policy.
South, N. (1998). A green field for criminology? A proposal for a perspective. Theoretical Criminology, 2(2), 211–233.
Stretesky, P. B., Long, M. A., & Lynch, M. J. (2013). The treadmill of crime: Political economy and green criminology. Routledge.
Taylor, D. E. (2014). Toxic communities: Environmental racism, industrial pollution, and residential mobility. New York University Press.
White, R. (2011). Transnational environmental crime: Toward an eco-global criminology. Routledge.
White, R. (2013). Environmental harm: An eco-justice perspective. Policy Press.