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REPORT
May 2024
Land Squeeze
What is driving unprecedented pressures on farmland and what can be done to achieve equitable access to land?
This page is automatically translated from the English original using DeepL and may contain errors.
The 2008 global financial crisis unleashed a huge wave of land grabbing. But the pressures on farmland never went away. 15 years on, global land prices have doubled and farmers are being squeezed from all sides.
Huge swathes of farmland are now being snapped up for carbon offsets and other forms of ‘green grabbing’ – adding to the pressures from conventional land grabs. Land inequality is on the rise in all world regions. While the farmers and communities who deliver food security and steward the land are being forced out.
The report identifies transformative actions needed to reverse the land squeeze and achieve meaningful and equitable access to land. These include putting community-led responses at the heart of climate and biodiversity policies, cracking down on dubious carbon offsets and land speculation, getting land back into the hands of farmers through innovative financing and ownership models – and delivering a new deal for farmers and rural areas, and a new generation of comprehensive land and agrarian reforms.
Susan Chomba, IPES-Food expert
Land isn’t just dirt beneath our feet, it’s the bedrock of our food systems keeping us all fed. Yet we’re seeing soaring land prices and grabs driving an unprecedented ‘land squeeze’, accelerating inequality and threatening food production.
The rush for dubious carbon projects, tree planting schemes, clean fuels, and speculative buying is displacing small-scale farmers and Indigenous Peoples. In Africa, powerful governments, polluting fossil fuel companies, and big conservation groups are elbowing their way onto our land under the veneer of green goals, directly threatening the very communities bearing the brunt of climate change.
Susan Chomba, IPES-Food expert
Nettie Wiebe, IPES-Food expert
Imagine trying to start a farm when 70% of farmland is already controlled by just 1% of the largest farms – and when land prices have risen for 20 years in a row, like in North America. That’s the stark reality young farmers face today. Farmland is increasingly owned not by farmers but by speculators, pension funds, and big agribusinesses looking to cash in. Land prices have skyrocketed so high it’s becoming impossible to make a living from farming. This is reaching a tipping point – small and medium scale farming are simply being squeezed out.
Nettie Wiebe, IPES-Food expert
Sofía Monsalve Suárez, IPES-Food expert
It’s time decision-makers stop shirking their responsibility and start to tackle rural decline. The financialisation and liberalisation of land markets is ruining livelihoods and threatening the right to food. Instead of opening the floodgates to speculative capital, governments need to take concrete steps to halt bogus ‘green grabs’ and invest in rural development, sustainable farming and community-led conservation. Bottom line, we’ve got to make some serious changes to democratise land ownership if we want to ensure a sustainable future for nature, food production and rural communities.
Sofía Monsalve Suárez, IPES-Food expert
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