Harvard and other major American universities are working through British hedge funds and European financial speculators to buy or lease vast areas of African farmland in deals, some of which may force many thousands of people off their land, according to a new study. Researchers say foreign investors are profiting from "land grabs" that often fail to deliver the promised benefits of jobs and economic development, and can lead to environmental...

Exasperated with the public perception of its role, the Indian government appears keen to somehow abdicate its key sovereign function of making land available for economic development by dumping it on the private sector. This is wrong. The maintenance of up-to-date land records, the scientific identification of tracts for a shift from agricultural to non-agricultural uses and the smooth transfer of land assets are the functions of the sovereign. The...

Development has a multiplier effect in terms of employm-ent, secondary activity and revenue to state, while delay entails loss for everybody. Tolstoy’s famous question, “How much land does a man require?” was answered when the Count who had ruthlessly exploited his serfs was buried in a grave measuring 7x4x4 feet. And that, Tolstoy concluded, was all the land a man requires. Is corporate and infrastructural greed in India today destroying the small,...

The farmers' struggle against land acquisition only shows that from passive forms of protest they have turned to active forms of resistance. THE recent agitation by farmers in Uttar Pradesh against cropland acquisition for non-agricultural purposes is only the latest in a long series of protests by farmers and rural communities, which started a decade ago in different parts of the country and which gathered momentum over the past five...

Governments can acquire land for “public purpose” while making sure that the displaced are compensated, relocated and rehabilitated. THE violent conflict over land acquisition in Uttar Pradesh and the persisting resistance to land acquisition for the Posco project in Jagatsinghpur district of Orissa are merely recent instances that exemplify the growing stand-off between the Indian state and its people centred on land. On the one side are governments (both Central...