Efforts to regulate land deals and avoid extreme exploitation of land-dependent people in target countries will create even more inequality, says small-farmers advocacy organization GRAIN:

From the World Bank to pension funds, efforts are under way to regulate land grabs through the creation of codes and standards. The idea is to distinguish those land deals that do meet certain criteria and should be approvingly called “investments” from those that don’t and can continue to be stigmatised as land “grabs”. Up to now, it was mostly international agencies that were trying to do this. Now, the private sector is engaging in a serious way to set its own rules of the game. Either way, the net result is voluntary self-regulation — which is ineffective, unreliable and no remedy for the fundamental wrongness of these deals.

Large-scale foreign land investments, so-called “land-grabs”, have created a lot of reporting over the last few years and provoked criticism of many active in development partnerships and in grassroot farmers’ movements. The hopeful now increasingly rely on sets of codes and standards – with dubious outcomes. This mechanism will only give legitimation to unwanted and harmful, at times practically neo-colonial investment practices, GRAIN insists: “While it is a huge and uphill battle, it’s clear that we need to stop the financing of land grabs, not make it responsible.”