Land Use

Type A: Land Use Change within Food-Oriented Production

In Type A, lands remain within food production, but the purposes for which food is produced have changed. In aggregated official censuses, these changes in land use are not always captured. There are at least two subcategories: A1 and A2. A1 involves lands previously dedicated to food production for consumption that are converted to food production for domestic exchange. This is perhaps one of the most extensive types of land use change historically. If the population of the world continues to increase at the current pace, somehow new lands have to be put to agricultural cultivation to produce more food. By 2005, the total cultivated land in the world was 1.5 billion. From 1990 to 2005, a yearly average of 2.7 million hectares (ha) was put to agricultural use, although these data were the result of “declines in industrialized and transition countries (−0.9 and −2 million ha, respectively)” that “were more than outweighed by increases of 5.5 million ha per year in developing countries” (World Bank, 2010, p. x). Not all of this new cultivation was devoted to food crops though, as the data include plantation forests for pulp (p. xi).

A2 involves lands previously devoted to food production for consumption or domestic exchange, which are converted to food production for export. It is this subcategory that is the focus of the current global land grab and its critics. Although this kind of land use change is not new, there are some new features associated with it today that contribute to making it even more controversial. First, A2 involves a new set of nontraditional land-grabbing countries (e.g., Gulf States, South Korea, China), alongside the more traditional ones. The 2007–2008 world food crisis prompted many of the nontraditional players to begin transacting land deals in developing countries as a way to ensure their own food security. Second, whether traditional or nontraditional, today's land grabbers are gaining control of land [Page 1023]through a combination of land purchases (where possible) and long-term leases of up to 99 years (where allowed). Third, many recent A2-type land use conversions are planned not for feeding people, but for feeding livestock (e.g., soya), fueling cars (e.g., palm oil) and industry (e.g., “green plastics”), or as indirect result of some crop use change. Fourth, the pace of land use conversion in this sub-category alone is rapid and extensive.

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