Will war in Ukraine escalate the global land rush?

Land grabbing typically leads to social and environmental harms.

Competition for water induced by transnational land acquisitions for agriculture.

The ongoing agrarian transition from smallholder farming to large-scale commercial agriculture promoted by transnational large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) often aims to increase crop yields through the expansion of irrigation. LSLAs are playing an increasingly prominent role in this transition. Yet it remains unknown whether foreign LSLAs by agribusinesses target areas based on specific hydrological conditions and whether these investments compete with the water needs of existing local users. Here we combine process-based crop and hydrological modelling, agricultural statistics, and georeferenced information on individual transnational LSLAs to evaluate emergence of water scarcity associated with LSLAs. While conditions of blue water scarcity already existed prior to land acquisitions, these deals substantially exacerbate blue water scarcity through both the adoption of water-intensive crops and the expansion of irrigated cultivation. These effects lead to new rival water uses in 105 of the 160 studied LSLAs (67% of the acquired land). Combined with our findings that investors target land with preferential access to surface and groundwater resources to support irrigation, this suggests that LSLAs often appropriate water resources to the detriment of local users.

Hydro-social dynamics of miningscapes: Obstacles to implementing water protection legislation in Mongolia.

Waterscapes with mining activities are often sites of water resource degradation and contestation. To prevent this, policy-makers deploy an increasing number of measures that purportedly align the interests of different water users. In Mongolia, mining-related protests led to the prohibition of mining in and close to rivers. However, implementation of these regulations has been slow. In this paper, we investigate why that is the case, drawing on an extended elaboration of the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework to disentangle the web of formal and informal rules, incentive structures, discourses, and other elements that characterize Mongolian miningscapes. We find that i) a combination of insufficient resources for lower-level actors, large areas to cover and high mobility of extractive operations, ii) a lack of information among implementing entities, combined with time pressure on decision-making and a lack of involvement of local actors, and iii) cultural norms and political context conditions that privilege the pursuit of private interests are key obstacles. Irrespective of these challenges, the prohibition of mining in riverbeds entrenches a social imaginary in the Mongolian governance framework that prioritizes water resources protection over resource extraction, offering a counterweight to dominant discourses that cast mining as a necessary requirement for social and economic development. Our analysis illustrates the usefulness of looking at implementation processes through the lens of mining- and waterscapes to identify how social power is embedded in social-political artifacts and impacts hydro-social outcomes. Strong discrepancies between the formal description of governance processes and interactions on the ground support the need to look at how processes play out in practice in order to understand implementation obstacles.

Energy implications of the 21st century agrarian transition.

The ongoing agrarian transition from small-holder farming to large-scale commercial agriculture is reshaping systems of production and human well-being in many regions. A fundamental part of this global transition is manifested in large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) by agribusinesses. Its energy implications, however, remain poorly understood. Here, we assess the multi-dimensional changes in fossil-fuel-based energy demand resulting from this agrarian transition. We focus on LSLAs by comparing two scenarios of low-input and high-input agricultural practices, exemplifying systems of production in place before and after the agrarian transition. A shift to high-input crop production requires industrial fertilizer application, mechanization of farming practices and irrigation, which increases by ~5 times fossil-fuel-based energy consumption compared to low-input agriculture. Given the high energy and carbon footprints of LSLAs and concerns over local energy access, our analysis highlights the need for an approach that prioritizes local resource access and incorporates energy-intensity analyses in land use governance.

Impact of transnational land acquisitions on local food security and dietary diversity.

Foreign investors have acquired approximately 90 million hectares of land for agriculture over the past two decades. The effects of these investments on local food security remain unknown. While additional cropland and intensified agriculture could potentially increase crop production, preferential targeting of prime agricultural land and transitions toward export-bound crops might affect local access to nutritious foods. We test these hypotheses in a global systematic analysis of the food security implications of existing land concessions. We combine agricultural, remote sensing, and household survey data (available in 11 sub-Saharan African countries) with georeferenced information on 160 land acquisitions in 39 countries. We find that the intended changes in cultivated crop types generally imply transitions toward energy-rich, but nutrient-poor, crops that are predominantly destined for export markets. Specific impacts on food production and access vary substantially across regions. Deals likely have little effect on food security in eastern Europe and Latin America, where they predominantly occur within agricultural areas with current export-oriented crops, and where agriculture would have both expanded and intensified regardless of the land deals. This contrasts with Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where deals are associated with both an expansion and intensification (in Asia) of crop production. Deals in these regions also shift production away from local staples and coincide with a gradually decreasing dietary diversity among the surveyed households in sub-Saharan Africa. Together, these findings point to a paradox, where land deals can simultaneously increase crop production and threaten local food security.

Global agricultural economic water scarcity.

Water scarcity raises major concerns on the sustainable future of humanity and the conservation of important ecosystem functions. To meet the increasing food demand without expanding cultivated areas, agriculture will likely need to introduce irrigation in croplands that are currently rain-fed but where enough water would be available for irrigation. "Agricultural economic water scarcity" is, here, defined as lack of irrigation due to limited institutional and economic capacity instead of hydrologic constraints. To date, the location and productivity potential of economically water scarce croplands remain unknown. We develop a monthly agrohydrological analysis to map agricultural regions affected by agricultural economic water scarcity. We find these regions account for up to 25% of the global croplands, mostly across Sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia. Sustainable irrigation of economically water scarce croplands could feed an additional 840 million people while preventing further aggravation of blue water scarcity.

Environmental heterogeneity and commodity sharing in smallholder agroecosystems.

Smallholder farmers undertake a number of strategies to cope with climate shocks in a community. The sharing of resources across households constitutes one coping mechanism when environmental shocks differentially impact households. This paper investigates commodity sharing dynamics among households in eight communities in an environmentally heterogeneous highland-lowland area in central Kenya. We use survey data and meteorological data to test whether commodity sharing, measured at the household level by net inflow of commodities, varies across a regional precipitation gradient, and we reveal how sharing fluctuates with rainfall over the course of a year. We find both precipitation and income to be significant predictors of households' net value of shared commodities. Specifically, farmers who live in drier areas with less income are more likely to receive more commodities than they give. We also find that the length of time a household has been established in the area is significantly related to commodity sharing. Further, commodity sharing follows the pattern of harvest and food storage over the course of the year, with households giving the most commodities at times when food storage levels are higher, that is, post-harvest. The study sheds light on the relationship between commodity sharing as a coping mechanism and environmental heterogeneity in a region prone to seasonal food insecurity.

Food Inequality, Injustice, and Rights.

As humanity continues to grow in size, questions related to human rights and the existing unequal distribution of food resources have taken on greater urgency. Is inequality in food access unjust or a regrettable consequence of the geographic distribution of biophysical resources? To what extent are there obligations to redress inequalities in access to food? We draw from a human rights perspective to identify obligations associated with access to food and develop a quantitative framework to evaluate the fulfillment of the human right to food. We discuss the capacity of socioeconomic development to reduce inequalities in per capita food availability with respect to the distribution of biophysical resources among countries. Although, at the country level, international trade shows the capacity to reduce human rights deficits by increasing food availability in countries with limited food production, whether it actually improves the fulfillment of the right to food will depend on within-country inequality.

Resilience in the global food system.

Ensuring food security requires food production and distribution systems function throughout disruptions. Understanding the factors that contribute to the global food system's ability to respond and adapt to such disruptions (i.e. resilience) is critical for understanding the long-term sustainability of human populations. Variable impacts of production shocks on food supply between countries indicate a need for national-scale resilience indicators that can provide global comparisons. However, methods for tracking changes in resilience have had limited application to food systems. We developed an indicator-based analysis of food systems resilience for the years 1992-2011. Our approach is based on three dimensions of resilience: socio-economic access to food in terms of income of the poorest quintile relative to food prices, biophysical capacity to intensify or extensify food production, and the magnitude and diversity of current domestic food production. The socio-economic indicator has large variability, but with low values concentrated in Africa and Asia. The biophysical capacity indicator is highest in Africa and Eastern Europe, in part because of high potential for extensification of cropland and for yield gap closure in cultivated areas. However, the biophysical capacity indicator has declined globally in recent years. The production diversity indicator has increased slightly, with a relatively even geographic distribution. Few countries had exclusively high or low values for all indicators. Collectively, these results are the basis for global comparisons of resilience between nations, and provide necessary context for developing generalizations about the resilience in the global food system.