Dr. Oliveira publishes a special issue of Globalizations: “Beyond land grabs”

Beyond land grabs: New insights on land struggles and global agrarian change

Dr. Oliveira’s article “Beyond land grabs: New insights on land struggles and global agrarian change” has just been published as the guest editor’s introduction to a special issue the journal Globalizations.

The article is co-authored with Ben McKay and Juan Liu, who also co-edited the special issue.

ABSTRACT: The conjunction of climate, food, and financial crises in the late 2000s triggered renewed interest in farmland and agribusiness investments around the world. This phenomenon became known as the ‘global land grab’ and sparked debates among social movements, NGOs, academics, government and international development agencies worldwide. In this introduction, we critically analyse the ‘state of the literature’ so far, and outline four areas that are moving the debate ‘beyond land grabs’. These include: (1) the role of contract farming and differentiation among farm workers in the consolidation of farmland; (2) the broader forms of dispossession and mechanisms of control and value grabbing beyond ‘classic’ land grabs for agricultural production; (3) discourses about, and responses to, Chinese agribusiness investments abroad; and (4) the relationship between financialization and land grabbing. Ultimately, we propose new directions to deepen and even transform the research agenda on land struggles and agroindustrial restructuring around the world.

KEYWORDS: Global land grab, contract farming, agricultural labour, control grabbing, dispossession, financialization

 

Globalizations seeks to publish the best work that contributes to constructing new meanings of globalization, brings fresh ideas to the concept, broadens its scope, and has an impact upon shaping the debates and practices of the future. The journal is dedicated to opening the widest possible space for discussion of alternatives to narrow understandings of global processes and conditions. The move from the singular to the plural is deliberate and implies scepticism of the idea that there can ever be a single theory or interpretation of globalization. Rather, the journal seeks to encourage the exploration and discussion of multiple interpretations and multiple processes that may constitute many possible globalizations, many possible alternatives.  The journal is open to all fields of knowledge, including the natural, environmental, medical and public health sciences, as well as the social sciences and the humanities.  Globalizations encourages multidisciplinary research and looks to publish contributions from all regions of the world. The articles and special issues focus on acute issues of the moment and on deep long-term structural shifts.

For the full-length article, see: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14747731.2020.1843842

Dr. Oliveira published in Applied Geography

Global-local interactions in agrochemical industry: Relating trade regulations in Brazil to environmental and spatial restructuring in China

Dr. Oliveira’s article “Global-local interactions in agrochemical industry: Relating trade regulations in Brazil to environmental and spatial restructuring in China“, co-authored with He Canfei and Ma Jiahui, has just been published in Applied Geography.

Abstract

China and Brazil are the world’s leading exporter and importer of agrochemicals respectively. We combine quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze global-local interactions in the spatial restructuring of China’s agrochemical industry in relation to a 2006 agrochemical import-acceleration policy in Brazil. We synthesize global political ecology and evolutionary economic geography (EEG) research on environmental regulations, technological upgrading, and the spatial transformations of China’s pollution-intensive industries, discussing arguments that the Pollution Haven Hypothesis (PHH) and Porter Hypothesis (PH) co-exist due to firm heterogeneity. While existing studies conceptualize heterogeneity in terms of firm size, regional hub (cluster) effect, and local government intervention, this study adds global-local interactions as dimension of firm heterogeneity – distinguishing firms with weak and strong international linkages. We show the import-acceleration policy in Brazil contributed to the de-concentration of agrochemical production towards western China (confirming the PHH). Yet increasingly strict environmental regulations in China curtailed de-concentration after 2010, when well-established firms and new entrants with strong international linkages consolidated exports to Brazil, while new firms with weaker international linkages exited this market (confirming the PH). This co-existence of PHH and PH due to firm-level heterogeneity of global-local interactions illustrates a theoretical synthesis we call an evolutionary political economic geography (EPEG).

Keywords: Evolutionary economic geography; Global political ecology; Global-local interactions; Pollution haven hypothesis; Porter hypothesis; Chemical industry

Applied Geography is a journal devoted to the publication of research which utilizes geographic approaches (human, physical, nature-society and GIScience) to resolve human problems that have a spatial dimension. These problems may be related to the assessment, management and allocation of the world’s physical and/or human resources. The underlying rationale of the journal is that only through a clear understanding of the relevant societal, physical, and coupled natural-humans systems can we resolve such problems. The journal was founded in 1980, and consistently ranks among the top journals of geography, planning, development studies, and environmental science.

For the full length article, see: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2020.102244

 

Dr. Oliveira presents his research at the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil)

Video of lecture at UFRRJ, July 31, 2020

Video of lecture at UFRRJ, July 31, 2020