Centering labor in the land grab debate

Placing labor at the center of the global 'land-grab' debate helps sharpen critical insights at two scales. At the scale of agricultural enterprises, a labor perspective highlights the jobs generated, and the rewards received, by people who work in and around large farms. This approach guides my critical reading of the report prepared by a World Bank team that argues for large-scale land acquisition as a way to reduce poverty. Using data from within the report itself, I show why poverty reduction is a very unlikely result. I develop the argument further by drawing on research in colonial and contemporary Indonesia, where large-scale plantations and associated smallholder contract schemes have a long history. A…