Farming as Equals: A Philosophical Investigation of Land Grabbing through the lens of Distributive Justice

ongoing

This research project aims to address the question whether land grabbing engenders a distinct moral concern—one that has not been sufficiently explored. Recent studies in political philosophy that directly address land grabbing take its moral distinctiveness to involve in the way land grabbing undermines territorial rights. A territorial-rights-approach may partially account for paradigmatic instances of land grabbing involving massive dispossession of land from small-scale farmers and of indigenous populations from their ancestral commons. It, however, overlooks increasingly intricate, ‘pin-prick’, forms of land grabbing present in the EU that involve transfer of ownership and control rights over relatively small individual plots of land in such a way that that the aggregate area of land can be quite extensive. In addition, theories about why territories matter for a state do not tell us anything about why land matters for a farmer. I hypothesise that, my preferred conception of distributive justice in farmland—'farming as equals’— offers a more promising moral diagnosis: (1) it maps out an analytical framework within which justice in the distribution of farmland is underwritten by concerns about the equality of farmers; (2) clarifies what is morally distinctive about land grabbing in all its multiple permutations; (3) applies theoretical insights to agricultural and land policies (such as CAP), legal protection of the rights of farmers, and to policy instruments related to environmental justice; and (4) deploys valid normative principles for scrutinising the neoliberal economic model where the concept of ownership (in farmland) is depersonalised and land is transformed from a vital resource for food security to a tradable commodity and an object of speculation. Finally, I believe that the innovative approach this project employs is suitable for addressing concerns of justice between generations as it pertains to inequalities in the distribution of farmland.