Land and Resource Grabs in the United States: Five sites of struggle and potential transformation

Abstract

Across the United States, communities are fighting to defend the resources they need to produce food. Corporate control of the food system is undermining the livelihoods of family farmers, farmworkers, fisherpeople, communities of color, and indigenous peoples—squeezing them economically; contaminating their soils and waterways; and pushing them off the land. These processes of dispossession and disenfranchisement—dubbed a new wave of global “land grabbing”—are not new, nor are they confined to poor countries of the Global South. Indeed, they form the basis of the history of capitalist expansion in the US. What is new, perhaps, is the rapid rate at which land and other resources are being concentrated in the hands of new financial and institutional actors—thanks to policies that favor profits over people, and finance over food.