International investor’s acquisition of large tracts of land in developing countries constitutes a hotly debated development issues. Critiques warn of local communities being sidelined by what they call ‘landgrabs’. The proposed paper aims at exploring the potentials and limits of resource rights in addressing such large-scale land acquisitions (LaSLAs).
First, I demonstrate why a human right to land leads into conceptual difficulties. Second, I therefore turn to the human right to food and review how this has been employed in arguing for principles (Schutter 2009) and voluntary guidelines (FAO 2012) regarding LaSLA.
All human-rights based approaches claim that local land users must be included in the decision-making processes of LaSLA. Accordingly, third, I draw on field work from Mali (Nolte, Voget-Kleschin 2013) to investigate the potential of participatory processes for remediating LaSLA’s negative effects.
I demonstrate that both claims for human rights to food and to participation point to the issue of background injustice sensu Rawls (Rawls 1993). This emphasizes that leastwise some of LaSLAs negative consequences cannot be addressed by regulating land investments but necessitate broader regulatory changes.
In concluding, I ask, if such regulatory changes should encompass introducing human rights to natural resources. That is, I scrutinize the necessity and accomplishment of human rights to natural resources in remediating negative consequences of Large-scale land acquisitions. Finally, I investigate what these considerations regarding large-scale land acquisition yield in terms of a critical appraisal of human rights to natural resources more generally.
FAO (2012): Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests. http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/user_upload/nr/land_tenure/pdf/VG_en_Final_March_2012.pdf.
Nolte; Voget-Kleschin (2013): Evaluating Consultation in Large-scale Land Acquisitions. (LDPI Working Paper, 28). http://www.iss.nl/fileadmin/ASSETS/iss/Research_and_projects/Research_networks/LDPI/LDPI_WP_28.pdf.
Rawls, John (1993): Political liberalism. New York.
Schutter (2009): Large-scale land acquisitions and leases. http://www.srfood.org/images/stories/pdf/officialreports/20100305_a-hrc-13-33-add2_land-principles_en.pdf.
