'Indirect' Land Grabbing, Private Certification and Global GAP

A lacuna exists in the literature on land grabbing relating to for-profit, private standards applied to agricultural products. Most often, the literature attributes land grabbing to a combination of processes which frequently include financial speculation, rising energy prices, food insecurity, or a national strategy of self-interest pursued by those nations which seek to protect themselves against volatile and fluctuating global food prices and future food insecurity. However, for-profit, private standards developed cooperatively by an oligopoly of food retailers including Fortune 500 companies like Wal-Mart, McDonalds and Carrefour, are closely associated with land grabbing, yet their impact is not addressed in an appropriate way. Through a careful analysis of the pineapple sector in Ghana, this presentation will develop an important causal mechanism often involved in the large-scale transfer of land from domestic smallholders, especially in the global South, to international investors most often in the global North.