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Land Grabbing

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Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics

Synonyms

Foreign investment in agriculture; Land acquisitions; Land grabs; Large-scale land acquisitions

Introduction

The application of force to coerce individuals to illegally give up their land or the otherwise illegal dispossession of land, a process known as “land grabbing,” is a violation of human rights – the arbitrary deprivation of property outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights(Article 17). Land grabbing is the most legally and ethically problematic form of large-scale land acquisitions. However, if direct or indirect force is not applied in the process of large-scale land acquisitions nor any laws broken and the individuals involved receive sufficient benefit in exchange for their land, are the exchanges necessarily ethical? Based upon a human rights-based perspective, this entry argues that human rights cannot be analyzed in isolation, but must be evaluated in totality in order to contextualize the vulnerability and duress experienced by those transferring...

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Correspondence to Logan Cochrane .

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© 2016 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

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Cochrane, L. (2016). Land Grabbing. In: Thompson, P., Kaplan, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6167-4_590-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6167-4_590-1

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  • Online ISBN: 978-94-007-6167-4

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