Zimbabweland | 8 June 2015

Phoro: Painting by Boy Dominiguez for Journal of Peasant Studies special issue ‘Political Reactions from Belo

Those of you interested in land in Zimbabwe will be interested in what’s happening elsewhere in the world. This week’s blog focuses on some wider themes, and points you towards some useful new resources. Last week 200 delegates assembled in Chiang Mai in Thailand for a major conference on land grabbing, conflict and agrarian-environment transformations in southeast Asia. It was co-organised by the Land Deal Politics Initiative (LDPI), a research network that I helped co-found. The conference marked the next step in this work, aiming to locate debates about land investment and agricultural commercialisation in regional contexts. Southeast Asia has been a focus of the global land rush in the period since the financial-food-energy crisis of 2008, but as elsewhere the dynamics of transformation have evolved in ways that are more complex than the original ‘land grab’ rhetoric. – See more at: http://farmlandgrab.org/post/view/25018-global-land-grabbing-some-new-resources#sthash.uSqF3ESS.dpuf