BUSINESS AND HUMAN RIGHTS / Šturma, Mozetic (eds)

called “foreignization” of land, constitutes a significant challenge, which these countries attempted to fight with statutory moratoriums on land sales. Consequently, the contribution will, in the first step, draw basic contours of the recent discussion on land grabbing from the perspective of international law and especially international human rights law. In the second part, the contribution will provide examples of how the European Union contributes, or even fosters land grabbing, and explain why land grabbing constitutes a significant problem within the EU. Since land grabbing is a complex phenomenon (of course not only in legal terms), it is not attempted to produce any surprising arguments or search for definite answers. The aim is rather to lift up the problem, highlight its relevance, frame it in international law, and look at its specific implications in Europe. As a preliminary remark, two methodological challenges in researching and writing on the topic of land grabbing from the international law perspective have to be noted, since they impact and delineate to a certain extent the scope of this contribution. For every academic contribution which attempts to put an issue into a legal perspective, a definition of the crucial term (here “land grabbing”) is the natural starting point. The term “land grabbing” may denote many different situations and de lege lata there is a lack of clarity as to what “land grabbing” means. As it will be shown, the term is contested. Moreover, research and publications on land grabbing tend to focus on the so-called “foreignization” of land, i.e. acquisitions and leases of the land by foreign investors, however, largely neglecting an equally important form of land grabbing – land concentration – which is particularly problematic (though not exclusively) with regard to Central and Eastern European (CEE) Member States of the European Union. In order to assess the scale and the severity of the problem, relevant data should be presented, providing the necessary context for this contribution. However, providing accurate figures and gaining access to relevant data is often a harsh undertaking due to the lack of transparency and other data-gathering aspects concerning land deals and situations denoted as land grabbing. With regard to many (harshly impacted) regions, such as Africa, data on land acquisitions is scarce and often of limited reliability. This is not surprising taking into account that none of the subjects involved in the “green rush” (States, companies, etc.) are very keen to make the conditions of land deals public, may these be corrupt officials, States fearing sensitivity of the information, or companies concerned about commercial confidentiality. Restrictions in the access to relevant data and the lack of accurate figures constitute a significant challenge when researching the problem of land grabbing. This study however takes a more general approach and the examples and data used are sufficient to provide a basic picture of why and how large- scale land acquisitions are problematic from the perspective of international law. 1.1 The Context Foreign investments in agricultural land are a phenomenon of the last decade, during which they significantly increased, becoming at the same time truly global, entering new dimensions and affecting virtually everybody. 4 Originally, this phenomenon was (and

4 There is currently a significant body of literature on land grabbing and legal aspects of this phenomenon. Cf. JACUR, Francesca Romanin, BONFANTI, Angelica, SEATZU, Francesco (eds.). Natural Resources

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