Land Squeeze: What is driving unprecedented pressures on farmland and what can be done to achieve equitable access to land?

Soaring land prices, land grabs, and carbon schemes are creating an unprecedented ‘land squeeze’, threatening farmers and food production, reveals a comprehensive new report by IPES-Food. The 2008 global financial crisis unleashed a huge wave of land grabbing. But the pressures on farmland never went away. 15 years on, global land prices have doubled and farmers are being squeezed from all sides. Huge swathes of farmland are now being snapped up for carbon offsets and other forms of ‘green grabbing’, adding to the pressures from conventional land grabs. Land inequality is on the rise in all world regions, and the farmers and communities who deliver food security and steward the land are being forced out. The ‘Land Squeeze’ report identifies transformative actions needed to reverse the land squeeze and achieve meaningful and equitable access to land, including putting community-led responses at the heart of climate and biodiversity policies, cracking down on dubious carbon offsets and land speculation, getting land back into the hands of farmers through innovative financing and ownership models – and delivering a new deal for farmers and rural areas, and a new generation of comprehensive land and agrarian reforms.

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Report