LAUSR

Description Land grabbing typically leads to social and environmental harms The simultaneous occurrence in 2008 of interconnected shocks in climate, food production, and international finance underscored the emergence of a contemporary “global land rush.” Since the turn of the century, a conservative estimate, limited to fully concluded deals, points to more than 45 million ha of land, approximately the size of Sweden or Morocco, having been acquired through transnational land deals for agricultural production (1). The unprecedented expansion of transnational land investments raised concerns about a neocolonial wave of land and water “grabbing” in the Global South (2, 3). This has stimulated a heated debate in scholarly and policy arenas on the diverging trajectories of the contemporary global agrarian transition. We posit that impacts of the Russian invasion of Ukraine will fuel the resurgence of a new global rush for land, triggering transformations that will have cascading and long-lasting structural effects on multiple dimensions of rural development.