Land Grabbing: Social and Environmental Implications

Soil is a complex resource very important for the maintenance of natural balances; at the same time it supports all human activities. All the modifications to the natural soil equilibrium, put in place in order to make it more functional to the economic objectives are extremely delicate, as due to the length of the regeneration time, soil can be considered essentially as a non-renewable resource and, as such, it must be used in a responsible way, also respect to the financial investments involving it. In recent years, political and economic circumstances have created a particularly favourable context for investments in land. Predictions which have drawn up long term perspectives based on the scarcity of resources and the guidelines which have given centrality to private investments seem to be questionable. The issue of agriculture resource scarcity might be less relevant if the current conditions of access and use were improved. Similar consideration can be done considering the role of private investments that as such will never pursue public interest objectives. As a consequence of such climate, land grabbing phenomena have been easily developed. In this paper, both the land grabbing phenomenon and its implication from the social and environmental point of view, such as land defrauding to local community and its destination to no food cultivation and the exploitation of the resource, are analyzed. In fact, it is hard to think that this kind of investments can lead to a sustainable and responsible soil use.