Global crises of recent years from record-breaking climate change events to rising inequality (Hickel, 2018) are part of a complex system of interacting, intersecting and compounding social, economic, and political crises known as the polycrisis (Jayasuriya, 2023) – which disproportionately affects the Global South while being largely caused by the Global North.  We are constantly reminded of the limits of our current anthropocentric capitalist system that prioritizes growth, profit, extraction, enclosure, private ownership and separation from the natural world at the expense of the wellbeing, or Buen Vivir, of the human and more-than-human world and the planetary ecosystem on which we depend (Yussof, 2018; Malm, 2016). The idea of land ownership sits at the heart of this extraction-based global operating system. Land serves as a critical lens through which to examine the causes, effects and solutions to the polycrisis. US and European land laws have been created by the logic of separation from and extraction of the natural world, class hierarchies, elite ownership, structural racism, settler colonialism and the increasing enclosure and privatization of the commons (Bhandar, 2018). The most stark example of this and arguably the greatest landgrab of recent history is the ongoing genocide in Palestine (Kanafani, 2023).

To address the issue of land ownership is to address the root causes of the polycrisis: the interlinked systems of capitalism and colonialism. First, enclosure of land has been an engine of capitalism. The history of land is intertwined with the historical development of capitalism. Common lands were privatized in England from the 13th century, but accelerated during the inception of capitalism in the 15-16th centuries (Linebaugh, 2014). Common lands were enclosed and commodified as a means to accumulate capital, through agriculture, real estate, and natural resource extraction. In a process, identified by neo-Marxist geographer David Harvey, as “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey, 2017), peasants were separated from common lands along with their traditional means of subsistence, and turned into a landless proletariat class, forced into wage labor. This process – which was also highly gendered (Federici, 2004) – formed the basis of capitalist social relations and broader wealth inequalities we see today. In today’s era of late-stage capitalism (or neoliberalism) in the 20th century the increasing governance by international businesses and the financialization/marketisation of land means land is treated as a tradable commodity resulting in speculative practices, where land is bought/sold for profit rather than its use value (Goldstein & Yates, 2017). This further concentrates land ownership in the hands of a wealthy few.  

Second, enclosure of land has been an engine of colonization. We can’t understand capitalist enclosure of land and today’s land inequalities without interrogating colonial and slavery regimes, where conceptions of private property developed alongside racial hierarchies (Bhandar, 2018). The institution of slavery was not just a system of forced labor, it was also a system of land ownership and control, directly expanding the US economy (Schermerhorn, 2015; Mintz, 2020; Murphy, 2023). The acquisition of land often led to the need for labor to work on it, which in turn led to the enslavement of people – or enclosure of racialized bodies (Mbembe, 2006; Wynter, 2003). Colonialism opened up vast swaths of lands to colonial powers to expropriate and thereby expand their economic model (Zambakari, 2017). The framework of the “coloniality of power” (Mignolo, 2013) helps us assess how power structures established during the colonial period have persisted and evolved rather than disappeared with the end of colonial rule – and today, land remains a key engine of colonial power relations through land grabs by Global North nations and multinational corporations (Nhemachena et al, 2017). 

Land enclosures, through the expansion of capitalism and colonialism, have led to a host of material effects: from climate change to biodiversity loss, dispossession to inequality. Capitalist and neo-colonial industrial agricultural projects, logging and agribusiness industries are catalyzing processes such as deforestation (Hansen et al, 2013), soil erosion (Lal, 2019) and biodiversity loss (Sala et al, 2000) – which reduces the climate adaptation capacities of soils and forests and stunts the Earth’s ability to respond to environmental changes which promotes ecological collapse. The inequality and dispossession we are witnessing today originate in the logic of conquering, capturing and enclosing land for the benefit of the most powerful (Veracini, 2015). The poorest half of the world population owns just 2% of total net wealth, whereas the richest half owns 98% of all the wealth on earth. This wealth includes land ownership. The next section: “who owns the land” provides more detailed data on land inequities.

The effects of land enclosure are not only material but also cultural. The stories, knowledge, wisdom and underlying epistemologies (ways of knowing) and ontologies (ways of being) tied to the land were affected by capitalist and colonial land appropriation. Capitalism formed a culture that celebrates individualism and an endless hunger of growth, described by North American Indigenous cultures as the psychological virus of Wetiko: a cannibalistic mindset of selfishness, greed, and short-term thinking. Colonization of land meant the culture of the colonized was assimilated into the culture of the colonizer. The diversity of languages, religions, beliefs and practices were often replaced by one religion, one language (Fanon, 1968; Ravishankar, 2020). Today, English, French, Spanish or Portuguese are the global hegemonic languages – spoken at the expense of Indigenous languages that better capture nature’s complexity and leave room for sensing land as animate (Kimmerer, 2013). Monotheist religions like Catholicism spread across many continents at the expense of other forms of beliefs like Animism, Indigenous cosmovisions, etc (Taussig, 2008). With this, land-based knowledge of the more than human world and ecosystems whose diversity is the key for all living systems to thrive, were lost (Fernández-Llamazares et al, 2021). They were replaced by monocultures, mass production, and the destruction of entire modes of living and being. This is a form of “epistemic violence” that erases other ways of knowing (epistemologies) and being (ontologies) (Vázquez, 2011; Wynter, 2003).

To address the issue of land ownership is therefore a means to find solutions to the polycrisis: land is a critical lever in transition away from neoliberalism, extractivism and endless pursuit of growth towards post-capitalist, post-anthropocentric cultures. Changing our relationship to land is essential, though it is not a small task. It means reclaiming the land and re-acquiring the knowledge that is tied to the land that was lost when land was privatized and diluted into one dominant culture. It also means battling long-standing power dynamics that mutate into new forms. The next part of this context explores these new forms by providing data on the inequality of land ownership worldwide. It illustrates how colonization, and the huge disparities it created between the Global North and South not only continue to exist, but are also perpetuated through new actors that replace the old ones. 

Who owns the land?

Land inequality mirrors wealth inequality as well as social and racial inequality. The vast majority of global wealth, including land, is concentrated into the hands of a very few. The World Inequality Lab reports that “the poorest half of the world population owns just 2% of total net wealth, whereas the richest half owns 98% of all the wealth on earth.” This wealth includes land ownership.

Regional or national contexts reflect similar situations. In Brazil, 1% of the population owns almost 50% of all land. In a country that holds 12% of the world’s available freshwater, such an uneven distribution of land ownership means poor and unequal access to essential resources like water. In the United States, white people own 98% of Rural Land (in the US). Despite making up 13 % of the population, Black Americans own less than 1 % of rural land in the country. In South Africa, approximately 70% of privately owned farmland is owned by white people – they make up less than 9% of the country’s population. 

It is important to note that land ownership inequality does not only happen in the Global South. Recent investigations revealed that half of England is owned by less than 1% of its population – mostly members of the aristocracy and corporations. The same investigations reveal that around “18% of England is owned by corporations, some of them based overseas or in offshore jurisdictions.” 

The biggest landowners of today are often yesterday’s colonizers. The British Crown’s main sources of income are derived from centuries-long ownership of land and property across England and the British Isles. The British Crown owns 10,762,730 square kilometers of land globally, this accounts for 7,23% of the land area of the planet.

However, the Catholic Church is truly the biggest private landowner in the world (about 177 million acres of land) – not only does it possess churches and monasteries, but also farms and forests. This represents considerable wealth, often non taxable. It is estimated that in Germany, both Catholic and Protestant churches – the biggest landlords in the country – amass €150 billion of revenue per year thanks to assets including farmland and other real estate. 

Extractive industries, multinationals and billionaires from the Global North are the new colonizers. These extractive industries continue the logic of exploitation of resources, of people and more-than-human world. They are responsible for environmental destruction, forced displacement of people and all other forms of violence. They sustain inequalities. Indeed, these are also the industries that have created billionaires. Thus, Australian mining magnate Gina Rinehart is Australia’s richest person as well as Australia’s biggest private landowner in her country, Australia, and one of the biggest private landowners in the world. 

There are several ways in which extractive industries continue to hoard land to exploit resources, and use it as a way to accumulate wealth: First, farmland is the newest pursuit of extractive industries and billionaires. Farmland has become the most valuable commodity in today’s global economy because it is considered more stable and secure than other forms of investment like financial markets. Billionaires such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Ted Turner, Mark Zuckerberg, have invested in farmland. They invest in the land knowing that with climate change it will become scarce and therefore more valuable. However, this has significant consequences on agricultural systems, as these landowners are prioritizing land use that will maximize their profit. Farmlands are indeed typically used for monocultures: soy, sugarcane, palm oil. These are cultures that are heavy in pesticides, destroy the soil, surrounding forests and biodiversity, and increase greenhouse gas emission. This massive agricultural exploitation too often involves the displacement of small farmers and Indigenous people. They operate on labor exploitation and resort to private security companies, leading to further violence.  A dire example of this is American pension company TIAA which has massively invested in farmland, in particular in Latin America in the Brazilian Cerrado – the most biodiverse place on earth.

Second, land grabbing has always been a modern form of colonization by Global North companies and billionaires. Through land grabbing, companies from the Global North continue the logic of colonization. They acquire land in the Global South with the aim to accumulate wealth. Fertile farmland has become the latest biggest motivation for land grabbing.

Figures are telling. From 2000 to 2023, 81% of land grabs were carried out by companies coming from the highest income countries (the Global North) in poor and low income countries (the Global South). In the same time period, 9.2 million hectares of Latin America were grabbed. Of those 9.2 million hectares, Brazil is the country where most land grabs happen. Argentina comes second. While some Global South companies can also be involved in the practice of land grabbing, the top land grabbers in Latin America are companies originating in the United States and the Netherlands. Similarly, in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the top 5% of foreign companies (a mere 3 companies) have grabbed 42% of the land in the region from 2000 to 2023. In East Asia and Pacific, a single USA based company – Independent Timbers and Stevedoring – has grabbed 16% of the land. Worldwide, the top 5% companies have grabbed 90% percent of land in poor and medium income countries.

However, it is important that settler colonialism is not a thing of the past but an active strategy utilized to displace Indigenous peoples. For example,  Israel’s occupation violates Palestinian territorial sovereignty and endangers the cultural existence of the Palestinian people. Israel has appropriated over 100,000 hectares of land from Palestinians since 1967 and demolished around 50,000 homes and structures in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Israel’s policy of constructing and expanding illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land is a primary cause of the mass human rights violations.

Indigenous people are still claiming their land back and fighting colonial practices. Global North extractive companies are holding onto the land stolen from Indigenous people. It is known that Indigenous people are the custodians and protectors of the world’s biodiversity. 25% of the global land surface is held by Indigenous people which contains 80% of the world’s biodiversity – most of it being forests. However while many constitutions recognize Indigenous land rights, Indigenous people have been fighting to protect these lands against new forms of colonizations like foreign companies’ land grabs and extractive industries. For instance, in Kenya, Indigenous people who were displaced by the British have tried to reclaim their land, now owned by British tea companies. In Hawaii, Indigenous people who were already displaced from their land (for the benefit of the agroindustrial complex and monocultures) are afraid that with climate change, more land grabs will happen. Desolated and abandoned land – as a result of the recent fires, for instance – becomes vulnerable to further grabbing.