Land: The long-term value

Download the report: The Land Security Agenda: How Investor Risks in Farmland Create Opportunities for Sustainability.

As investors turn to land-based assets and commodities, large areas of fertile land are being acquired around the world to produce biofuels, food commodity crops, timber and develop extractive industries. Where land governance is weak, new risks are being created. These include, on one hand, the security of local people, their access to food and water, and conflicts associated with forced evictions. But risks also include reaching vital limits to how much arable land there is available, as well as soil erosion and water availability, on which the economies of host countries, and their political stability, ultimately depend.

The Land Security Agenda outlines the security and risk implications of the growing wave of investments in farmland and commodities. It shows why all stakeholders involved, from global investors in farmland and commodities, to civil society and political leaders in countries seeking to attract foreign investment, must realize their common interest in managing these risks to ensure long-term value.

Our program of work is pursuing practical opportunities to:

• Introduce ecological limits and human rights into investments
• Provide an integrated framework to assess data on critical trends
• Support advocacy and independent analysis at country level
• Introduce transparency into land regulations by host governments

Please get in touch if you would like to be kept informed of our work.

Why land security?

Food commodity prices are on a steady rise, much of the planet’s arable land is already being cultivated –and large proportions of it are being devoted to grow biofuels and crops to feed livestock. Investors are flocking to land as a way to hedge the risk of volatile financial markets or to guarantee the supply of critical commodities, like food, fuel crops, and minerals. The extraordinary amounts of water needed for irrigation of large-scale agriculture further strains resources for local water consumption, irrigation by small-holder farmers, and potentially the inputs needed by hydropower plants. As human population continues to grow, and more space is needed to grow the commodities demanded, ‘land’ is quickly becoming the nexus that holds all these trade-offs together and, we believe, will fundamentally challenge the environmental and climate agendas in the next few decades.

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Joffe Charitable Trust for this project.