Foreign Acquisitions of Land in Developing Countries. Risks, Opportunities and New Actors

The Special Issue focuses on the recent wave of foreign acquisitions of land in developing countries and provides. This essay article reviews the debate, providing an overview of the extent, patterns and origin of investments, and contextualizing the various contributions included in the issue. The main sections are devoted to the determinants of FDI, including the balance between risks and benefits of land internalization, the opportunities and risks of land acquisitions and regulation. The deals involve land usually on a very large scale and predominantly in the context of complex and unclear structures of property rights; weak stakeholders may have insufficient “voice” vis-à-vis their governments; governments may have weak planning and regulatory abilities. The possible risks of increasing investments are associated with property rights and potential dispossession of vulnerable land users, land concentration and lack of transparency in the contracts.