The new abnormal: Identifying and ranking anomalies in the land trade market.

Large-scale national and transnational commercial land transactions, or Large-Scale Land Acquisitions (LSLAs), have been gaining a lot of academic attention since the late 2000s and since the reported rush for land, resulting in turn from an increase in demand for arable land. If many data exist to characterize land deals, the analysis of investment networks remain limited and predominantly portrays power asymmetries between countries from the Global North investing in the Global South. The aim of this work is to perform a deeper investigation on the land trade market, specifically focusing on cases that do not follow such narratives.

The parable of arable land: Characterizing large scale land acquisitions through network analysis.

Land is a scarce resource and its depletion is related to a combination of demographic and economic factors. Hence, the changes in dietary habits and increase in world population that upturn the food demand, are intertwined with a context of increasing oil prices and rise of green capitalism that in turn impacts the demand in biofuel. A visible indicator of these phenomena is the increase, in recent years, of Large Scale Land Acquisitions (LSLAs) by private companies or states.