Energy and Food Demands, Drivers of Land Grab; A Case of Rufiji River Basin In Tanzania

Abstract

Land grabs has been a tendy phenomena in the last decade across the grobe with Africa and Asia being the hard hit regions.  There has been many drivers that fueled land grabs including the crisses in the food, fuel and finance sector. Attempts has been made by scholars, activists and international communities to define what consitute “land grab” in the contenporay period. Informed by the framework definition of land grabs provided by International Land Coalition’s Tirana Declaration of 2012, this paper uses two cases of foreign land-based agricutural investments to prove the existence of land grabs in Tanzania. Broadly, the two cases are evidence of the global energy and food crises shaping the national and local politics of land governance. These national and local politics are manifested into land grabs dispossesing communities of their land. The paper urgues that there is direct link between the global and the national politics of land grabs. If further shows the role played and approaches used by social movements to resist land grabs.