Landgrabbing

The appropriation of land, especially for agricultural use and construction by foreign investors, state institutions and industrial and agricultural companies from Western industrialised countries, is a massive ecological and human rights problem today.

The large-scale land grabs in the age of colonialism laid the foundation for today's global injustice. The aftermath of colonial ideologies and practices is currently bringing about new forms of land grabbing that continue to be predominantly at the expense of people in the Global South and committed and perpetuated for the benefit of people in the Global North. In the Global South, for example, small farmers are expropriated under the guise of economic progress and forced to work for large agricultural corporations that cause long-term damage to the soil through monocultural cultivation and the use of pesticides. Land expropriation happens just as much in connection with mass livestock farming or in the name of ecological sustainability, for example in the cultivation of crops such as rapeseed, oil palms and soya for "biofuel", which entails the clearing of virgin forests, the loss of plant and animal species and the rise in food prices. The effects of man-made climate change such as droughts and floods are also a form of land grabbing.

The guests of the Future Talk LANDGRABBING discuss this global deplorable state of affairs in its various forms and report on possibilities to counter these social and ecological offences as well as on people who are engaged in the fight against land grabbing.

Participants

Kurt Langbein, director and producer of the film "Landraub" (2015)
Franziskus Forster, policy officer at ÖBV-Via Campesina Austria, university lecturer at the Boku and collaboration with the Nyeleni movement for food sovereignty.
Thomas Fatheuer, social scientist and author of the report "Land Use in the Context of the Global Environmental Crisis" (2020). From 2003 to 2010, he headed the Heinrich Böll Foundation's office in Rio de Janeiro.
Lautaro Iriarte, Fridays for Future activist

Moderation: Michael Huber, Kurier
An event in cooperation with the Kurier