Tanzania’s Land Rush: Impacts of the Farmland Investment Game

After the global financial crisis of 2008, a new trend in foreign direct investments (FDI) emerged: investors’ rising interest in farmland in developing nations. This ’land rush’ was a marker of increased land commodification and agricultural financialization, but has also been associated with global narratives of agricultural modernization, and development through FDI of ’cheap, unproductive and/or idle’ farmland.

Yet, as this book demonstrates, global investment dynamics are dictated by complex economic, political, socio-historical dynamics in any host country. Focusing on the land rush in Tanzania, the contexts of six investment projects in the nation are examined and unpacked, helping to understand the ways in which political struggles over land, capital and authority all feed into determining the goals - and eventually the outcomes - of the ’farmland investment game’.

JOANNY BE´LAIR is currently working as a postdoctoral fellowship in scientific diplomacy for the Bureau du Québec à Rabat, Morocco. She previously hold a postdoctoral fellowship at the Faculty of Geoscience, Utrecht University, Netherlands, and worked closely with LandAc, the Netherlands Land Academy. She completed her PhD in political science at the University of Ottawa, Canada in 2019.