Land control-grabbing in Guatemala: the political economy of contemporary agrarian change

Domestic and international capital controlling Guatemala's sugarcane and oil palm industries are deploying a dual investment strategy in the context of global financial, energy, food and environmental crises. They allocate current booming revenues to high-cost, long-term investments and they open and adapt new territories for cultivation. Under a new extractivist governmentality, corporate land grabs aim to control land and natural resources as well as land-based wealth and the labour that produces it. Land ownership is being (re)concentrated and social relations reshaped: compensation to dispossessed indigenous peasants for their land is insufficient to boost non-farm livelihoods or to regain access to land. This paper describes efforts to institutionalise and legitimise this project, as well as the ongoing resistance to it.