Mardi intime de la Chaire Hoover par Kebadu Mekonnen Gebremariam.

This paper examines the social justice implications of farmland grabbing—broadly defined as an expropriative transfer of land from peasant farmers to financial interests. Recent studies in political philosophy that directly address the topic take the distinctive wrong of land grabbing to involve in the way it undermines territorial rights. This paper takes a different approach. It scrutinizes farmland grabbing via two important debates within egalitarian political philosophy, namely the general debate between luck and relational egalitarians about the aim of egalitarian justice, and a specific debate regarding the incentives argument for inequalities. 

I submit that a defense of land grabbing through the incentives argument would be untenable, so for two reasons. Firstly, the process by which assets such as farmland are coded as capital invariably determines their market value, thereby allocating incentives before their productive contributions are known. Secondly, since land grabbing’s distinctive feature consists in expropriation, and not in exploitation, its justification should lie in something other than reasons for unequal distribution of the return from cooperative schemes of production. 

This paper also shows that both luck and relational egalitarianism have implausible implications, each for different reasons. Luck egalitarian views condemn both paradigmatic cases of land grabbing and what I call Robin Hood cases, even though the latter is aimed at eliminating the role of unchosen disadvantages in the distribution of farmland. While relational egalitarianism avoids the challenges that arise when applying a distributive account of justice to a form of land capture that fosters control over land without acquisition, it too has implausible implications at the extremes of material wellbeing. I conclude by highlighting the advantages of Cohen’s community constrained luck egalitarianism—as one plausible approach for rejecting paradigmatic cases of farmland grabbing while simultaneously declaring Robin Hood cases as permissible.