Neue Publikation von Kristina Dietz "Agrarian change through speculation: Rural elites as land brokers for mining in Colombia"

"Agrarian change through speculation: Rural elites as land brokers for mining in Colombia".

This paper studies the connections between the expansionof mining capital, speculative forms of land grabbing andagrarian transformation. It is argued that in periods of com-modity boom, the landowning rural elite benefits from min-ing through speculative land deals with mining companies.They act as‘land brokers’for the mining firms, helping themto overcome a significant barrier to land accumulationthrough the de facto abolition of landed property. The anal-ysis is based on a qualitative case study on the expansion ofcoal mining in central Cesar in northern Colombia. Todevelop my arguments, I refer to the concept of accumula-tion by dispossession as defined by Michael Levien, and his-torical materialist approaches on rent, and speculative landdispossession. In addition, I use concepts developed forstudying coercive land grabbing and agrarian elite participa-tion in armed conflicts to analyse the mechanisms appliedto (coercively) acquire rights to land. It is concluded thatwith high global prices for minerals, metals and fossil fuels,the expansion of mining in the countryside fosters a processof agrarian change through land speculation that is articu-lated in a reconcentration of landed property, a re-strengthening of the rural landowning elite and the dissolu-tion of peasant agriculture

Hier gehts zum Artikel: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.12563