Abstract:

Given China’s expanding presence in Africa’s extractive industry, this article considers why China is benefiting more than Zimbabwe from the significant increase in Chinese investment in the latter’s lithium megaprojects. The article explores energy colonialism and new patterns of accumulation in the extraction, beneficiation and export of Africa’s critical minerals, drawing on Contreras et al.’s six-dimensional energy colonialism framework to enhance our understanding of the debilitating effects of these phenomena. This framework illuminates the novel extractivist logic of green extractivism that fosters economic dependency and power asymmetries to sustain and reproduce transnational capitalism. The article considers four case studies where Chinese ownership, investment and operations are substantial. The findings show that energy colonialism underlies China’s significant increase in investments in Zimbabwe’s lithium megaprojects. The Chinese extractivist and colonial model of mining promotes the accumulation of wealth on one side and the accumulation of tragedies on the other.

Read their full article here:

https://doi.org/10.62191/ROAPE-2026-0015

Amrita Sharma is an Associate Professor at O P Jindal Global University in Haryana, India. She teaches political studies and works across political economy, political anthropology, political ecology, critical agrarian studies, and political geography. Her research examines the everyday politics of conflicts, resistance, and social movements, with a sustained focus on sovereignty, development, extractivism, nationalism, markets, corruption, infrastructures, states, and militarization.

Her current project studies the political economy of horticulture in Kashmir that approaches political conflict through an embedded understanding of markets and the economy. Drawing on over ten years of immersive ethnographic and comparative fieldwork across the Himalayan regions of Kashmir and Himachal, her work traces agrarian production, trade networks, market practices, bureaucratic regimes, and spectacular surveillance in militarized settings. It foregrounds the materialities of state-making by interrogating the paradoxes of routine and exception. She is presently completing her first book manuscript.
Her writing has appeared in Projections: MIT Journal of Urban Planning, Human Geography, History of the Present, Journal of Peasant Studies, Wasafiri, and The Caravan. She received the Institute of Human Geography Research Grant in 2023 and the NIF Book Fellowship in 2025.

Today, August 6, the Argentine Congress will debate a bill aimed at flexibilizing and eventually eliminating National Law 26,737, enacted in 2011, which restricts foreign ownership of land. From the Collective of Agrarian Scholar-Activists from the South (CASAS), we express our strong rejection of this initiative and deep concern about its territorial, social, political, and environmental implications.

Land is not merely an economic asset. It is the material basis for the reproduction of peasant and Indigenous life, food sovereignty, the conservation of commons, and the self-determination of peoples. Weakening regulations that limit foreign land ownership would open a new cycle of territorial concentration, private appropriation of strategic resources, and loss of sovereignty—whose significance transcends national borders.

For more than a decade, Law 26,737 has functioned as an institutional tool to preserve Argentina’s territorial sovereignty by establishing limits on the acquisition of rural land by foreign individuals and corporations. This legislation did not prohibit foreign ownership but set a 15% cap at the national, provincial, and municipal levels, recognizing the strategic nature of land and its associated resources. However, various surveys indicate that this limit has been reached or even exceeded in multiple local jurisdictions, particularly in border areas and regions rich in natural resources and biodiversity. Current initiatives to relax or eliminate these restrictions represent a significant setback in territorial governance and public-interest protection.

Currently, approximately 13 million hectares of rural land in Argentina—about 5% of the national territory—are in foreign hands. The main countries of origin include the United States, Spain, and Italy, with the United States alone accounting for around 2.7 million hectares. Moreover, more than one million hectares are registered through tax havens, further complicating effective regulation. This land grabbing has not been random; it has been concentrated in highly strategic areas, including border zones, glaciers, water basins, native forests, logistical corridors, and regions with high mining potential.

These territories are also home to numerous Indigenous communities. Argentina has 1,779 Indigenous communities, many located in regions where disputes over land, water, biodiversity, and other strategic commons converge. In this context, further liberalization of the land market could intensify tensions over their territorial rights. This convergence reveals that deregulating foreign land ownership affects not only land tenure regimes but also the governance of territories where strategic resources, extractive activities, and collective rights intersect.

The push to dismantle land regulation in Argentina is not an isolated event. It is part of a long-standing historical pattern of land concentration in private and foreign hands dating back to the late 19th century during the consolidation of the nation-state. Today, we are witnessing a new global wave of land and commons grabbing that, since the 2007–2008 food and financial crises, has enabled transnational corporations, investment funds, and financial actors to appropriate millions of hectares worldwide.

These processes are accelerated in contexts of economic deregulation and increasing concentration of political power, where the weakening of public controls and territorial rights facilitates new forms of accumulation by dispossession. The recent arrival of Peter Thiel (owner of Palantir and a key Pentagon contractor) and his interest in Argentine Patagonia—particularly investments aimed at maximizing the exploitation of the Vaca Muerta formation (a major unconventional hydrocarbon reserve)—along with the visit of IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva to this strategic geological region, illustrate the renewed dynamics of colonialism affecting Argentina and the broader region. It is also important to note that Argentina is currently the IMF’s largest debtor.

The attempt to dismantle the current land regime is not merely an administrative reform to attract investment; it constitutes a structural transformation in territorial governance that could deepen land concentration, expand private control over strategic resources, and weaken sovereignty in a global context marked by competition over freshwater, critical minerals, biodiversity, and food.

These concerns are heightened by the broader context in which these reforms are being promoted. Argentina is experiencing a rapid expansion of extractive activities—particularly mining, hydrocarbons, agribusiness, and large-scale infrastructure projects—across territories inhabited by peasant, Indigenous, and rural communities that have historically sustained essential forms of production for food security and ecosystem care.

Family, peasant, and Indigenous agriculture remains a strategic actor in food production and regional economies, despite occupying a very small share of agricultural land. According to a study by the National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA) based on the 2018 National Agricultural Census, small producers represent 63.7% of agricultural units but control only 13.4% of the land. Between 2002 and 2018, the total number of agricultural holdings declined by 25%, reflecting a persistent trend toward land concentration. Although updated data are lacking, this trend has likely continued—and even intensified—after the pandemic and the policy shifts introduced in 2023.

Since March 2026, more than 15 legislative proposals have been introduced to modify or repeal Law 26,737, many of which have been revised in response to pressure from peasant, Indigenous, academic, and political organizations. This dynamic demonstrates widespread social opposition to a model that undermines territorial sovereignty.

This issue cannot be reduced to a debate over investment or property rights. It concerns who controls access to water, critical minerals, biodiversity, and territories that are strategically vital in the context of the global climate crisis and the crisis of the agri-food system.

As an international community of scholars committed to agrarian justice, environmental justice, and the sovereignty of peoples, we recognize that decisions about land have consequences that transcend national borders. The growing financialization of natural resources, the expansion of transnational capital, and global competition over strategic resources make it essential to strengthen—not weaken—democratic mechanisms for territorial regulation.

We therefore express our solidarity with peasant, Indigenous, rural dwellers, environmental, labor, academic, and human rights organizations defending the social function of land and the commons in Argentina.

We call on the international community to:

• Publicly reject any initiative aimed at eliminating or weakening restrictions on foreign ownership of rural land;
• Support the efforts of Argentine peasant and Indigenous organizations in defending their territories and ways of life;
• Promote respect for Indigenous and rural territorial rights in accordance with international human rights standards;
• Demand that any regulatory reform ensure transparency, effective public participation, and evaluation of social, environmental, and territorial impacts;
• Reaffirm that land, water, and the commons cannot be reduced to commodities governed solely by market logic.

Defending land is also defending democracy, food sovereignty, environmental justice, and the possibility of building more just rural futures.

International solidarity is more necessary than ever.

You can download and share the statement here:

Abstract:

The Landless Rural Workers Movement of Brazil (MST) primarily organized occupations of large-scale farms, forcing the redistribution of land for creation of agrarian reform settlements. In the past 20 years, however, land occupations and the establishment of new agrarian reform settlements have consistently declined, while the MST shifted strategies to strengthening existing agrarian reform settlements, increasing marketing mechanisms through government purchasing programs and direct rural–urban connections, cultivating new financial instruments, advancing agroecological transformations to strengthen production and contesting space in governance and discourse about sustainability, rural development and socio-ecological wellbeing. We argue this shift represents not an abandonment of the agrarian question but its adaptation, reflecting transformations of agrarian capital and social, ecological and political dynamics nationally and internationally rather than internal decisions within the MST alone. Thus, we theorize why, where and how new agrarian questions change in specific places over time, transforming and being transformed by social movements.

You can find their paper here:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/joac.70100

This contribution draws on a feminist experience developed in 2025 as part of the Omega Resilience Awards initiative and rooted in a broader process of university extension and collaborative knowledge production with grassroots collectives across Uruguay. Using body-territory mapping as a collective feminist methodology, we examine how women narrate and make visible the impacts of land and water dispossession, environmental contamination, and multiple forms of violence, while highlighting the networks of care, resistance, and solidarity through which life is sustained in their territories. This piece contributes to broader debates on territorial defense, feminist struggles, and alternatives to extractivist development models in the Global South, while offering insights into feminist methodologies that foster collective reflection, situated knowledge production, and processes of resistance and collective care.

Abstract:

In Uruguay, a series of transformations have taken place that threaten the sustainability of family, peasant, and community-based agriculture, agroecology, and careful ways of inhabiting territories, in the face of the dominant extractivist model. These are contexts in which extractivist practices have caused varying degrees of harm to the fabric of life—impacting communities and the ways in which relationships between human and more-than-human lives are built. Focusing on social struggles in recent years, we observe that resistance to dispossession and structural crises is becoming increasingly central. In particular, the leading role of women has become more visible in defending life, the health of territories, land, and water—denouncing contamination and poisoning in the hands of agribusiness, as well as land concentration in the hands of real estate speculation. Our aim has been to make visible the ways in which life is sustained and territories are inhabited through the networks woven by the women with whom we have been working. We understand these networks as ties and spaces of encounter built throughout their lives.

Read their full paper here: https://www.agrariansouth.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/ASN-RB-April-June-2026_1.pdf

CASAS, a network of over 400 academics from around the world, is launching a global campaign supporting Colombia’s Agrarian Reform against far-right backlash.

The Colombian Agrarian Reform achieved historical gains: 280,000 ha restituted, 779,000 ha redistributed, 2 million ha formalized, and 25 peasant territories recognized. Through restitution, redistribution, recognition, and regulation, Colombia proved agrarian justice is possible.

Now, the new far-right government threatens to dismantle these achievements. Peasant, Indigenous, and Afro-descendant leaders are being threatened and criminalized, facing escalating threats. Furthermore, public servants implementing land reform are being targeted.

As academics and scholar-activists, we demand protection for defenders and respect for territorial rights.

Sign the petition here (EN/ES): https://bit.ly/4vKX78i

Land is life, defend Agrarian Reform

CASAS Collective.

Cuba is in the grip of a punishing economic, commercial and financial blockade imposed by the United States for over 60 years. It has affected electricity generation, transport, healthcare and food distribution. Now, Washington is tightening the screws once again, intending to destroy Cuba’s revolutionary project, subjugating its people through hunger, medicine shortages and the disruption of daily life.

Cuba has given the world far more than it has received: doctors in the most remote corners of the globe, life-saving vaccines, literacy brigades that taught millions of people to read, inspiration and support for cooperative organisation, the widespread adoption of agroecology and, in all of this, growing solidarity and humanist internationalism to build a fairer and more sustainable world. Now, as the U.S attempts to collectively punish an entire nation for refusing to bow down, it is up to us to repay that solidarity with strength and determination.

La Via Campesina is organising a fundraiser to support the Cuban peasantry in their struggles. Your donations will go directly to the Small Farmers National Association (ANAP), Cuba’s national peasant organisation and a member of La Vía Campesina.

The ANAP is already in the process of building food and energy sovereignty through agroecology. Your contributions will further help ANAP peasant families to install irrigation and renewable energy systems, expand agroecological production, diversify local seed systems and strengthen small-scale cooperative processing to consolidate the production of healthy and nutritious food in a sustainable manner and ensure the people’s food supply. The funds will also be used to purchase medicines, essential supplies and educational materials, prioritising women, children and older people in vulnerable areas.

La Vía Campesina intends to raise 100,000 EUR to provide humanitarian aid to the people of Cuba through the link below:

Please share this call with anyone interested in showing their support for the Cuban peasantry.

Abstract:

The erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir is home to one of the largest pastoral transhumance communities in the Himalayas. There is a need to situate state education policy for tribes against the specific mode of production involving nomadic pastoralism and ecological labour. This phenomenon of Transhumance existence acts as an anchor against which the lived experience of the Bakarwal tribe can be located, and any impact of the former bears upon the latter. The existing circumstances of these pastoralist communities can be spatially located against the varied effects imposed upon their ability to practice transhumance. It is in this context that the article analyses the state education policy on securing the futures of the children of the Bakarwal community. The paper highlights the issue of hegemonic bias in state policy on education, which invisibilises the lived environment where the tribe is situated. The paper lays out the effect of formal education on embedded ecologies and epistemes within the community.

Read their full article here: https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2026.2678962

This article was collectively written by CASAS’ members Sinem Kavak, Lorenza Arango, Doi Ra, Zeynep Ceren Eren Benlisoy, CarloJohn Arceo, George T. Mudimu, Daren Shi-chi Leung, Adwoa Yeboah Gyapong and Mnqobi Ngubane.

Abstract:

Migrant workers have long played a central role in the global food system, yet they often remain marginal in food sovereignty discourse and practice. In this paper, we discuss why and how migrant labour is overlooked and explore ways to more effectively integrate migrant workers into food sovereignty frameworks, including debates, discourse, mobilisations, and practices. Increasing numbers of ‘working people’ migrate in search of livelihoods, which raises questions about the role of migrant labour in food sovereignty, its connections to changing forms of social reproduction across different spaces, and its relevance for advancing agrarian justice in the present neoliberal era. Evidence suggests that migrant workers produce food for both self-consumption and market sale in urban, peri-urban, and rural areas. However, the emphasis on localisation within food sovereignty has often prioritized peasant agriculture, overlooking contemporary trends towards semi-proletarianisation within both small peasant and worker households that combine subsistence farming with wage labour. A more inclusive food sovereignty agenda must address the lived realities of working people, particularly regarding their access to land. Urban and peri-urban food production by low-paid and informal workers illustrates the need to expand the concept of food sovereignty beyond rural peasants to encompass diverse labouring populations.

You can cite the article like this:

Kavak, S., Arango, L., Ra, D., Eren Benlisoy, Z. C., Arceo, C. J., Mudimu, G. T., … Ngubane, M. (2026). Food sovereignty, capitalism and migrant workers. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2026.2692534

You can read their full article here: https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2026.2692534