Although many reports on land-grabbing – the enclosure of tracts of land and natural resources by  corporations and foreign powers – have focused on the global south, where the vast majority of acquisitions take place, a new report suggests Europe's land is at just as great a risk of enclosure.

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In January this year, researchers from the Universities of Virginia and Milan produced a comprehensive assessment of land and water grabbing worldwide, which they said has increased over the past decade, and is hampering efforts to achieve global food security by limiting people's access to land which they formerly enjoyed. In July 2012, Washington DC-based sustainable development organisation Worldwatch Institute released a report suggesting that, although the pace at which agricultural lands worldwide have been bought up by foreign or transnational private investors had fallen since the peak levels of 2009, the consolidation of agricultural land into a few private hands is continuing above 2005 levels.

According to Worldwatch, around 70.2 million hectares of agricultural land worldwide has been transferred into the control of foreign private and public investors since 2000. The greatest number of purchases have been in Africa, where, in total, 56.2 million hectares, or four per cent of the continent's agricultural land, has been bought or leased in this way (34.3m ha since 2000).

The issue has risen to international attention in recent years, especially since the 2007-8 global food crisis, when rapid rises in the price of food led to a dramatic acceleration of land-grabbing activities.

This week, a report published by the Transnational Institute (TNI), a progressive policy organisation based in Amsterdam, reveals that three per cent of landowners in Europe control half of all agricultural land. TNI said that, in some European countries, "This massive concentration of land ownership and wealth is on par with Brazil, Colombia and Philippines."

The report looks at the concentration of land in Spain, Germany, Italy, France and Austria, as well as Eastern European and Former Soviet Union states, including Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Ukraine. However, none of the 25 authors examine Britain, which is thought to have amongst the most unequal patterns of land distribution found anywhere in the world.

Kevin Cahill, author of Who Owns Britain suggested in 2002 that 69 percent of the land in UK and Ireland is owned by 0.6 percent of the population. Since Cahill's book was published, evidence suggests this pattern has only increased.

Concentrations of land reinforced by current EU policy

The authors of Land Concentration, Land Grabbing and People's Struggles in Europe, suggest that many of the observed patterns of land concentration are not new, but that they have accelerated in recent decades, particularly in Eastern Europe.

They also believe current EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) subsidies and national policies are driving this dynamic, as they favour large land holdings. The authors argue that current subsidy schemes marginalise small farms and have played a part in blocking access to land for smaller farmers and new entrants. An example of this is the distribution of subsidy funds in Spain, where, in 2009, 75 percent of the subsidies were cornered by only 16 percent of the largest producers.

The authors said that, in addition to European Companies and landowners accruing yet more land, new actors including Chinese companies and Middle Eastern hedge funds are also seeking to "profit from the increasingly speculative commodity of land."

Professor Jan Douwe van der Ploeg of Wageningen University, one of the study's researchers, said on Wednesday that the TNI report revealed "an unprecedented dynamic of land concentration and creeping land grabbing, [which] has worsened the existing situation where many young people want to stay in or take up farming but cannot maintain or gain access to land."  He added, "This was already a serious issue before, but has become worse."

The professor continued that current and future CAP schemes are likely to perpetuate this situation, further hampering efforts to achieve a more sustainable and just agricultural system. "Access to land is a basic condition to achieve food sovereignty in Europe. Indeed, the three most pressing land issues in Europe today are land concentration, land grabbing, and inability of young people to maintain or gain access to land to enter sustainable farming – interlinked… issues quite similar to the ones we see in Africa, Latin America and Asia today," he said.

Authors' recommendations

The authors conclude that there is a drastic need to rethink the conventional view of land issues as something isolated to the Global South. They say their study reveals threats posed by land grabbing to farmers in Europe's most developed countries, and that unless the issue is checked, young farmers and the innovation they bring could be excluded from the land.

However, they highlight some areas where hopeful and inventive responses to these enclosures have met with success and inspired people to take action where political decision makers have not. These include the case of SOC in Andalusia, where landless peasant farmers are collectively occupying land and cultivating it using ecological farming systems.

They also look at urban farming initiatives, which present diverse and original means of engaging with food where most people live (especially relevant given the urbanisation of Europe's population, which is only predicted to continue); one example given comes from Vienna, where young people have 'squatted' fertile urban land for community supported agriculture and city food gardening, preserving it from conversion to urban commercial projects.

Although the authors pledged their support for more autonomous projects, they also made a series of recommendations to national and EU leaders last week, based on the report's findings. These include:

-          Removing the incentives for land-grabbing through tax penalties, moves against unfair competitiveness and recognition of historical land use rights

-          Increasing support for younger and smaller farmers in CAP reforms

-          Proposing a European directive on land, with a civil society consultation process, which would bring communities into decisions on land use

-          Prioritising the use of land for food over fuel crops

Jeanne Verlinden, a spokesperson for Via Campesina in Europe, said the study shows that, "Land needs to be seen again as a public good." She commented, "We must reduce the commodification of land and instead promote public management of this common resource on which we all depend."

In January this year, over 100 charities, faith groups and development organisations led by Oxfam launched the 'IF' campaign. The campaign takes land grabbing as one of the key areas for action in its push for a world in which food security and social justice are attainable. According to the campaign, "An area of land the size of London is being sold or leased in developing countries every six days." Furthermore, the IF campaign highlights the threat to food security from such activities; "58 percent of global land acquisitions in recent years have been to produce crops that could be used for biofuels. This reduces the land available to grow food."

On Wednesday, European Parliament rapporteur Corinne LePage drew the Parliament's attention to land use change as a result of the EU's biofuel policies in a report presented to the Parliament.