Land grabs across developing world must be stopped

THE struggle over land is a defining feature of Ireland’s political history.

As a nation we understand the importance of land as a safety net for those who have nothing to fall back on in hard times.

The dispossession and marginalisation of the rural poor are nothing new. However the scale and pace of the large scale acquisition of land — or land grabbing — in the developing world in the last decade is unprecedented and is having disastrous consequences for the world’s poor.