Land, agriculture and migration

The 2023 World Development Report (WDR, 2023) on migration is progressive in its advocacy for both migration and migrants, demonstrating a clear desire to build a better world for all by reducing the barriers to movement and mitigating the negative effects of hostile or insecure environments for those who migrate. Any report on a topic as large as migration—particularly one with the ambition to encompass the whole world—must focus, and the WDR 2023 has chosen to concentrate on the immediate causes and effects of moving across international borders, with income as the proxy for access to a larger basket of resources and rights, or what Amartya Sen (1976) would call entitlements. Influenced by this proxy, the report contends that economic inequality between nations is the largest predictor of who moves, and the desire to improve personal circumstance is the greatest motivation. What falls out of the report is one of the primary root causes for migration historically and today: insecure or insufficient access to land and its benefits (Hermans & McLeman, 2021; Radel et al., 2019; Sassen, 2016), which is only imperfectly captured in statistics on poverty or inequality. The WDR 2023 mentions land only twice, both times in the chapter on gender where the report rightly argues that improved land tenure security gives women greater resilience, providing them with income and stability to remain in place and support a family. This exclusion continues a longer trend in World Development Reports. Over the past 45 years (1978–2023), WDRs have exhibited an overwhelming urban and industrial focus.1 This is surprising given that the majority of the world's poor reside in rural areas, and they depend on access to land for both remaining in place and subsistence and survival. Only three reports have focused specifically on agriculture (1982, 1986 and 2008), suggesting that WDRs are less an analysis of current conditions and improvement therein and more focused on achievement of trajectories of growth (modernization) understood to require industrialization and urban development. This aspirational vision of development as a transition from rural to urban economies has dominated political perspectives and academic theories since the growth of political economy as a field of intervention in Europe in the late 1700s. Economic growth strategies have deliberately focused on moving people from rural areas to urban ones, tightening property relations and creating rental or ownership contracts that will allow the concentration of land, intensification of production, and release of ‘unnecessary’ or underemployed rural inhabitants (usually smallholders on untitled land deemed marginal) into the cities where they will be absorbed as cheap labour in industrial production. Even today, concerns about climate change and food insecurity have led to calls for sustainable intensification, a land-sparing approach that intertwines the concentration of high-yield agricultural production with restricted-access natural spaces, both of which are likely to lead to further out-migration from rural areas (see the debate summarized in Baudron et al., 2021). When people exit the countryside, they leave behind their primary means of production and social reproduction: the land and natural resources. Across the latter half of the 1900s, rural to urban migration filled the cities of the Global South in just 30–50 years, leading to growing informal populations and economies in over-crowded urban centres.2 None of this is news to the World Bank, which has developed a field of study and policy around land governance. A central tenet is that land tenure policies (particularly property rights) must be strengthened to mitigate forced displacement while facilitating voluntary out-migration, furthering livelihood security, competition and economic growth (German, 2022). The common wisdom is that greater tenure security will allow property holders to invest in their land, confident in their long-term access and able to use their titles as collateral for bank or corporate loans. The World Bank's Land Governance Assessment Framework is intended to evaluate the strength of a given country's land rights and rules because the bank agrees that such rules are integral to sustainable endogenous development. The need to understand land tenure dynamics has increased in recent years due to several factors, some of which the WDR 2023 highlights and others it does not. First, rapid urbanization is being accomplished in some countries by sweeping state-led dispossession and induced rural to urban migration. This has been well documented in both India and China (Andreas et al., 2020; Goldman, 2020; Levien, 2018). It is also evident in Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa (Mwesigye & Matsumoto, 2016). Second, climate change is making vulnerable land and farmers even more vulnerable, pushing them into cities or across borders when drought or extreme weather strikes (Clapp et al., 2018). Third, remedies for climate change include conservation and carbon mitigation or credit programmes that restrict land use in ways that may trade household vulnerability for ecological resilience (Agrawal et al., 2019; Davis et al., 2020; Vigil, 2022). Fourth, growing recognition of the greenhouse gas effects of coal and natural gas use has motivated interest in biofuels, and the push to replace food crops with spatially expansive fuel or flex crops has implications for agricultural land availability (Borras Jr et al., 2010; Rosa et al., 2021). Fifth, a series of economic crises in the mid-2000s (particularly in insurance, housing and automobile markets) along with a world food crisis that reverberated globally between 2006 and 2007, causing street protests in over 60 countries, generated increased investment in land that came to be known as the Global Land Grab (see Wolford et al., 2024). Imperfect data exists on these large-scale land acquisitions (Edelman, 2013; Liao & Agrawal, 2024) but perhaps the most significant effect is rising land prices across the globe. Higher land prices make it difficult for communities and poor households to retain access, pushing them to sell or forcing them to leave and moving to nearby rural areas, cities, or across political borders.3 According to data compiled by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the Land Matrix, there is significant overlap in the countries that have the highest internal conflict, numbers of internally displaced peoples, and recent investment in land.4 Sixth, changes in financial markets have made it easier for large-scale investors such as hedge funds and pensions funds to trade farmland. This financialization of land contributes to increasing prices and concentration of ownership (Ashwood et al., 2022; Fairbairn, 2020). Seventh and finally, these economic, political, and environmental factors have combined to both justify and incentivize increased large-scale commodity and flex crop production or what some have called the ‘return of the plantation’ (Li & Semedi, 2021). This leads to mechanization without resulting in local jobs or development as promised. In the wake of the Global Land Grab and rising interest in plantations, some countries are re-writing their land tenure rules to favour international investment and large-scale acquisitions. This is evident with the latest round of changes to the Land Policy and Land Law in Mozambique, both of which are being revised to facilitate outside investment, suggesting that more investment into land will generate more migration from the rural areas to cities in Mozambique and beyond (Bruna et al., 2023; Tanner, 2022). One could argue that attention to land access is outside the scope of the World Development Report, but I argue that including land access fundamentally changes the perspective on migration. If the goal was to promote a policy discussion, then including an understanding of how land governance and access shape migration is necessary to understanding which policies need to be under discussion in which countries. Several factors are key to reshaping how we might think about policy. First, rural–urban migration is often the first step along a path to international migration. Second, rural–urban migration is not an unintended effect of violence, war or instability. Rather, it is an intentional effect of most development theories, policies, and prescriptions for developing countries. International migrants often bear the stigma of having been forced to flee, when it should be more widely recognized that displacement is an expected component of most growth models. Third, rural–urban migration, particularly of the poorest and most vulnerable, arguably benefits countries in the Global North that depend on raw materials for industrial production and a heavily decentralized global food system. Significant resources have been expended to assist large-scale producers in the Global South in their intensification and expansion, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Indeed, many of these corporate producers are headquartered or live in the Global North. While receiving migrants is sometimes pitched rhetorically as a form of charity, this disguises the benefit wealthy northern countries receive from landed production in the South. At a minimum, the complicated global flow of foreign direct investment in food, natural resources, and more recently, climate funds for land-based mitigation programmes, blurs the line between sending and receiving countries. Fourth, if forced migration is seen as a response to insecure land access, perhaps the discussion can broaden to include policies that strengthen local control over land, community-led decision-making around land laws and investment rules, cooperative profit sharing with local communities and ‘matrix’ organization (Perfecto & Vandermeer, 2010) of biodiverse small farms, conservation areas, and rural development. We thank all field workers who accompanied A. Bernich into the field, particularly Connor Bland and Gilbert Coombes. The Janet Cosh Herbarium provided plant identification support. Discussions with Hillary Cherry and Matt Sheahan helped formulate our ideas. The opinions expressed in this Commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors, Editorial Board, International Organization for Migration nor John Wiley & Sons. NA.