The dominant narrative of international institutions and donors often depict large scale agro-investments as a pro-poor strategy, which will help modernizing and increasing productivity in the agricultural sector, thereby fostering socio-economic development. However, the extent to which these land deals are effectively contributing to reduce poverty remains open to question. Indeed, few investments are operational, and proposed benefits rarely materialize. Increasingly, land dispossession appears to be the most common tangible local impact for rural residents.
Investors are not sole actors in the processes of land dispossession. Scholars have also highlighted the key role played by the state in processes of dispossession and capitalist accumulation. By presenting an aggregated analysis of fifteen large and medium scale agro-investments in four different Tanzanian regions, this study tackles specifically the question of how the state and other actors use governing tools to operationalize dispossession processes associated to large scale agro-investments, and to capture benefits from it.
Underscoring five different means and tools of governing — village land use planning, the creation of a National land bank, the change of administrative status, the piloting of a new Land for Equity policy, and a donor funded Land Tenure Support Programme — used to dispossess smallholder farmers and pastoralists, we seek to contribute to the debate about the legitimacy of large-scale agro-investment as a pro-poor strategy. In addition, our analysis provides a new picture of the legal innovativeness that exists at global, central, regional, district levels of governing in order to legitimize displacement of rural residents from the land they use.