By Jennifer Baka

Unlike the large scale, biofuels-induced land grabs occurring in Africa(Cotula et al. 2009; Sulle and Nelson 2009; World Bank 2010), the land grabstaking place in India involve smaller tracts of land and are more subtle and obscured. However, the outcomes on both continents pose equally deleterious threats to the rural poor. Motivated by both international and domestic policies to restrict feedstock cultivation to marginal environments, biodiesel companies in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu have slowly been amassing plantations of privately owned ‘wastelands’, the government’s term for marginal lands, by purchasing lands from farmers at low rates and/or re-registering farmer’s lands without their knowledge or consent. After short-lived attempts at raising biofuel plantations and likely after receiving government subsidies for seedling procurement and land preparation, the companies are in the process of selling lands into real estate for at least double the purchase price per acre, according to government land records. Thus, instead of minimizing threats to food security and enhancing rural welfare, growing biofuels on marginal lands appears to be doing the exact opposite by dispossessing farmers of their agricultural land.

This paper examines the mechanics of the biofuels-induced land grabbing taking place in Tamil Nadu and its impacts on agrarian livelihoods. As will be demonstrated through a detailed examination of land records and interviews with key stakeholders, India’s wasteland-centered biofuels policy is reducing the extent of agricultural area and dispossessing poor farmers of their ancestral lands, one of the few assets this class of farmers have. After a literature review on the politics of wasteland mapping, the paper briefly reviews India’s current biodiesel policy and wasteland assessment procedures in Sections 2 and 3, respectively. The land grabbing examination is presented in Section 4 and concluding remarks are offered in Section 5.