By Madeleine Fairbairn

Rather than treating global farmland acquisitions as a top-down phenomenon driven entirely by global markets, this paper instead highlights the crucial mediating role played by national-level land politics and domestic elites using material drawn from interviews with government officials, investors, and civil society organizations in Mozambique. I first describe, in broad strokes, the current wave of large-scale foreign land acquisitions in Mozambique. Next I describe the domestic institutional context within which this foreign demand for land has been inserted. I focus on the national Land Law and the extent of unofficial “land markets” as two institutions which particularly mediate the effects of foreign farmland demand on rural communities. In the section that follows, I argue that domestic elites also play an important role. Local- and district-level elites may position themselves as intermediaries in foreign land acquisitions or grab land themselves in response to increased external demand. However, this lower-level opportunism is linked to and implicitly sanctioned by a broader approach to land governance within the ruling party, Frelimo, in which community land rights are seen as an impediment to progress and people at the highest levels of government use their influence to profit from foreign land investments. I conclude that describing land grabs as “neo-colonialism” may obscure a highly complicated chain of causation in which local and national elites benefit from international investment in return for their role in facilitating the expropriation of peasant lands.