Cultivating alternatives: Land Grabbing and Peasant resistance in Romania

Orientação: Irina Velicu

Programa de Doutoramento: Democracia no Século XXI

Financiamento: FCT

This project looks at the particularity of contemporary's land grab as part of structural changes of the global economy characterized by neoliberal reforms such as land privatisation in the developing world and globalisation of food production. The research questions are: How does industrial agriculture transform peasants from producers to labor force? Do peasants resist their own commodification and how? The study I propose will focus on the consequences that land concentration and the industrial agricultural sector has on the Romanian small farmers, following their strategies of survival and resistance. Romania is one of the European countries in which land grabbing has drastically increased, having vast and fertile agricultural land, which is also at a lower price compared to older EU member states. The study will consider Romania's position of marginality in the EU, and how this phenomenon is integrated with unequal regional development accelerated by neoliberal policies.