”Fill the earth and subdue it” – on various types of postmodern agriculture and land grabbing in the globalized world

Abstract

The process of land grabbing has been analyzed in the presented article. The nature of this process consists in efforts to take possession of or to merely control particular areas of land that have been qualified as agricultural ones. Some leading actors of postmodern, global capitalism perceive land grabbing as an important mechanism for controlling the world economic system as well as a source of huge profits. The side effect of such process leads to various negative phenomena and social consequences, including marginalization and exclusion of many rural and agricultural communities. Moreover, it results in – what we call – the new rural poverty as well as new types of unsustainable social and economic (class) relations based on domination and exploitation. This particular process has been analyzed in the context of the so-called post-modernization theory that covers the following aspects: hyper-rationalization, hyper-commodification, hyper-differentiation and hyper-individualization. Concluding, contemporary postmodern agriculture seems to be not only a form of post-productionist activity or of sustainable development but also an effect of post-modernization processes leading to the dynamic development of capitalism with an “ugly face”, to unsustainable management of natural resources (including land as a fundamental type of such resources) and huge profits resulting from the growing asymmetry of knowledge, power and ownership.