A question of scale: the construction of marginal lands and the limitations of global land classifications
Nalepa, Rachel A.
With the growth of the biofuel complex, the concept of marginal landd has emerged as a term commonly associated with the promotion of agrofuels. Remote sensing and other data are used to globally characterize land as marginal based on predominantly biophysical features that render them non-competitivee for the purpose of commercial agriculture. Marginalityy is a relative and non-static term, however, dictated by the economics of localitiessthe scale on which land use decisions are actually made. This paper: (i) questions the very notion of marginal landd as a relevant and prescriptive concept given its inability to be uniformly operationalized across scales and (ii) advances the notion that marginal landd is an artificial spatial construct that serves to re-frame land in a way that neglects socio-ecological processes in order to re-frame it in support of principles based in resource productivism.
Event: International Conference on Global Land Grabbing
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