LAND TRAFFICKING: AGRIBUSINESS, TITLING CAMPAIGNS AND DEFORESTATION IN THE PERUVIAN AMAZON
Juan Luis Dammert
This paper focuses on the politics of agribusiness expansion in peripheral areas of the Peruvian Amazon. The paper analyzes the mechanisms through which forested land is brought into the land market for agrarian purposes and the unintended role played by titling campaigns –supposedly aimed at regularizing the spontaneous occupation of the Amazon– in the expansion of the corporate agribusiness frontier. The legal requirements for forest conversion into agriculture are overlooked in titling campaigns, unlike the cases of corporate projects in which there is a stricter scrutiny. In this context, buying titled lands has become an attractive avenue for plantation development to skip environmental requirements. This situation has led to intensified colonization of forested lands to acquire titles and sell them to interested parties. The paper shows how the titling mechanism has been used perversely to promote processes of deforestation and land grabbing and characterizes this dynamic as land trafficking.
Event: Land Governance in an Interconnected World_Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty_2018
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