The urban and northern face of global land grabs
Holt-Gimenez, Eric, Yi Wang and Annie Shattuck
Detroit, Michigan, the former Paris of the Midwest, is ground zero of the U.S. recession. Detroit is also a flashpoint for the northern food justice movement. There are over 300 community gardens in Detroit (Wahl 2010), an active food policy council, and a city food charter that explicitly addresses structural racism in the food system. Detroit's food justice activists are also under threat from a large land grab. Detroit is not alone in this phenomenon. In Oakland, Californiaaan historical seedbed of the food justice movementtfood activists are also fighting an eminent domain ruling to give land to a large grocery chain, in the name of greening Oakland's 'food deserts'. Land grabs in the food systems of urban northern communities are occurring in parallel with what many have dubbed the global land grabb (GRAIN 2008; Zoomers 2010). While these land deals are clearly of a different scope and magnitude than the large scale rural land deals in the global south, urban land grabs in the global North pose similar challenges for northern food justice movements as the global land grab poses for the food sovereignty movement in the global South. The purpose of this paper is to explore the political economy of land grabbing and resistance in urban, northern communities, using a food systems framework. By comparing what is shared and what is different about land grabs in the urban North and the global South, this research hopes to inform possible North-South, urban-rural alliances between Food Justice and Food Sovereignty movements.
Event: International Conference on Global Land Grabbing
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