Benjamin Neimark
| Benjamin Neimark is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and Geography at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA, USA. His research on agrarian studies and peasant labor coalesce around themes of land tenure, resource property rights, and agrofuel production in Africa and Madagascar. His previous research focuses on the political economy of biological prospecting on the island nation of Madagascar. Bioprospecting involves search for, and commercialization of, useful natural compounds in new pharmaceutical and industrial products. His work examines studies of drug discovery and development and analyzes the politics of access to some of the most valuable global biogenetic resources endemic to Madagascar. Two recent publications on this work includes:”Subverting Regulatory Protection of 'Natural Commodities:' The Prunus africana in Madagascar” in Development and Change (2010), and a co-authored piece with Dr. Richard Schroeder, “Hotspot Discourse in Africa: Making Space for Bioprospecting in Madagascar” in African Geographical Review (2009). Email: bneimark@odu.edu |
Research on Land-grabbing:
The land of our ancestors: property rights, social resistance, and alternatives to land grabbing in Madagascar
This study focuses on a well-known ‘biofuel battleground’ in Madagascar, highlighting the first case of successful social resistance against contemporary land grabs. Development economists and land policy specialists advocate for formal property rights to secure tenure and stimulate agricultural investment in land and markets, and while foreign aid projects are beginning to address land rights, most of Madagascar’s agricultural zones remain under extremely complex overlapping state and customary claims. International donor’s copious funding of land tenure is producing some positive results; however, as a new Malagasy-generated land law (“Law 2005-019”) is now being implemented nationally in rural sites. Yet, as competing visions of land securitization take hold; significant questions remain regarding whether the law is an adequate alternative for protecting rural Malagasy from dispossession of livelihood resources under agro/biofuel capitalism. Additionally, given the history of politically-charged divisions in Madagascar, tenure claims may fracture along class, gender, and ethnicity, exacerbating tenuous social relations and promote rural differentiation. This project addresses these questions empirically and builds on existing foundational analysis of this bellwether case of global land-grabbing.
