Jessica Chu
| Jessica Chu is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at SOAS, University of London. She holds an MA in the Anthropology of Food (SOAS) and a BA(Hons) History and BSc Life Sciences (Queen’s University, Canada). Her research interests include issues concerning food security, agricultural development, and land rights and she is currently conducting research on large-scale land acquisitions in Zambia. Email: jessica_chu@soas.ac.uk |
Research on Land-grabbing:
Foreign investments in agriculture in Zambia: Evaluating potential and the new social products of large-scale farmland acquisitions
Zambia has been the site of rising foreign investment in large-scale land acquisitions; it has been suggested (World Bank, 2010) that with its abundance of land and water, Zambia contains great potential to act as Africa’s new ‘bread basket’. In particular, the acquisition of large-scale farmland has been promoted as an investment opportunity with safe returns, as well as a way to promote local food security and economic development, suggesting the rise of a new model of agricultural development. This project seeks to evaluate the potential in large-scale farmland acquisitions in contributing to agricultural development, with particular regard to the positive and negative impacts to food security, social relations, and agricultural livelihoods. This research contributes to a larger PhD project that explores the political and cultural economies of large-scale farmland acquisitions in Zambia. It seeks to examine, what frictions are produced in the social relations between global discourses and local knowledge?
