IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cep/cepdps/dp2075.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Large-scale land acquisitions: Trees, trade and structural change

Author

Listed:
  • Tommaso Sonno
  • Davide Zufacchi

Abstract

Large-scale land acquisitions are a key component of agricultural foreign direct investment. In 2023 alone, nearly 6% of the world's arable land was acquired globally. This paper examines their impact on agricultural production, environmental outcomes, and local communities. To identify these effects, we exploit an exogenous increase in palm oil land acquisitions driven by the Ebola epidemic in Liberia. We find a 54% growth in production, primarily due to an expansion in cultivated hectares rather than large improvements in land productivity, accompanied by a significant rise in palm oil exports. Our results indicate that LSLAs have altered the equilibrium of palm oil production, fuelling the adoption of an extensive monoculture system oriented toward international markets. The expansion of this tradable industry generated modest positive effects on the local economy and spurred a process of structural transformation. Women transitioned from agriculture to service and sales jobs, while men shifted into manual labour positions. However, all of this came at a cost: increased deforestation, air pollution, and a decline in local land ownership.

Suggested Citation

  • Tommaso Sonno & Davide Zufacchi, 2025. "Large-scale land acquisitions: Trees, trade and structural change," CEP Discussion Papers dp2075, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
  • Handle: RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp2075
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp2075.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp2075. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://cep.lse.ac.uk/_new/publications/discussion-papers/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.