Rethinking land grabbing: a focus on land Pawning in rural Malawi

Abstract

Land pawning, is a relatively understudied practice in Malawi’s agrarian landscape and broader land scholarship. Our research contextualizes this practice within debates of domestic and global land grabbing. Focussing on smallholder farmers, we analysed how land pawning reshapes labour dynamics, capital flows, and survival strategies. Crucially, we interrogated whether this practice constitutes land grabbing. Our findings reveal that landowners, unable to repay loans, face prolonged dispossession and expropriation of their land, trapping them in perpetual cycles of debt and poverty. This compels them to depend on precarious wage labour for subsistence. By enabling small-scale capitalists to extract land and labour from vulnerable rural and poor households, land pawning mirrors the dispossessive outcomes of conventional land grabbing. We thus argue that land pawning represents a localised, small-scale, incremental form of land grabbing that not only perpetuates inequalities but also erodes local agrarian economies that chiefly depend on access to land.