The digitalisation of land: more data, less land

Many countries have been digitising their land registries since the mid-nineties. With this, they aim to standardise and integrate information relating to existing lands and the natural resources on them to optimise sustainable land governance, both in urban and rural areas.

According to the main proponents of this process, such as the World Bank, so-called “land governance” helps to formalise individual land ownership through a simplified, cheap and speedy land regularisation process. This, in turn, allows land to be sold on the market and encourages investment.[1]Placing land in the market as private property is, according to them, the key to increasing agricultural productivity and generating employment, which will, in turn, bring rural development and poverty reduction to the countries of the global South.

The logic is to standardise data collection through an integrated international system that will contain geo-referenced satellite data on land, updates on land-use change, and digitised land documents. Based on this data, a "digital land profile" is created capable of maximising business and investments in emerging countries.

Potentially, these technologies can help identify illegally appropriated land, recover it, and allocate land for agrarian reform. However, as GRAIN revealed in its September 2020 report Digital Fences, the structure of these "modern" cadastres favours the legalisation of land illicitly acquired by local elites. It fosters a new, now digital cycle of land grabbing in the remaining agricultural frontiers of Latin America.

These records have existed for a long time; many date back to colonial times. They were used as instruments to mark a central power's claim over a given territory. Cadastres authorised the collection of taxes by States on urban or rural land. Later, with the standardisation of private property and as enormous tracts of land were transferred to individuals, these cadastres started to incorporate legal and physical (cartographic) criteria to help define the location and boundaries of each property. This then served to define private property rights over the land, with its inclusion in the property register.[2]

In the Latin American context, deeds were granted by the Crown. These excluded all non-Europeans with no economic power (indigenous, enslaved black people, mestizos and women) from access to land and the means of production necessary for survival. Cadastres and property registers have historically been used as instruments to classify land as public or private, establish property rights, and replace the complex sociocultural relations established collectively by indigenous and peasant communities. This operation is at the heart of some of the most violent disputes in Latin America and involves indigenous people, peasants, Afro-descendants, States, and local and transnational elites.

Cadastre data is primarily collected through self-declarations and documents provided by the occupiers/owners themselves. Cadastres do not generate property rights but are used as a basis on which to formalise rights in property registries later. Cadastres–which are costly and require specialised professionals to collect physical and cartographic information about areas–, combined with the State’s failure to publish complete details of the location and quantity of existing public and unoccupied lands, have historically allowed national elites to illegally appropriate land. With more economic resources and political connections, these local elites can formalise ownership over large tracts of public lands. Often they have appropriated these lands, traditionally occupied by local peoples and communities, using violent means. This process is known as land grabbing.

So, land information held in cadastres and property registers tells the story from the land grabber’s perspective. These people have become large landowners, and economic and political elites, by dominating the use of force and the structure of land "governance" over time. With land agencies and registry offices dominated by local agrarian elites, the information in the cadastral systems is fragmented, unreliable and imprecise.

As per its nature, public and communal lands cannot be bought, sold or offered as collateral for loans, making it harder for land grabbers to extract wealth if they take over these lands. This is where new technologies come in; the digital integration of cadastres and land registries enables these lands to be reclassified. Through cadastres, rural properties can be included on registries that provide access to public policies and funding, which, in turn, can be used as a basis to issue individual property titles. Large landowners are then able to grab the lands of indigenous, traditional and peasant communities and sell them onwards to an increasingly transnational elite.

Extracting and making land data available improves "governance", but mainly for those outside the territories who do not ordinarily hold this information. Up-to-date access to geospatial data on land use is crucial for corporations and financial investors to better locate and price land, resources of interest and production. This also makes it possible to put a price on and negotiate the commons- resources that were previously not on the market, like clean air, native vegetation and other elements of an ecosystem. Because they are unlike any other commodity, it is complicated to assign a price to the commons. The quantification of carbon sequestered by nature- such as native vegetation and soil- for the issuance of carbon credits, for example, absolutely depends on the digitalisation of land.[5]

The entry of land and its data into the digital world represents technological and infrastructural change. It has opened land to new buyers, shifting control of it and its governance structure to primarily transnational and financial agents. That said, local elites resist these programmes for fear of exposing fraud and land-grabbing schemes. Currently, they have the advantage that the State information systems are unreliable. To promote the shift to digitalisation, governments relax the requirements to regularise properties. Efforts include allowing remote information capture through satellite images, outsourcing digitalisation to private companies (often controlled by influential local businessmen), and keeping the information generated secret from the public.

In Colombia, President Ivan Duque’s government has replaced in-person verification with capturing information based on high-precision aerial photos and satellites for its multipurpose cadastre. It has also authorised municipalities and private companies to carry out the registry, removing state oversight. These changes leave the new digital management of the cadastres vulnerable to influence by local elites and foreign capital, such as legalising the approximately 48% of titles estimated to be illegally acquired and including them on the map.

In Paraguay, the National Institute for Rural and Land Development (INDERT) instructs that paid titles within the country’s recently created digital database (SIRT) be validated without verifying whether these digital records were forged in historical land grabbing and corruption processes. This process amounts to counter agrarian reform in which peasant settlements are at risk of disappearing.[6] The most significant number of settlements registered in the SIRT with titles issued before 2021 are in the departments with the most important presence of foreign capital, such as Alto Paraná. SIRT data was made confidential after several inconsistencies were pointed out, claiming that the question of ownership involves personal and not public information.

In Brazil, about 30% of public forests (14 million ha) were illegally registered as private property in the National Rural Cadastre System (CAR) as of the end of 2020. As the CAR is self-declaratory, land grabbers draw fictitious rural properties within public forests on the map in a new onslaught of public land theft. The ease of digital land grabbing has stimulated subsequent cycles of deforestation and fires, which is necessary to appropriate and introduce the lands into the market.

Cadastres in developing countries are characterised by high concentrations of land ownership and unreliable information about public and communal lands. In these countries, land tenure regularisation policies based on digital cadastres, which support individual land titling in mass, are likely to consolidate the historical illegal occupation of public lands. Furthermore, cadastre and registry digitalisation has accelerated the privatisation of public and unclaimed lands, incorporating a more extensive stock of lands and resources of interest to the market and global financial flows.

From the middle of the 20th century, the technical integration of industry and agriculture and the increased agricultural production of commodities for export gave rise to agribusiness. Although based on the extraction of natural resources, agribusiness production increasingly integrates the industrial, service, and financial sectors. Agricultural production is not only about food. It's also about animal feed, fibres, energy, medicines, cosmetics and financial products derived from land and agricultural commodities—from bonds to carbon credits- increasingly demanded by the new social and ecological pact being forged internationally. As a result, trade with food, land, and natural resources has become a new frontier for multiple production chains, benefiting agents outside the agriculture industry, particularly the financial system and institutional investors such as pension and investment funds.

Global production chains for commodities often depend on access to large tracts of land in several countries to meet their respective demands. "Land governance", therefore, involves not only land, large landowners and states but also diverse sectors of the economy and investors interested in land-based financial derivatives. It consists of the governance of land, agriculture, energy, environment, climate and their respective markets. All this is made possible thanks to the digitalisation of information on land.

In the 1990s, as part of the push for market liberalisation, international cooperation actors such as the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Organization of American States (OAS), began to increasingly shift funding from land redistribution policies (colonisation projects and agrarian reform settlements to pacify rural conflicts), to the construction of Land Information Systems (SIT).[7] [8] Funding was earmarked "to modernise" and standardise technologies and forms of data collection— from manual formats to digital.

The loans for building these SITs, in addition to encouraging countries to adopt a standardised system for capturing, storing and sharing information (such as through the LADM and SOLA/FAO System), have also been set aside to expand and constantly update the types of information collected on land and other territorial information, for multiple purposes. Loans also cover the digitalisation of documents in public registries, which aim to transform deeds and land titles into cadastre-integrated magnetic records.[9]

In Colombia, USAID hired California-based company Tetra Tech, who subcontracted the implementation of the multipurpose cadastre of the National Land Agency (ANT) in 11 municipalities. All aimed to accelerate and lower the digitalisation process costs and formalise property rights over public lands (baldíos). Tetra Tech has launched the Land Node platform to collect, process and integrate cadastral information with land records. It has already digitised 1.5 million records. According to the platform, the shift from manual to digital clears doubts about the validity of records. The platform is a pilot case for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's "Enabling Satellite-Based Crop Analytics At Scale" initiative to create a standardised, high-quality infrastructure to collect, store and constantly update information for sharing within the data chain.

Access to digitalised information from cadastres and land registries means that up-to-date information about a particular property's legal status, size, environmental conditions, and productivity can easily be consulted when the financial banking system or the capitals market prepares to grant rural credits and loans.

In Brazil, real estate credit associations, FinTechs, financial market entities and banks have presented a draft law for a centralised electronic system that integrates information from public registries. All these actors aim to reduce the costs and time spent searching for "(debt) guarantees on movable and immovable property, making credit acquisition and financial transactions more efficient". Recent changes to the legal frameworks for land, the environment and the rural credit system have created new mechanisms to increase the participation of international financial investors in land in the country. Digitalisation of the debt guarantee system is the next step on the agenda for the financial market.

Evidently this technological shift aims to create a digital “governance” structure that consolidates and expands land and resource capture in favour of global value chains and the financial system.

The very nature of land and natural resources means that its capture by global financial flows is something that faces strong resistance. Land is strongly linked to its physical context, which presents obstacles when standardising prices to convert it into a commodity. The intangible nature of these ecosystems and the commons found within them offer an additional barrier when trying to appropriate and market them like any other product. Furthermore, changes in land ownership and its "governance" is marked by historical contradictions involving a violent process of disputes between communities, local elites and transnationals.

The digitalisation of information on land and natural resources may seem to set land governance on the right path of sustainable management. However, considering the hegemony of financial capital, digitalisation could result in a new cycle of land theft, further increasing the concentration of land ownership in the hands of those who control data and global finances. A new period of enclosures and scarcity of vital resources for the world’s majority could be ushered in.

The fact is that food and medicinal raw material for all societies come from the biodiverse territories of the world that are the fruit of an already existing and resilient community "governance". This democratic governance involves the careful intergenerational work of building knowledge, techniques and technologies by traditional peoples and communities. Strengthening the unrestricted use of biodiversity by these peoples and knowledge networks, beyond the fences of private property and financial capture, is what can provide a viable future for humanity.