Digital fences: the financial enclosure of farmlands in South America
Georeferencing — a digital mapping technique increasingly employed by South American governments to register land ownership — is being regularly used by landgrabbers and companies to expel traditional communities from ancestral lands occupied for decades or even centuries, according to a report by GRAIN, an NGO that works with peasant communities around the world. The innovative technology is also allowing a few powerful actors in the international financial sector to play a decisive expanding role in the transformation of large tracts of tropical rainforest and savanna into agricultural lands.
