Leveraging debt, they imposed 'structural adjustment programs' that reversed all the economic reforms that global South countries had painstakingly enacted.

Today, power imbalances like these, enshrined in the Uruguay Round of the WTO, are estimated to cost poor countries around $700 billion each year in lost export revenues.

there is a yawning gap between the 'real value' of the labour and goods that poor countries sell and the prices they are actually paid for them. This is what economists call 'unequal exchange'.

a trenchant indictment of our global economic system

Adam Smith [...] called this 'previous accumulation' [...] Karl Marx called it 'primitive accumulation', perhaps to highlight its barbaric nature, for the process of accumulation was violent

a 'temporal fix'. Capital can be invested in long-term projects like infrastructure, education and research that will improve the future productivity of capital.

To avoid having to confront domestic resistance, which can be politically costly, policymakers might solve a crisis of over-accumulation by resorting to a 'spatial fix'--in other words, by opening up new consumer markets, labour markets and investment markets abroad.

This Manichean view fits nicely with our already existing assumptions

A land purchase qualifies as a grab when it entails a transfer of at least 500 acres to be converted from smallholder production, collective use or ecosystem services to commercial activity. Land grabs may provide abstract economic benefit--increasing GDP, for instance