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The paper tries to address attention to the recent phenomenon of large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) made by foreign investors through purchase and lease arrangements in low-income agriculture-based countries.

The phenomenon of LSLAs has been recurrent in the history of human populations, although manifested in different forms, space and time. Since 2008, however, it has not only increased greatly at a very high speed and at a growing scale but it has assumed different connotations, compared with previous LSLAs, with particular reference to the space concerned (the phenomenon has a global dimension), to the motivations behind it, to the way in which the acquisitions have been made, not to mention the impacts produced on local populations and the environment.

The aim of the paper is that of contributing to examine, from the economic theory historico-analytical perspective, some aspects of contemporary LSLAs, global land and water grabbing in particular, which seem passed generally unnoticed. The main thesis will be that the dominant economic theory (neoclassical economics) appears indeed as an invisible though crucial driver of that phenomenon, in so far as it profoundly shapes the ‘vision’ which supposedly lies at the very background of most of the subjects and of the policy makers and institutions involved.

In interpreting the contemporary phenomenon of global land and water grabbing, an alternative ‘vision’ will be used instead –  that generated by the alternative economic paradigm, rooted in the works of the classical economists of the 18^th and 19^th centuries and rivaled by Sraffa in the 1960s, which, in contrast with the neoclassical paradigm, and far better than this, might help greatly in the understanding of the phenomenon from a different perspective and, in so doing, it might give also some hints useful for more viable and sensible policy prescriptions.

Analytical modifications of the contemporary classical economists-based framework are very much needed in pursuing that aim.

Land and Water Grabbing, Classical Political Economy, Mainstream Economics, Conflicts