Justifying Climate Injustice: How TIAA is leading universities in a new global land grab.

Keywords: Land grabbing, Financialization of farmland, Retirement and pension Funds, Social responsibility
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 11

Abstract

Research by Ahtone and Lee (2021) has shown how the higher education in the United States was built on land stolen from Indigenous Peoples. The "Land Grab" institutions are only beginning to reckon with the debt owed to Indigenous communities today, along with questions of how to restore land unjustly taken.

Today’s investors see land as “like gold with yield" (Fairbairn 2020), while scholars recognize that land has intangible value for communities and peoples, and is central to identities and economies. Ironically, universities are continuing to be at the forefront of new land injustices, now rationalized as climate mitigation. University endowments are grabbing land, but the the world’s largest land speculator is the for-profit manager of university and non-profit retirement funds (TIAA) which has acquired land both legally and illegally in ways that is harmful to communities in the United States, Brazil and other countries, particularly unrecognized Indigenous Peoples and communities of color.

This paper will examine the ways in which TIAAs land acquisitions for large-scale industrial agriculture and pulp and fuel plantations have expanded from 2010 to the present and how the ideas used to justify them in reports and media interviews have changed over that same period. The discourse that began with claims of sustainable agriculture has expanded to achieving “Net Zero” (although too late reach global climate targets). Meanwhile TIAA acquisitions have funded notorious land grabbers and deforestation, and have been most aggressive in regions where black farmers and communities of color have been losing land.