## 2 Large-Scale Land Acquisitions  
In the last decade, international investors unexpectedly expressed an interest in land, with its demand brusquely rising at an unprecedented pace, especially after the 2008 commodity bubble [2]. According to [PERSON] [7], in 2009 alone, the demand for land targeting Sub-Saharan Africa, which was fed by a strong LSLAs-component, equaled 20 times its historical average. To get a sense of the global magnitude of this phenomenon, the Land Matrix [8], which is widely recognized as the most comprehensive and up-to-date database on large-scale land transactions, collects information on over 2800 deals since the beginning of the new millennium, corresponding in aggregate to just above 100 million hectares (ha) of land. Two out of three of these large-scale land deals, spreading over 77.3 million ha, are labelled as \"_transnational_\", while the rest of the records reflect purely domestic land transactions. With a list containing more than 90 destination countries and over 120 investor countries, even acknowledging that the same country can appear both as investor and as targeted region, the global scale of the LSLAs phenomenon is not currently under debate. Since the Land Matrix is constantly updated, it is important to say that these figures were obtained on November 12 th, 2018. In addition, the reported figures for the total number of deals and total area includes all records in the dataset, irrespective to their _negotiation status_, according to which a deal can be \"_concluded_\" (2401 deals, corresponding to 70,347,793 ha), \"_intended_\" (262 deals over 21,776,190 ha), or \"_failed_\" (146 deals, equal to 8,620,377 ha). It is not a coincidence that several empirical papers borrowed from trade economics the (in)famous gravity equation [9]--which already had been borrowed from physics--to analyze different aspects of LSLAs [10; 11; 12]. Given this, one of the ways in which we can look at LSLAs is through the lenses of an international market, where land is the main traded commodity. Yet, it seems that this international market for land it is an unusual one, not just because of the peculiar nature of its commodity, which was hardly traded internationally in the past, but also because it appears to be a \"_market without prices_\" [13]. In this sense, the LSLAs literature pointed out the lack of information and transparency surrounding the entire life cycle of these investments-from the inception phase, through the negotiations, up to the operational stages [14]. On the one hand, the increasing pressure from civil society, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and international institutions, in a joint effort to improve the information landscape around LSLAs, is gradually contributing to the disclosure of contractual terms, land records and cadastral registries. Indeed, beside the already mentioned Land Matrix, information on land records can be found on the _Open Land Contract_ on-line repository [15], on the _Cadasta_ website [16], as well as on the _Land Portal_ web platform [17], which contains a rich selection of open access data and information on land tenure and land governance across the globe. On the other hand, it is also true that finding in a systematic way the price at which large-scale land deals are closed is still, to a large extent, a lost cause. The evidence emerging from the existing LSLAs literature suggests also that high-income and land-scarce countries sought, and are still seeking, land in low-income but land-abundant countries, mainly from the _Global South_[4]. After an initial emphasis put on the _negotiation status_, that is, whether a deal was actually concluded, still under negotiation or cancelled, the second _Analytical Report_ from the Land Matrix shifted the attention to the _implementation status_, suggesting that, with more than half of the reported deals currently in operation, the LSLAs phenomenon reached a new \"_productive_\" era [18]. The LSLAs phenomenon stimulated two main and opposed development narratives.