By Ian Werther in News — 13 Mar 2026

Land Power argues land reform underpins global power, citing South Korea's growth.

Land Power, by Michael Alberts and translated by No Seung-Young, surveys how land has underpinned political and economic power from the 19th century to today, arguing that who owns land helps determine who holds influence in world affairs. The book positions land as a strategic resource whose control can reshape economies, borders, and governance.

The opening chapters revisit a provocative moment in global geopolitics: the idea of the United States attempting to acquire Greenland at the start of the year, a move that alarmed other countries because land ownership, beyond simple territory, signals access to resources and strategic leverage. The discussion frames land as a proxy for power in international competition.

A central idea is that land wields economic, political, and social force. The author traces how land ownership has long structured inequality, citing the 1850s settlement of California and the fate of the Cahuilla people in Palm Springs. The U.S. federal government pressured unfavorable treaties in 1852, and remaining land was carved up to serve railroad interests, pushing many Indigenous communities into reserves and widening gaps in income, education, and health—reproducing racial hierarchies that endured for generations.

Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture
For much of human history, most of the world’s land was wilderness: forests, grasslands and shrubbery dominated its landscapes. Over the last few centuries, this has changed dramatically: wild habitats have been squeezed out by turning it into agricultural land.
If we rewind 1000 years, it is estimated that only 4 million square kilometers – less than 4% of the world’s ice-free and non-barren land area was used for farming.
In the visualization we see the breakdown of global land area today. 10% of the world is covered by glaciers, and a further 19% is barren land – deserts, dry salt flats, beaches, sand dunes, and exposed rocks.1 This leaves what we call ‘habitable land’. Half of all habitable land is used for agriculture.
This leaves only 37% for forests; 11% as shrubs and grasslands; 1% as freshwater coverage; and the remaining 1% – a much smaller share than many suspect – is built-up urban area which includes cities, towns, villages, roads and other human infrastructure.
There is also a highly unequal distribution of land use between livestock and crops for human consumption. If we combine pastures used for grazing with land used to grow crops for animal feed, livestock accounts for 77% of global farming land. While livestock takes up most of the world’s agricultural land it only produces 18% of the world’s calories and 37% of total protein.
The expansion of agriculture has been one of humanity’s largest impacts on the environment. It has transformed habitats and is one of the greatest pressures for biodiversity: of the 28,000 species evaluated to be threatened with extinction on the IUCN Red List, agriculture is listed as a threat for 24,000 of them.4 But we also know that we can reduce these impacts – both through dietary changes, by substituting some meat with plant-based alternatives and through technology advances. Crop yields have increased significantly in recent decades, meaning we have spared a lot of land from agricultural production: globally, to produce the same amount of crops as in 1961, we need only 30% of the farmland.

With solutions from both consumers and producers, we have an important opportunity to restore some of this farmland back to forests and natural habitats. — Representative image for context; not directly related to the specific event in this article. License: CC BY 4.0. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The book labels these shifts a broader, ongoing process it calls “The Great Reshuffle,” the sweeping reallocation of land that occurred across continents in the 19th and 20th centuries and that deepened structural inequities in many societies. Yet Alberts emphasizes that land reform is not inherently zero-sum, noting cases where redistributing land has produced broader social and economic gains.

In highlighting Peru, the author points to a deregulatory and redistributive sequence beginning in 1968, when large landholders’ estates were restructured in favor of farm workers. By the early 2000s, formal documentation of land ownership aided clearer property rights and was associated with faster economic development. These examples are offered to show how property and land policy can translate into measurable economic outcomes.

The Sugar Land Refinery.
Stephen F. Austin's colonists brought sugar cane to Fort Bend County in the 1820s. The Sugar Land area was once part of Oakland Plantation, where Nathaniel and Matthew Williams planted sugar cane about 1840. They began processing the cane in 1843 using a horse-powered mill and open-air cooking kettles. In 1853 the plantation and mill were purchased by William J. Kyle and Benjamin F. Terry. They improved the mill and promoted a railroad for the area, which they named Sugar Land. Terry later helped organize the famed Confederate cavalry unit, Terry's Texas Rangers, and was killed in the Civil War. After the war, the operation was sold to Edward H. Cunningham, who expanded the sugar mill into a refinery. W. T. Eldridge and Galveston businessman I. H. Kempner, Sr. bought the refinery in 1907. They began importing raw sugar to operate the refinery year-round because local cane was available only seasonally and in decreasing quantities in the early 1900s. Named by Kempner for the Imperial Hotel in New York City, the Imperial Sugar Company and the City of Sugar Land have grown steadily. During the 1970s, the Imperial Sugar Company produced more than three million pounds of refined cane sugar daily. — Representative image for context; not directly related to the specific event in this article. License: CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The author also foregrounds Korea’s experience, arguing that South Korea’s land reform laid the foundation for its later development, in contrast to the North’s collective land system. South Korea distributed small plots to cultivators on a paid basis, a model the book treats as a significant structural reform that helped fuel postwar growth and social stability.

Ultimately, the author argues that how land power is reorganized will shape a sustainable future, with implications beyond Korea for global markets, supply chains, and security. For U.S. readers, the book’s cross-border comparisons illuminate how land policy intersects with topics of American concern—from agricultural resilience and rural livelihoods to technology-enabled resource security and geopolitical competition over critical land and resources.

The work runs 420 pages and is priced at 25,500 won.

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