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Who are the worlds biggest landowners
- sillypuddy 3y agoMy money is on Shaq and The Mountain, they must own some land.
- outside1234 3y agoHow does the royal family own more than 90% of Canada? This is insane!
- ethbr0 3y agoIs 90% of Canada more or less valuable than the other 10% of Canada?
- autokad 3y agoI definitely didn't know that.
- Kalium 3y agoI think this is an artifact of attribution. Something like 90% of Canada's land is owned by the Crown of Canada, which as far as I can tell is public land owned in a technical sense by the British royal family. In practice it seems to be mostly owned and controlled by provinces. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_land#Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_land#Canada
- ssnistfajen 3y agoThe crown is merely a legal concept that due to precedence (since common law countries place so much emphasis on precedence), had to be attached to a natural person who despite holding the title cannot really use its powers as they wish thanks to more precedence that evolved over the history of the UK.
- SonicScrub 3y agoThey only do on a technicality. Canada is huge and only a tiny fraction of it is inhabited. Most of Canada is government owned, which is referred to as "Crown Land" (owned by "The Crown", which is the legal entity controlled by the monarch). Note that this land is "owned" by the monarch in the same way the head of state is the monarch. Ceremonially and historically true, but in practice not at all. There are legal restrictions preventing the monarch from using the land in a way that someone who "owns" the land typically would. For instance, they can't sell it, transfer it, and revenue from renting the land (usually for natural resource extraction) goes to the entity administering that land. Which is either the provincial or federal government, who are also responsible for who deciding who gets to use the land in the first place. So again, technicality true, but if a monarch attempted to actually use the land, they'd be thwarted by the Canadian legal system from actually doing so. In much the same way the Canadian legal system has acted to prevent our "head of state" from acting as one in practice.
- asdff 3y agoCould Canada be used as like a hunting ground or something like from days of yore?
- hammock 3y agoThe Crown land, yes of course. https://www.harvestyourown.ca/start-harvesting/finding-a-place-to-hunt/ https://www.harvestyourown.ca/start-harvesting/finding-a-pla...
- morkalork 3y agoNot just hunting. You can camp / live on it for free as long as you follow some restrictions like moving every X many days. Edit: "The Crown" really is just the state in Canada. When you commit a crime, it's The Crown that prosecutes you. Obviously that's not literally referring to living royalty..
- bombcar 3y agoAnd this is true of most US Government "BLM" land.
- tamimio 3y agoLast time I said that to someone they didn’t believe it, but it’s true, yet people are spending 70years mortgage to buy few square feet of property to spend the rest 10y of their lives in.
- ricksunny 3y agoDisturbing and I feel we can do better. The primacy of the 30-year mortgage as the anchor of professional life & status needs to recede into history.
- ta1243 3y ago100% land value tax, distributed evenly to each citizen as a citizen dividend. Therefore everyone can have an equal amount of land (by value -- land in the middle of a major city is clearly more valuable than land in the middle of nowhere), and the only thing they then need to do is build appropriate shelter.
- VancouverMan 3y agoBeyond the cost, what's even more nonsensical about land "ownership" in Canada is the significant lack of freedom and control that comes with it. This should be clear to anyone who has been involved with, or even just witnessed, expropriation proceedings, for example. The bureaucracy involved with building or extending common structures on property that one "owns" can be extremely costly, time-consuming, and painful. Even trimming or removing a tree on said property can involve significant restrictions and bureaucracy in some places.
- version_five 3y agoIt's silly, just like the "Inuit own nunavut" may be true on a technicality but it's pointless. The King is our head of state and through the legal concept of the Crown may technically be the "owner" but in fact they're controlled by the elected government. Likewise the nunavut land (which is effectively uninhabitable arctic) would be governed by whatever self government they have, but you might as well say the citizens of the US own all federal land. I thought adding these made the list look silly, they should have stuck with ownership as it's commonly understood. In which case I suppose it would have been just Australian ranchers.
- dragonwriter 3y agoThey are probably counting all land owned by the Crowns of various nations of which Charles is King as personal property, which I guess is true in one rather abstract sense but substantively not, as it is the national government that exercises all the powers associated with ownership, not the King in his own person. There is the Crown Estate, in the UK that is essentially (at least, beneficially; not sure how much of it can be alienated even in theory) the personal property of the King, and the Duchy of Lancaster (and, for the Prince of Wales, Cornwall) where the income goes to the Sovereign, but I don’t think there is much, if anything, similar in Canada or other countries of which Charles reigns.
- ssnistfajen 3y agoCrown land in Canada is roughly the same equivalent to federal/public land in the United States. The "crown" is more of a legal concept than a person. Charles just happens to be the one who currently holds based on legal precedence. This does not mean the monarch of Canada (a legally separate entity from the monarch of the UK) can privately dispose the land at their wish, since in a constitutional monarchy they almost always act on advice from (prime) ministers who act as the real heads of governments holding executive power. Most of the land nominally owned by the British royal family around the world are like this, they don't really count towards their net worth since they don't have full control over these lands. The royal family's real income come from other sources than these nominally held lands: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finances_of_the_British_royal_family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finances_of_the_British_royal_...
- FrustratedMonky 3y agoReading this, I'd think we get all of our Beef from Australia. Do Australians really have that many cows? Or do they just have a fewer large farms, and large farms show up on this list, as opposed to in US that has lot of smaller farms.?? So does US eat more beef, but have smaller farms?
- sprocket 3y agoI imagine that a lot of the Australian farms are going to be in the outback, where the quality of the land and feed for the cattle is marginal, and you have to farm extensively (ie. range cows on large tracts of land). They are not going to be irrigating and fertilizing millions of acres, so the feed is going to be relatively poor as compared to lush, green farmland you might be familiar with.
- jaimie 3y agoExactly. There is huge variability in how many cows can be supported by the land. For a deep dive, check out: https://www.farmbrite.com/post/how-many-cows-can-i-keep-per-acre https://www.farmbrite.com/post/how-many-cows-can-i-keep-per-...
- myshpa 3y ago> where the quality of the land and feed for the cattle is marginal Might be because they deforested those lands and have been grazing those cows there for god knows how long now. EDIT: It seems I somehow managed to overlook we're talking about the outback, not the eastern Australia. https://wwf.org.au/news/2021/australia-remains-the-only-developed-nation-on-the-list-of-global-deforestation-fronts/ https://wwf.org.au/news/2021/australia-remains-the-only-deve... AUSTRALIA REMAINS THE ONLY DEVELOPED NATION ON THE LIST OF GLOBAL DEFORESTATION FRONTS In the 13 years from 2004 to 2017, an area of forest six times the size of Tasmania, more than 43 million hectares, was lost in the 24 deforestation fronts. The report says “cattle ranching” (the destruction of trees to create pasture for cattle) was “by far the most significant driver” of forest loss or degradation in eastern Australia.
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- rfwhyte 3y ago[flagged]
- haha1111 3y agoSurely your ancestors were much much better persons
- wyldfire 3y agoMy knee jerk when I read the title was "The Windsors". But they're #1?
- ta1243 3y agoSeems to be because the site is counting all public owned land in Canada as being owned by Charles + family, which isn't right -- it's owned by "The Crown", which is a different thing.
- bradford 3y agoAs a US citizen, I found this page (from the same site) more interesting: https://www.madisontrust.com/information-center/who-owns-most-land/ https://www.madisontrust.com/information-center/who-owns-mos... (It's the same presentation, scoped to the US)
- hammock 3y agoThat page ignores the federal government, which dwarfs any of these landowners by far
- lolinder 3y agoIt's not in the diagram, but they mention it at the end: > Who owns the most land in the U.S.? While not private landowners, the U.S. federal government owns about 640 million acres of land, which is 28% of the land in the country.
- qup 3y agoApproximately 10% as much as the british royals, apparently.
- hammock 3y agoConsidering America started as a much smaller subset of the British commonwealth, I’d say the government is doing pretty well
- lolinder 3y agoThe number in that chart is misleading, because it counts all public land (both federal and provincial) in Canada. So, yes, there's more public land in the Commonwealth than the United States federal government has, but it's not actually the royal family's.
- Urgo 3y agoI could very well be reading this wrong, but it looks like for "only" 15 million you can almost make it into the top 10 with a single purchase of 860,000 acres: https://www.landwatch.com/white-pine-county-nevada-farms-and-ranches-for-sale/pid/417208520 https://www.landwatch.com/white-pine-county-nevada-farms-and...
- throwaway75 3y agoThe islamic waqf board[0] and the catholic church[1] are the largest non-government landowners in India! 0. https://theprint.in/opinion/waqf-boards-are-indias-big-urban-landlords-but-whose-interest-are-they-serving/1430928/ https://theprint.in/opinion/waqf-boards-are-indias-big-urban... 1. https://myvoice.opindia.com/2022/06/who-owns-most-of-india/ https://myvoice.opindia.com/2022/06/who-owns-most-of-india/
- lock-the-spock 3y agoThey at seems rather useless. It is based on a small number of countries' data, apparently missing for instance Russia and Mongolia.
- gizajob 3y agoOne can consider all the land listed in Australia well and truly stolen without recompense from their aboriginal owners.
- hinkley 3y agoI always forget just how big Australia is but from one British Colony to another, we are 28% ahead of you in the US, and North America is at least 2.6 times worse. And that's not counting the Spanish colony to the south.
- gizajob 3y agoDo you mean me? I’m British, so the coloniser not the colony. Have spent a decent amount of time in Australia though, and even have an Australian ex-wife to prove it.
- hinkley 3y agoYeah I assumed you were talking about your own home. Let's blame it all on the Norman Invasion.
- gizajob 3y agoThey do have a lot to answer for
- pbhjpbhj 3y agoThis is interesting to me. You're British "by accident of birth". You, yourself, are no more a coloniser than any native person, surely. I know it's considered a British thing, in jest at least, to assume the guilt of past generations ... but do you really perceive yourself in this way, even a bit? Personally, I don't think guilt helps us move forward, we need to do what is right now. Interested in anyone's thoughts here.
- pbhjpbhj 3y agoIt sounds like you want to perpetuate the same failed system, someone owns the land exclusively and everyone else is out of luck? No matter the status or origin of your parents, don't you deserve a share of fertile land (or it's proceeds)? This has a major impact going forward, some native peoples land are going to not exist due to sea level rises ... Just for avoidance of doubt, imperialist colonisation is absolutely wrong, IMO. Morally indefensible. But that's not because it infringes property rights; we've got one planet and, intrinsically, none of us have any greater birthright in that planet than any other.
- myshpa 3y agoAmerican Indians were right... nobody should own the land. The British Royal family and the Catholic Church... those lands were stolen and should be returned to the people. Given that most of that list is meat farms, that would be a lot of forests, a lot of carbon storage, and a lot of biodiversity.
- hinkley 3y agoThere's a BBC series where they look at living conditions at different times, but the Tudor England one was most memorable. They didn't come right out and say it but the implication was clear, that by the time of Henry VIII's reign, the Church and the Royal Family each owned about 1/3 of England and the Church controlled more and more land every time someone had a deathbed conversion. The American version of British History is that Henry broke with the church so he could marry more people and have an heir. I think he knew damn well that the Church was consuming England whole and he may be one of the last monarchs that still had the power to stop it.
- lolinder 3y agoBoth stories can be true at once—it's a matter of record that Henry used his position as head of the church to go through a lot of wives, and that the initial tensions were centered on his rather hasty annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon so he could be legally married to his then-4-months-pregnant mistress. It's also well established that he took back a lot of land from the Church. History is complicated and events rarely have a singular explanation.
- hinkley 3y agoFew decisions are good for only one reason.
- nonethewiser 3y ago> American Indians were right... nobody should own the land. How is this even possible? Even in communism the state owns all the land. Native American tribes also went to war with each other to control different areas. Legally recognized by many or not, some person who group is going to control the land.
- _yb2s 3y agoThis would have been interesting if done carefully, but to me it seems like virtually everyone listed is basically some sort of weird exception that doesn't really count as land ownership. For example- native tribes should more be thought of as nations than individuals or corporations. Land collectively owned by Inuit people is not a land owner anymore than just listing the size of a large country and calling it a "large land owner." The fact that they are not totally sovereign in the way most nations are is a technicality in this context. Also, this huge amount of land owned by the British Royal Family seems to be just the combined size of all commonwealth countries? They have no real power or property rights to any of that land. I wonder if they are even counting only public land in those places, or also even considering privately deeded land in commonwealth countries?
- gizajob 3y agoIt’s all classed as “Crown Land” - “The Crown” being a nebulous occulted entity that ostensibly belongs to the British Royal family, but in reality is a dark and esoteric form of trust run as a private company from the City of London - not part of the UK proper, and a law unto itself within the original Roman square mile of London not conquered by William the Conqueror…ie The King/Queen has to ask for the permission of the Lord Mayor of The City (not Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London) to enter it. It’s like a bit of a cabal that uses smoke and mirrors to hide the nature of its ownership of whole swathes of the Earth, while pretending to act in the name and interests of the British/Soverign. King Charles in reality/personally only owns a few estates like Sandringham in Norfolk and Balmoral in Scotland, as well as the Dutchy of Cornwall now recently passed to Prince William. Hence it’s a little mistaken to label the huge top block listed as belonging to King Charles, it doesn’t at all in actuality, he’s just the front man. The Crown also likely hold ultimate title to all the land listed under the names of all the Australian “landowners” too, when Aboriginal sovereignty was never ceded and is still basically unresolved, because it was taken with extreme force and contract placed on it when it clearly and obviously belonged to the non-contracting people who had been on that land for some 50,000 years.
- _yb2s 3y agoIn cases where they technically own this land in foreign countries- if they tried to exercise any property rights at all the "ownership" would immediately be revoked.
- nonethewiser 3y agoDoesnt the CCP own all the land in China?
- snapcaster 3y agoNope!
- walthamstow 3y agoIn the Australian Ag. Co. entry, the Joe Lewis they're talking about is the one who owns Tottenham Hotspur FC and has just been indicted for insider trading in the US
- gizajob 3y agoNot unexpected for a Spurs fan
- coffeeshopgoth 3y agoThe list is very much Australian. As someone who has done land leasing for natural resources, you can rack up a pretty huge leasing position pretty quick (I know these people on the infographic own it, but back in the day it was pretty easy to just pay next to nothing for a lot of these parcels - Gina Rinehart has expanded her kingdom, but she inherited an awful lot from Langley). One time, I was looking at something for oil and gas exploration and they came back with a number of $20,000,000 - I was thinking, "Oh, that is going to be something, like, 20,000 acres, probably." They gave me the numbers and I converted it acreage, looked at it on a map and recalc'd a few times because I thought I was way off. Nope. It was just an equivalent acreage as Tennessee, that's all.
- acyou 3y agoIf this isn't the "real" list, what's the real list of the world's biggest landowners? Would it also be more interesting to list by asset value instead of area basis? I think it's also possible to hold interests and control over assets (land) through companies and trusts without your family's name needing to show up on Top 100 lists. Certainly something I would be interested in doing if I was a billionaire. If a government is really effectively just a large corporation, are they effectively the real land owners? When you get down to it, what is land ownership besides the right to determine what's done on and with property? And are governments with military and enforcement bodies not the ultimate arbiters of who controls land, where disputes are ultimately resolved in some sort of conflict? Is land ownership a little bit more of a complicated subject?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]