The boom of the “land grab” (the massive purchase of cultivatable lands) is intertwined with one of the largest hidden problems of developing countries: the lack of entitlement for land to the people who cultivate it and, more generally, the lack of legal frameworking and properties of millions of poor people all over the world.
Many juridical systems, in fact, exclude part of their citizens from the institutions that should help them emancipate themselves, forcing them thus to work illegally, without any legal status, nor property or officially registered companies. This “extra-legality” is translated in the impossibility to accede to credit, capital and, in conclusion, to wealth; furthermore it makes these second-rate citizens exposed to all kinds of abuse by the first-rate citizens (and companies) who may rely on a well-defined juridical position. In the countries where this situation happens, in order to develop their businesses, poor people are forced to create a parallel economy with its own rules and practices, the so-called “informal economy”, but the results of this economy are so precarious that it often ends up by not only increasing poverty but also frustration and social tension.
The Peruvian economist  Hernán de Soto and the Instituto Libertad y Democracia (Ild), the Lima-based no-profit organization that he founded, have been working for almost thirty years to solve this problem. Their aim is to move towards a market economy including all the informal work and wealth produced by poor people.
L’Idl proposes itself as a think tank and agent for change in developing countries. In particular, it offers technical support to governments in order to help them create the legal instruments that allow everyone to participate in national and international markets. Among the requirements considered essential by Idl to generate wealth are property rights, legal ways to increase companies productivity, and identity mechanisms which allow citizens and companies to work in extended markets.
Hernán de Soto, 67 years old, defined by Bill Clinton «the greatest living economist of the world», is considered by many a guru and likely to get the Nobel prize. In December 2008, the 63rd General Assembly of United Nations recognized the importance of his job as part of the strategies to eradicate global poverty, taking a resolution to implement the proposals contained in the report of the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor, co-chaired by the former US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright and de Soto himself. At the base of the report there are the same principal theories of Idl: the importance of property rights and company rights in relation with the eradication of poverty which affects, according to estimates, four billion people all over the world. During the next five years, if everything goes as planned, Soto should coordinate the development of his projects to start the creation of prosperity in 40 African countries. All of this is happening in a moment when the world is facing one of the worst crisis in history. Regarding the current crisis, Soto proposes a singular interpretation which finds points of contact between the underdeveloped economies and the ones seen as more developed. The United Kingdom and the United States, for example, according to Soto, suddenly start to correspond to some of his definitions of poverty. «Suddenly, they have all become banana republics», he has stated. And the reason is simple: just like in poor countries where the informal economy spreads, since 2000 informality has been spreading in advanced economies because of the so-called “derived” financial products, unregistered assets which, by now, have become poisonous, putting at risk all the loans linked to them.