The recent global rise of food prices has predicated the explosion of land-grab practices at a global geo-economic scale. In Eastern Europe, although the post-socialist ‘great transformation’ entailed the commodification of the land, unsettled land ownership and undeveloped land market offered, at best, only a short-lived and tenuous protection from land-grabs. The global financial crisis impacted particularly strongly the resource-dependent, export-oriented economies of Bulgaria and Ukraine. More