1.5 Subsumed deals

The Land Matrix records individual large-scale land acquisitions that meet the criteria defined in the Land Matrix deal definition. These land deals represent the primary entity and main object of the Land Matrix database. However, there are cases where an investor has undertaken several contractually independent land acquisitions within the same country or region, and the available information only refers to all these projects collectively, that is, to the investor’s overall investment in that country or region. In such cases where the available information is not sufficiently detailed to record individual deals and where these deals would therefore have to be excluded from the database, there is no better option but to subsume various deals under one (parent-) deal. In such situations and only in such situations, multiple deals of the same investor within the same region or country should, by exception, be combined and recorded as a so-called “subsumed deal.”
When recording a “subsumed deal”, the comment fields are of particular importance, as only detailed comments—at a minimum under Location and Land Area—can both indicate that the deal is a “subsumed deal” and help address and compensate for inherent inaccuracies.

While it is, of course, an advantage not to have to omit the individual deals entirely, it must be clearly understood that “subsumed deals” inherently involve certain attribution inaccuracies and an increased risk of deal duplications.
Therefore, with every deal update, an attempt should be made to find further details and to split these subsumed deals into separate individual deals. For investors involved in subsumed deals, particular care must be taken to verify whether deals for these investors have already been recorded in the same country and to ensure that the investments included in the “subsumed deal” have not already been entered as individual deals in the database.