Land is back on the agenda
A special feature on reforming land for sustainable food
To believe that the state can in the long term contain, orientate and regulate the activity of the economic forces without encroaching on the regime of private property is in fact to abstract from the political and psychological dynamic of capitalism. -Reform and Revolution, André Gorz, 1968
Are we witnessing a growing appetite to invoke agricultural land reform in wealthy nations?
I little over a year ago, I and four colleagues opened a call for academic papers that would explore how land relations prefigured outcomes for food system change. We sought papers that went beyond this descriptive work and offered clues to how we might untangle our commitments to property. I think we need to urgently follow these leads if we ever hope to have a meaningful change in how we use land and share the benefits of the food system. The special issue is now complete. If you like academic articles you can read the open access collection here:
We focused our call on insights emerging from the so-called Global North or Minority World, because the land question is frequently one studied “elsewhere.” Narratives of contested claims, commons, shifting cultivation, and state-led land reforms are the subjects of extensive research outside the global core. This is because the system of property rights in places like the US, Europe, and the UK is framed as settled, orderly, and legally certain. While we learn a great deal from observing how property gets made and unmade in places where the land isn’t already all carved up, formalized, and commodified, a little investigation and the property systems of the Global North are just as fluid, imperfect and absurd.
Despite the apparent cultural and legal entrenchment of property relations, there is thus always a chance of remaking our relation to land in the service of different land use paradigms and social imperatives. But to do this requires a clear-eyed engagement with land and property in the world of food reform. Unfortunately, direct attention to the structures that drive the land system have been sidelined in favor of a fetishization of the techniques and practices of sustainable food. Food system change must be a land-first project of reform or it is nothing.
Is this changing? Have the frustrations and paltry wins of the food movement led to a search for deeper engagement with remaking land tenure, property, and access?
The collection of 12 articles show a diversity of contexts where yes, cultural, legal and institutional commitments to property end up watering down the much needed impact of alternative food projects. But they also show a diversity of strategies that food groups and policy reformers are experimenting with to remake the land relations that ultimately determine what happens on the land.
In the introduction to the special issue we lay out our theoretical case for why the property relations found consistently in the Global North confound the aspirations of food system change. We track the rise to dominance of the “ownership model” of property and show how it favors land use and economic activity antithetical to sustainable agriculture. We liken the ownership model to a form of hegemony, where state powers will use their monopoly on violence to protect norms of property but more insidiously, we also come to internalize the virtues of owning things exclusively as part of a moral value set. Thus, a combination of legal, institutional, and cultural forces work to uphold a stubborn common sense about the naturalness of the ownership model. Combatting this requires a search for countervailing nodes of power that can create a new “good sense” about agricultural land.
Here, we identify five trends amongst the Global North Food reformers trying to build alternatives to the ownership model. These domains of transformation, we argue, are signs that food movements are getting more serious about centering land as part of their political and practical projects. Considering the deep challenge at hand of remaking entrenched property relations in service of a sustainable food system, we give these domains a harsh critical appraisal. But we also respect that we don’t know the recipe of transformation and thus must seek for “non-reformist reforms” that open open the conditions for structural realignments.
Domains of Transformation*
From the collection of articles we suggest there are five types of contests to land relations when it comes to food movement actors in the Global North.
*This section draws closely from the published introduction
Trust instruments (quasi-market reforms)
By far the most popular strategy is to raise money somehow and then buy agricultural land. In this strategy, actors gather capital by some creative means and use it to purchase land at market value. They then use existing legal tools designed for asset management to hold the land which may provide tax benefits as well as break the chain of individual ownership. A trust is often structured to facilitate a kind of collective tenure through articles of incorporation and lease arrangements drawn up by the trust board to encourage alternative agricultural use.
Legislative land reforms
Legislative land reforms where politics direct new rules and entitlements for land redistribution, compensation, and transfer are often considered a practice of history. Perhaps such reforms are stigmatized as a practice of nations that don’t have a settled rule-based order. But, given the demands of the time, this may be about to change. while such legislative changes to property conjures images of constitutional conventions, there appears to be an appetite for a modest land reform policy agenda that is palatable to modern centrist political agendas.
Municipal actions
Alongside legal innovations at national or supranational level, local land alternatives also play a role in the recognition of new ways of managing land. Local territories (cities, towns, regions) are potentially key intermediary scales for generating solutions, implementing agricultural, ecological, energy and food transitions, and initiating systemic transformations through a bottom-up process. A growing number of local authorities engage in ambitious, radical strategies about land access, use, and management. Some municipalities are challenging the status quo, building local alternatives to the dominant private property regime. In France, for instance, municipalities traditionally focused on land use planning, notably zoning, to preserve farmland from further urbanization and constrain the hegemony of the landowners.
Recognition of Indigenous land relations within settler colonies
The struggle for the recognition of Indigenous land claims in settler and postcolonial contexts is a vivid current within counter-hegemonic and anti-capitalist framings of food politics. Here, rather than land relations being somehow “hidden” or “implicit” in proposals for more just and sustainable ways of organizing food systems, control over land and territory is at the forefront.
Sustainability Agendas
As emerging environmental policy in the EU and the United States add mandates to deliver certain outcomes for carbon emission reduction, water quality provisioning, and biodiversity maintenance, a new wave of agricultural groups see an opening to argue that their acquisition of land provides the process to achieve the governments stated aims. The EU may not have been considering land reform as a tool to meet their target-based policies, but their environmental ambitions may force engagement with new legal argumentation about land reform.
Each of these domains have unique politics, promises of transformation, and weaknesses towards cooptation. The big question here is how do these strategies stack up against the powerful force of entrenched land relations? While we detail our assessment of the dangers of how many of these strategies may slip towards the false wisdom of pragmatism and incrementalism in the paper, they undoubtedly offer evidence that land is back on the agenda. If our argument holds that there will be no meaningful sustainable food without a paradigm shift in property relations, then it is time to meet these food movement actors where they are and begin experimenting with which type of interventions create space for meaningful transformation. In the struggle for sustainable food, we must struggle for land as well.
The collection
The Introduction
Adam Calo, Sarah Ruth Sippel, Sylvia Kay, Coline Perrin, Kirsteen Shields; Transforming land for sustainable food: Emerging contests to property regimes in the Global North. Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene 12 January 2024; 12 (1): 00028. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/elementa.2024.00028
Perspective
Antonio Roman-Alcalá; Land reform in the United States: Lost cause or simply a cause that has been lost?. Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene 12 January 2024; 12 (1): 00087. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/elementa.2023.00087
Policy bridge
Sean F. Kennedy, Camille Frazier; Land equity in California: Challenges and opportunities across the policy landscape. Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene 12 January 2024; 12 (1): 00106. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/elementa.2023.00106
Interview
Charlotta Sophie Sippel, Sarah Ruth Sippel; Territorio-tierra: A community feminist perspective on land by Indigenous Xinka women from Guatemala. Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene 12 January 2024; 12 (1): 00024. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/elementa.2024.00024
Research articles
Lanka Horstink, Kaya Schwemmlein, Gabriela Abrahão Masson; Land sovereignty in depressed and contested agro-territories: The cases of Portugal and Brazil. Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene 12 January 2024; 12 (1): 00075. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/elementa.2023.00075
Ana-Maria Gătejel, Antonella Maiello; Commoning, access, and sovereignty: Disentangling land–food relations in the case of peasant livestock farmers in Romania. Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene 12 January 2024; 12 (1): 00060. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/elementa.2023.00060
Olivia Oldham, Pania Newton, Nicola Short; Land-based resistance: Enacting Indigenous self-determination and kai sovereignty. Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene 12 January 2024; 12 (1): 00118. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/elementa.2023.00118
Adrien Baysse-Lainé; Moving toward a fairer access to land fostering agroecological transition? A decade of legal change and reframing of debates around soil and climate in France. Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene 12 January 2024; 12 (1): 00070. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/elementa.2023.00070
Elise Wach, Ruth Hall; Land commoning in deagrarianized contexts: Potentials for agroecology?. Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene 12 January 2024; 12 (1): 00085. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/elementa.2023.00085
Bonnie Holligan, Helena Howe; How property relations shape experiences and transformative potential of urban growing spaces: Connecting land, food, and Earth justice perspectives. Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene 12 January 2024; 12 (1): 00082. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/elementa.2023.00082
Margriet Goris, Eliane Bakker, Leonardo van den Berg, Marianna Siegmund-Schultze, Sinéad O’ Keeffe, Marc Ravesloot, Conny Bufe, Jan Hassink; Collective land arrangements that decommodify land for agroecological transformations. Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene 12 January 2024; 12 (1): 00061. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/elementa.2023.00061
Raychel E. Santo, Sara N. Lupolt, Katherine M. Uhde, Robert C. Bennaton, Keeve E. Nachman; From access toward sovereignty: A scoping review of municipal land access policies for urban agriculture in the United States. Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene 12 January 2024; 12 (1): 00089. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/elementa.2023.00089
Tianzhu Liu, Romain Melot, Frédéric Wallet; Integrating land and food policy to transform territorial food systems in the context of coexisting agri-food models: Case studies in France. Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene 12 January 2024; 12 (1): 00063. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/elementa.2023.00063