Landscapes Podcast Episode 9: Farm Subsidies and the Green Transition
Kai Heron reveals what England's new farm subsidy plan shows about the politics of food system transformation.
Episode Description
Brexit produced a once a generation chance to create a wholesale reform of agricultural subsidies. Kai Heron works through what England’s new farm subsidy plan reveals about the politics of food system transformation.
Episode Links
You can’t eat profits: A democratic vision for England’s tormented farmlands. The New Statesman By Kai Heron, Alex Heffron and Rob Booth
Climate Leninism and Revolutionary Transition. Spectre Journal. Kai Heron and Jodi Dean
Women: The Last Colony: Maria Mies, Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, Claudia von Werlhof
The Classical Agrarian Question: Myth, Reality and Relevance Today: Sam Moyo
On carbon markets and their hype: The Value of a Whale, Buller
Landscapes is produced by Adam Calo. A complete written transcript of the episode can be found at Adam’s newsletter: Land Food Nexus
Send feedback or questions to adamcalo@substack.com
Transcript
*The transcript has been lightly edited for reading comprehension
Adam Calo (Introduction): In 2021, the average farm business income in the United Kingdom was £46,500 During this time, 29% of all farms across the UK operated at a loss. Even though farmers are frequently framed as rural entrepreneurs or virtuous enterprises, farmers may be better understood as managers of lucrative assets like land and machinery, rather than businesses that buy low and sell high.
But if the business of farming isn't working, how does it persist? How do we get our food?
Part of the answer of course is that the state has a strong interest in maintaining a reliable in the food supply to conduct favorable trade with others and secure enough calories at low price for it’s domestic population. Public money via subsidies is a key driver that props up the otherwise nonsensical microeconomics of food production.
This is why farm subsidies often get scrutinized as a key stubborn leverage point that maintains the status quo of the food system. Using tax revenues to pay large commodity farmers to continue to do business as usual—and even incentivizing them to do more of the same—continuously frustrates the expansion of alternative farming models that don't enjoy the benefit of a production safety net.
What's more is that politically, it seems that proposals for subsidy reform are non-starters, because the beneficiaries of the subsidy regime are now some of the wealthiest and largest landowners in any scale of governance. Think of the corn ethanol subsidy in Iowa. It seems like there is an ecological consensus that continuing or expanding corn ethanol production is a bad idea, but the political power entrenched in its maintenance almost guarantees its persistence.
But strange things happening now in the United Kingdom. Because of Brexit, the UK will no longer be under the control over the European Union's agricultural subsidy regime. That means we get the chance to observe a redrawing of a farm subsidy system from the start.
What will come out of this once in a generation opportunity? What vision of the food system will be made through the new law?
In England, the result of about five years of work, public consultation and debate has led the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (or DEFRA) to announce. ELMs: the environment and land management scheme.
The mainstream debate about ELMS has been about what specifics end up in the law. Which farming practices are incentivize over others. But the more interesting story here is about what the designs of ELMS reveals about the types of food system interventions we dare to come up with.
Because if we read the subtext of a brand new vision for farming at a national scale, we might be able to see the hidden values of ideas of what farming should and could be as well as the blind spot, intrinsic to imaginations of sustainable food.
So when I saw an article in the New Statesman, by Kai Heron and collaborators launching a serious critique of ELMS as it's currently written, I knew that Kai would be a great voice to think through this new agricultural policy as a way to work through transformative change in the food system and how that might come about. Kai is a lecture in political ecology at Lancaster University’s Environment Center.
And what really comes through in our conversation is how much ELMS is an environmental legislation and not so much a food policy. ELMSs may certainly green England's farming, a laudable goal. Under ELMS, we can squint and see a future English countryside with more biodiversity, cleaner water, and more habitat for human and non-human enjoyment.
But ELMS environmental success, absent a consideration of where the people of England ought to get nourishing food, means the continued maintenance of a food system based on favorable global trade relations. Where the people of England get to enjoy a healthy environment and their backyards, but are fed through the exploitation of land and labor elsewhere. An “elsewhere” of which the ecological and social conditions of food production are left out of sight out of mind. And as Kai argues, we ought to challenge this vision of a green transition. One were wealthy nations green inside their borders while fueling that transition based on the exploitation and degradation of ecosystems elsewhere.
Interview
[00:04:37] Adam Calo: We are going to be talking about a new food system policy in England called the Environmental Land Management Scheme aimed at replacing the existing subsidy regime.
But before we do that, I think we really need to talk about the food system in general and the current problems that might be associated with the food system.
How is the food system structured to deliver some of the problems that you might be concerned with?
[00:05:01] Kai Heron: This is a great question and it's a huge one.
And there are many things, but I'm going to stick to my top five. I'll work through those, top five. First, it’s anti-democratic. Second, it's neo-colonial and imperialist food system. Third, it's ecologically destructive. And then fourth, it doesn't actually deliver good quality food. That's not its primary goal.
And then fifth, in far as these four things come together, it robs us of an alternative and richer future and way of living.
It's anti-democratic in a couple of senses. There's a strong populist critique of the food system, that says that multinational corporations have a near monopoly on food and food production.
So this would point out that 40% of the global seed market, for example, is controlled by just two companies that Bayer, BSF, Syngenta, and Corteva, practically dominated seed and pesticide markets as four companies. And then the only 10 companies own most of the brands that we're now familiar with.
So Unilever, Mars, Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Nestle, those kind companies. And I say this is populist critique because it points to these large companies and it says, that their control the system is the reason why it’s undemocratic and what we need to do is welcome smaller producers into the system and allow them to compete. From my perspective, that's true and justified. But we also need to go further than that and think about, what in the Marxist tradition that I come from calls impersonal domination, market forces, that lead even well-meaning growers to overproduce food and to compete with one another in a market because they have to maintain their profitability.
And this leads to overproduction. So we waste, a third of all food produced to waste. So this idea of overproduction and domination by market forces, that doesn't just happen with these big multinationals. It's baked into the structure of capital accumulation. And so this kind of form of domination of even small producers having to stay within market logic is a form of anti-democratic practice that stops the collective organization of our food system for everyone's betterment.
[00:07:11] Adam Calo: So in that way you get these small holder farmers who might have designs of an ecologically sensitive or just food system who nonetheless have to kind of create a business model in order to stay afloat.
[00:07:21] Kai Heron: Yeah, that's exactly right. So put it this way, one of the things that's quite common in progressive farming communities, is this idea that what we need is, say cooperatives. And cooperatives are great. It's really important for workers to be in control of their workplace. It's really important to collectively control our food systems as far as we can. But even so, those cooperatives are going to have to compete with other cooperatives to stay in business. That bottom line is profitability in our existing food system. And this puts constraints on the kind of system that we can imagine. And since it's not centrally planned, it's planned in a disaggregated way by each of these cooperatives or food producers, it leads to a form of disorganization, that mainstream economists would say is a good thing …It's the invisible hand guiding market logic, but actually it's a form of disorganization that leads to a load of inefficiencies. Such as a third of our food going to waste.
[00:08:17] Adam Calo: So that's undemocratic. What are some of the other problems with the food system as it works?
[00:08:22] Kai Heron: The neo-colonial and imperialist logic. I think this is something that’s really important. And I'm pleased to see is becoming a more popular talking point at the moment in this space. From the beginning our food system, especially in the UK, has had a colonial imperialist undercurrent, through which we exploit seasonal labor forces. In the UK at the moment, we import, you know, labor if you like, by, bringing labor in from overseas for picking season and then summarily send them back to their countries of origin. Super exploiting them in the process. So, just this year, it was found out that Indonesian pickers had been put into debt bondage.
They had to pay money to come over. They weren't earning enough money while they were here to pay off their debts. And then they couldn’t even get back to their country because they didn’t have the funds to get back.
So this idea of unfree labor is at the core of capitalist agriculture, but so is the exploitation of lands and labor overseas to feed our own workforce cheaply. So Britain, again, Ireland, India, and even the United States, these were spaces where food could be produced cheaply. They also served as a kind of safety valve against descent, people like Sam Moyo make this argument.
This neocolonial underpinning still persists.
[00:09:49] Adam Calo: I remember during the first lockdowns, one of the first exemptions for travel was for seasonal agricultural workers to come to the UK.
[00:09:55] Kai Heron: Exactly that. So, I mean, the point of reference, the one I always think people should read on this is Raj Patel and Jason Moore's book, the History of the World and Seven Cheap Things. And they have a chapter there building on people like Maria Mies, who argue that it is a truly global food system that has to cheapen labor forces and cheapen food in parts of the world to maintain food at a cheap price in the global north for global north workers and consumers.
It has to this entirely because of the global capital. A cheap labor force, cheaper labor means lower wages. Lower wages means increased profitability for corporations or capital across all sectors. So there's a global structural logic here that wants to keep prices as low as possible.
The best way to do that is to exploit labor in places where wages can be reduced, they can be made lower, primarily the global south.
[00:10:54] Adam Calo: So that was the imperialist and neo-colonial tendencies of the food system. What is your other key problems with the food system?
[00:11:02] Kai Heron: Ecological destruction. So-called conventional agriculture as we call it, is nothing short of an ecological calamity. It's the second largest producer of greenhouse gases behind energy production itself as a sector. And it's one of the primary causes of waterway pollution biodiversity loss, soil erosion, soil compaction, you name it. It's also grossly wasteful.
So from the perspective of human history, what we currently call conventional agriculture is nothing of the sort. It only really took off after World War II, where heavy use of fossil fuel derived inputs became the norm farming systems in the global north. The system then being rolled out through into the global south through the so-called Green Revolution.
So this entire system is designed if you like, to work against nature to tame and control nature, to manage it. It doesn't work with natural ecological flows. It instead disrupts them to maximize profitability.
The other, the final two of these, it just doesn't deliver good food. This system, maybe, maybe you could say, okay, labor conditions are not ideal.
It causes ecological issues that need fixing and we can remedy those and reform those. At least we get good food outta this. But this isn't the case either. It produces food quickly rather than producing nutritious and good quality food because the profit motive that guides our food system wants to maximize productivity over quality.
So malnutrition and diet related ill health has exploded in recent decades. In 2021, the World Health Organization found that around 45% of all deaths among children under five were connected with under nutrition. And obesity is on the rise because we're not getting the kinds of nutrient dense foods that we need. We're getting these high caloric, but low nutritional foods instead.
These four come together to kind of rob us of a better future. So the problems combine to interrupt and disrupt demands for things like food sovereignty or the self-determination of food growers.
Instead they are dominated by market forces, this undemocratic move of the marketplace. Or the right to food for non-growers. Capacity to have food rather than having to be dependent on a wage to hopefully access food. And this idea of robbing us of a better future. This was very much a concerted project at a certain point in time.
So, going back to the Green Revolution and its rollout, people like Eric Ross point out that, the Green Revolution was a political project to integrate peasants into a global food system and to quell demands for more revolutionary form of land reform. It is a project to maintain business as usual.
[00:13:53] Adam Calo: This is an incredibly broad overview of, the global food system, but I wonder, could you describe in, say, the United Kingdom, what are some of the either historical policy decisions or ongoing regulation or just political work that ends up maintaining that system
[00:14:12] Kai Heron: The UK's a really interesting case. It's a's a fun place to live and work if you are interested agriculture. Because obviously it is one of the capitalist agricultural sectors in the world, if not the oldest. So it reproduces those five issues that I've spoken about in detail and you find them manifest not just in these broad terms, but in particular policy or orientations, just as you're saying.
So around 70% of the UK is designated as agricultural land, which is huge portion of our land. But we import around 50% of our food from overseas. So that right there is the ongoing effects of the UK's development path. It was a colonial project, importing food and importing labor from our colonies and our colonies. We can still see the effect of that in our food system today. So the UK government talks about food security. Food security means the continued extraction of food and exploitation of land and labor from overseas, despite the fact that 70% of the UK is designated agricultural land.
We only a fraction of our own fruit and vegetables. I think it's somewhere around 20 percent in total. About 8 percent of our fruit. The rest of this comes primarily from intensive growing systems in the Netherlands and in Spain, but post Brexit also increasingly in Morocco where super exploited and appalling labor conditions are the sort of for granted when we buy our food in the UK. Grown in Morocco, and we don't tend to think too much about the labor conditions that produce that and the kind of neo-colonial underpinnings of that and the fact that these intensive spaces of production are very ecologically damaging. Other issues in the UK agricultural system. Land ownership is extremely opaque and uneven.
Two thirds of our country is owned by just 0.36% of the population. 17% or so is owned by hedge funds and multinationals, and then around 30% is owned by the aristocracy still. This kind of neo-feudal underpinning that is very much a part of contemporary British capitalism. And what that means is that land prices are extremely high. So that means if you want to change this food system by creating a regenerative or an agroecological farm, the upfront costs of doing so are almost prohibited for the majority. And then finally, until very recently, we had a subsidy system that promoted land consolidation in the hands of an increasingly small number of producers and which incentivized productivism, so the mass production of food, which had anti-ecological effects. That system was caused the common agricultural policy.
[00:16:50] Adam Calo: When people who want change the food system, try and explore--probe around for maybe underlying or root drivers. The finger gets pointed at the subsidy regime. The idea that if the logic of producing just for profit or prodcustivism is supported through subsidies. That if that subsidy system was reversed somehow, then those five issues that you talked about would perhaps be disrupted.
So can you talk a little bit more about how agricultural subsidies work and how they might contribute to the way the food system operates?
[00:17:24] Kai Heron: So at their most basic level subsidies are a form of financial assistance provided to farmers by the state, through public funds to support their business.
Subsidies in the UK in particular and elsewhere in the global north, keep domestic farmers competitive in international markets. But they also have other effects such as, maybe contributing or definitely contributing to reductions in the price food, producing cheaper labor across all sectors-- that issue raised earlier. So from here, things get to get even more complicated with subsidies. So subsidies can be given on the basis of various metrics. They work in different ways in different contexts. So the EU common agricultural policy, which the UK used to be a member of before Brexit, gave subsidies in relation to the area of land that was farmed.
So that meant that large scale conventional farming systems, in fact some of the Europe's wealthiest farmers would receive more subsidies than small scale producers. So smallholders wanting to experiment in say, agroecological farming would be given less financial assistance than highly industrialized and polluting systems that were working hundreds of acres.
So there's inequality here, but this was by design to consolidate land and create food efficiencies, right? The idea that if you work at scale, you can produce more food more efficiently. It's also worth pointing out. Subsidies are much less common in the global south than they're in the global north.
Subsidies in the global North are there to keep producers in the global North competitive with the low price of food that is produced through the super exploitation of producers in the global South. And this means that they are one mechanism among many to artificially lower the price of food. Again, cheap food means cheap labor, which means greater profits across all sectors of capital.
This is a really critical point. And I keep returning to this because one of the common demands related to whether or not we should abolish subsidies, is this issue that we should just pay more for our food. If only we paid more for our food, then farmers wouldn't need to be subsidized. But the cheap price of food, -- I know food is increased in price, with the war in UKraine with inflation-- but nevertheless, many of the costs of food are externalized.
And this is an essential feature of a capitalist system of wage labor. So one way then finally to think about subsidies and their function, and this may rub some farmers the wrong way since they tend to be a rather libertarian group by disposition is, it's a public wage it's a kind of benefit payment.
That is achieved through state payments. And those payments are derived whether from taxes levied on companies and consumers in their own countries, but also from value drain from the global south. So the recording of the labor of the global south in the GDP mechanism of the global north. So subsidies are bound up in all of these complex issues.
But it's important to say that none of this is to blame subsidies. They're not the issue per se. Getting rid of subsidies in itself would not fix this problem. They are a symptom of the kind of contradictions and tensions within the global food system. And just to give an example of that, the Department for Environment and Food and Rural Affairs in the UK it's called DEFRA, recently found that four in ten farmers in the UK would suffer losses if subsidies were removed entirely.
And so it shows the dependence and reliance on subsidies even if they create all of these tensions and contradictions and inequalities in our food system.
[00:20:54] Adam Calo: There's such an attention in rural entrepreneurship and business models that are innovative. But then you look at the stats about the net returns on farming, and it's almost dominantly in the red. And so, it's more of a social contract where a lot of these governments are paying farmers for food production.
But then the question becomes what kind of food production?
[00:21:13] Kai Heron: Precisely, and that's one of the fascinating ideological tensions in the farming sector. At least conventional farmers frame themselves, responsible business people, maintaining the business, doing the good work of feeding the people through the fruits of their own labor and hard work.
And there's some truth to that story. But on the other hand, if they're receiving any kind subsidy that subsidy has come through the work and of others and supporting them to produce the food. This part of the story tends to get lost, which I find fascinating.
[00:21:41] Adam Calo: The other tension that you brought up considering the global flows of capital and of exploitation is how introducing a cheap. commodity, for example, here in the Netherlands, like dairy, that can then be exported to other countries undercuts the wages of local producers, which actually may increase food insecurity.
While at the same time farmers may claim legitimacy by saying, we are feeding the world. Look how much we are producing.
[00:22:08] Kai Heron: Exactly. That, that's another major tension. The case I always give, Netherlands is a great one. The US is the one I go to. The one that I think is the most fascinating is the way the US imported rice into the Haitian markets, obliterating Haiti's domestic rice production in the process, but claiming that what he was doing was helping develop it and modernize the Haitian agricultural system.
And it led to desperation and poverty. And this was under Bill Clinton's government. And then Bill Clinton became the special envoy to Haiti later and apologized for what he had done. But it just shows food being used as a weapon there, as an externalization. Yes, they're feeding the world of their rights, but they're also breaking the livelihoods, by design, tearing apart the livelihoods and communities of the countries that they're feeding.
[00:22:54] Adam Calo: You mentioned earlier that those who receive subsidies tend to be the larger landowners and in perhaps propping up old legacy aristocracy landowners. One of the things this leads into is a sense of inability to contest subsidy policy because perhaps of this powerful political bloc who would see their wealth and their land ownership be threatened if that were to change dramatically.
But because of Brexit, as you mentioned, all of a sudden there was this once in a generation chance to rewrite the subsidy regime, exiting out of the rules that were in place in the European Union. And so, what has England come up with? They've been working on a new plan, on this key policy lever for about five years.
And some of the details have recently just been released.
[00:23:40] Kai Heron: Yes. So we should start by saying that farming's a devolved issue in the UK. So for those who aren't listening from, from the UK, could be a bit of a complex situation. The vote leave EU happened in 2016. And now the constituent countries of the UK, so England, Wales, Northern Ireland, Scotland, are in the process of redesigning their subsidy systems.
So the system I'm going talk about now is exclusively focusing on England, with other countries are in processing of consulting how they're going to replace the common agricultural policy. But you're absolutely right, this language of once in a generation was the language used at the time. The idea was leaving the EU, gives the UK in general an opportunity to reconsider its subsidy system.
The common agricultural policy or CAP was almost universally disliked both by farmers and by, the British government because of the inequalities baked into it. And so this was an opportunity to leave cap behind and replace it for something else. And you know, I think that's one of the good outcomes, if you like, of Brexit was this opportunity to do this.
And so in its place, the English government announced it would create based not on direct payment, which is how CAP worked, direct payments for the area of land that was farmed. But instead, payments were going to be delivered, for what it called public money for public goods. So farmers would be incentivized to manage their land in ecologically responsible ways, while producing their usual outputs and their usual farming business.
The new scheme then was named Environmental Land Management Schemes or ELMS for short. So from there, it gets even messier. So ELMS are comprised of three distinct payment systems. There's a part called the Sustainable Farming Incentive, or Sustainable Farming Incentives, usually abbreviated to SFIs, which promote, as the name suggest, sustainable methods of farming.
So things like companion cropping or growing low input cereals.
Things that would somewhat reorganize the food, the way you're growing the food on your farm. Then there is countryside stewardships, which reward farmers for undertaking activities over and above their farming practices. So this might be things like creating habitats for wildlife, alongside their farming business.
It might be planting trees, maybe improving flood defenses. And then finally there's something called landscape recovery. Which is a project that was to support a smaller number of large scale and kind of bespoke projects to restore areas of wildlife, whether through say, peatland restoration or regrowing forests.
So CAP, you received direct payments based on land. ELMS, you choose from a kind of suite of things that you could do on your land. There's almost like a list. There is a list you can go through and see how much you will be paid for each of the practices that you could get involved with.
So you could, for instance, decide to plant low input cereal if you are an arable producer while maintaining your hedgerows or developing your hedgerows. And you could give over a portion of your land to things like natural habitats. Those three things together would give you payments to support your business. From the beginning, ELMS was quite widely supported by the farming community and by countryside groups. Cap again, was almost universally unpopular. So this idea of introducing a new and ecologically attuned system was by and large welcomed. but it's really important to stress that ELMS is still, in the process of being rolled out across England. So some of the details came out earlier this year.
Others are still to be decided. The scheme will come fully into place by 2025, and cCap payments are being slowly removed. They'll cease by 2027. So there's this arc, this overflow, of the two for the moment and by 2027 the CAP will be gone and we will have this ne ELMS system.
[00:27:36] Adam Calo: And there's some pretty broad claims that DEFRA makes about ELMS, in on their website claiming that "ELMS will transform England's food system ushering in a new Green era food production and ecologically regenerative land management that will help Britain achieve net zero by 2050. "
What is the food system going to look like if ELMS is successful?
[00:27:57] Kai Heron: That is a great question and I think the key part is what you've just quoted. So the idea that this is going help us achieve net zero. Let me start on that.
So the WWF did a freedom of information request quite recently. To find out to what extent DEFRA and the government imagined ELMS would contribute to our net targets in the UK. And it found the numbers were grossly overinflated. So there was this expectation that ELMS would already be leading to dramatic decarbonization and sequestratiob. But as I said, ELMS isn't going to be fully rolled out until 2027 anyway. So this idea that it's gonna achieve such a dramatic contribution, seems to be a bit of a fantasy.
This issue speaks to, I think, a larger imagining of what ELMS is supposed to do. And you can think about it as transitioning away from supporting farmers and paying farmers to produce food, which was was the common agricultural policy, towards imagining farmers more as stewards of landscapes. As practitioners of ecological regeneration alongside their existing farming business.
The SFI, that pillar of the ELMS is something that reshape how people do their day business. But the countryside stewardship pillar rewards farmers for undertaking activities that are not directly related to their farming practice. So it's a shift of subsidy systems from payment for food production to ecological management, or land management.
And I think that's probably the most important and dramatic shift, that ELMS introduces.
[00:29:34] Adam Calo: . Returning to the SFIs, as someone who kind of studids, or at least has studied the more agronomic practices of agroecology, what comes on that list is really important. I imagine there must have been lots of debate about what counts as a sustainable food practice. how does ELMS decide what counts as sustainable practices?
[00:29:52] Kai Heron: Yeah. So there has been a lot of debate about what should be in the SFI. As you may imagine, different interest groups have very different opinions about what should be included. And it's a fluid situation constantly changing. So my understanding, for example, is that SFI do not include at the moment payments for things like organic farming, at least not explicitly and not directly, but you can receive payments for certain things that look a lot like elements of agroecology.
Companion planting, for example, is often pointed to, as an example of this, as is the fact of using less pesticides, low input production. Both of these, you are essential to an system. But there's also a lot of criticism that, though ELMS is incredibly ambitious in as far as it tries to move towards an ecological system of land management and food production, the majority of the SFI options you can pick from as a producer, kind of continue practices that already exist.
So farmers are paid, for instance, and I'll be a little blunt here. They're paid for maintaining soil health. Which, yes, it's important to maintain soil health, but if you are a farmer, maintaining your soil health is an essential part of your business anyway. So receiving a payment for doing that is unusual.
You know, it's like paying a trades person for not destroying the tools they use to do their trade. It's a strange and unusual process and it speaks to the unique place of agriculture in the British economy.
[00:31:13] Adam Calo: Maybe you could comment a little bit more about the separation of the different pillars of ELMS, how really the SFIs is about what counts as agricultural production and others are other activities that are more about nature conservation, perhaps.
[00:31:27] Kai Heron: I think you're right to point to a difference between SFI then the Countryside Stewardship Scheme and the landscape recovery.
As a part of these pillars. So sustainable farming incentives is very much about what does look like responsible farming. What is farming. And then the countryside stewardship and land recovery elements. I think we could say that they are almost of an entirely different logic and they're underpinned by something that Adam, I know you've worked on in the past, which is land sparing versus land sharing, right?
So the countryside stewardship scheme and the landscape recovery scheme or about imagining giving land back over to nature, having a separation between food production almost and Nature as something that's distinct and separate that farmers are now given the responsibility to manage. One of the criticisms of ELMS, aside from the problem of reproducing this land sparing versus land sharing issue, is that farmers, their upfront costs, introducing growing trees, for example, or other countryside stewardship initiatives that smaller producers may not be able to front, they may not be able to afford to do these and the returns may not be sufficient to make it worth their while to do them.
So there's an ambition here to imagine farmers ecologically restoring our landscapes in the UK, but the reality may not actually live up to.
[00:32:39] Adam Calo: You mentioned that there's maybe a land sparing logic within ELMS. Maybe it's worthwhile just taking a step back and talking about the broader land sparing land sharing debate, but then particularly like why do you think ELMS seems to have adopted more of a land sparing pathway to getting to both food production and environmental outcomes?
[00:32:57] Kai Heron: This is a really important debate, that I think you need to have a position on one way or the other if you are going to be involved in Agriculture reform in any way. Land sparing is the idea that humans need to minimize their impact on non-human nature or on the rest of nature by using the land that we do occupy in intensive ways.
So it might, for example, mean high rise buildings in cities so that we aren't demographically sprawling across a landscape. But it also means producing food in highly productive and intensive and concentrated ways. So, monocultural farming systems lend themselves this kind of dynamic as of course do vertical farms, which have a very low footprint, at least in the territory they are built. Land sparing is the idea that we have this intensive use of land where we are which allows us to restore, “wild nature,” quote unquote elsewhere in the world or elsewhere on the landscape.
So we defend that and we protect that for species, for conservation, for biodiversity by minimizing the land that we occupy. That's land sparing.
Land sharing is the idea, and I'm going to reveal some of my sympathies leaning more this way here, that humans and nature are not separate things. That ecosystems for thousands of years have relied on human interventions of various kinds. And that conservation and biodiversity maximization, food production and our habitation, can and maybe should coexist with one another. Something like, a rewilding, it's in the name itself, giving “back to nature,” right? Which reproduces this separation between man and nature, which is very problematic in all kinds of ways.
So rewilding is involved in this. It's on one side of the debate, it's on the a sparing side
ELMS falls into, I think it falls into the land sparing side of this because of those three pillars that we've discussed. So, countryside stewardships and landscape recovery in particular seem to be about, if you like, a version of rewilding. So it's creating habitats for wildlife. We would be planting trees, might be, re wiggling rivers or whatever it may be.
But these are, these are ideas that came out of the rewilding movement. And then landscape recovery is explicitly about creating peatland restoration and forest restoration. These are good things in themselves. But what you don't see very much in those two pillars, or even in the sustainable farming incentives pillar is a way of thinking about supporting farming in the UK and in England in particular, that integrates human activity into nature that recognizes a kind of land sharing approach of regenerating ecosystems through our food production, through our habitation of the landscape.
This, I think is a missed opportunity to reimagine the way that we relate to non-human nature.
[00:35:51] Adam Calo: I wonder like why did you think that kind of logic won out in the design of the policy? Part of me thinks, some of the originators of the lands sparing, lands sharing framework were ecologists from the United Kingdom who were studying those systems. And I wonder if it's just more of a kind of science and technology studies, history of science problem that, the design of the policy is just created with whoever is around to give that type of evidence.
[00:36:15] Kai Heron: I think that's probably right, but I also think, I mean, the people to point to here are, people like, again, Mies or, Von Werlhof or more recently Jason Moore. The idea that there's this distinction between nature and society goes a very long way back in Western and European traditions of thought.
Anything, as von Werlhof says you don't want pay for, goes into the side of nature. Anything that you think is valued, or you do want to pay for, goes onto the side of society. So this ontological rift, or even it's even in the book of Genesis, the idea that man, quote unquote very masculine category, has dominion and control over nature. These two things are separate.
That idea, I think doesn't just structure conservation, though it does, I think it structures a lot of our thinking, in Europe and European traditions of thought, including environmental movements who may otherwise be very critical of ELMS or the farming practices it reproduces.
[00:37:11] Adam Calo: This is why I get a kick out of looking for land sparing land sharing logics is, in some sense, it is kind of an ecological debate that, some claim can be tested with hypothesis testing and with empirics, but when it seeps into policy, then it has these real implications and could really drastically reshape what land and rural livelihoods look like in England.
[00:37:33] Kai Heron: Exactly, and I think that's really what we need to be pushing for, as far as we can in our writing and in our organizing, these, these reimaginings of our relationship with nature, non-human nature to specify that, is a really exciting part of the debate and discussions, potentials or something like ELMS.
[00:37:50] Adam Calo: In this article that you've written with Alex Effron and Rob Booth, you are fairly critical of ELMS to achieve the stated aims. The main argument here you say is that
"ELMS is likely to force farmers out of the industry, consolidate land in the hands of small landowning elite and do little to mitigate global heating while guaranteeing that Britain misses historic opportunity to create a socially and ecologically just food system."
So I wonder, maybe we could just talk about these claims one by one. How might ELMS as it's currently designed, perhaps force farmers out of the industry? Shouldn't incentives for environmental stewardship allow for all of the small holder agroecologists who have these skills to really benefit and flourish.
[00:38:29] Kai Heron: I mean, in principle, yes, that's how I would like ELMSto work. In practice, some of the issues I've just raised, come up here again. Things like companion planting or low impact farming should be welcomed. What I would like to see maybe some reforms to these elements of ELMS to introduce more agroecological farming into the core of the ELMS structure.
But that is not where we're at. And there are various challenges for those wanting to participate. So again, most of them have upfront costs that are difficult for farmers, especially these small scale producers that we're talking about. There have also been some complaints that the payments are too low, so why would you follow in or be involved in this?
And then meanwhile, large scale producers are more likely to be able to have the capacity to do this. So I think at least on your first part of this question, this idea that does it support agroecological farming? There are parts in there that might, but I do not think that was the goal of ELMS.
ELMS was not trying to transition us towards an agroecological food system. It's, tinkering around the edges of what is a fundamentally broken food system. Instead of trying to imagine this overhaul that we would like it to.
[00:39:38] Adam Calo: It seems like it has emerged perhaps from that ecosystem service concept. So if we can identify the types of ecological services that get us to net zero, for example, by 2050, then we will link the practices to that. But if the logic of how you get to net zero 2050 is through that land sparing model, then it doesn't allow for regeneration at the site of farm practices itself.
[00:40:06] Kai Heron: Exactly. And if you buy into these ideas of carbon markets and carbon offsets through land management, which I mean, studies come out almost every month showing that there's an overhype of these schemes, and in fact, they're not achieving targets that they should be achieving. ELMS fully buys into the idea that carbon offsets through agriculture, consists side by side and that there's no contradiction with, for example licensing new oil and gas extraction in the North Sea, which we've done, or opening a new coal plant in Cmbria just north of where I live. All of this is okay cause in part ELMSs and other schemes through this logic or offsetting are helping to displace those emissions. But all the evidence points to the contrary.
[00:40:49] Adam Calo: The next claim you make is about a connection perhaps between ELMS and furthering land consolidation. You were saying that the existing subsidy regime is the one that has been contributing to land consolidation. So how would this also contribute to land consolidation?
[00:41:02] Kai Heron: Yes. So this is a good example of the fluidity of ELMS. So when we wrote that piece, for the New Statesmen, it was the case, this is one of the peculiarities of the system that upland producers, primarily livestock producers, in the upland of the UK where the land is less productive, it's less good for arable growing. Upland producers were going to receive lower rates of pay for doing exactly the same land management practices as livestock producers in, in the south of the UK. We have a north south economic divide in the UK. And it's almost a joke that this was reproduced in the proposals for ELMS and this caused a lot of consternation among upland producers and rightly so
[00:41:43] Adam Calo: But wasn't this kind of back to that land sparing logic of those lands are actually better suited probably as trees. So let's figure out a way to disincentivize agriculture in those zones for the sake of efficiency.
[00:41:55] Kai Heron: Yes, I think that's exactly right. So that was our claim, right? That the point here almost by design is to put upland producers out of business, they will go out of business. That land will no longer be used to produce food and instead, what would come into the breach,
we argued, given the price of land, is not going to be a new generation of farmers. It's be probably hedge funds, multinational corporations, or other independently wealthy people looking to use carbon offset schemes to, rewild or to grow forest plantations, whatever it may be, to benefit from carbon credit markets.
And so this was our concern. This was the land consolidation that we saw coming. It's not that ELMS itself will lead to consolidation, but one of the effects of ELMS is that it would lead to land consolidation in places like the uplands. One of the interesting things since we've written that paper, is that the government of backtracked on this, and so now upland producers will receive the same amount of payments for the same practices as those in the south.
I think that's a result of genuine consternation from producers and it shows some of their power and influence.
[00:43:05] Adam Calo: There is a really one-two punch there. If incentives from the practices are lower in the uplands, but then if you think of who can actually tap into the higher level landscape recovery plans, you need to be an actor with a lot of transaction costs already built in, or upfront capital, as you said, to then maybe get into those lands that are potentially abandoned or deprioritized.
[00:43:26] Kai Heron: Yes, exactly, the point of reference is for us at least when we're in the background in that piece and in the background of my thinking about this is Scotland. So people have written a lot about Scotland and the way that, its land is if not more, opaque than English land ownership.
And there's been this emergence of so-called green lairds. So green landowners who do have that upfront capital and wealth and can access this land and can use it for their ends. For example, Brewdog, which is a kind of hipster beer company, wants to be net zero. So it's bought 9000 acres of upland Scotland. Shell are in on this game as well.
These are the companies with the capital and the capacity, like you say, to do that. And so yeah, there is this one two punch taking away the funds and financial support for upland producers and creating the space where these actors can move into the breach, if you like. I like to think about this as a new land grab or a new enclosures movement or green grabbing those kinds of terms are entirely appropriate for the way ELMS was looking to function in the uplands of England.
[00:44:32] Adam Calo: And do you see, for example, the rise of some kind of new, green land investment in England, in anticipation of these new funds available? Or maybe green consulting companies that could allow certain actors to tick the boxes in order to tap into the landscape recovery plan?
[00:44:47] Kai Heron: Absolutely. So there already are these businesses who will say, we will consult you on how to maximize or use your land appropriately to maximize the income revenues that you get from this ELMS scheme or to maximize the profits that you can make from carbon credit markets in offsetting markets.
I think again, this is very much by design.
[00:45:06] Adam Calo: But Kai, I mean like even if the land ends up getting consolidated and managed through these new green consultants and the number of farmers reduce. Maybe it wouldn't so bad if, if there was a form of green feudalism. I know one of your claims is that the food system's anti-democratic, but at least we would have emission reductions and at least we would have a landscape that wasn't poisoning us.
[00:45:28] Kai Heron: Yeah. Yep. You could, you could make that kind of devil’s bargain. But there is no evidence that these carbon offset schemes are working. And so fundamentally, this bargain is not one that we can make. We can't say, “well okay, look, land is going be consolidated in the hands, of multi-national corporations, but that's okay cause they're going to guide us to this greener and better future.”
For several reasons. One, again, these offsetting schemes don't work. And two, I think it's fundamentally a matter of social and climate justice that the UK does move towards producing some more of its own food, ideally through something more like a food sovereignty system or arrangement or a set of demands. That kind of conceptual framework.
And ideally through an agroecological or land sharing approach to land management. This matters because the UK, as I said earlier, is fundamentally dependent on the exploitation of land and labor from elsewhere in the global economy. I do not think that a green transition in the global north or in the UK where we offset our emissions by using our land for forest plantations or rewilding, is a green policy at all if it relies on the exploitation or degradation of ecosystems elsewhere.
[00:46:41] Adam Calo: I personally get worried in these kind of green transition logics that are based around these outcomes or targets, because even as an academic, it'll be just hard for me to tell if what is being done is leading to the outcomes rather than perhaps, as you were saying, trying to pass legislation or striving for a food system based on new values or political commitments. at least then that could organize activity around those values instead of just trusting that a few hedgerows here, a few new rivers re wiggled will lead to the amount of landscape change required to reduce emissions at a global scale.
[00:47:21] Kai Heron: Exactly. I would really like to see a shift away from food security conceptualizations in the UK, towards a food sovereignty framework. And not just an appropriation of food sovereignty, but an understanding of food sovereignty as a series of demands and propositions made by producers in the global south, or that were sympathetic to producers in the global south. But to make that move at a policy level. To do a normative shift. Would require disrupting the food system as it exists, which as we started with, is a fundamentally neo-colonial imperialist project. So since that's off the table, I think really ELMS, all ELMS can do is, again, play around the edges of the the existing food system, while over-inflating what it can claim to do.
[00:48:07] Adam Calo: That really leads to the next piece that I wanted to talk to you about, the the politics of ELMS within a broader conversation of the politics of food system reform. So within those five years of development of ELMS, many kind of food system reform groups like Sustain UK and the Sustainable Food Trust we're really involved in trying to shape the legislation. And at the end of the five years, it almost looked like the whole thing was going to be scrapped. There was a moment when it was just going to be returned to area payments because they couldn't work out these details.
Why do you think these groups invested this time in trying to shape this legislation when perhaps they might even have more radical political tendencies or or visions? What do you think is the value in trying to contest these types of legislation?
[00:48:51] Kai Heron: As someone who's been involved in consultations on various government legislations around land and around agriculture, the more radical organizations getting involved in these, I think would honestly say it's unlikely that their voice is going to be heard.
We know how consultations work in this country or any country. The consultation process itself legitimates the outcomes, even if the outcomes do not listen to the voices that chose to speak up as part of that process. Nevertheless, it's a space where you can try and apply some sort of leverage onto government policy. One of the really interesting and useful things if you're interested in this space is to look at the various submissions to the consultation around ELMS from organizations like Sustain.
And you can see that they're making quite ambitious demands of the government that unfortunately didn't filter through into the policy. I think we could expect that, but it's good to get those demands out there and to build a conversation around that. So I think that's at least one reason to get involved.
Even if you know that, you know, the outcome is unlikely to be the one that you would hope for.
[00:49:52] Adam Calo: But I get the sense from reading some of your work that even in contesting and trying to get the voice out there might be futile. So in an article in the Spectre Journal on perhaps the inevitable political response that will emerge because of climate catastrophe, you write
"the question is the direction revolutions will take. Towards the abolition of eco apartheid and the establishment of equitable and livable societies, or towards the entrenchment of authoritarianism, fascism, and neofeudalism."
So it seems like with this quote, you sense that the environmental realities that we are facing is going to force transformation. The question is which direction it takes. And if you look at ELMS from this broader view, it really just seems to fall into kind of a long line of maybe more reformist strategies like nature-based solutions, offsetting climate smart agriculture.
But your reading of politics doesn't put much stock in trying to engage with these types of legislative reforms?
[00:50:47] Kai Heron: Yeah, so that's right. And here's one of the contradictions in the way that I think about politics. I think it's absolutely worthwhile to consultation spaces where they exist. But the contribution inspector is to say that those spaces, we need to understand where we engage with them, that they're foreclosed to radical political engagement projects.
Any engagement with them is only there to build our own forces, and to build our composition or our collective capacity to organize. I don't expect that the government's going to listen to those kind of demands in this consultation. So what they're there for is to build a collective subject, to put it in that kind of language.
They can see that the government is not going to deliver through these normal channels, what we would hope for it to deliver, and then instead something more radical is going to be needed. And that then speaks to this issue of transition, which is the thing that occupies the majority of my thinking.
It's almost impossible to look at the world and not see that transition is one of the most important projects and questions of our time. And I think ELMS does feed into this very directly. It is a transition yes, away from common agricultural policies towards something else. But as the quote you chose, says,
it's also I think a transition towards what I've taken to calling ecoapartheid. It's spin on the notion of climate apartheid, which is something that former UN Special Rapporteur warned that we were moving towards. Which is the idea that the global North-- we're quite familiar with this idea now-- the global North protects itself from the effects of climate collapse. While the global south
takes the majority of the weight of that. Racialized communities in the global north will also feel the effects of climate collapse much harder and much quicker than white communities in the global North. Eco apartheid is part of that logic. I prefer eco to climate for all kinds of reasons.
But the idea that, ELMS is fundamentally about trying to Green England while not thinking about this global food system. Despite saying that we should get involved in consultations and lobbying push to make this better, that that project is fundamentally a project that is part of building out what I call the infrastructure of ecoapartheid. So a kinda land sparing system of land management in the global north, the exploitation of land and labor in the global south.
And so we only get involved in spaces like Elm's consultations in so far as they help us organize ironically against those spaces. I think there's a bit of a paradox there, but one of the problems of the moment is that we cannot jump to a revolutionary project. We have to build the forces that can conduct something against ecoapartheid.
[00:53:27] Adam Calo: That links to what I saw as another main argument in that Spectre Journal piece where you talk about a skepticism of a capitalist managed transition, but also kind of chide the left for failing to think about the politics of transition. You know, why can't we manage a transition through clever technical technocratic reforms?
Why can't we have this Kai? And why has the utopic imaginings of post-capitalism like agroecology or food sovereignty, failed to think about the pathways from where we are now to where we might want to go?
[00:53:55] Kai Heron: Okay, great. There's an almost a pleading in this, why can't we have these clever technocratic reforms? Yeah. I wish we could, in some level too.
That piece and a few other pieces and things I'm working on, primarily of this concept of capitalist catastrophism, makes this argument that there's this well known phrase on the left, and I almost feel sorry for having to mention it, but it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
And this idea was captured by Mark Fisher and his well-known book capitalist realism, where he argued that basically the left imagination had been suppressed to the point where we all we can imagine is a continuation of capitalism. We cannot imagine anything outside of it. And one of the things guiding that Spectre piece and my ongoing work is that this is no longer true.
So in in recent years, we've had an abundance, a plethora of post-capitalist imaginaries that are really inspiring. So there's degrowth, there's land back movements, certain versions of the Green New Deal which were more radical. You name it, there've been so many of these alternatives that I think it points to the fact that we can now imagine world outside of capitalism.
What we're not very good at doing is imagining how we get from where we are–the current space and time—to these post-capitalist imaginaries where we would like to be. So take your pick, whether it's the half earth socialism position, for example, or a Green New Deal or, degrowth. The pathway from where we are to where we know that we need to be realistically within decades, seems totally opaque. It's totally invisible to us. And so one of the contributions of the Spectre piece is to impose or force this question of revolutionary transition, which is a question that the revolutionary movements have been dealing with for decades, right? It was a big thing in anticolonial struggles. It was huge in the revolutionary movements of the early 1900s.
And so we're trying to push people back to thinking about transition. It’s not much a chiding but it's also a kind pleading that we need to do this difficult work of organizing and thinking about how a transition would happen and who the actors who would conduct this transition would be.
Why we can't have these clever technocratic reforms. Let's focus on what technocratic reforms we're talking about.
But many of them fundamentally are not real changes to the system as they exist. So I think something like a Green New Deal, right? This is, I think a policy-based technocratic reform in the global north, that is predicated as many scholars and activists have, have argued on the extraction of resources from the global south to build out this transition.
So it's not radical enough, it's not going to fix the problem would be one answer. And other to why we can't just have reform. There's this old argument in radical movements of do we go for reform revolution? A famous thing from Rosa Luxemburg. Is it reform or revolution? I think we're in a moment in time where to get even these kind of modest reforms, something like the green new deals that were discussed around Bernie Sanders and AOC would take something amounting to a revolution in political situation.
The political sphere is so locked down to progressive movements that we would need something like a revolutionary force to drive through even modest reforms. And if you need a revolution to get modest reforms, you may as well have a revolution.
[00:57:11] Adam Calo: What's your opinion on something like a Polanyian approach, which to me has always felt like a middle path. Where, the problem here is the unregulated market and that unregulated market is destroying society and the environment and counter movements will rise up—maybe through political actors or maybe through social movements or some kind of combination—to re-embedn the market logics in society and in the environment.
And from that sense, maybe something like ELMS or maybe a more radical or more agroecological ELMS kind seems to embed the market in environment in society.
[00:57:44] Kai Heron: Yeah. So I think Polanyi is a good point of reference here, and I think the so-called Green Keynsian position here is a good example of this as well, isn't it? To try and contain or control capital. To re-embed it in society, is not a project that I think is viable or achievable in the current without something like a dramatic overthrow of political power.
So I think it's a failed project. I'm talking now about the balance of class forces. The strength of the forces opposed to that re embedding, I think are far too great, in this point in time for that to be a realistic prospect. And that's precisely the situation that happens before there is a revolution, right?
People don't choose just to have a revolution instead of reforms. The path to reform is closed off to them. And so there's nothing left other than more radical action. I think we're in that situation. So that Polanyian framework of, oh, just re-embed it, I don't think that's open to us at the moment.
And I recognize there's plenty of space to disagree with that. But that at least that's my analysis of the present moment. And beyond that, I have other issues with Polanyi as a framework. Primarily because of his tendency to treat, well, he directly treats land and labor as if they're not commodities.
He argues that they shouldn't be treated as commodities, but the capitalist economy obviously treats land and labor power as a commodity. They are used as commodities, and we should remember that, and it's critical because labor struggle, class struggle against the commoditization of our labor power is a fundamental reason for struggle. It’s one of the motivators for struggle is to abolish commodification of our labor.
[00:59:17] Adam Calo: Your second main problem of the food system is relying on its imperialist and colonial exploitation. Is that a re-embedding for who you know? To what extent would re embedding still rely on exploited or devalued labor or ecological conditions elsewhere?
And I think that's kind of, Nancy Fraser’s attempt at trying to say, we got to be careful about what type of society we embed the market into.
[00:59:40] Kai Heron: Precisely. So I think Nancy Fraser is a great point of reference in this. I've been returning to Maria Mies project on subsistence and the subsistence perspective, which is in many ways is a kind of pre-degrowth degrowth argument around how, even if we kind of could return to a controlled capitalist economy, it would nevertheless be predicated on exploitation or domination of various actors, but also of nature itself. So Mies uses this famous iceberg analysis that I think has influenced Fraser as well, where there's the waged economy at the top, the kind of global north we receive our wage and our payment every month, and we live on our wages.
And then beneath the water, in this iceberg analogy, there's colonial labor forces. The work of women that's unpaid. The work of nature or the ecological processes and flows that we need for our economy. Re-embedding an economy that still exploits colonial labor, women and ecological systems is not something that we should be aspiring to.
[01:00:40] Adam Calo: So this really leads to the last claim that you mentioned in that first piece where you said that that ELMS misses out on an opportunity to create a socially and ecologically just food system. I want to point out perhaps a kind of contradiction in your argument here, because you're, you kind of say that, rewriting a new subsidy regime, you it can't actually achieve anything.
It might be worthwhile in engaging in kind of contributing to a more revolutionary politics. But at the same time, you do seem to think that there is a missed opportunity here. So, what would a food policy with a blank check, look like that would actually create this type of politics that might create the power to create a new food system perhaps?
[01:01:18] Kai Heron: Great. Now I get to do a plug of an ongoing project of mine. So I like this question. So I've working for a couple years on a project with some colleagues of mine, on something called Public Common Partnerships.
We wrote two reports for Commonwealth, you can find them there. But the basic point here is a democratization of the economy. A public common partnership creates a space in which producers, but also consumers of any asset or resource can democratically control the economy. In some way you might want to think about it as a way of reproducing a commune system for production.
And in recent work in a forthcoming report, I've been making the case that we need to recommon or produce institutions to common agriculture in the UK. Looking primarily at public land to begin with. The council farm estates in England, council farms are are land owned by local councils, or local authorities.
That was initially, it's supposed to be used to allow new entrants into the farming system. And then when people have gained enough capital, they're meant to leave these farms and get their own land and become farmers. Because of the value and the price of land, this is not happening.
Council farms are not working as they should. And so instead, people end up living on them, renting them for decades. Councils are increasingly selling off their council farm estates to plug deficits in their budgets for essential social services. This report, one of the things it argues, is that these should be used as spaces, for a recommoning of agroecological production in the UK.
So that shift of values we were talking about earlier. Away from food security and towards an agroecological food sovereignty approach.
[01:02:58] Adam Calo: So I use the term of the blank check, but under the more current circumstances, it's just of the current controls over the pile of money that was the subsidy payments, that is the operating space to do policy work. Is there space to accomplish some of these things through that?
Or is the scale of governance not appropriate to meet those values and those visions that you laid out?
[01:03:22] Kai Heron: Yeah, that's a really good question. I think, so I think this question needs to be answered, not in the abstract, right? So it's not, the state, cause we're talking about the state, is the state the right scale to make interventions. But is the state a scale that is currently available to us to make those interventions? And in that case, given the reactionary government that we have in power, given that our opposition labor party in the UK is just a slightly different version of a reactionary government, the state level currently is closed to us and to radical action.
That's maybe where I would start to answer that question. And so that means we need to think at different scales. So I'm not one of these people, you know, it's quite common in agrarian movements to say we need a bottom up perspective, and the state is intrinsically suspicious and authoritarian. I don't come from that tradition, but do think that our moment of being able to use and wield the state for progressive policy maybe was the Corbin moment in the UK and we are not in time anymore so we need think creatively.
[01:04:22] Adam Calo: Regarding land reform. I think, you, like others quickly go to, “well, let's look at the public lands that are available” because they're all kind of essentially failing to do their stated aims of serving the public, usually in terms of public agricultural lands. And that would be an easy way to use existing entitlements to reorient the types of land use, or partnerships that could exist there.
But what do you do about the current land owners that are embedded in the conventional system? I'm looking for help here because in the Netherlands, you have, a reform that's based around a mandate to reduce emissions and the state comes up to the solution of buyouts.
So just buying out farmers to cease their operations is the main tool. Even with that offer, in order to achieve the goal of emission reductions, you still have extreme strong political backlash where the almost conspiratorial talking point of the state is coming for your land is made true.
I mean, they will pay you millions of euros for it. But, it is an existential threat in that sense.
[01:05:20] Kai Heron: This is a problem. So various solutions have been proposed. One of those would be land value tax. So trying to apply some pressure on private owners and extract some kind of wealth out of private owners that can be used to maybe purchase greater land, like more public land. But that's clearly a state level intervention and my previous answer says that that's foreclosed to the moment.
But I think I'm sympathetic to that as a, as an attempt to try and create land reform opportunities in the UK. And then the other thing that I would like to down the line I'd like to see, one of the benefits of a public common partnership is, any of the surplus that is produced by something ran as a public common partnership can be used to create new common, new spaces of commons, new practices of commoning.
So assuming we're lucky enough to get a food system can generate surpluses or other parts of the British economy that could create surpluses, some of that surplus, I would hope, could be put into something like a land bank. That land bank could hold onto those reserves and then use it to purchase more land off of private landowners.
So that might be an another mechanism. That's a long way away. So, in the meantime, I think it's really important to break the myth of private land ownership. To break the idea that going onto someone's land is, someone's land, quote unquote, that you're trespassing by doing so. And you don't have a right to be there, but they have complete control over that space.
So I'm heartened by movements like the right to campaign, the UK, which is, you know, trying to get it so we can rove anywhere we like in England, just as you can in Scotland. I'm also fascinated in the severe resistance to that from private land owners, who believe that the general public will dump waste on their land.
And, I realize there's a contradiction between these very small proposals I'm making and where we need to be to have something like land reform. But we first need to put land reform on the political agenda and things like right to roam are beginning do that.
[01:07:20] Adam Calo: Yeah. I wonder if perhaps the private landowner resistance to right to roam it belies a deeper understanding that if people get to understand that land is valuable to them can be used or experienced to a greater number of interests, the panopoly of interest that could be on that land, it does start to weaken that strength, either mythological or legal around you get to do what we want on the inside of those boundaries.
[01:07:45] Kai Heron: I think that's right. I was speaking to a quite large landowner just the other week about right to roam. She was heavily opposed to it. But her arguing was that they're going to exactly dump waste so that they'll put their trash on her land and she'll have to tidy it up. And I made the point that maybe people only do that, they only fly tip, they only put trash in places when they don't feel some kind of connection or control of the space that they're in.
And so allowing people access to these spaces and allowing them to move through it would actually lead them to appreciate it, right? And feel this connection. And so therefore they'd be less alienated and less likely to act in the way she was concerned about. And that genuinely seemed like a novel idea to her. Which just shows I think the, the hold of private property in our imaginations. And this is a kind of a dramatic change of values and a re-imagining of who owns land, right?
If I had a blank check, land reform to democratize land ownership in the UK would be a fundamental and good and effective start.
Making it so people are less dependent on the market for their food. So things like, Rob, a co-author of the mins works on the Right to food rather than being a commodity. These kinds of large scale dramatic changes, I believe are what is needed. And even if they themselves do not lead to this dramatic revolution, these kind of organizations, democratic control of our food supply, put us in a much better place down the line than being reliant on multinational corporations for our food.
A contrast I'd like to make: Democratic and collectively produced agroecological food production in a way that is sympathetic with nature, is the vision that I would like to see. I think we're in a moment where we have a choice between that and something where we have a land sparing system where multinational companies are maybe rewilding land for carbon offsetting schemes while we move towards very technocratic ways of feeding ourselves in the future.
So I think George's Monbiot’s book Regenesis is a good point of reference here. The idea of precision fermentation, to produce a kind ofa protein powder effectively out of fermentation processes. It's a system that's being trialed and tested, to produce food in a land sparing way. But our food supply in that vision is going to be owned by large corporations. And it's going to continue to perpetuate the exploitation of labor, of colonial lands, of colonial labor and of nature. And so we we're in this moment, this fork in the road, between those two choices, I think.
[01:10:15] Adam Calo: I think that's a great place to end. Kai, thank you for coming on Landscapes.
[01:10:18] Kai Heron: Thank you very much. It's been a a lot of fun.
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