Mainstreaming Land Reform
From Scotland to Cartagena to Sacramento, it's increasingly clear land relations must change
The link between land governance and food systems change grows more salient. Here is a summary of recent events and resources that caught my eye and deserve to be shared.
ICARRD +20
The Second International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD+20) was held in Cartagena, Colombia this past February. The conference called on a global delegation with the aim of centering the role of land policy on the intertwined crises of rural poverty, food insecurity, and the climate crisis. As Jun Borras wrote in his excellent summary of the event:
ICARRD is an intergovernmental conference like no other because it touches on an extremely politically contentious topic: the possible dismantling of large private landed properties and their redistribution to peasants, rural working people, and the Indigenous.
While most gathering on these crises address them from a technical approach, ICARRD takes two additional steps: pinpointing land relations as a root driver of these problems and forwarding land reform as the solution. Emerging out of the conference is the official ICARRD+20 Declaration, a global benchmark on the role of land on global environmental and social problems.
A sample of the declaration:
3.We note that hunger and malnutrition, food insecurity, poverty, and rural unemployment are phenomena intrinsically linked to inequality in access to and control over land, water, and other natural resources. This inequality prevents peasants, smallholders, rural workers, Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities from having the necessary conditions to create dignified and sustainable livelihoods over time.
While not all social movement organizations agreed with the final declaration (disagreements on definitions and the depth of proposes policy interventions), 28 of the 56 participating countries ratified the statement, a remarkable step that shows a growing recognition that trends of land consolidation must be contested.
The California Agricultural Land Equity Task Force issue briefs
ICARRD may seem like a concern for geographies of legal pluralism and Global South land grabbing, but land issues are also front of mind in global North locales. In California, I recently wrote about the drama that unfolded after the state appointed group called the California Agricultural Land Equity Task Force produced its report filled with land policy recommendations. The task force has now produced an executive summary of the report, as well as compact summaries of recommendation based on different stakeholder groups or policy ideas. There is a recommendation summary for conservation organizations, for local governments, for California Native American Tribes and Tribal-serving organizations, for funding needs, and for technical assistance. Perhaps land reform isn’t such an “out there” thing after all. As a sense of the tenor of the debate on this issue, a share an amazing comment received on an op-ed about the need to develop new land policy in California.
Land Reform in Scotland is a work in progress
Scotland has long featured in my mind as a test case for modern-day land reform that walks the line between reformism and revolutionary action. October marked the International Symposium on Scotland’s Land Reform Futures. The event featured an exchange between Scottish policy officers and academics, as well as learning for alternative land tenure models across the world. I participated in a small way, presenting about how developments in the US land policy show sigs that land is back on the agenda. Don’t worry if you missed it, the symposium organizers have released 21 talks on youtube as well as a summary of the event, and a letter of lessons learned sent to the aforementioned ICARRD+20 process. An excellent summary of Scottish Land Reform and its future is found in the welcome address from the Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs.
The Land Food Nexus
What does all of this action on land reform have to do about food?
A fascinating new paper in the Journal of Agrarian Change makes this link directly, arguing that dependence on pesticide use is strongly linked to property regimes. In The Pesticide Land-Nexus, by Julie Guthman and Marion Werner argue that investigation into pesticide use and dependence has elided the role of land to its peril. Land valuation articulates with proposed agricultural models. Yields and land values are inflated due a ever increasing demand of techniques like fumigation. Therefore, certain lands are locked on a pathway towards commodity production, which implies entrenched pesticide use. Furthermore, continual pesticide applications degrade neighboring lands, reducing land values in other cases. Both of these effects foreclose the development of alternative farming models. Thinking about how to reduce pesticides from a health or agronomic angle will miss these land-based drivers of input-dependence. Reforming land access is thus a needed tool to intervene in trends in pesticide use. In summary the authors write:
Our conclusions echo recent literature in agroecology, which points to the barriers that land values pose to the adoption of alternative forms of biological control.
Yes, to change land use, we must change land governance.
Of course, a more productivist view will argue that reducing pesticides will contribute to yield loss, which will threaten farmer incomes and inevitably lead to land expansion “elsewhere.” In this lens, the yield boosts from pesticides are the sustainability solution.
A recent paper in Nature Food is the latest to contradict this land sparing claim. The study reviewed “functionally rich crop rotations” across Europe. Crop rotations are a basic diversification strategy that reduces needs for inputs like fertilizers and pesticides. What is unique about this study is that the researchers weren’t as much focused on the effect on yields, but n contribution to calories and macronutrients across different nutritional benchmarks. They studied the difference between cereal monocultures and rotations with other crops like legumes or pasture for dairy production. That way, the paper can make a claim about how diversification influences contribution to nutritious diets, not just bushels per acre. Their findings were clear:
Rotations with three functional types produced more calories and macronutrients than cereal monocultures and cereal-only rotations with forage crops used to produce milk.
Because of this finding, the authors use the logic of land sparing (questionable but interesting) to make the counter conclusion: because more calories and macronutrients were produced with diversification, rotations produce no pressure to expand land:
Our analysis shows no trade-off between functionally rich rotations and food production or agricultural land expansion.
A sisyphean battle to contest the feed the world myth
In two recent podcast appearances I try to make the case for the often overlooked, but ever-present connection between land and food.
In the student newspaper at my university, I was interviewed by the In a Nutshell Podcast by host (and also masters student I am supervising) Jara Majerus. We discussed how simplified goals of producing more food and efficiency maximizing does not resolve global hunger and that a focus on changing land relations would be much more productive. There are also two brief Instagram clips of interview highlights.
In the TransAct podcast (a podcast about transformative change) I discussed the role of land governance on justice, democracy, and food systems change.
We discussed a grounding paper for me by Monica White about the Freedom Farms Cooperative. For me, this work so clearly shows the link between land control and resistance to authoritarianism.
White, M. M. (2017). “A pig and a garden”: Fannie Lou Hamer and the Freedom Farms Cooperative. Food and Foodways, 25(1), 20-39.
In my work, I often focus on the argument that alternative land relations are the key to sustainable food. But sometime I miss the reason for this is largely a part of the ability to emancipate through the ability to self provision.
This conversation dovetailed nicely with the other guest Liza Steultjens. Liza is a PhD candidate whose work focuses on pastoralist land relations, global commodity markets, and international agricultural policy in the western Sahel region.
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Finally, if you like Land Food Nexus, apply for this PhD project on Europe’s community land