June 8, 2025
#25 Towards a Land-first Food Movement in the Global North: A New Collection on Sustainable Food and Land Governance
Geographically variegated property regimes shape the scope of both the commodification and assetization of farmland. Adam Calo, Sylvia Kay, Sarah R Sippel, Coline Perrin, and Kirsteen Shields report from a multi-country study that explored this nexus, as well as the question of what would need to happen in terms of property regime restructuring to engender more agroecological ways of relating to nature. Their intervention is highly welcome since particularly in the food systems transformation discourse for societies of the Global North, the issue of property rights remains largely absent.
Photo credit: Adam Calo, 2020
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.
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The story of contested land relations appears reliably in academic literature located in agrarian and forest frontiers of the Majority World. There, a long tradition of agrarian and development scholars reveal the way capital interests bend unruly land relations to their purposes through legally harmonized systems of private property. Capital interests apparently are well aware that if they want to develop predictable returns from long-term investments, they need to first prop-up a predictable and friendly property regime. It is a bit of a puzzle, then, that advocates of food system transformation in the Minority World do not often take the same approach. Proponents of food system transformation in the so-called “Global North” certainly want to see drastic changes in land use. Agroecologists wish for poly-cropping and pesticide bans. Ecomodernists want intensification and data-driven precision farming. Neoagrarians see a future of repopulated smallholder farms. Regardless of the form, underneath the practices that may define a sustainable food system are the deep politics of land that dictate material forms of use, from farm to distribution.
Changing agricultural land use in a meaningful way thus demands a parallel effort of change in land relations. New farmers must gain reliable access to quality soils. Farmland assets must be transferred out of monopoly control. Rents extracted from farmland must be redistributed. Legal guardrails must be established against unchecked farmland financialization.
For the geographies of the so-called Global North, “encroaching on the regime of private property” may seem like a pragmatic impossibility. After all, notions of property, wrapped in layers of legal, institutional, and cultural armor, appear settled in places like North America, the UK, and Western Europe. But if dominant property relations are a relentless driver of food system unsustainability, a coming land reform movement may not be so outlandish in a world where the ecological contradictions of the status quo are increasingly apparent. We may be beginning to see a “land-first” food system transformation approach in the Global North that recognizes the futility of bringing sustainable food without challenging the dominant property regime.
To support this potential, we established a special issue to collect evidence of food system reform being actualized through experiments in land reform. We focused our call on insights emerging from the 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. 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.
In the introduction to the special issue, we lay out a theoretical case for why 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 Gramscian hegemony, where state powers will use their monopoly on violence to protect norms of property. Even more insidiously, the virtues of owning things exclusively become internalized as natural and good. Thus, a combination of legal, institutional, and cultural forces work to uphold a stubborn common sense about the correctness of the ownership model. Combatting such hegemony thus requires a search for countervailing nodes of power that can create a new “good sense” about agricultural land.
The collection of 12 articles shows 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.
Synthesizing the articles, 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 for transformation. We thus must search for “non-reformist” land reforms that open up the conditions for structural realignments.
Despite the apparent cultural and legal entrenchment of property relations, these domains of transformations offer practical starting points to experiment with a land reform movement suitable for the property regimes of the Global North. They remind that land relations are constantly being remade and maintained in the name of various social imperatives. Remaking land relations to synergize with sustainable food practices will require 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.
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.
The Land Trust Movement
By far the most popular strategy is to raise money somehow and then buy agricultural land in some form of trust instrument. Goris et al. [1] and Wach & Hall [2] detail projects in England and the Netherlands that use creative financial and organizational techniques to do what they see as an effort to “de-commodify land.” Perhaps a critical mass of these efforts can destabilize land markets. But across the collections, authors wonder what types of political stances will allow for the parcel-to-parcel model of land trust to welcome a broad base of supporting constituents.
Legislative Land Reforms
In the minority are burgeoning examples of state-led land reforms that use legislative powers to contest or remake property norms. For example, Kennedy and Frazier [3] detail the origins of the California Land Equity Task Force, a state-appointed body tasked with addressing unequal benefits of agricultural land use. Wach and Hall [2] compare the reparations based movement in South Africa to the “commoning” efforts of England. Antonio Roman Alcalá [4] details the history of land reform movements in the US, and calls for new class-based solidarity efforts to put land back on the agenda, albeit in a way that united rather than divides.
Municipal Actions
Alongside legal innovations at national or supranational level, local territorial authorities (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. Holligan & Howe [5] and Santo et al. [6] review the interaction between ambitious urban food growing projects and municipal land policy. Liu et al. [7] explore how French municipal policy goals towards health and region food interact with land governance to enable or restrain agroecological practices. Municipal authorities may have special powers over remaining “common” lands that persist under alternative cultural and legal frameworks. Defense of these remaining “commons” in Romania, explored by Gătejel & Maiello [8] reveals a contested agrarian frontier within the legal norms of the Global North.
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. The case of the #ProtectIhumātao campaign, detailed by Oldham, Newton, and Short [9] shows how Indigenous land relations, through struggle, can translate to agricultural land redistribution mediated through Western legal traditions. A reliable source for land relations outside of the “ownership model” is clearly in some Indigenous perspectives. Sippel and Sippel [10], delve deeply into this theme through a collection of interviews about land with Xinka women from Guatemala.
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 arguments about land reform. Baysse-Lainé [11] details a decades-long effort to apply sustainability logics to French land governance. Hortsink et al. [12] identify legal premises like the social function of land as a key ecological logic behind land struggles in Portugal.
Putting Land back on the Agenda
Each of these domains has unique politics, promises of transformation, and weaknesses towards co-optation. 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.
[1] Goris M et al (2024) Collective Land Arrangements that Decommodify Land for Agroecological Transformations. Elem Sci Anth 12(1):00061 [2] Wach E and Hall R (2024) Land Commoning in Deagrarianized Contexts: Potentials for Agroecology? Elem Sci Anth 12(1):00085 [3] Kennedy S F and Frazier C (2024) Land Equity in California: Challenges and Opportunities Across the Policy Landscape. Elem Sci Anth 12(1):00106 [4] Roman-Alcalá A (2024) Land Reform in the United States: Lost Cause or Simply a Cause that has been Lost? Elem Sci Anth 12(1):00087 [5] Holligan B and Howe H (2024) How Property Relations Shape Experiences and Transformative Potential of Urban Growing Spaces: Connecting Land, Food, and Earth Justice Perspectives. Elem Sci Anth 12(1):00082 [6] Santo R E et al (2024) From Access Toward Sovereignty: A Scoping Review of Municipal Land Access Policies for Urban Agriculture in the United States. Elem Sci Anth 12(1):00089 [7] Liu T et al (2024) Integrating Land and Food Policy to Transform Territorial Food Systems in the Context of Coexisting Agri-food Models: Case Studies in France. Elem Sci Anth 12(1):00063 [8] Gătejel A-M and Maiello A (2024) Commoning, Access, and Sovereignty: Disentangling Land–Food Relations in the Case of Peasant Livestock Farmers in Romania. Elem Sci Anth 12(1):00060 [9] Oldham O et al (2024) Land-based Resistance: Enacting Indigenous Self-determination and Kai Sovereignty. Elem Sci Anth 12(1):00118 [10] Sippel C S and Sippel S R (2024) Territorio-tierra : A Community Feminist Perspective on Land by Indigenous Xinka women from Guatemala. Elem Sci Anth 12(1):00024 [11] Baysse-Lainé A (2024) 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. Elem Sci Anth 12(1):00070 [12] Horstink L et al (2024) Land Sovereignty in Depressed and Contested Agro-territories: The Cases of Portugal and Brazil. Elem Sci Anth 12(1):00075