Achieving Food System Resilience Requires Challenging Dominant Land Property Regimes

Adam Calo,Steven Mcgreevy,Pierre Gasselin,Kirsteen Shields,Annie Mckee,Adrien Baysse-Lainé,Coline Perrin,Mai Kobayashi,Annette Aurélie Desmarais,André Magnan,Sarah Ruth Sippel,Naomi Beingessner

doi:10.3389/fsufs.2021.683544

Abstract

Although evidence continues to indicate an urgent need to transition food systems away from industrialized monocultures and toward agroecological production, there is little sign of significant policy commitment toward food system transformation in global North geographies. The authors, a consortium of researchers studying the land-food nexus in global North geographies, argue that a key lock-in explaining the lack of reform arises from how most food system interventions work through dominant logics of property to achieve their goals of agroecological production. Doing so fails to recognize how land tenure systems, codified by law and performed by society, construct agricultural land use outcomes. In this perspective, the authors argue that achieving food system “resilience” requires urgent attention to the underlying property norms that drive land access regimes, especially where norms of property appear hegemonic. This paper first reviews research from political ecology, critical property law, and human geography to show how entrenched property relations in the global North frustrate the advancement of alternative models like food sovereignty and agroecology, and work to mediate acceptable forms of “sustainable agriculture.” Drawing on emerging cases of land tenure reform from the authors' collective experience working in Scotland, France, Australia, Canada, and Japan, we next observe how contesting dominant logics of property creates space to forge deep and equitable food system transformation. Equally, these cases demonstrate how powerful actors in the food system attempt to leverage legal and cultural norms of property to legitimize their control over the resources that drive agricultural production. Our formulation suggests that visions for food system “resilience” must embrace the reform of property relations as much as it does diversified farming practices. This work calls for a joint cultural and legal reimagination of our relation to land in places where property functions as an epistemic and apex entitlement.

Highlights

Evidence continues to indicate an urgent need to transition food systems away from industrialized monocultures and toward agroecological1 production (IPES Food, 2016; Clapp and Moseley, 2020), there are only few signs of significant policy commitment toward food system transformation in global North geographies (Lang et al, 2018; Pe’er et al, 2019)
Private property regimes take the form of a strong “ownership” or “castle-and-moat” style (Sax, 1993; Sax, 1451), distributing authority of decision making to rights holders, dispensing capacity to adapt to current owners of property and their heirs, and entrenching incentive structures aligned with forms of exploitative and exclusionary resource use (Shoemaker, 2021)
We show how a focus on the logics through which land is used, accessed, valued, and controlled provides insights into how food system transformation visions hinge on the ways property regimes are expressed or contested

Summary

Introduction

Evidence continues to indicate an urgent need to transition food systems away from industrialized monocultures and toward agroecological production (IPES Food, 2016; Clapp and Moseley, 2020), there are only few signs of significant policy commitment toward food system transformation in global North geographies (Lang et al, 2018; Pe’er et al, 2019). Private property norms in many global North contexts presents a structural challenge to the emergence of an equitable and resilient food system In such geographies, private property regimes take the form of a strong “ownership” or “castle-and-moat” style (Sax, 1993; Sax, 1451), distributing authority of decision making to rights holders, dispensing capacity to adapt to current owners of property and their heirs, and entrenching incentive structures aligned with forms of exploitative and exclusionary resource use (Shoemaker, 2021). Private property regimes take the form of a strong “ownership” or “castle-and-moat” style (Sax, 1993; Sax, 1451), distributing authority of decision making to rights holders, dispensing capacity to adapt to current owners of property and their heirs, and entrenching incentive structures aligned with forms of exploitative and exclusionary resource use (Shoemaker, 2021) These regimes present an intractable tension between individual liberties guaranteed by the state and the urgent structural changes required of a food systems transition. For the food systems of the global North, a landscape of competing private farmland businesses makes systematic behavior change counter intuitive (van der Ploeg et al, 2019) while simultaneously encouraging trends of farmland consolidation, market articulation (Thorsøe et al, 2020), asset financialization (Howard, 2016; Fairbairn, 2020), and narrowing rural succession patterns (Calo, 2020a)

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