# FOOD
# FARMLAND ACCESS AND LAND RIGHTS
More and more people – especially young people – are eager to get into farming and join the local food movement. Unfortunately, they face a formidable barrier: access to land. Land is often prohibitively expensive, consolidated by absentee corporate owners, or sold to developers and paved over for profit. Even worse, around the world, small farms, farmland, and farmers are disappearing at an alarming rate to development pressures, speculation, corporate concentration, land grabs and other factors. This is happening just as we urgently need to transition to localized food systems with more people on the land, for ecological and social resilience and sustainability. Ensuring access and protecting land sovereignty for small-scale, local farmers - as well as returning land to those historically dispossessed of it - is protecting the most fundamental material base of a local economy - the ability to feed ourselves. Join the struggles for farmland access and protection, for land sovereignty and against land grabbing and development.
# Farmland Access and Land Rights Actions
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# Link Land and Landowners with Aspiring Farmers. (Expand Action)
# Find Affordable Land to Farm. (Expand Action)
# Create or Support a Community Land Trust.
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# Support land reparations movements.Expand Action
# Oppose land grabbing.Expand Action
# Start a lawn sharing program.Expand Action
# Policy action: Support land reform.Expand Action
# Voices from the field In the Transnational Institute's podcast episode Forward to the Land: a conversation with European peasant farmers (episode 22 of the State of Power podcast), three young farmers in Europe discuss how they overcame land access challenges. Watch the Planet Local Young Farmers Short Film Series by Local Futures, which includes 36 short videos that profile young farmers from around the world. The 36-minute documentary film The Land for Our Food follows Gavin Bridger, a young grower from England, as he roams through Europe meeting with small organic farmers and organizations working on land access issues.
The short animated film The Right to Resist Land Grabs, by Pesticide Action Network Asia Pacific, explains the gravity of the global land grab crisis for human rights, food security and livelihoods, as well as the courageous movements resisting it. This episode of the Peasants, Rise Up! webinar series by the Asian Peasant Coalition highlighted the crucial need for land reform to help attain food security, and food sovereignty.
# Policy The report, Roots of Resilience: Land Policy for an Agroecological Transition in Europe, details tools that policymakers and NGOs can use from the local to the European level to make land more accessible to agroecological farmers.
The report, Land Access for Beginning and Disadvantaged Farmers (US) contains numerous policy initiatives aimed at making farmland available to those who need it most. Land Policy: Towards a More Equitable Farming Future, by the National Young Farmers Coalition (US) draws attention to the importance of land access for young farmers and ranchers, and policies that can level the playing field. The American Farmland Trust's Protecting Farmland program describes a number of policy strategies to protect farmland from development and facilitate its transfer to the next generation of farmers, including "current use taxation", smart land-use planning, agricultural zoning, and agricultural districts.
Minnesota’s Beginning Farmer Tax Credit offers tax credits to landowners for selling or leasing farmland to beginning farmers. See more in the article Want More New Farmers on the Land? Give Landowners a Tax Break. The Landworkers Alliance’s Supporting New Entrants program offers two policy recommendation papers: Supporting the Next Generation of Farmers and Hands on the Land (UK).
The report Land for the Many lays out a detailed policy agenda for radically reforming land access and ownership to advance equity and sustainability (UK). # Resources This section contains resources on the following topics, in order: access to farmland, land reform, land grabbing, and reparations.
# Access to Farmland Your Land, My Land, Our Land: Grassroots Strategies to Preserve Farmland and Access to Land for Peasant Farming and Agroecology, is a report by Nyéléni Europe and Central Asia platform for Food Sovereignty aiming to "nourish the food sovereignty movement in Europe with ideas to support their local struggles for land as well as to try and connect different experiences." Agrarian Trust (US) has curated an extensive list of land access guides here. In the article, For a New Generation of Farmers, Accessing Land is the First Step Toward Tackling Consolidation, Tom Perkins describes the harms of land ownership concentration, and how community land trusts are taking "measures to address what can broadly be called land access and affordability issues, particularly for young or other socially disadvantaged farmers."
# Land Reform * The International Land Coalition looks at the causes and consequences of land inequality, as well as potential solutions, in their report Uneven Ground: Land Inequalities at the Heart of Unequal Societies. * La Via Campesina's Global Campaign for Agrarian Reform is a compendium of stories on land reform struggles by small-scale peasant farmers from around the world.
* Peter Rosset's article, Fixing our Global Food System: Food Sovereignty and Redistributive Land Reform, argues that rebuilding the local food economy in the global South cannot happen without redistributing land from "export elites" to food-producing peasants and family farmers. # Land grabbing * The primer The Global Land Grab by the Transnational Institute gives a comprehensive background on the drivers of land grabbing and how to stop it. * FarmlandGrab.org, a resource hub created by the NGO GRAIN, is an excellent source of information, with articles in English, French and Spanish on land-grabbing throughout the global South. * The NGO Stop Africa Land Grab has a full page of resources, with links, about land grabbing in Africa.
* This article from GRAIN focuses on land grabs for biofuels.
* Jonathan Watts reports that 1% of farms operate 70% of world's farmland, and that this land inequality is rising with farmland increasingly dominated by a few major companies. * Land Grabs and Land Justice is the focus of the June 2020 Issue of Nyéléni newsletter. * The Land Grabbers: The New Fight Over Who Owns the Earth, by Fred Pearce "presents a first-of-its-kind expose that reveals the scale and the human costs of the land grab, one of the most profound ethical, environmental, and economic issues facing the globalized world in the twenty-first century."
# Reparations * Local Futures' article, Mending a History of Discrimination through “Person-to-Person Reparations", and the YES! Magazine article A Digital Map Leads to Reparations for Black and Indigenous Farmers discuss the Reparations Map for Black and Indigenous Farmers instigated by Soul Fire Farm (US) that catalyzes voluntary transfers of land and resources to indigenous people and people of color who are eager to build a life in agriculture, but are stymied by systemic injustices.
* Ruth Terry's article New Donations to Black-Led Food and Land Groups Aim for True Reparations shows why channeling funds to Black food producers is a "particularly potent form of support."