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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa:de:qucosa:84433 |
| Date | 30 March 2023 |
| Creators | Calo, Adam, McKee, Annie, Perrin, Coline, Gasselin, Pierre, McGreevy, Steven, Sippel, Sarah Ruth, Desmarais, Annette Aurélie, Shields, Kirsteen, Baysse-Lainé, Adrien, Magnan, André, Beingessner, Naomi, Kobayashi, Mai |
| Publisher | Frontiers Research Foundation |
| Source Sets | Hochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion, doc-type:article, info:eu-repo/semantics/article, doc-type:Text |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | 2571-581X, 683544 |
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