by Elise Wach, Institute of Development Studies
From India to Wales, Kenya to Mexico, farmers have been fiercely protesting challenges to their livelihoods in recent years. While the media and marches tend to focus on low prices and the need for better subsidies, an increasing number of social movements have been focusing on a much deeper affliction to our food systems: land as private property. How is land and food controlled, and how could this change?
The centuries-old ‘land question’ is also being revisited in academia. Changes to property systems are increasingly seen as a prerequisite to changes in food systems. While ‘access to land’ has been a central focus of the agroecology and food sovereignty movements over the decades, changing the nature of land relations themselves has come into focus more recently.
Movements are talking about ‘collective rights’, ‘democratic control,’ ‘land sovereignty’ and ‘food as commons’. These are all concepts that align broadly with the notion of commoning, or the process of collectively controlling resources for collective benefit, rather than for the benefit of private individuals. Could movements for land commoning help to create food systems that are more ecologically sound and socially equitable?
Comparing land and food in England and South Africa
Ruth Hall (PLAAS, South Africa) and I explored this question through a study of land commoning movements in England and South Africa. While certainly distinct, these two contexts share several important similarities.
First, they are both highly de-agrarianised, meaning that many people’s livelihoods don’t centre on agriculture. Most people are divorced from the land in England, and to a lesser degree in South Africa, where farming and self-provisioning of food continues to shrink (in one rural district from 57% in 2008 to 15% in 2019).
Second, their food systems are highly neoliberalised, and corporate power is extremely concentrated. As a result, many people are disconnected from where their food comes from and are disempowered in their food systems.
Third, both contexts are characterised by high social inequalities, and particularly racialised inequalities, in terms of access to land and access to food. While these countries share dramatically different colonial histories, of coloniser and colonised, they are deeply interrelated.
Why Commoning?
When people start relating to land as a commodity, rather than a collective resource, this radically changes what is produced, how it is produced, who the producers are and who has access to the products.
Some people have credited the privatisation (and commodification) of land with increased agricultural production. But when production is driven by capitalist markets, it deviates drastically from what people need and distributes benefits unequally. We can see this today with our high levels of food insecurity and nutritional inadequacies.
Food poverty in the UK is 22%, while in South Africa over 30% of people are living with hunger and 54% experience hunger intermittently. Obesity levels among women in South Africa are at 68%, while in the UK, 54% of household dietary energy comes in the form of ultra-processed foods – or what could be more appropriately described as ‘industrially processed edible substances’: calorie sources which are linked to over 30 health problems.
Corporate control significantly shapes our food systems, and it has been a target for those advocating for better farmer livelihoods as well as those campaigning against ultra-processed foods. But it is also essential to also look at property systems as a linchpin of our food system failures.
For example, in the Scottish Highlands, land privatisation resulted in drastic declines in food security, dietary diversity, biodiversity and social equity, culminating in famine and extreme poverty in the mid-19th century. It was only Scotland’s ability to import food, thanks to wider British imperialism and colonialism, that enabled the Highlands to eventually achieve relative food security after the transition to capitalism.
People want to farm, but not always commercially
We compared social discourse and strategies gathered through participant observation of social movements over nearly 10 years in England and 20 years in South Africa. Movements in both countries are advocating commoning of land, or a break from private, individualised property ownership. We show that in both countries, these land movements are motivated not only by a need for a livelihood, home and belonging, but also by demands for racial justice and decolonisation.
In contrast to findings from ‘Who Wants to Farm’, published in 2014, an overwhelming number of people want access to land to produce food in both countries, and the majority of these are young people. But this is not a push towards people pursuing fully commercial land-based livelihoods. This is perhaps in part because people have seen how difficult or impossible it is to make a livelihood by farming commercially.
In South Africa, the main focus is food for meeting basic needs, and only a minority want to produce food commercially. In England, the discourse has focused on reparations, ecological restoration, belonging and re-peopling the landscape, largely (though not entirely) through producing food.
Differences in urgency?
One of the main differences between movements in the two countries is the frequency of land occupations. They are a key feature of land movements in South Africa, but are relatively uncommon in England. This could stem from the difference in urgency for food security between the two contexts.
In South Africa, millions of people are finding that they cannot meet basic needs by either wage employment or social grants, so turning to the land is a matter of survival. In England the state provides a far greater level of social protection (e.g. benefits) than in South Africa. On top of this, it is possible that in England, most people don’t see land as a provider of sustenance as they have been long been dispossessed from the land.
Yet strenuous enforcement of property law combined with racism are likely to play significant roles in deterring occupations in England. One black farmer, for example, was reported to the police on multiple occasions while harvesting his crops as it was assumed he was stealing.
Uneven commoning
A second finding is that commoning discourses feature unevenly in both places. Movements portray individualised private property rights as capitalist and colonialist, underpinning racial injustices and ecological degradation. Yet in both countries, the demands of both racial justice and land access lead to divergences from commoning in practice.
In England, many proponents of agroecology do not challenge property law, but work within the system in order to ‘get things done,’ such as by running land cooperatives or matching aspiring new entrants with land holders. In South Africa, commoning efforts are in tension with the desire by many to get land titles, given previous dispossessions. Longstanding racialised hierarchy of rights in South Africa – with secure titles for Whites and insecure permits for Blacks – means that what has been denied, and what people want, is security, which is often equated with title.
In both contexts, it is possible that class divides within the movements may be a factor in these inconsistencies, and this merits further research.
New ways of thinking
Longstanding and widespread dispossessions and food systems that marginalise agrarian livelihoods pose strong challenges to land movements. Yet these challenges may also be what gives rise to different ways of thinking about agrarian futures.
The focus on commoning among movements in England and South Africa is a strong break from typical land reform movements which work to secure individualised access to land, an approach which often fails to grapple with the capitalist dynamics which cause inequalities to begin with.
While the idea of commoning in these movements is uneven and contested, treating land and food as common goods, rather than as commodities, could contribute to more equitable and ecologically sound futures. We have started to unpack the dynamics and potentials of these movements in our recent paper, and call for much more research in this understudied area.
Read the paper
Land commoning in deagrarianized contexts: Potentials for agroecology? Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene, June 2024