The International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems recently released a report highlighting escalating pressures on farmland. It identified four primary drivers: deregulation and financialisation, which treat land as a speculative asset; expanding conservation and carbon offset projects competing for land; mining, urban sprawl, and infrastructure developments encroaching on agricultural areas; and industrialised food systems favouring corporate chains over smallholders. These factors threaten equitable land access for farmers. Nettie Wiebe, a founding member of La Via Campesina and report co-author, emphasized these challenges in an interview with Think Ink, stressing the urgent need for policy reforms to protect agricultural lands and support small-scale farmers.
Here is an excerpt from the interview:
Land is just such an enormously important component of food systems, food security, food sovereignty. It’s also a key component of climate action and biodiversity. So who owns the land and what we do with the land on which we all depend are key components of our possible futures.
[The report] tries to clarify some trends, expose some assumptions, and come up with leverage points where we could make changes that would bring us to a place of greater equality, better protection of environments, and greater food security and sovereignty. […]
Land inequality is an old topic. It’s linked to colonialism, racism, patriarchy: I mean, it’s only relatively recently, in my generation, that women got equal access to land in the Prairies. These are deep seated issues that have troubled rural communities for a long time.
But there are some new trends. Land grabbing is one of those, which became pretty intense in the 2008 crisis and seemed to taper off. But it is rolling along as we speak and in fact intensifying. We looked not just at traditional land grabbing but there are new things like the deregulation of financial markets and the increasing financialisation of land transfers and land accumulation.
Green Grabbing is a relatively new trend that is perversely labelled as environmentally better and hence very difficult for environmentalists and those of us who care about climate change to push against. But for the most part, it is a pernicious diversion from real solutions.
Then there’s the increasing encroachment of urbanisation and mining. Here in Canada, the mining is in the north for the most part, which is not agricultural land. But elsewhere in the world, particularly in South and Central America and in Africa, extractive industries are a real assault on many communities, including small scale farming.
Then, of course, we talked about the assumptions around agriculture as just a productive asset, the bias towards productivism and maximising the production of very few major crops, very few species of animals, and the push to expand those everywhere, at the expense of biodiversity and diverse diets for people.
[…] Everywhere in the world, the increased pressure on the price of land spells displacement for small scale farming. That’s here in Saskatchewan, as well as in Honduras, Brazil, or Zimbabwe. Wherever we look, there’s pressure on land prices from the intrusion of major investors with deep pockets, sometimes governments, often agribusiness.
The report details that there’s a huge expansion in funds that are specifically allocated to grabbing land because it’s a physical asset, a capital asset, which is deemed to be more secure than bonds and other financial instruments.
And the deregulation of the financial market has encouraged, or at least permitted, a lot more of this to go on. That’s a policy issue. A governance issue.
It’s also a values issue. If we see land as just a productive asset to extract value from rather than seeing it as part of our identity, the place where we live, our source of culture and food, our web of life… Land isn’t just bushels per acre and the more you confine it to that domain, the more open it is to financial exploitation. This is a dangerous trend on many levels.
When we say that 70% of farmland is controlled by 1% of the world’s largest farms, that’s a dangerous trend because they don’t love the land. Land is like family: if you don’t love it, you will exploit it and destroy it. That’s what we’re seeing around us.
Read the full text of the interview here, which offers a wide range of perspectives and possible ways to address these challenges.