Compeerism solves land reform—key to undoing capitalist structures and sustainable ag

Hannes, Professor of Geography at the University of West Georgia. “Contending With the Limits of Our Natural World.” From Capital to Commons: Exploring the Promise of a World Beyond Capitalism. University of Bristol. Pp 125-126. LJS

Privately held agricultural land, in turn, which is the norm in Minority World economies, is firmly plugged into the corporate food-based commodity chains controlled by ‘Big Ag’. To confront this reality, one compeerist-aligned effort has been the legal pursuit of a transvestment of land from private to community hands by establishing land trusts and easements. Currently, conservation is the main goal here, in which a particular plot of land is protected from development in perpetuity, even with a transfer of land title. The US has seen a boom in such trust efforts over the last few decades, with conservation-based trusts making up nearly three per cent of all US territory, exceeding the size of the entire United Kingdom (LTA, 2022). Some land trusts, however, are focused specifically on maintaining agricultural land. The US government’s Purchase of Agricultural Conservation Easement programme (PACE), for instance, has worked with private landowners to protect over three million acres of farmland. Private agricultural land trusts, in turn, make up roughly the same amount; combined with PACE the total size of agriculturally focused land trusts in the US equals the approximate area of Albania (AFT, 2021). While the PACE programme offers significant potential for the government to implement further landuse conditionalities, it is mostly in the private trusts where the aim for more intentional agriculture has been pursued. The US based Agrarian Trust, for example, purchases land and then manages it in line with commons-based principles in an effort to protect ‘farmland for sustainable agriculture’ while preserving ‘its affordability for new and disadvantaged farmers’ (Agrarian Trust, 2021). The Trust currently presides over 11 agrarian commons across the country, consisting of up to 12 farms each. At the same time, while land trusts offer an ideal option for pursuing commons-centred agriculture, it is important to note that Ostrom was not singularly focused on land ownership when considering the principles of sound commons governance. What matters, instead, are the mechanisms in place that allow for bottom-up input and power in determining the status of the land, that is, who has access to it, and how it can and cannot be used (Fennell, 2011). As such, given that trusts/easements still make up a relatively small portion of total land, arguably the most likely scenario for an expansion of compeerist-aligned, DG-FL practices would be for privately-owned small and medium-sized farms to voluntarily embrace community-oriented production and governance principles. Such governance can be pursued in a number of ways. One popular option has been the establishment of specific community-sponsored agricultural (CSA) purchasing agreements – in the US over 12,000 farms sell directly to users/consumers using CSAs (NAL, 2021). While such agreements generally include specifications on what and how to farm, they also often embody much more, including monetary and labour investments by CSA members in the farm and its operations. In this way, these commons-centric community farmer collaborations offer an enticing alternative for local farmers to the outright control that the massive transnational food industry currently exerts over the management of both small and large farming operations. Additional community-based purchasing arrangements with local farmers could come from municipalities, for example via increasingly popular farmto-school programmes, as well as from retail cooperatives, which have a long history in pursuing specific standards for their members. Grocery member co-ops, for instance, were pioneers in demanding the disclosure of ingredients and nutritional information, as well as for introducing organic food. Today such co-ops still have significant market share in Europe and could again become more active in their purchasing standards if their members demanded it. Importantly, this could include forging cooperative relationships with local farmers with the intent to push for more humane, local, and sustainable agriculture. A final example of pursuing commons-oriented governance over farmland can be found in the food sovereignty movement, which takes aim, among several other targets, at the distant governmental regulations placed on local agriculture (Edelman et al, 2014). The goal here is generally to achieve bottom-up forms of governance in the pursuit of a more viable community oriented agricultural sector. In practice this can mean that a community decides to exclude their local, community-serving farms from specific rules and restrictions that are clearly meant for large, industrial operators, and place undue burdens on small-scale producers. For instance, communities adopting food sovereignty measures may allow local farmers to sell certain products that are officially not permitted according to federal law, such as unpasteurized milk or food that was not processed in an industrial, federally regulated facility. Importantly, in this way, a community exerting more control over the rules and regulations related to proximate food production then also enables it to exert more say in how local agricultural land is used.