Locating The Agrarian Struggles For Land

Land and agrarian struggles are fundamental to emancipation yet the politics of “good food”, in wealthy nations, is underwhelming. In places like the US and Europe, the radical promise of a post-capitalist food system and land reform tends to be watered down. Technocratic, apolitical narratives tend to dominate such as farm-to-table restaurants, regenerative agriculture, eco certifications, and nature-based solutions. The radical anti-capitalist potential of agroecology and food sovereignty becomes instead a capitalist reform. The structuring dynamics of race, class and gender become assimilated into the dominant liberal worldview.

Actors, activists, and academics seeking radical food and agrarian politics draw inspiration from active political struggles such as the militancy of MST, the success of Cuban organopónicos, and the international organising of La Via Campesina. Radical international movements for agroecology and food sovereignty are crucial, especially as imperialist relations inextricably structure relations between the North and South. But the mistake we observe is the attempt to straightforwardly translate the politics of peasant movements and agroecological practices to the Global North. Instead, what is needed is a careful unravelling of the material structures and narratives that drive and maintain agriculture in the North.

When proposing alternatives, the lack of engagement with the question of land (as a property relation) creates a vacuum that is filled by rural romanticisation on one side and glistening ecomodernism on the other. For some, the food and farming system will be transformed through rural landholders producing for their local “community,” while for others a land-sparing rhetoric drives images of overyielding industrial production and a clearing of the countryside for “wild nature.” While these competing narratives struggle for legitimacy, a growing “Green Agenda” barrels ahead that supports the status quo, veiling the landscape and labour exploitation behind it.

This symposium intends to bring the land and agrarian struggles into a spatial design audience while laying the groundwork to break through these deadlocks, with an eye to synergising ecological reforms with land and agrarian change, rather than these two things being at odds. Architecture-and-landscape-oriented design tends to focus on urban narratives, concealing the global food system's detrimental impacts and forms of oppression, even though agriculture occupies nearly half of the Earth’s surface and more than 70% of UK land. Centring these struggles aims at proposing new ways of seeing the landscapes that fuel urbanisation processes, bringing to the fore those dependencies. It seeks to reflect on practical pathways for transformation out of the failures of the good food movement in Europe and – by extension – other wealthy nations.

The day aims to bring together actors, activists and academics, to discuss more radical futures for agroecology and food sovereignty in the wealthy countries of the North. The first session examines land struggles in the UK today and how they hamper the imagination of radical transitions, the second looks at who is imagined as the revolutionary subject of agroecology, and we close by discussing the role of (anti)imperialist political struggles.

This event is organised by the Root and Branch Collective (RBC), a scholar-activist group dedicated to research and action for a radical agrarian studies approach geared specifically to the political ecology of Europe. Rob Booth, Adam Calo, Sophia Doyle, Daniel Hartley, Alex Heffron, Olivia Oldham, Clara Oloriz Sanjuan and Alfredo Ramirez from RBC will participate.

Each session will start with short guest presentations and finish with a round table discussion.

Schedule

10.30am -12pm Session 1 - Land struggles in the UK today
Chaired by: Olivia Oldham (RBC)
Presenters: Christabel Buchanan (Shared Assets), Keir Milburn (Abundance) and Naomi Beingessner (James Hutton Institute​)

12-1pm Lunch Break

1-2pm Session 2 - Who is imagined as the revolutionary subject of agroecology
Chaired by: Alex Heffron (RBC)
Presenters: Catherine McAndrew (Land Workers Alliance​), Claire Ratinon (SALT, Solidarity Across Land Trades) and Nell Benney (Lancaster University)​

2.30-3.30pm Coffee Break

3.30-5pm Session 3 - (Anti)imperialist political struggles (Hybrid: Online and in-person)
Chaired by: Adam Calo and Sophia Doyle (RBC)
Presenters: Antonio Roman-Alcala, David Gilbert and Inea Lehner (Climate Vanguard)

5-5.30pm Conclusions/ Action points

Image credit: David Gilbert

Caption: The gate leading to Casiavera's reclaimed land in Sumatra. The letters written across the gate now read Tanah Ulayat, or Collective Land. Up until the late 1990s the gate read Dona Plantation Company.

Host or Publisher AA Public Programme