Land Justice: Re-imagining Land, Food, and the Commons

by Justine M. Williams

They live. Badly, perhaps, but they live. With 25 percent of the world’s agricultural land, they produce 70 percent of the food we eat, virtually with little or no government support (GRAIN 2014). The 2.5 billion peasants and small farmers make up a third of the world’s population. If rural communities are displaced, they will be pushed to the city slums. Samir Amin (2011) points out that the global economy would have to grow at a rate of seven percent over 50 years to absorb just a third all this labor. This is impossible. The current agrarian transition—and the American path projected for the rest of the world—not only condemns a third of humanity to dispossession, unemployment, and misery, but most likely means global chaos. We must repopulate the countryside, not empty it. We have to invest to improve the quality of rural life, not just extract its wealth. We must break up and redistribute large plantations and implement agroecology on a small and medium scale in order to restore the environment, cool the planet, and ensure a decent income to rural people. We need to open up farming in the city, instead of paving over farmland. We must advance a transformative agenda of land sovereignty to block the capitalist agrarian transition. For this, we must implement social and structural changes beyond land reform, beyond farmers and beyond the countryside itself. Put simply, we have to change everything. But how can this be achieved if the majority of small farmers are strugg...

what we need to do