ABSTRACT
Ultimately, there can be no single vision of the most appropriate form of property ownership for food sovereignty. Open access, public property, individual, communal, cooperative and collective ownership all have different merits in different contexts, and the best solution may be to recognize the merits of different property forms and allow for flexibility. Agarwal’s piece in this collection cites LVC leader Paul Nicholson’s preference for collective rights over individual land ownership (cited in Wittman 2009, 679), but this may be a difficult rule to force on farmers who have historically resisted large-scale, top-down collectivization efforts. Instead, attempts to integrate individual land ownership with various forms of collective organization and institutionalization, such as credit and machinery cooperatives, have the potential to build solidarity and benefit from economies of scale while allowing traditional or culturally appropriate ownership forms and norms to survive and multiply.
