ABSTRACT

Food insecurity has increasingly been linked to circumstances in which farmers lack clear, enforceable and sufficiently long-term property rights in the farmlands they use to produce food. These connected food and access insecurities have emerged in Canada, the United States, Australia, Europe and several other industrialized country contexts through the gradual untethering of farmlands from their more traditional settings (small-scale, kinship-based and rural), and through the disaggregation and redistribution of property rights to new entrants and actors. These trends have motivated a set of controversies about who ought to have access to farmlands for food production, and about the legal tools and resources needed to sustain structures of farmland ownership and access that are adequately adapted to local ecologies, cultures and economic systems. This chapter examines the idea of the “farmland commons” as a promising solution to the linked problems of food and farmland insecurity. In short, farmland commons can be defined as a range of institutional structures – rules and norms – for collective self-governance of farmlands by groups of people who manage the resource together (while excluding others outside the group). Within this broad definition, advocates of farmland commons have demonstrated considerable diversity in their ideas, practices and objectives. The key to developing farmland commons that address insecure land rights as a cause of food insecurity will therefore depend not only on identifying principles for good institutional design, but also on the success of commons advocates in mobilizing support for the legal and other reforms needed to sustain such diverse commons arrangements over the long term.