by Olivia Oldham
PhD Candidate | Global Academy of Agriculture and Food Systems, University of Edinburgh
If you're reading this newsletter, I probably don't need to explain to you that the food system is not working—either for people or planet—and that agroecology and food sovereignty are alternatives worth striving for. While there are lots of things we could be doing to work towards those goals, one of the key elements we should be thinking about is land. And, because the rules of property structure, things like who gets access to land, how they are able to access it, and what they are able to do with it once they've got it, then we also need to be thinking about property.
What is property?
But what is property? You might think it means ownership, or 'the stuff I own'. And that would be fair enough—that's what most people mean when they talk about property. But for a lawyer, property means something a bit different. It means a relationship between people about a thing, not the thing itself.
Sometimes, lawyers talk about that relationship being made up of a "bundle of rights". Think of it like a bundle of sticks. Each of those sticks represents a right. Keeping with property in land, those rights might include the right to keep others out; or the right to make decisions about what happens on the land; or even the right to alienate—that is, to sell or otherwise get rid of it. We might, if we were being particularly radical, even think about some of those sticks representing a responsibility, too. Maybe, the responsibility not to degrade ecosystems, or the responsibility to use the land for the common good (like in Brazil, where this responsibility is actually set out in the constitution).
So the idea of private ownership is actually a very particular bundle of rights that has become so common that we tend to just equate it with property, full stop. But, in fact, there are lots of different ways of putting that bundle together—and we'll get to that a bit later.
Private ownership: how good?
First, let's deal with private ownership, which is at the heart of our system of property and farming here in Aotearoa New Zealand. People like private ownership for a lot of reasons. The rights I mentioned earlier—keeping others out, making decisions, and alienation—mean that farmers who own their land can feel secure. No landlord can kick them off or tell them how to farm, and making long-term investments in farm infrastructure or ecosystems feels less risky. That right to sell, in particular, can be appealing because it allows the land to be used as leverage for a mortgage, or as an asset the farmer can cash out to fund their retirement or support their kids to buy their first farm, or whatever else they may want to do.
The problem is, these benefits of private ownership—while they can be great for individual farmers, and can be appealing for agroecological producers, too—can have negative impacts for the food system as a whole. They can actually end up undermining efforts to shift the food system towards agroecology and food sovereignty. Not to mention that, in Aotearoa New Zealand, the entire system of private ownership is built upon the dispossession of tangata whenua.
For starters, that autonomy that can be so good for the individual farmer, also means that landowners are free to farm in ways that degrade te taiao and that don't produce healthy, nutritious food for local, regional and national communities but instead pursue whatever goals the farmer wants—usually, profit.
"Ah," I hear you say, "but if it's a good farmer, who is growing agroecologically and wants to promote food sovereignty, then they don't care about profit! They are motivated by other things, like stewardship of ecosystems, respect for Papatūanuku, and care for the people they feed!"
And in some ways, you'd be right. Most agroecological farmers are driven by those things. My best friend is one of them, as are many others who I know and deeply respect. If I ever get myself out from behind a computer and into a field, I will be too. But the problem is, private property ownership creates a system where this is no longer about choices.
At some point, if the farmer wants to keep farming, they are almost inevitably going to have to prioritise profit over some of their other goals, unless they (a) are very lucky; or (b) inherited their land or the money to buy it (which you could say is the same thing). Because that famous 'security' being a landowner gives you is only secure as long as you keep up with your mortgage repayments—that is, the cost of land.
Alienability, the right to get rid, is so central to private ownership that some people have argued that, without this right, it isn't private ownership at all! But when you're behind on your mortgage repayments, that 'right' starts to look very much like a curse.
Here's where it gets kind of complicated.
We all know what happens when mortgage repayments aren't met—eventually, the bank will repossess the property, and sell it to someone else to get their investment back. Usually, the person who is able to afford that land is the person with the most money. This can lead to land concentration, where more and more land is owned by fewer and fewer people—but we're not going to focus on that today. Instead, we're going to focus on what determines the price of the land at the time that it's sold. First and foremost, land values are determined by how much money people think they can make off the land in the future—as rent, profit, or both. Those amounts are determined by what has been produced on the land in the past, as well as what the land might be able to be used for in the future—whether that's for a dairy conversion, planting pine forest, or subdividing it for a housing development.
This has major consequences for agroecological farmers. Not only because, very often, it pushes them onto marginal land which might be less productive, less climactically favourable, or very far away from markets, or even prices them out of the market entirely; but perhaps even more importantly because it means that when those agroecological farmers do manage to buy the land, their mortgage repayments reflect what they could be making if they didn't prioritise their agroecological principles and instead farmed to maximise their yield—and their profit. They can do this by lowering their ecological and social standards (and the first thing they do, typically, is to 'self-exploit'—meaning that they work themselves to the bone and barely pay themselves (if at all)—to make the numbers add up. Because they so want to make it work). Or, they can do this by seeking out higher value markets, like organics—which partly explains why organic food often costs so much, and why lots of organic farmers in Aotearoa New Zealand are focused on exports, rather than domestic markets. Sometimes, they might turn to novel products—like kiwifruit once was, or the recent moves by Pāmu to develop deer milk, into a marketable product.
Farmers in most cases are, to use a fancy term, 'market dependent'—meaning they are forced, economically speaking, to sell what they produce on the market, in order to earn enough money to pay for the land. So, in the end, it often doesn't matter very much whether farmers want to farm agroecologically—the cost of land, which is a direct consequence of private ownership's central right of alienability (within a capitalist system), can force them to undermine those goals.
We also shouldn't forget that these dynamics of private ownership are not just harmful to farmers and the food system—they are also central to the continued dispossession of tangata whenua, and the ongoing exclusion of Māori from access to and authority over their ancestral lands and territories.
That seems bad…what do we do?
The good thing about seeing property as a bundle of rights (and responsibilities) is that we can repackage that bundle in different ways. One good idea that has been floating around for a very long time is the commons. Basically, the commons is a way of governing a resource (so, a property relation) that is neither public nor private, but collectively managed by a self-governing, well-defined community. And they have the potential to overcome some of those problems with private ownership.
You may have heard of the 'tragedy of the commons', or the idea that the commons can't work because humans are tragically but unavoidably selfish. This is a simple theory but unfortunately, it's simply incorrect. It has been repeatedly demonstrated—both by mainstream economists as well as by many traditional and Indigenous societies—that it is entirely possible for communities to effectively govern resources, given appropriate institutional design.
There are, around the world, a number of organisations building on the principles and ideas of the commons to develop new ways of understanding and putting into practice property rights and responsibilities that might be more enabling of agroecological, food sovereign food systems. For example, in the UK (where I work) there is the Ecological Land Cooperative, which holds land collectively and grants secure, lifetime leases to new entrant farmers at affordable rates, so long as they adhere to agroecological management provisions. The Agrarian Trust in the USA, and Kulturland in Germany do similar things. Another approach is the idea of public-commons partnerships, where the local council and a commons association made up of community members and different stakeholders co-own and co-govern local land. At a bigger scale, the Scottish Parliament has passed a number of land reform laws which give communities a right of first refusal on local land, and even has (some) money available to help them buy it.
Here in Aotearoa, Village Agrarians is working to put issues around land access and, crucially, land ownership, on the agenda. Their land matching service works to reduce barriers to land access within the existing framework of property rights. More broadly they are working to develop greater awareness of the ways in which private ownership of land undermines agroecology, ultimately aiming to be part of developing alternative forms of ownership and stewardship.
Of course, any commoning initiatives here in Aotearoa New Zealand would have to be built upon an understanding that much of the land which could be 'commoned' was stolen from tangata whenua. This means that any work to begin 'commoning' land would need to centre movements and demands for land return, and ongoing conversations on constitutional transformation, such as the discussions and action stemming from the Matike Mai report. Land commoning would look different in Aotearoa New Zealand than in other parts of the world—and this is something to be embraced and addressed head on, with tangata whenua leading in any endeavour. This may look like a public-commons-iwi partnership, for instance. Or it may look like existing iwi owners holding farmland in trust for ecological stewardship by whānau or others. It may look like land reform that creates an iwi right to buy as well as, or instead of, a community right to buy. Or it may look like none of these—commoning may not even be the right framing. The key here is to centre Māori leadership, and for Pākehā and other tauiwi to be willing to ensure that any agenda for shifting property relations reflects Māori needs and desires.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I don't think deer milk is the future. But the commons, as one possible foundation for a decolonial vision for a food sovereign, agroecological Aotearoa New Zealand, just might be.
