Excellent article on this topic by Olivia Oldham.
I was excited to see the Reframing Food Futures workshop facilitated by Future Narratives Lab in collaboration with the Landworkers’ Alliance and Stir to Action. One of the many topics that arose during the workshop was that of land; I think it’s worth considering land — and particularly the property regimes that underpin how we govern, access and use it — in more detail. Property is at the heart of food systems change, and shapes all three focus areas discussed at the workshop in different ways.
The prevailing narrative of property in the UK is one that largely centres the private ownership of land as the only desirable — or at least the only realistic — property relation in a modern society. Of course, this centrality is not only narrative; private land ownership materially dominates the British landscape, too.
Perhaps unsurprisingly then, private ownership figures centrally in narratives of food system change, wherein solutions to difficulties with access to land tend to be focused on gaining entry into the system of ownership — through purchase or otherwise. Yet there are some issues with this approach, which I have sketched out in a previous piece (and see also for example here, here and here), and I believe it is important to unpick these property narratives and build new ones to enable a “unified vision of a better food system…that’s healthy, just and sustainable” as this workshop aimed to do.
Full article: https://www.futurenarrativeslab.org/narrative-work/the-role-of-property-in-food-futures/
Another similar article by Olivia here: https://oliviaoldham.mhttps://oliviaoldham.medium.com/is-private-property-a-barrier-to-food-system-transformation-5d940ba07778
People's Land Policy 