Why Access to Land is Vital for Sustainable, Healthy and Fair Food systems: Strategies for Increasing Access to Land for Agroecological Farming

The UK’s food systems are in dysfunction – rates of child obesity and diabetes are high and soaring, food poverty is growing, the number of farmers is declining rapidly, soils are increasingly depleted, biodiversity is plummeting and bird and bee populations are threatened by agrichemicals. There need to be transformative changes in food and farming in the UK. Ensuring that land is accessible for agroecological producers is vital to enabling these necessary changes to happen. In partnership between the Institute of Development Studies and the Land Workers’ Alliance, research has been undertaken to identify strategies for increasing access to land for agroecological production, in order to contribute to a transition towards sustainable – or even regenerative – food systems in the UK. This briefing summarises these strategies.

This briefing has been prepared as part of the Transitions to Agroecological Food systems project, a multi-country participatory research partnership between the STEPS Centre at the Institute of Development Studies (University of Sussex), the Land Workers Alliance in the UK, the Farmer to Farmer Initiative (UNAG) in Nicaragua and the Forum for a Sustainable Rural Development (FODDE) in Senegal. The briefing was drafted by Elise Wach based on research led by Clare Ferguson, and presentations and deliberations undertaken by small-scale ecological farmers and key experts in January and February 2017 as part of the project. Special thanks to Chris Smaje for additional inputs. For more information, please contact Elise Wach, e.wach@ids.ac.uk.