SWFS - Governing land and landscapes: Political ecology of enclosures and commons

Authors

  • Harriet Friedmann University of Toronto

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.95

Keywords:

commons, land, landscapes, knowledge, farming systems, governance, bioregions

Abstract

Most of the world’s food is still produced by small farmers, many of whom remain organized though customary land tenure. Customary tenure is a general term for specific cultural ways in which farmers embedded in ecological contexts allocate rights and obligations to use land, including cultivation, forest, grazing, and water. These are always unique, but they share the quality of not being centrally based on the kinds of land markets created in so-called advanced economies. An important feature at the present moment is direct appropriation of land and conversion of customary land use into private titles to specific plots of land. These include major deals with national governments in Africa and throughout the world to make huge areas of land (or water necessary to use the land) available to national elites, foreign governments, or large corporations. They also include international aid policies which, in trying to encourage small farmers to participate more directly in world markets, encourage a shift to individual titles. These actions threaten to dissolve the capacity of communities to govern the land as social and ecological conditions change (Tran, Provost, & Ford, 2014).

Author Biography

Harriet Friedmann, University of Toronto

Professor Emerita of Sociology, University of Toronto and Visiting Professor at Institute of Social Studies (Erasmus University), Harriet researches a variety of food and agricultural issues from a historical, political-economic, and socio-ecological perspective. She is a present member and previous Volunteer Chair of the Toronto Food Policy Council, a Board member of USC, which promotes seed diversity and small farms, and Advisor to several organizations devoted to food system change. She was awarded the Canadian Association of Food Studies´ Lifetime Achievement Award for Food Studies in 2011.

Past publications include: ‘The political economy of food: a global crisis’ in New Left Review (1993), ‘From colonialism to green capitalism: Social movements and emergence of food regimes’ (2005) and ‘Food sovereignty in the Golden Horseshoe Region of Ontario’ in A. A. Desmarais, N. Wiebe and H. Wittman (Eds.), Food sovereignty in Canada: Creating just and sustainable food systems (2011).
photo of a doorway with a sandwich board promoting thali, burgers, pita sandwiches, and chicken wings in French

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Published

2015-09-08

How to Cite

Friedmann, H. (2015). SWFS - Governing land and landscapes: Political ecology of enclosures and commons. Canadian Food Studies La Revue Canadienne Des études Sur l’alimentation, 2(2), 23–31. https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.95

Issue

Vol. 2 No. 2 (2015): Special Issue: Mapping the Global Food Landscape

Section

Research Article

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