What I find depressing and angering is the fact that defining land as property makes governments feel the need to control it, especially if, as Lester Brown discusses, a food crisis makes those without ownership of land vulnerable to economic instability and starvation. This puts most of the people who actually live and work on land at a disadvantage; when food prices increased drastically after 2008, there were a lot of “land acquisition deals”, or land grabs, in which “governments, agribusiness firms, and private investors seek control of land wherever they can find it,” without actually consulting the people who live on the land in question (Brown, 13). One reason people aren’t able to have any voice over the powerful businesses or government forces negotiating about the land they live on is the fact that most people don’t actually have formal land rights that would be recognizable in the system in which land is recognized as property.
I am actually interning this quarter for a non profit that works to get land titles to farmers, and especially women, so this aspect of our focus was particularly interesting to me. It is one way of addressing the problem of individuals and the land they feed themselves from being manipulated by the world food businesses and other powerful forces. However, it feeds into the larger global mindset of breaking land, humans, food, and everything else into utilitarian machines, so I don’t necessarily believe it is a way to address the environmental and social exploitation of the capitalist, global market for food attached to a mechanical system worldview. However, it is a useful short term means of pushing back against those who use the current system for their gain, regardless of how it impacts the lives of people living on land involved in “land grab” kind of deals.
