Sjoerd Wartena
Sjoerd Wartena is a sustainable food systems advocate and Founder of Terre de Liens, a civil society organization devoted to ecologically-friendly agriculture and securing affordable access to farmland.
Created in 2003, Terre de Liens addresses the difficulties faced by organic and peasant farmers in securing agricultural land. Land prices are high and land market so competitive that access to land has become a major bottleneck for farmers seeking new farms or additional land to maintain their current activities. Terre de Liens explored collective ownership schemes and saw an opportunity to realize a better vision.
Since 2007, Terre de Liens has directly acquired farmland, which it holds in perpetuity for the sake of current and future generations. Terre de Liens’ land is let to farmers who undertake to farm organically or biodynamically or who are peasant farmers committed to respecting the environment. To acquire farmland, Terre de Liens has created two financial tools: la Foncière, a solidarity investment company; and le Fonds, an Endowment Trust which collects investment or donations in cash or kind.
Through the Foncière and the Fund, Terre de Liens now holds title to 350 farm estates, amounting to 9,500 hectares, where hundreds of adults live and/or work. This has been made possible by the support of over 1,200 members, about 15,000 (mostly individual) shareholders having assembled €125 millions. In just three years, Terre de Liens has made significant progress towards freeing land from the commodity market so that it can be preserved in sustainable agricultural production.
Terre de Liens also founded the European movement Access to Land (www.accesstoland.eu) bringing together European organizations inspired or comparable to Terre de Liens, to exchange experiences and do political work in Brussels.
Son of a doctor, Wartena studied literature and worked at a university library in Amsterdam. In the 1970s he moved to a village in southern France, where he learned farming and in 2003 founded the movement Terre de Liens.