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Freeing land from market pressures

April’s installment of “Schumacher Conversations: Envisioning the Next 50 Years” brought a spirited discussion on freeing land from market pressures and renewing relationships between people and the Earth. The full recording of “Reallocating Land: From Market to Commons” is now available on our website and YouTube.

Together, Severine von Tscharner Fleming of Agrarian Trust, Sjoerd Wartena of Terre de Liens, and Satish Kumar of Resurgence Trust envision where the land-as-commons movement may be headed. Schumacher Center Program Director Natasha Hulst moderates.

Highlights from our April Conversation

Satish Kumar on the history of voluntary land redistribution in Indi

Contemporary land commoners trace the roots of the modern movement to the example of India’s post-Independence gramdan and boodhan movements, led by Vinoba Bhave. Having walked with Bhave for many years, Satish Kumar gives a vivid retelling of this inspiring story:

“After Mahatma Ghandi… India become independent politically, but Vinoba said, India also needs to be independent economically and socially. One thing which would bring an end to poverty, is to provide land to those who have no land… Poverty cannot be brought to an end by industrialization.”

In contrast to post-colonial violence around the globe, Bhave sought non-violent land reallocation.

“He called a meeting in the village, inviting all the landlords and the landless. ‘Are you prepared to give 80 acres as a gift to 40 families?’

After a long silence, one landlord stood up and said “I understand your appeal. I believe in nonviolence. I will give 100 acres of land to the poor as a gift.”— 20 acres extra as a common land for a school, a well, facilities and so on…”

Bhave resolved to walk from village to village until every landless Indian had secure access to land. In the end, Satish reminds us, the boodhan movement redistributed some four million acres of land to small farmers — a great non-violent revolution.

Sjoerd Wartena shares lessons from 1970s farmland activism in France 

“I am of the generation directly influenced by Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful,” says Sjoerd. He recalls his early days in the French ‘back to the land’ movement, telling how years of ‘agri-cultural‘ practice (Sjoerd’s emphasis) led to the formation of Terre de Liens and its struggle for land as a commons. Quoting economist Karl Polanyi, Sjoerd asserts: “the day our ancestors made land a commodity was a dark day for humanity.”

Sjoerd describes how the organization has grown to serve 20,000 shareholders, 350 farms, over 600 farmers, and some 20,000 acres of land.” Along their way, Terre de Liens members rediscovered the true meaning of words like “democracy, compromise, delegation, trust.” Through the seemingly endless committee-work and fundraising, Sjoerd says, the simple joys of agrarian work sustain him:

“Nothing gives more satisfaction than the real creation of farm, artisanal, or processing activities. Seeds coming out of the soil will always be a miracle…”

Finally, Sjoerd recalls an early lesson in the French Alps, where members of Terre de Liens met with peasant farmers whose ancestors had worked the land for generations. He describes them as “last representatives of an endless chain of transmission of knowledge: how much they knew from nature, how complete they were… our task should be to repair that the chain.” This, he realized, is “the whole basis of Terre de Liens.”

Severine von Tscharner Fleming on the relationality of commoning

Severine addresses the human, embodied aspect of commoning, as witnessed among the many young people she meets in her work with Agrarian Trust. For the upcoming generation who “want to put our lives, our physical bodies, back into contact with the Earth,” farming is “the fundamental understory of a new, peaceful economy… [They’re] going to become a farmer because it’s at the forefront of the change that needs to come.”

“What does it take to come back into relationship with one another, directly holding the reins of an economy ourselves? Not delegating it to the market, not leaning on our historical habits of dominion and control…”

It takes humility, Severine says, to embark on such a “great, vulnerable learning process.” Building on Sjoerd’s remarks, she described the interpersonal labor as every bit as important as agricultural labor — and every bit as fruitful:

“The human process of accommodating ourselves to how risky this is—the committee work of it, the fundraising are not just dutiful helpers—that is the process of getting back into relationship…and reconstituting our capacity for governance…on a human scale…

In fact, the political leadership that we need of this next generation, and the ecological leadership that we need to participate in our survival — based on the facts that we have, not the fantasy that’s projected, not the market and what it tells us to do — that level of accountability and reciprocity and sensitivity is in fact a happy side-outcome of that committee work.”

The next 2023 Schumacher Conversation, “Activating Stagnant Capital to Catalyze Local Transformation,” will take place Thursday, May 18 at 2:00 PM EST. The participants will be:

  • Chuck Collins of Inequality.org
  • Alfa Demmellash of Rising Tide Capital, and
  • Kate Poole of Resource Generation

The Conversation will be hosted by Nwamaka Agbo of Kataly Foundation. Register for this upcoming event here.

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