Land politics – who controls what land, how is it used, for how long, for what purposes and to whose benefit – is a central pillar of the debate on agroecological transition in Europe. This policy report argues that it is time to ground land policy in collective action and democratic forms of land politics. This is based on an understanding of land not as a commodity but as a common resource, a living territory and a natural landscape.

In practice, this implies a different set of land property relationships and more diverse models of food production than those of industrial agriculture, which homogenises landscapes and cultures. This opens up the possibility for other land access regimes to emerge beyond simply that of the land market, including forms of common and collective land use and ownership. This approach to land politics also helps to sustain more ecologically regenerative models of food production such as organic agriculture and peasant agroecology as practiced by many of Europe’s small farmers, fishers, pastoralists, and indigenous peoples. Therefore, this policy report looks to support increased access to land for agroecology throughout Europe. This support is now more critical than ever in light of a number of alarming trends including increasing land concentration and land speculation, instances of land grabbing, the precipitous decline in the number of farmers and smallholdings, a generational challenge in terms of farm succession, massive biodiversity loss, a crisis in soil fertility, and the devastating impacts of intensive livestock breeding and industrial agriculture, to mention but a few.