A rich project: Learning about Innovative Land Strategies

From September 2018 to February 2021, seven European and national level organisations working in various fields joined forces to build and disseminate strategic knowledge about land strategies for agroecology and food sovereignty.

They collaborated in an Erasmus + partnership called "Collaborative learning about Innovative Land Strategies". Partner organisations included the European Coordination Via Campesina (ECVC); Eco Ruralis, the Romanian peasant farmers’ union; the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM-EU); URGENCI, the international network of local solidarity partnerships and community-supported agriculture; Terre de Liens, a French civic movement promoting access to land for agroecology; the Real Farming Trust (RFT), a UK charity supporting "enlightened" agriculture; and the Transnational Institute (TNI), a Dutch research and advocacy on natural resource politics. Three of these organisations are also members of the Access to Land network.

This partnership gave us the opportunity to share and cross-fertilize our experiences and analyses around farmland use in Europe and the many pressures it is faced with. It also enabled us to document and disseminate a large range of grassroots and policy solutions, from the local to the European levels.

The partnership thus resulted in:

• two highlight publications
  • the handbook Your land, my land, our land (April 2020): bringing together real-life stories, practical experiences, legal tools and more, the handbook highlights strategies to facilitate access to land for the benefit of all peoples: peasant and agroecological farmers, consumers, pastoralists, consumers, local communities and environmentally-minded people and organisations.
  • the policy report Roots of Resilience: Land Policy for an Agroecological Transition in Europe (February 2021)
• a training seminar on Legal tools and levers for local land strategies, which gathered 90 participants from 17 European countries near Paris for 3 days of experience-sharing and learning sessions.
• a series of 7 webinars on various dimensions of land strategies in Europe:
  • the first three webinars presented concrete grassroots mobilisations and solutions (overview, young farmers, community support),
  • the four remaining webinars focused on policy dimensions (national land coalitions, financialisation of land, land policies in Central and Eastern Europe, EU policy framework).

Due to the sanitary crisis, the partners could not engage as much as initially planned with policy makers, although some exchanges took place in particular on the occasion of the training seminar and several of the webinars.

This partnership enabled us to consolidate our analyses and proposals, and to build stronger links between the partner organisations, which are continuing to collaborate at national and European levels.