Who Owns the Future of Farming?: Land for People and Planet trough Commons-based Solutions
One of the biggest challenges to scaling up sustainable farming today is access to land. Across the world, land prices are skyrocketing, driven by speculation, large-scale monoculture farming, and urban expansion. This makes it incredibly difficult for small-scale and agroecological farmers to put down roots—literally and figuratively.
In Quebec, we’re exploring innovative ways to turn this around.
In this ongoing research project—based on interviews with farmers, local government officials, and non-profit organizations—we found something inspiring: land trusts designed specifically for social and agricultural use (or FUSAs, fiducies d’utilité sociale et agricole). These land trusts take farmland out of speculative markets and protect it for the public good, ensuring that future generations of farmers can access land not as a commodity, but as a shared resource.
This work, led by postdoctoral researcher Dr. Julia Ros-Cuellar and master’s student Laura Howard, is not just about Quebec. It speaks to a broader global movement. Around the world, communities are experimenting with new tools—like land trusts—to break the cycle of speculation and support food systems that work for people and the planet.
This project sits at the intersection of land justice, food sovereignty, and climate resilience. It reflects a simple but powerful idea: if we want sustainable food systems, we need to start by transforming how we think about land.
This project is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Development Grant and Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC) Soutien à la recherche pour la relève professorale.