Class struggle in the British countryside—resisting land grabbing and forging the alternative

A short article articulating the need for a new struggle over land in Britain that focuses on both resisting land grabs and building an alternative to the status quo

An image of some Welsh hills with a conifer forest and grassland, with a crudely inserted cut out of the Shard in London inserted into the landscape. With the title of the article in black writing: Class struggle in the British countryside—resisting land grabbing and forging the alternative

I’ve been struggling to fully articulate the main point I want to make with my working paper ‘Trees Devouring Sheep: Land grabbing investment funds and the ‘new enclosures’ of Welsh farmland’. I wasn’t clear enough at the time when I had to finish that paper for submission but since, and thanks to some feedback from others, I feel like I’ve found what should be the central argument (and will work into the next version).

There has begun a new class struggle over land in Wales. Whereas until fairly recently land has generally passed from the hands of retiring farmers or bankrupt farmers, to either larger farmers or to new smallholders. Actually often both, as the house and a few acres gets sold to ‘incomers’ and the land passes into the hands of a local farm that is expanding, as a way to try and stay in business amidst a falling rate of profit. We now have a new actor: investors. They have always been around but I think there is a shift occurring whereby they might become the primary buyers of land in Wales and across the UK. There are a few reasons why investors are increasingly moving into land: 1) inheritance tax loophole 2) rentier income from subsidies and tenants 3) net zero commitments 4) timber production 5) natural capital markets eg. carbon or biodiversity credits/offsetting 6) a need to diversify portfolios as a way to hedge risk of other investments: land returns a fairly dependable asset appreciation.

Even though land is already privatised there is a qualitative shift when land moves from the hands of a landowner-farmer to an investor-landowner. The former struggles with the constraints of the profit motive in farming to produce food whereas the latter is interested in financial return for its own sake. Even when they couch it in the friendly rhetoric of ‘repairing nature’—the motivation is solely financial return where ecosystem services and nature restoration serves as the vehicle for profit and rent. Farmers are looking to make a profit, as a way to make a living, but rarely are farmers really seeing a return on capital through agriculture. In reality most farmers grow in size through leveraging higher levels of debt. It is rarely a case of capital being turned into more capital in a meaningful sense.

Not only does the shift of land from farmer to investor lead to a change in the land’s subordination to the logics of capital but it leads to land being taken away from smaller and new entrant farmers. What Van der Ploeg, Franco and Borras Jnr call ‘entry denial’. There is increasingly a crisis whereby young farmers are struggling to find a farm due to a lack of available (or affordable) land/tenancies. This will have long term consequences for British agriculture as younger people have to move onto other jobs outside of farming, breaking the chain of farm succession.

But where is the potential for class struggle? Currently we see land grabbing investment funds, of which there are many active in the UK, hoovering up land, taking advantage of agrarian crisis. The potential lies in the intervention of a third actor, namely movements for land justice, climate justice, local rural culture (eg Welsh language struggles), housing, and food sovereignty and agroecology. This third actor can engage in a double movement of resisting these land grabs whilst also furthering alternative property relations based on building a new commons, or forms of property outside of the limitations of private property. This might look like community land trusts, public-common partnerships, community supported agriculture, community woodlands, renewed council farms, and so on. Ultimately we need new forms as well. The key being forms of property relations that take farming in a direction beyond the private landowner towards more democratic forms of property and land management.

This third group based on a coalition of struggles and movements can find ways to defend against land grabs—an important first step to prevent eg ‘entry denial’—and forge a path towards reformed socio-ecological relations. That is why the land grabbing rubric is relevant. Some will ask: how is this land grabbing? What we see is one private actor (eg a retiring farm) selling to another private actor. There is no extra-economic coercion as we often see in land grabs in the global south. But the point needs to be that we see the concrete process that’s occurring in front of us. And what is occurring is a concentration of land ownership into the hands of institutional (or very wealthy individual) investors and a deepening of capitalist relations in the British countryside. This leads to rural decline as farming is the backbone of many rural economies and ways of life. And at the same time this provides an opportunity for a new path forward if disparate struggles can be galvanised into something more powerful. In Wales that could unite under the banner of ‘Nid yw Cymru ar Werth’. I’m sure there are other potentials both here in Wales and elsewhere in Britain.

For me, any potential way forward lies in cultivating a politics of landlessness (and reclaiming land), as put forward recently by Antonio Roman-Alcalá. Resisting land grabbing is one route towards reclaiming land and I think in the process already-existing small(er) farmers will benefit just as much as the currently landless through a reinvigoration of the countryside and food/farming. Capitalist logics, rooted in private property, will always favour the concentration of land ownership. This is why we must build a new countryside rooted not in the demands of capital accumulation but in the demands of people and planet.