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Although evidence continues to indicate an urgent need to transition food systems away from industrialized monocultures and toward agroecological production, there is little sign of significant policy commitment toward food system transformation in global North geographies. The authors, a consortium of researchers studying the land-food nexus in global North geographies, argue that a key lock-in explaining the lack of reform arises from how most food system interventions work through dominant logics of property to achieve their goals of agroecological production. Doing so fails to recognize how land tenure systems, codified by law and performed by society, construct agricultural land use outcomes. In this perspective, the authors argue that achieving food system “resilience” requires urgent attention to the underlying property norms that drive land access regimes, especially where norms of property appear hegemonic. This paper first reviews research from political ecology, critical property law, and human geography to show how entrenched property relations in the global North frustrate the advancement of alternative models like food sovereignty and agroecology, and work to mediate acceptable forms of “sustainable agriculture.” Drawing on emerging cases of land tenure reform from the authors' collective experience working in Scotland, France, Australia, Canada, and Japan, we next observe how contesting dominant logics of property creates space to forge deep and equitable food system transformation. Equally, these cases demonstrate how powerful actors in the food system attempt to leverage legal and cultural norms of property to legitimize their control over the resources that drive agricultural production. Our formulation suggests that visions for food system “resilience” must embrace the reform of property relations as much as it does diversified farming practices. This work calls for a joint cultural and legal reimagination of our relation to land in places where property functions as an epistemic and apex entitlement.

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This article examines contemporary political controversies over agricultural land in the prairie region of Canada. We suggest that contemporary land politics reflect elements of continuity and change in a distinctive “land imaginary” connected to the region’s history and recent restructuring. While neoliberalism, and more recently, financialization, have been the main drivers of restructuring in recent decades, certain strands of agrarianism continue to shape social relations in the agricultural sector. We present three case studies, the first of which examines the controversy over institutional investment in farmland, focusing on the Canada Pension Plan’s large-scale purchase of Saskatchewan land. The second case study examines conflicts over the deregulation of government-run community pastures, with implications for the ranching sector, environmental conservation, and the future of native prairie. Our third case study focuses on the proposed sale and land-use conversion of government-owned pasture land in Alberta, dubbed “Potatogate”. We examine the role of farmers, ranchers, governments, NGOs, and private interests in shaping debates over land ownership and use. We argue that these conflicts reveal a tension between (financial) neoliberalism and agrarian arguments and values, with significant differences across agricultural sub-sectors.