Making Explicit the Land Politics of Sustainable Food Futures

Social and environmental pressures have given rise to a diverse array of interventions aimed at transforming the food system. These interventions span technical innovations, agronomic improvements, and behavioral change strategies, promising to address global challenges such as food insecurity, climate change, and biodiversity loss. While visions for the future of food are welcome and important, they often overlook the land politics that inevitably shape future land use decisions and practices. This omission has profound implications for both the viability and equity of proposed interventions. Land is the foundation of food production, yet the governance of land—its ownership, access, and control—is frequently treated as an afterthought. Implicit assumptions about land underpin most food system proposals but are rarely made explicit. For instance, the promotion of genetically modified, drought-resistant crops, such as those championed by high-profile initiatives, often assumes land tenure systems conducive to large-scale, intensive farming. Such assumptions risk perpetuating or deepening existing inequalities in land access and ownership. By neglecting to address the underlying property regimes that shape how interventions take hold, these efforts can inadvertently reinforce exclusionary systems and fail to achieve their transformative potential. In this paper, we explore the implicit and explicit ways dominant food system transformation proposals relate to land relations. Specifically, we examine how food system imaginaries—the ideological frameworks shaping these proposals—are tied to, or decoupled from, the land relations necessary for their implementation. This analysis reveals that ideologies of food system interventions must be paired with a corresponding land politics to achieve synergistic outcomes. For instance, interventions promoting agroecological practices might necessitate communal land tenure or secure land rights for smallholders, while large-scale technological solutions might assume the continuance of private, commodified land systems. Recognizing these underlying assumptions can help actors evaluate emerging claims to food system change and identify pathways toward equitable and sustainable outcomes. Our analysis suggests that the alignment of dominant food system proposals with prevailing land tenure regimes explains why certain interventions are prioritized while others are sidelined. Food system change has been overweighted toward technical, agronomic, and behavioral dimensions, leaving land governance inadequately addressed. This elision creates tensions: interventions that graft onto dominant property relations may exacerbate exclusion, while those requiring alternative land relations are unlikely to scale without significant political processes to reform land governance. We argue that by centering land governance in discussions of food system transformation, this “land-first” approach challenges the dominant “practice-first” orientation that prioritizes what happens on the land rather than how land itself is governed. Reorienting our food system debates around land politics allows us to critically interrogate whose interests are served by proposed interventions and to envision alternative futures that better align with equitable land relations. Ultimately, by pairing food system change with a deliberate engagement with land governance, we can chart a path toward more inclusive and resilient food systems.