“Solar Panels on Our Barns, Not on Our Hectares”- Farmers’ Resistance to Renewable Grabbing in France

To date, the literature on green grabbing has primarily concentrated on the Global South, where the scale of large-scale land acquisitions for carbon finance and conservation initiatives has been most pronounced. Nevertheless, the global land rush for climate and environmental purposes is increasingly manifesting within the European Union as well, exacerbating the patterns of land concentration that have developed on the continent over the past decades. Ambitious greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction and biodiversity targets drive the repurposing of rural land towards large-scale projects focused on carbon capture, energy transition, and landscape restoration. Despite the significant role that rural land plays in our efforts to achieve net-zero emissions, "just transition" policies overlook the profound impact that market-driven green transitions can exert on agrarian economies, as well as the challenges it creates concerning rural food producers’ opportunities for land access and control. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in France, this paper examines the mobilization of farmer groups against the risks of "renewable grabbing," which arise from financial power asymmetries between farmers and large corporations amid surging land values. The farmer protests that have unfolded across Europe in 2024 have highlighted the untenable pressures experienced by food producers striving to sustain their livelihoods. In focusing on their critiques of the EU's green standards, mainstream commentary on this mobilization tends to obscure the diverse visions and claims of injustice that have motivated the protests, often leading to their instrumentalisation by anti-green, populist parties. This paper elucidates the neglected land justice issues at the heart of farmers' concerns with green capitalism and market-led green transition pathways. It discusses the campaign "solar panels on our barns, not on our hectares," spearheaded by the Confédération Paysanne in France, to emphasize farmers’ mobilization of food security and land sovereignty narratives to contest the dominant ecological modernization paradigm. At the national level, the left-leaning trade union representing small-scale farmers challenges the derogatory procedures introduced by Law 2023-175 to expedite the implementation of renewable energy projects. At the local level, the union collaborates with various stakeholders to publicize and oppose land transfers from food producers to renewable energy companies. Adopting a conflict transformation approach, this paper conceptualizes these resistance movements as potentially constructive agents of proposition rather than as conflicts that must be resolved at all costs, highlighting the alternative pathways for sustainable and fair transition that they advocate. This ethnographic research is situated within the Justlanding research project, which investigates the contentious politics of land in the EU's race to net zero, with the aim to support the operationalization of a “land-just transition” paradigm.