About Agrarian Justice

In recent years, transnational corporations and some national governments have initiated a large-scale worldwide enclosure of agricultural lands, mostly in the Global South, causing livelihood disruption, displacement and dispossession. In this context TNI has identified and forged alliances with transnational agrarian movements and groups that struggle against this injustice.

The ‘agrarian justice’ cluster brings together research and analysis on political struggles in rural areas around access, control and ownership of resources and land, as well as on international agrarian movements struggling against dispossession and working to construct alternatives. They carry out evidence-based policy studies, field research, and advocacy campaigns; coordinate local-national initiatives across regions; and collaborate with various other networks working on common themes. They publish relevant materials that can be used by social movement and NGO advocates in their campaigns and lobby work on these issues.

Global burning issues are 

1. The political economy of agrofuels;
2. Overseas development aid and land policies;
3. Social movements and rural democratisation;
4. Global land grabbing;
5. Food sovereignty.

History:

Agrarian justice work in TNI has a long history, although it hasn't labelled as such or been pulled together systematically before. Agrarian justice-related work has been carried out in other existing programs such as Drugs and Democracy programme. In the early 1990s, TNI also worked closely with peasant organisations in the context of its overseas development aid work.

The current ‘agrarian justice’ cluster can be traced to a series of discussions between TNI fellows and staff within the New Politics programme as well as with other outsider agrarian justice scholar-activists, including Jenny Franco and Jun Borras. It was decided to explore the possibility of trying to bring in a rural dimension to the New Politics program. This has led to the ‘social movements and rural democratisation’ research project in 2005 onwards.

In 2006, TNI decided to coordinate a global research-advocacy initiative to take a critical look at overseas development aid agencies and their land policies. This was, and is, in the midst of the global mainstream advocacy to promote massive privatization of the remaining commons. This initiative has been in collaboration with key individuals in three important institutions: the Belgian North-South Coalition of Movement or 11.11.11, Foodfirst Information and Action Network (FIAN) with Sofia Monsalve and Armin Paasch and with the Institute of Social Studies (ISS) through Jun Borras when he was still at ISS. Jenny Franco represented TNI in this group.

The discussion and subsequent work on agrofuels started in 2007 when colleagues from the Open University of the UK (Les Levidow) invited TNI to become part of a large EU-wide consortium of academics and civil society groups to carry out a major environmental policy study, with TNI coordinating the agrofuels component. In 2009, TNI decided to consolidate and expand its ongoing initiatives related to global land grabbing which is a natural extension of its work on agrofuels as well as on the alternative of food sovereignty.

It is in this context that we see it necessary to try to put some degree of coherence among the various initiatives related to agrarian justice, and starting such an organized and coherent cluster beginning 2010.