In recent decades, the various strands of the food movement have made enormous strides in calling attention the many shortcomings and injustices of our food and agricultural system. Farmers, activists, scholars, and everyday citizens have also worked creatively to rebuild local food economies, advocate for food justice, and promote more sustainable, agroecological farming practices. However, the movement for fairer, healthier, and more autonomous food is continually blocked by one obstacle: land access. As long as land remains unaffordable and inaccessible to most people, we cannot truly transform the food system. The term land-grabbing is most commonly used to refer to the large-scale acquisition of agricultural land in Asian, African, or Latin American countries by foreign investors. However, land has and continues to be “grabbed” in North America, as well, through discrimination, real estate speculation, gentrification, financialization, extractive energy production, and tourism. This edited volume, with chapters from a wide range of activists and scholars, explores the history of land theft, dispossession, and consolidation in the United States. It also looks at alternative ways forward toward democratized, land justice, based on redistributive policies and cooperative ownership models. With prefaces from leaders in the food justice and family farming movements, the book opens with a look at the legacies of white-settler colonialism in the southwestern United States. From there, it moves into a collectively-authored section on Black Agrarianism, which details the long history of land dispossession among Black farmers in the southeastern US, as well as the creative acts of resistance they have used to acquire land and collectively farm it. The next section, on gender, explores structural and cultural discrimination against women landowners in the Midwest and also role of “womanism” in land-based struggles. Next, a section on the cross-border implications of land enclosures and consolidations includes a consideration of what land justice could mean for farm workers in the US, followed by an essay on the challenges facing young and aspiring farmers. Finally, the book explores the urban dimensions of land justice and their implications for locally-autonomous food systems, and lessons from previous struggles for democratized land access. Ultimately, the book makes the case that to move forward to a more equitable, just, sustainable, and sovereign agriculture system, the various strands of the food movement must come together for land justice.

In May 1967, internationally renowned activist Fannie Lou Hamer purchased forty acres of land in the Mississippi Delta, launching the Freedom Farms Cooperative (FFC). A community-based rural and economic development project, FFC would grow to over 600 acres, offering a means for local sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and domestic workers to pursue community wellness, self-reliance, and political resistance. Life on the cooperative farm presented an alternative to the second wave of northern migration by African Americans--an opportunity to stay in the South, live off the land, and create a healthy community based upon building an alternative food system as a cooperative and collective effort. Freedom Farmers expands the historical narrative of the black freedom struggle to embrace the work, roles, and contributions of southern Black farmers and the organizations they formed. Whereas existing scholarship generally views agriculture as a site of oppression and exploitation of black people, this book reveals agriculture as a site of resistance and provides a historical foundation that adds meaning and context to current conversations around the resurgence of food justice/sovereignty movements in urban spaces like Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, New York City, and New Orleans.

This handbook presents a must-read, comprehensive and state of the art overview of sustainable diets, an issue critical to the environment and the health and well-being of society. Sustainable diets seek to minimise and mitigate the significant negative impact food production has on the environment. Simultaneously they aim to address worrying health trends in food consumption through the promotion of healthy diets that reduce premature disability, disease and death. Within the Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Diets, creative, compassionate, critical, and collaborative solutions are called for across nations, across disciplines and sectors. In order to address these wide-ranging issues the volume is split into sections dealing with environmental strategies, health and well-being, education and public engagement, social policies and food environments, transformations and food movements, economics and trade, design and measurement mechanisms and food sovereignty. Comprising of contributions from up and coming and established academics, the handbook provides a global, multi-disciplinary assessment of sustainable diets, drawing on case studies from regions across the world. The handbook concludes with a call to action, which provides readers with a comprehensive map of strategies that could dramatically increase sustainability and help to reverse global warming, diet related non-communicable diseases, and oppression and racism. This decisive collection is essential reading for students, researchers, practitioners, and policymakers concerned with promoting sustainable diets and thus establishing a sustainable food system to ensure access to healthy and nutritious food for all.

Inequality is one of today's greatest challenges, obstructing poverty reduction and sustainable development. As the power of elites grows and societal gaps widen, institutions representing the public good and universal values are increasingly disempowered or co-opted, and visions of social justice and equity side-lined. This book explores the roles of elites and institutions of power in the deepening of social and economic cleavages across the globe, by asking how inequalities have reshaped structures from the local to the transnational level, and what consequences they have wrought. In addition, the contributors present examples of peaceful processes of policy change that have made societies greener and more socially just, levelled out social stratification, and devolved power and resources from elites to non-elites, or towards marginalized or discriminated groups. Based on cutting-edge empirical research, the chapters in this volume bring together conceptual thinking and a number of case studies from the Global North and South, combining different levels of analysis and a range of qualitative research methods to present solutions for closing the inequality gap.

Undertaking a journey into the “hybrid governance” of urban food movements, this book offers an original and nuanced analysis of the urban milieu as epicentre of food activism and food governance. Through examples of food movements in the city-regions of Toronto and Brussels, the author highlights the critical governance tensions urban food initiatives experience as they develop in diverse ways and seek to change food systems and their related socio-political conditions. The author investigates urban food movements as they negotiate access to land in urban areas, build resilient food network organisations, and develop supportive policies and empowering institutions for urban food governance. Through the analysis of these tensions, the book effectively puts real-life challenges of urban food movements in the spotlight—challenges that are increasingly visible and pertinent in today’s converging climate, socio-political, and health crises. The author offers suggestions to improve alternative food practices and, ultimately, to design promising pathways to instigate food system change.

This book examines the dynamics of natural resource conflicts in Africa and explores the different governance approaches for securing sustainable peace. One of the most prominent challenges facing Africa today is the consequences of natural resource extraction. While these resources hold the potential for economic transformation across Africa, their extraction also comes with a range of environmental, social, and economic consequences, including issues related to governance. This book assembles a unique cohort of peacebuilding, environmental justice, and sustainable development scholars and practitioners from Africa and beyond to examine the dynamics of natural resource conflict and explore the governance approaches that offer pathways for sustainable peace in Africa. Drawing on case studies and empirical lessons from the Horn of Africa, Southern Africa, West Africa, East Africa, and the Central Sahel region, along with the African Union, the multidisciplinary contributors offer fresh insights into the nature of natural resource conflict in Africa, delve deeper into the complexities of natural resource governance, and highlight the interplay between resource governance and sustainable peace. By shedding light not only on Africa’s experiences and vulnerabilities but also on the challenges of natural resource governance, this book fills a crucial gap in understanding the connection between natural resource governance, conflict, and pathways for sustainable peace in Africa. Drawing on a range of disciplinary perspectives, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of natural resource governance, peace and conflict studies, environmental policy and justice, sustainable development, security studies and African studies more widely.

This special collection aims to offer insight into the state of geography on questions of social justice and urban life. While using social justice and the city as our starting point may signal inspiration from Harvey’s (1973) book of the same name, the task of examining the emergence of this concept has revealed the deep influence of grassroots urban uprisings of the late 1960s, earlier and contemporary meditations on our urban worlds (Jacobs, 1961, 1969; Lefebvre, 1974; Massey and Catalano, 1978) as well as its enduring significance built upon by many others for years to come. Laws (1994) noted how geographers came to locate social justice struggles in the city through research that examined the ways in which material conditions contributed to poverty and racial and gender inequity, as well as how emergent social movements organized to reshape urban spaces across diverse engagements including the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, anti-war protests, feminist and LGBTQ activism, the American Indian Movement, and disability access. This book originally published as a special issue of Annals of the American Association of Geographers.