Grond van Bestaan

Ways of belonging
How Grond van Bestaan is clearing the path to sovereign land use in the Netherlands

Grond van Bestaan is a foundation here in the Netherlands that applies the CLT (Community Land Trust) model, to make regenerative farming practices viable for farmers and the community around them.
By taking land off the market and leasing it out for extended periods at an affordable price, the land itself shifts from being a commodity that serves to generate profit to serving the community, allowing farmers to apply values that honor the Earth to their practices, while giving the community access to fresh local produce.

Farming today, whether we are speaking about the Netherlands or anywhere else in the world, often has little to do with the romantic vision many of us hold onto in our heads of a family in the nature, caring for their land and their animals. While farming has always been about making a living through creating a food surplus, it has now turned into a fierce battle to keep things profitable. This largely looks like fully automated processes, heavy machinery working the land while consuming massive amounts of fossil fuels, monoculture which leads to depletion of the soil, and a strong reliance on pesticides.

Any farmer desiring to take a different, more holistic and regenerative approach can rarely compete on the market due to the horrendous prices that fertile farmland sells for. The only way to make up for the price of the land is by adapting the highly standardized farming practices that are subsidized by the state. This leaves no room for smaller, community-oriented ecological farmers who don’t want to compromise their values.

The problem with land use within the capitalist system today is that values such as affordability, accessibility, sustainability, biodiversity, or ecological soundness fall short because the land itself is capital. Land is a good that can be bought, sold, and speculated over. There is no safety in a global market that changes so drastically, is controlled by big players and leaves no room for the people that live in the houses, work in the shops, farm the land over which this speculation is happening, not to mention all the non-human life that does not have a voice in the struggle. 

For this very reason, potentially well-meaning participatory processes can only do so much, even at the municipality level. Governments can always ask residents for their input and opinion, but often in the end the decision is made for the most profitable option. This often shows in the dampened enthusiasm with which citizens show up to those participatory events. It’s known that the range in which change can happen through democratic processes is limited and that regular people don’t have leverage against big corporations.

Why is that the case?
To understand this a bit better we have to take a look at how society is structured. We have the state as the main obvious regulating body that is supposed to ensure public safety and justice through law and legislation. Then there is the market, which the state is supposed to regulate and police, but also support through the granting of property rights. Next to State and Market, there is a third pillar, one that is often forgotten in this triangle of transactions. The third pillar is made up of the Community. Ideally, the market provides this community with productivity and choice, and the community in return regulates the market with values and norms while molding the state through democratic oversight. As of today, these three pillars have gotten out of balance. No longer do values have an impact on the market. No longer is the state truly separate from the market. Raghuram Rajan speaks about how this imbalance came to be in his book, The Third Pillar; How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind. For this article, I want to simply point out the imbalance while focusing on some direct and applicable strategies that the community can make use of to bypass the hurdles of the capitalist system to regain some kind of agency.

When it comes to land use, at the core of these community-centered strategies lies the CLT model, which is short for the Community Land Trust model. Originally developed in the United States to help black farmers get access to land, this strategy has been applied to all kinds of neighborhood and community projects, preventing gentrification, circumventing zoning, and by that, helping to prevent the destruction of local communities all over North America.

The goal of the CLT is to take land off the market and make it available to the community.

As mentioned in the introduction, the goal of the CLT is to take land off the market and make it available to the community. Instead of selling the land to the individuals who intend to use it, the land is owned by a non-profit organization, in this case that would be Grond van Bestaan, but any regular group of people can fund a CLT. It is crucial that this organization is not interested in creating profit from the land. Now, local communities, citizens, farmers, or cultural collectives in need of land, can lease the land for an affordable price from the organization and by that, attain the right to use the land. Like this, the rights of use are being separated from the ownership.

Inspired by Gandhi who walked from village to village asking people in the community to gift land to those who didn’t have any to farm, the CLT model relies on gifts and interest-free loans as well as crowd-funding or crowd-lending campaigns. One issue with the approach of gifting land to individual farmers was that the farmer, in case of a bad harvest, often sold the land to ensure his survival. From this issue, a new practice emerged. Now the land was gifted to the village instead, so in case of a bad harvest, the farmer didn’t have to sell and the hit was being absorbed by the united community. Similar concepts occurred many times before in human history, one of them being the feudal system prevalent in the Middle Ages. German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies speaks of this example in his book Community and Society: 
“…The relationship between community and feudal lords, and more especially that between the community and its members, is based not on contracts, but upon understanding, like that within the family. The village community, even where it encompasses also the feudal lord, is like one individual household in its necessary relation to the land. The common land is the object of its activity and care and is intended partly for the collective purposes of the unit itself, partly for the identical and related purposes of its members…“

What is important to point out though is that feudalism was far from just as a social system. Raghuram Rajan mentions in The Third Pillar that during the Middle Ages the Church invented the concept of debt, thereby replacing the notion of agreements and favors with deadlines and consequences, This enabled Lords to ostracize and even execute members of the community for not paying their shares, thereby creating landlordism as it persists today. I wonder, can we as a multitude of local communities return, bit by bit, to the concept of favor?

One of the projects Grond van Bestaan is connected to is Voedselpark Amsterdam. While the fight over the future of the Lutkemeer Polder, the last bit of Amsterdam's fertile ground, has been going on for years, the municipality still seems hesitant to make a final decision on bringing the development and construction of the distribution centers led by the SADC (Schiphol Area Development Company) to a hold. Meanwhile, Behoud Lutkemeer has developed an elaborate alternative destination plan. Voedselpark Amsterdam, a biodiverse farming ground with room for recreation, participation, educational programs and the capacity to generate produce for about 20.000 people, is ready to be realized. All that is missing is the green light from the municipality. This is no easy choice for the city government since the square meter of distribution center is amongst the most profitable options for land use currently. Should the choice in the end be made in favor of the Voedselpark, Grond van Bestaan would take on the ownership of the land or lease it from the municipality, and then grant the rights of use to Voedselpark Amsterdam, to ensure the community- and nature-oriented outcome.

A Community Land Trust consists of three parties that are collectively making decisions.

When speaking of centralizing land ownership, many people quickly think of communism. The idea of the state having total control over capital and resources doesn’t sit well with us today, rightfully so.
In the CLT model, land ownership is not placed with the state or an individual, but with a non-governmental foundation, which makes deviation from the initial agreement much harder, even when one lease ends and a new one begins, since the goals and values of said foundation, such as accessibility, sustainability, and ecological soundness, are being protected and upheld by a whole Board of people with no pressure to generate profit. This ensures that prices stay low, generation after generation. A Community Land Trust consists of three parties that are collectively making decisions. These three parties are the people that use the land (for example, biological farmers), the community that is impacted by the way the land is used (for example, the community nearby that gets to consume the goods produced on the land), and the advisory board which holds the ownership of the land (in our example Grond van Bestaan).
These three parties are in constant dialogue with each other to figure out the needs of the community and the land user, and to see how those needs can be met within the value system of the CLT, which in our case focuses on biodiversity and soil health.

This kind of practice is not only beneficial in its practical outcomes of honoring the needs of the community, farmers, and nature. It also creates a web of interaction, a healthy system of interdependency. Now that values get to play a role in the decision-making, people feel excited about participating in their neighborhood or community. They feel like they can be heard and seen, and are eager to make an actual difference for the better.

It is a way of doing things that, sadly, we have almost forgotten as a society. Most of us grew up with a very individualist mindset - ‘Help yourself because no one else will.’ CLT is building on a different strategy, one that is in line with the philosophy of the commons.

The philosophy of the commons is built upon the belief that community-shared resources such as land, hunting grounds, and homes can be managed responsibly by the people who make up the community, without the need for state interference or privatization, which more often than not leads to unequal access to resources and a perpetual continuation of financial and social inequality. It reintroduces the idea that when a community becomes organized, it very well can manage its resources taking into account the long-term effects that the use of said resources is causing, eventually resulting in higher shared benefits and reduced shared harm. There is no need for the infantilization of the citizens. If responsibility is given to the people, people take responsibility, for each other and for the maintenance and care of the resources they are depending on.

Within this way of thinking we can recognize that what is good for the community is good for the individual in the long run. We can build trust that if we extend a helping hand, someone else will do the same for us when we’re in need. In the beginning, this approach can feel very counterintuitive, but it does pay off in the long run, once we allow ourselves to build trust into the support system of our direct community.
I can speak from experience here since I am blessed with an amazing community of people with whom I live and work on shared projects. The process of stepping back in some places from needing to do things my way, to do what's best for the collective, has been a difficult but very rewarding journey for me.

I know that many people today are feeling an urgency to rekindle a sense of community and shared responsibility. A shift is needed, from thinking about how the land belongs to us towards how we find ourselves belonging to the land, from ownership to stewardship, from profit to care. It is possible and we can see it happen if we look close enough, even in our direct surroundings.
Communities are uniting to make space, land, and housing accessible to the ones who are willing to use it in a way that does not only serve themselves. One very good example of this is the CLT that has been set up by citizens of the H-buurt in the Bijlmer. A shift is happening towards a new way that does not suppress the symptoms of its disfunctionality but instead listens and creates room for all needs to be heard and met, the human and non-human ones. If we want to protect our future as people, we must protect our soil, the plants and animals that make up our ecosystems. We must stop turning a blind eye to the exploitation of our land for profit. Grond van Bestaan is taking steps in that direction, clearing the path for sovereign, ecologically-sound land use.