Land backing actions to preserve agricultural use

Abstract

Urban growth around cities principally takes place on farmland, which is definitively lost for agriculture. Farmland preservation has become over these last decades a major issue for public policies, with concerns about environmental questions (water management and flood risk, ecological corridors and terrestrial and aquatic ecological networks) and about food issues. Public authorities have numerous tools to manage land use and limit urban expansion, principally based on the principle of urban planning. However, the permanent changes in urban planning allow landowners to develop strategies to enhance the value of their land rent through urbanization. At the same time, society and especially the urban world are bringing back agriculture to the public debate. As a consequence local authorities propose new dynamics regarding agricultural and environmental issues in their policies. In this context, some initiatives aiming at protecting farm use over the long term are based on public or collective acquisition of farmland. This paper gives a first analysis of this recent phenomenon we call "land backing actions".