From Scarcity to Value Creation: A New Era of Land, Food, and Community Wealth. Part I.

Ariel Reyes Antuan
Oct 15
5 min read

Updated: Oct 16

By Ariel Reyes Antuan, Iyé Creative

When talking about Land and Land Access, Indigenous Nations, Black Canadians and other racialized groups have stood in the crossfire of government policy and corporate interests in the past 200 years. Exclusionary laws, forced displacement, chattel slavery, cultural loss, and continuous extraction have left us exhausted. The shapeshifting nature of corporate power has taught us a painful truth: dependency is not survival — it is erasure.

Art piece by Razan Mereeb from the Ways We Eat Event, Nov '23.

In my learning, community-led land access frameworks have long been devalued or dismissed as “informal” or even “savage” — words historically used to undermine Indigenous and land-based cultural practices. They were the original operating systems of care, trust, and reciprocity. When those systems were fractured, wealth creation and redistribution within our communities were severed. Dependency replaced self-determination, sadly, we’re still paying a high price

The Project

The goal of this blog is to keep mobilizing the knowledge emerging from the Advancing Land Access Project, led by Iyé in partnership with the Capital Region Agriculture Initiatives Roundtable and supported by the Real Estate Foundation. Together, we formed an Advisory Committee – composed by Zoe Blue, Farmer Shelly, Ramya and Khalilah – to hold space for both our ideas and our frustrations — to steward not just outcomes, but the emotions and realities that come with this work. Nancy Nyandika is the lead researcher. Through conversation — even when we’re weary of it — we’re learning to speak differently: to move beyond the visible frameworks and into the unseen systems, the programs and patterns that were designed to keep us apart.

While writing these lines, I have to recognize that this work is complex because it sits at the intersection of law, policy, economics, and healing. Yet complexity cannot be an excuse for exclusion. Our task is to translate systems into stories and structures people can act on — to break down land access, governance, and finance into practical pathways that communities historically ostracized from ownership can truly navigate and lead.

Participant's note in the Ways We Eat Event, 2024.

Why Land Matters

Land is not acreage — it is a living system, a source of healing power, permanence, and protection. It shields us from displacement, food precarity, and the economic and ecological crises already testing our collective resilience. In his 1963 speech Message to the Grassroots, Malcolm X reminded us that “land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality.” He was called “radical” for saying what remains profoundly true: without access to land, we are left vulnerable to every form of power imposed upon us. His words still echo today — not as a warning, but as a directive to reclaim the ground beneath our future.

In BC, Indigenous Nations continue to reclaim their territories, slowly but steadily, modeling what lawful and cultural restoration can look like. Their work reminds us that land is not simply property — it is a relationship.

Meanwhile, Statistics Canada and the Department of Finance Canada’s Annual Financial Report released in June, 2025 mentioned that.Canada’s public debt reached $597 billion in early 2025, with debt-servicing costs up 35% since 2023. As governments struggle to contain fiscal debt and investors plan for 2050, our communities must also plan generationally, meaning communities must build self-sustaining land access and stewardship systems.

Land trusts, cooperatives, and community wealth funds are not nostalgic experiments — they are modern resilience systems. They are how we safeguard futures. Community land trusts in Canada now steward nearly 10,000 housing units and an expanding portfolio of farmland and community spaces (Canadian Network of Community Land Trusts Census, 2023).

Our Current Reality: Who Owns the Land, and Who Feeds Our Communities?

Canada’s agricultural system remains highly concentrated, and exclusive.

In 2021, only 3.7% of farm operators identified as racialized, despite racialized groups comprising over 26% of the national population.

In November 2024, the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food (AGRI) held hearings under Issue Agri-116: Intergenerational Transfer of Farms and New Entrants during Canada’s 44th Parliament. The discussions reaffirmed what many of us working on the ground already know: that the future of Canadian agriculture depends on removing the structural barriers preventing new and diverse farmers from accessing land.

Testimonies from organizations such as Young Agrarians with its BC Land Matching Program

highlighted the age of farmers and that rising land values and limited succession planning have made intergenerational transfer increasingly unattainable.

According to Young Agrarians only 8.6 percent of Canadian farmers are under 35.

The Committee’s report called for new financing tools, mentorship networks, and accessible land-matching programs—evidence that the shift toward community-driven, equity-based land access is not just a grassroots movement but a national priority.

Many Black and immigrant farmers — from Caribbean, African, and South Asian backgrounds — work on insecure leases, temporary community garden plots, or face restrictive zoning when trying to scale.

Canada imports more than 70% of its fruits and vegetables during winter, primarily from the U.S. and Mexico. When those supply chains break, our communities are hit first and hardest.

This dependency reveals a dangerous paradox: those most affected by food insecurity are the least represented in agricultural ownership and planning.

Yet there is hope. This new generation of farmers — Black, immigrant, Indigenous, and equity-denied — are reclaiming ancestral practices, rebuilding economies, and restoring culture through food. Our ancestral knowledge was never lost. Our memories, our seeds, our recipes, and our ways of organizing — these are currencies. They are the capital of the future.

I trust. I see it. So it becomes.