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

Jess Reyes Barton
3 days ago
6 min read

By: Ariel Reyes Antuan from Iyé Creative

Framing Land Access as a Policy Problem, Not a Power Problem

My biggest mistake was that I often analyzed land access primarily through policy and programmatic lenses such as bylaws, zoning, and administrative barriers rather than through power and ownership structures. This can inadvertently center governments as the problem-solvers instead of positioning communities as the stewards and decision-makers. So –in my opinion– Land access isn’t just about regulatory permits; it’s about redistributing agency, control, and narrative.

Who owns the narrative controls everything.

My advice is to shift from “policy innovation” to power redistribution — frame community land trusts and co-ops as instruments of structural repair, not pilot programs. Here some of my guiding questions for you to ask yourself:

What forms of power (economic, cultural, or narrative) would need to be redistributed for communities to truly self-determine their food futures?
How can community-led and models reflect not only equity, but ancestral memory — the repair of relationships, not just the redistribution of assets?
What would it look like if policy frameworks were written from the lived experiences of those most impacted by Land and housing inequities?
In your own work or community, what are the unseen systems that still reproduce dependency rather than self-determination?

With these questions I invite you to think critically about power, structure, and belonging within land and food systems.

From “Protection” to Access and Equity

A 2018 white paper by the Institute for Sustainable Food Systems titled Protection Is Not Enough found that while British Columbia’s Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) has succeeded in protecting farmland from development, it has failed to ensure access and affordability.

Farmland prices have soared 400–500%. Institute for Sustainable Food Systems, 2018

Since the 1990s, farmland prices have increased exponentially in the last 30 years, driven by speculation and non-farming investors. In some regions, one in four buyers are not farmers.The report urged regional governments to go beyond regulation — to become co-stewards of land alongside communities. That shift still hasn’t happened.

The learnings

Through the REF Project, led by Iyé in partnership with CRFAIR and regional collaborators, we’ve spent the past year researching and listening — to farmers, policy-makers, and community members — to gather the evidence needed to implement shared land stewardship models. These models are designed for communities who have been racialized, displaced, and excluded from accessing Land for food and medicine growing, aiming to reflect our identities, stories, and futures across Coast Salish territories.

We’ve learned that wealth creation must be tied to community health. A community with access to Land, food, and culture is not merely surviving — it is compounding value across generations.

In April 2025, we convened conversations with land trust stewards across the region to deepen our understanding of what belonging to Land truly means. Together, we explored land trusts not as technical tools, but as living frameworks of relationship — tools that reconnect people to place, purpose, and collective responsibility.

Yet a recurring concern emerged: economic sustainability beyond ownership.

One participant summarized it powerfully:

“Owning land is not enough — land must feed its own stewardship.” - Anonymous participant.

Too many land trusts have failed because they lacked an economic engine. The lesson is clear: cooperatives and land trusts must be reframed as climate-resilient economic infrastructure — vehicles that generate and circulate value through community wellbeing, education, and food sovereignty.

The group also recognized that lawful Land access for Indigenous, Black, immigrant, and equity-denied communities must be both cultural and spiritual. Stewardship, legacy, and justice are not separate ideas — they are woven together. Several models were studied, from Québec’s social trust frameworks to BC’s emerging community commons experiments, each showing that there is no single blueprint, only the shared ethic of care behind the structure.

The clearest insight was the need to separate but connect three roles:

Ownership — removing Land from speculation.
Stewardship — caring for Land collectively.
Residency and Use — living and working in right relationship to Land.

Ancestral Garden from the Ways We Eat Event.

When these elements are balanced, Land is protected not only legally, but morally and spiritually.

“Reclaiming ancestral relationships to land is both a lawful act and a healing act — one that restores belonging where it was taken.” It is a process of re-entanglement between people and place with the capacity to restore coherence where fragmentation once existed, bridging the physical and the spiritual, the seen and the unseen. In this way, belonging is not merely inherited; it is continuously practiced and renewed through right relationships.

Where We Find Success

Across the country, a wave of community-led initiatives are reclaiming the link between land, culture, and food. From Indigenous Food Sovereignty Conferences, W̱SÁNEĆ Land Trust, and others.

The Canadian Black Farmers Association (CBFA) is another example. The association –led by TK Ajayi – unites African, Caribbean, and Black Canadian farmers to pursue land ownership and grow culturally rooted crops. Through partnerships with federal agencies, it is developing a Black Farmers Hub in British Columbia — a space for training, mentorship, and heritage crop production that carries the memory of migration and belonging.

Their work illustrates a transformative truth: food sovereignty begins with land sovereignty.

Meanwhile, the Capital Regional District’s Bear Hill Land Service is reimagining what public stewardship can mean. It’s about more than farmland — it’s about weaving equity into the DNA of how agricultural programs are built. Keep your eyes on this one; it’s a signal of what’s possible when public systems begin to shift.

The district is moving toward direct invitations and relationship-based outreach to engage racialized and immigrant farmers, piloting low-cost municipal land leases that reduce administrative barriers, and planning a regional land trust umbrella where public bodies can hold land securely while empowering communities to steward and cultivate it according to their own ecological and cultural values.

Our beloved Amaranth. Designed by Razan Meereb

Lastly, the support we’ve received from the Capital Region Food and Agriculture Initiatives Roundtable and the Victoria Community Food Hub Society has been exceptional. They have steered all the meetings with City of Saanich Staff and the Capital Region District, looking at the land banks to see what plots are available. Their decade of community-driven work continues to be a source of learning and inspiration, and I’m deeply grateful for the knowledge and collaboration they’ve shared throughout this journey.

The Call

Despite growing recognition that nutrient-dense, culturally rooted foods grown locally directly shape our social determinants of health, food is still largely viewed — and measured — as a commodity rather than a relationship. We lack localized evaluation tools and disaggregated data to understand how eating patterns, access, and cultural food practices impact racialized communities in the Capital Region. Without this data, it becomes difficult to design interventions that reflect lived realities. Encouragingly, farm-to-school and food literacy programs are beginning to recognize the need for culturally rooted curriculum — approaches that not only feed children but also teach belonging, identity, and care through food.

I deeply feel that as a community, we can no longer wait for others to design our future. It is time to plan accordingly — to organize, to build, and to invest in ourselves with the same long-term vision that corporations and governments use to shape theirs.

To the youth: you are not inheriting scarcity; you are inheriting memory. Within that memory lies a blueprint for creation that does not rely on extraction or permission.
To policymakers: treat community infrastructure as national security — because food, land, and belonging are what sustain a nation.
To investors: the greatest returns of the next century will not be measured in profit margins but in health, resilience, and cultural continuity.