The role that local authorities can play to regulate farmland highly depends on the possibilities that national frameworks afford for action, as well as on the financial resources they may be able to dedicate to specific land and agriculture policies. For instance, in Flanders, a large part of cities’ revenue depends on the number of inhabitants and enterprises – in other words, on how much land has been developed for housing and businesses. Cities need to find alternative financial resources if they are to protect much-needed open space. This handbook makes the case that advocacy is a non-negligible area of work for local authorities to create more possibilities for proactive land action at the local level.

Carrying out experience-based advocacy

• Often, local authorities are first-hand observers of the shortcomings of national legal land frameworks. They can provide feedback to legislators about the hurdles they meet in implementing regulatory tools locally and thus contribute to their improvement. A local view about possible incoherence between national, regional, and local level principles of action should also be integrated when revising existing laws or making new ones.

• Local governments are also the best placed to qualify the type of means – in terms of budget as well as political mandates and responsibilities – they need to make a difference on the ground. They can advocate for the margins of freedom and the level of decentralisation needed to carry out efficient action.

• Finally, by applying high standards and innovating for access to land, local authorities can exemplify possible avenues for change and inspire legislative bodies. They can also document lessons learned from their work and draw conclusions on policy changes needed to support the upscaling and transfer of land innovations.

It is very difficult as a city to stop the change in function of agricultural buildings and the surrounding land, because the Flemish law allows it." - Eva Kerselaers, Policy Officer Agriculture and Horticulture. City of Ghent, Belgium

Using institutional channels and coalitions

• Local governments have access to more direct institutional channels and have a more important political weight to appeal to senators or parliamentary representatives. They can use these platforms to convey claims for enabling access to land for agroecology and new entrants.

• Local authorities can also have seats or representatives in bodies that establish certain policies. They can contribute to gearing policy by actively participating and channelling their constituents’ voices in these instances.

• Using coalition representation – e.g. taking a membership in a mayors association or local authorities network – can be a more effective way to carry out lobbying, including at the EU level (through international local authorities networks such as ICLEI, NALAS, Energy Cities, and so on).

Advocating based on international frameworks

• The United Nations’ voluntary guidelines on land tenure, Declaration on the Rights of Peasants, and overarching sustainability frameworks such as Sustainable Development Goals or climate agreements can provide grounds for local authorities to demand more enabling policy frameworks to improve land systems. These soft law instruments are meant to hold signatory countries accountable, any local government or citizen is legitimate in advocating for their application.

• Local authorities can themselves subscribe to standards developed internationally for local governments; e.g. the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact which was signed by cities from all over the world committed "to develop sustainable food systems that are inclusive, resilient, safe and diverse, that provide healthy and affordable food to all people in a human rights-based framework, that minimize waste and conserve biodiversity while adapting to and mitigating impacts of climate change”.

Complementarily to direct intervention in land markets, local authorities can leverage financial instruments such as taxation, subsidies, or local budgets to catalyse local agricultural dynamics. Depending on the degree of freedom to set local rules in the matter, these indirect interventions can:

• Incentivise better land use and land stewardship

• Support new generations in accessing land

• Help local agriculture deliver public goods more efficiently

Encouraging better land use and land stewardship through tax and incentives

Curtailing bad land uses through fiscal instruments can entail, among other possibilities:

• taxing land development;

• taxing more heavily land transfers that are above market prices;

• increasing property taxes for abandoned farmland.

While incentivising better uses may be done through:

• Tax rebates for small farms (e.g. in Spain, the municipality and Spanish government can set tax rebates on the Real Estate Tax for farmland for personal and family farming).

• Real estate tax exemptions for owners who agree to lease their land to farmers. For instance, the town of Claira in France led a programme to fight land abandonment. The municipal council voted to exempt owners from paying the communal share of the property tax on farmland made available to growers for 5 years.

• Payments for the delivery of public services. While this is a vast area of action that goes beyond land intervention, payments can be directed to incentivising specific care for the land or applied with surface criteria (increased for small farms).

Supporting generational renewal in agriculture

Supporting land transfer processes to new generations through fiscal and financial tools can entail:

• Exemptions of succession taxes for family farm transfers. For instance, the Catalan government facilitates transfers through succession and donations tax exemptions.

• Subsidising farm partnerships or internships prefigurating succession (paying for internship stipends of new farmers, allocating more investment subsidies to farm partnerships, etc.).

• Financing counselling for retiring farmers and land restructuring related to succession (e.g. diversification of farms, new investments).

While transfers that do not benefit new farmers can be discouraged through:

• taxing operations that lead to land concentration (taxes above a specific area of farmland held);

• applying differentiated support to large farms (e.g. lower investment subsidies).

A general lowering or exemption of succession or real estate taxes on farmland can be counter-productive. If applied in an indiscriminate way, these measures can incentivise private purchases by non-farmers, who invest in land as capital to transfer to children. If possible, tax arrangements should be tied to the continuation of the farming activity.

Help local agriculture deliver public goods more efficiently

Providing a favourable environment for agroecological farmers and minimising the withdrawal from farming also entails acting on dimensions that precede access to land, such as farmer training, and that follow farm set-up (e.g. developing local markets, life-long training and other measures to ensure small farms remain viable in the long term).

Prior to farm access, local authorities can for instance:

• finance infrastructure and services to restore the land to viable farming (e.g. creating an access path, providing access to water, draining land, paying a contractor to remove bush and scrubs, etc.);

• subsidise agroecological education and training programmes for farmers;

• fund or provide public land for the setting up of farm incubator;

• facilitate access to housing for new entrants.

To help maintain dynamic, locally-oriented, and sustainable agriculture local authorities may:

1. Fund the development of short supply chains including:

• financing infrastructure for food processing (e.g. collective food labs that farmers can rent punctually, post-harvest season);

• funding the creation of local retailing outlets, backing the development of a local brand and other farm-to-fork projects;

• make strategic use of public procurement (procuring food from local farms).

1. Back farm diversification and other strategies to improve the viability of farms in the long term

• fund agrotourism programmes;

• support the maintenance of ecological infrastructures, healthy soils, etc.

• help farmers receive life-long training in diverse areas (business, diversification, etc.).

As agroecological farming contributes to major environmental objectives, local authorities may support it as part of their environmental schemes. In this way, they can draw from environmental regulations and policy instruments – which are often more developed than those for farmland and agriculture – as well as from environmental budgets, which may have more dedicated resources.

There are increasing interfaces between urban planning and agriculture. But while it is clear today that small-scale and organic farming adds value to local development – as an asset for food security, climate resilience, and territorial attractivity – there is still work to do to stop considering farmland as a reserve for urban development. In order to better achieve the protection of farmland in land use planning, this handbook advocates for:

1. developing a shared vision for farmland in planning documents;

2. leveraging planning tools to safeguard farmland;

3. making long-term decisions and exemplifying good practices.

Developing a vision and strategy for agriculture, recognising its multiple contributions to local development and territorial balance

To prioritise land stewardship in local land plans, local authorities can back planning processes with the following dimensions:

• Engaged planning. Going beyond the consultation of traditional experts and institutions, local authorities can ensure that land use planning processes engage with communities, non-profits, businesses, and preferred land users (e.g. new entrants, organic farmers). Addressing the topic of farmland in interaction with other key planning topics – housing, infrastructure, community facilities, among others – can provide a deeper and more coherent vision of how farmland should be used, and under what conditions land use changes are possible.

→ Learn more about organising democratic dialogue on land in the “” section.

• Interacting with other frameworks. At state level, some countries (e.g. Germany, France) have started defining long-term objectives to curtail the loss of farmland. Spatial planning documents set for regional or provincial levels also increasingly put forward sustainable development targets. Ensuring good coordination between planning at national, regional and local levels in terms of objectives, priorities and speed of action is an important task, which can be better performed if the cross-participation of different levels of governments in planning processes is well organised.

• Setting specific territorial goals for agriculture. Local authorities can also inform decision-making by creating a better picture of the contributions of agriculture to local development – e.g. measuring benefits in terms of food production, carbon sinking, risk management (see table “agriculture and territorial risk management” below) – and of the amount of land and type of farming needed to meet public goals (see Zoom box on PARCEL, online modelling for promoting local food systems). There is also a need to work into spatial planning considerations on the needs of farms and farmers, e.g. need for ecosystems preservation, need for land coherence beyond the farm unit, etc.

Agriculture and territorial risk management

Earmarking land for agriculture

Local authorities need regulatory tools to implement the protection of farmland in land use plans and to operationalise them. This varies across countries. Depending on your context, you may be able to leverage:

• Area zoning/designation, designating areas for agriculture, nature conservation, and forestry, in addition to areas for development, urban densification, risk management, and so on.

• Protected/strategic agricultural areas, demonstrating the public utility purpose of specific agriculture areas and applying additional land use protection (e.g. legal procedure to change use). See the Zoom box below on Protected agricultural zones and perimeters for the protection of agricultural and natural peri-urban areas in France.

• Proactive greenbelt planning/densification policies to limit sprawl, encourage urban/city centre regeneration and brownfield development and create permanently open (and potentially productive) spaces around cities.

• Proactive designation/labelling of natural sites where biodiversity protection can be associated with sustainable agriculture practices (parks, monuments, Natura 2000 areas, etc.).

• Conservation easements/voluntary agreements between farmers and the local government to maintain land in farming for a set term (in return for contributions by the local governments, for instance, lower land use taxation rates).

• Developer tax/compensation mechanisms, requiring developers to restore areas and natural infrastructures to compensate for the destruction of others or taxing development to provide resources for conservation/public purchase of agricultural land elsewhere.

• Purchase/transfer of development rights, to remove or transfer development rights from agricultural areas to areas designated for development (for denser urban development).

Some planning tools can be leveraged to favour specific land users, e.g. permits for farm housing and buildings (which can be delivered only for specific buildings needed in organic farming for instance), or infrastructure development for access to specific farmlands.

Ensuring the stability of zoning and perspectives for agricultural development

Besides regulatory protection, consistent action and exemplary behaviours from local authorities is an instrument of success to keep land in agriucltural use. In many countries, a vicious circle fuels urban sprawl:

⇒ Urban development has led to frequent land use changes.

⇒ Landowners entertain the idea that their land may become buildable, and thus more valuable. They prefer not to rent the land to farmers or rent it only through short-term contracts that do not allow investing/establishing a farm business on the land (e.g. land is rented for grazing horses).

⇒ As a result of landowners’ resistance, there is less farming and farmers on peri-urban land and thus urban development becomes justified because lands are abandoned or underused.

Food, farming, and environmental policies have become areas of rising interest for local authorities. This responds to the dual pressure of demands from citizens (for local food, responses to climate change, green landscapes, clean air…) and from central governments who ask local authorities to meet objectives around carbon-storing, densified urbanisation, supply of organic food in schools, etc.

Decentralisation processes that occurred in the past 40 years have also transferred new responsibilities to local authorities to address these issues. In most countries, they hold a key role in land use planning and taxation systems. They can also catalyse policies and orient their budgets towards specific territorial development strategies. Efficient regulation for access to land can combine for instance:

• coherent urban planning documents (with precise zoning to protect land and concrete monitoring);

• strategic subsidies (to improve local farming infrastructure, training options for new farmers, etc.);

• tax incentives policies (e.g. providing exemptions for owners who rent farmland)

• strategic use of public procurement.

Are there regulatory tools to protect farmland locally? How can I create a more enabling policy environment for the development of small-scale agroecological farming? Check the infographic for a quick overview of how to act, and read the sections below for more information on the roles that local authorities can play regarding planning, administering, catalysing and advocating for sounder land policies.

Local authorities sometimes play a role in the local implementation and monitoring of national laws regarding land access and land markets. They can also activate tools at the local level to enable better use and distribution of land.

Policy tools to intervene in land markets vary across countries, and so does the role of local authorities in applying them. A few direct intervention options are summarised in the following table. Depending on your context, these may inspire you to become more proactive with tools that exist in your country or to advocate for a reform of national frameworks (see advocate section) if you need more land tools and powers for local authorities.

Intervening in land markets, possible tools and roles of local authorities

Other land redistribution schemes exist, but they are often part of larger land reform processes and are often carried out as part of a national policy rather than decided at local level.

Relevant examples: Applying regulatory schemes to intervene in land markets