Resources

The report outlines CAFF’s core policy goals to drive meaningful progress toward land reform in California. These goals and subcategories present a suite of policy strategies and ideas that we aim to pursue in various forms in order to make strides in creating a future where land is accessible and we ensure justice and equity, respect Indigenous sovereignty, and invest resources in those systematically denied for centuries.
This policy platform outlines actionable solutions toward greater land equity and focuses on the following core goals:
- Guarantee land security for beginning and underserved farmers and land stewards
- Curb land accumulation and consolidation by the few while ensuring access and benefits for many communities who currently lack such access.
- Promote farmer cooperatives to facilitate greater collective power and management of resources, sustainable practices, and stronger local food economies
- Reform insufficient policies and programs to facilitate greater allocation of resources to address land access inequities

"In the Struggle lays out historic, subterranean confrontations over water rights, labor organizing, and the corruption of democratic principles and public institutions. As California’s rural economy increasingly consolidates into the hands of land barons and corporations, the scholars’ work shifts from analyzing problems and formulating research methods to organizing resistance and building community power. Throughout their engagement, they face intense political blowback as powerful economic interests work to pollute and undermine scientific inquiry and the civic purposes of public universities. The findings and the pressure put upon the work of these scholars—Paul Taylor, Ernesto Galarza, and Isao Fujimoto among them—are a damning indictment of the greed and corruption that flourish under industrial-scale agriculture. After almost a century of empirical evidence and published research, a definitive finding becomes clear: land consolidation and economic monopoly are fundamentally detrimental to democracy and the well-being of rural societies."