Placing land and food struggles in agriculture-industry power asymmetry: insights from Wanbao Village, Taiwan

Abstract

Land grab scholarship hitherto has seldom discussed about place, while alternative food networks (AFNs) scholars often overlook socio-spatial issues beyond agri-food systems. This paper addresses these gaps with a place-based approach. It examines two land struggles and three AFNs initiatives in Wanbao Village in Taiwan, showing how they co-shaped and protected the community’s sense of place from the threat of domestic land grabbing. Moreover, it demonstrates the structural linkages between land and food struggles that undermined AFNs' ‘(re-)localization' strategy, calling for their combined efforts in research and activism to defend marginalized agricultural/rural space from land frontier-making in a capitalist-industrial society.