A-Infos (en) UK, ACG, Jackdaw #24 - Mobilise for Land Justice: Now more than ever! (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

The Land Reform Act 2025 was passed in November by the Scottish 
Parliament, the latest in a series of land reform acts. However, land 
justice campaigners do not think it will make much of a dent in the 
concentration of land ownership, which is only getting worse, with 421 
landowners owning 50% of the private rural land, compared to 440 in 
2012. Land being in the hands of so few in Scotland has resulted in a 
rural housing crisis, inflated land prices, depleted biodiversity, an 
unsustainable industrial forestry sector, an inequitable food system and 
an agricultural sector which is growing more consolidated.
According to Josh Noble of Community Land Scotland: "...we must also 
recognise that the bill does not go far enough to bring about real land 
reform and change Scotland's unequal land ownership pattern. It does not 
intervene structurally in the land market. It does not assess who is 
buying land in Scotland. It does not provide routes to challenge 
existing ownership. It does not change the financial incentives that 
encourage land accumulation." 
(https://www.thenational.scot/news/25668145.land-reform-pathway-tobuilding-true-people-power/)
The structural issues in the land market, together with the way money is 
to be made from 'natural capital' (e.g. trading for carbon credits), 
means that we are seeing a massive increase in 'mega-lairds'. Most of 
these are absentee landowners: investors, billionaires and corporations. 
They often claim to be managing the land for nature, but their main aim 
is profits for themselves and marginalisation of local communities.
For example the Dane, Anders Povlsen, is the biggest private landowner 
in Scotland totalling around 88,406ha, largely in Sutherland, the 
Cairngorms, and Lochaber. Strathconon Estates in Ross-shire are another 
rapidly growing mega-laird, headed by Lego heiress Sofie Kirk 
Kristiansen, with land totalling 42,730 hectares. Another meg-laird is 
Oxygen Conservation (OC), an Exeter-based company with a publicly stated 
aim to 'help save the world'. They have taken control of 13 estates 
across the UK from Cornwall to the Highlands over the past four years. 
They have quickly acquired five estates in Scotland which total over 
48,000 acres. This includes the 12,000 -acre Invergeldie estate in 
Perthshire, over 15,000 acres of Dorback Estate in the Cairngorms, 
11,366 acres near Newcastleton in the Borders, 523 acres of the Firth 
Tay and the recent purchase of the controversial 9,301 acre Kinrara 
Estate, west of Aviemore, from BrewDog. 
(https://www.communitylandscotland.org.uk/scotlands-new-mega-lairds-now-controlling-huge-areas-of-scotland/).
The Alternative
Land justice campaigners walked from Skye to Glasgow to highlight the 
issues faced by communities as a result of the long history of 
dispossession. They made clear links between what has happened in 
Scotland and elsewhere around the world.
"Communities were cleared from their lands by an empire that mostly 
turned those evicted into labourers working at the furnace of empire's 
factories in Glasgow, or into colonisers sent from the quaysides to 
evict other communities from their lands elsewhere."
Their goal is to fundamentally change the system, implying that we need 
a revolution that overthrows capitalism, even if they do explicitly say 
this.
"In the hills and the cities, in the global north and global south, how 
do we reclaim lands and buildings that were stolen and are now used to 
make some extremely wealthy and others to struggle? How do we reclaim 
our past and future, through our actions in the present? How do we build 
trust and solidarity across our differences, so that we can finally end 
the system of domination?"
They made sure to engage with local communities, listening to people's 
stories and sharing experiences of land injustice. Such actions, linking 
people in the city with communities in the rural areas, are vital as 
they show that land justice is needed everywhere: land needs to be used 
for the needs of people and nature, and not for profit.
(The full story of the walk can be found at: 
https://www.grassroots2global.org/land-justice-walk).

https://www.anarchistcommunism.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/jackdaw24_low-res-1.pdf
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