Flanders, a region without smallholders

Farmers are going extinct in the Belgian context, and historical smallholders are the first ones to be pushed out. These dynamics widely differ in the three regions. The reasons are numerous and vary between lock-ins in international market logics, the exporting industry, investment logics, international and regional politics, but also climate change, soil depletion and flooding problems. In this chapter, we will focus on the loss of smallholders in relation to the issue of access to land for farming, revealing different degrees of food-disabling land policies by contrasting Flanders to Brussels and Wallonia.