Line Algoed

Through an interdisciplinary conversation in the context of the project: Food Insecurity in Times of Climate Change: Sharing and Learning from Bottom-up Responses in the Caribbean Region, we expose the voices, history and knowledge of local communities and activists in Barbuda, Belize, Colombia (San Andres and Providencia), Jamaica and Puerto Rico to the food insecurity and ecological crisis in the Caribbean. The composite effect of climate injustice and the COVID-19 pandemic is outlined as anthropogenic crises that thrive on inequality and dependency in the Caribbean. The community experiences of the project countries reveal an emergence of knowledge and diverse ways of producing food and relating to the environment as alternatives to development. It is a criticism of the solutions imposed from above that ignore the knowledge, needs and practices of popular ecologies in the Caribbean.

Between 2002 and 2004, residents from seven informal settlements located along the Caño Martín Peña, a highly polluted channel in San Juan, Puerto Rico, established a community land trust to regularize land tenure and protect the historically marginalized barrios against the threat of displacement, as an unintended consequence of the ecological restoration of the channel. This article looks at the Fideicomiso de la Tierra del Caño Martín Peña (the Caño Martín Peña Community Land Trust or Caño CLT) from a political ecological perspective, as it aims to identify how the interests, policies and discourse of political and economic elites function to perpetuate the vulnerability of residents in unplanned settlements, and how the Caño CLT is an effective instrument to counter this process. The Caño CLT supports on-site rehabilitation by taking land out of a hostile market, reinforcing solidarity networks and democratizing sustainable planning through ongoing participatory planning-action-...

Chapter 12 in "On Common Ground: International Perspectives on the Community Land Trust". This chapter is the result of a collaborative research project between a nongovernmental organization based in Rio de Janeiro, Catalytic Communities, and Latin America’s first community land trust — one of the world’s only CLTs in an informal settlement—the Fideicomiso de la Tierra del Caño Martín Peña in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The aim of the research project was to study the potential of CLT instruments and strategies developed by the communities along the Martín Peña channel as a way to tackle insecure tenure in Rio’s favela communities.

Between 2002 and 2004, residents from seven informal settlements
located along the Caño Martín Peña, a highly polluted channel in San
Juan, Puerto Rico, established a community land trust to regularize
land tenure and protect the historically marginalized barrios against the
threat of displacement, as an unintended consequence of the ecological
restoration of the channel. This article looks at the Fideicomiso de la
Tierra del Caño Martín Peña (the Caño Martín Peña Community Land
Trust or Caño CLT) from a political ecological perspective, as it aims
to identify how the interests, policies and discourse of political and
economic elites function to perpetuate the vulnerability of residents in
unplanned settlements, and how the Caño CLT is an effective
instrument to counter this process. The Caño CLT supports on-site
rehabilitation by taking land out of a hostile market, reinforcing
solidarity networks and democratizing sustainable planning through
ongoing participatory planning-action-reflection processes. It is a
critical piece of the wider comprehensive development ENLACE
Caño Martín Peña Project, whose benefits include reducing the risk of
flooding and restoring the environmental qualities of the mangrove
channel. The article considers that informal settlements like those in
the Martín Peña area are often located in a city’s most environmentally
vulnerable, yet ecologically and geographically valuable areas, prone to
land grabs after disasters. By looking at public discourse in Puerto Rico
and the U.S. in the aftermath of the devastating hurricanes that struck
the island in 2017, we analyze the assumed links between informality
and vulnerability and how these assumptions are used to spur public
support for displacements. The article argues that documenting and theorizing the knowledges produced by the enduring resistance of the
Martín Peña communities can support residents in unplanned
settlements in the Global South to come together and create
mechanisms that protect land and counter vulnerabilization.