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Paper short abstract:

In the constantly transforming land and water-scape of the Scheldt’s estuary, recent changes in water management are re-shuffling the entanglement of land, water, humans, non-humans and capital. This paper builds on fieldwork in grazing pastures to reflect on uprooted commons.

Paper long abstract:

Polderization – the process of draining, enclosing and claiming tidal and/or coastal land – has been ongoing for nearly a thousand years in the estuary of the Scheldt, allowing humans to settle and farm on ground previously occupied by water and marshes. After WW2 this process developed exponentially and most of the regions’ wetlands were drained to give further room for mechanized agriculture. Locally-elected water boards, mostly constituted of land-owning farmers, manage the region’s commoned drainage network (c.f. Ingold, 2017) to maintain land suitable for agriculture. Severe flooding in the late twentieth century followed by a growing awareness of the threat of rising sea levels then led to a shift towards ‘giving more room to the river and its nature’ (c.f. Goeldner-Gianella, 2007), reclaiming agricultural lands for the river. This shift has been strongly backed by the Port of Antwerp as it enables its expansion (Zitouni, 2020). Furthermore, severe droughts in recent years have accelerated the restructuring of farmers’ commoned water management network moving it into the hands of a centralised bureaucracy.

In this constantly transforming land and water-scape, this paper focuses on dairy farm pastures as sites of production of the plantationocene. Based on long-term anthropological fieldwork, it will present an ethnography of the hydro-social and extractive cycles that produce these pastures. As the entanglements and co-production of land, water, humans, non-humans and capital transform to meet new societal priorities, this site of ongoing land reclamation provides a nuanced case of uprooted commons.