The literature highlights the negative impacts of urban sprawl on landscape, environment, and food security. In Western countries, the current challenge on the urban fringe and on abandoned land in rural areas is to (re)develop farming in ways that meet the urban societal demands for local food, agrarian landscapes, and preserved environment. Perceptions of justice or injustice are pivotal aspects in land transactions and can become barriers to farmland preservation and farming development. Thus, in this paper we propose an analytical framework based on the scientific literature and on an inductive approach to analyse social justice issues in farmland preservation and development policies on the urban fringe. Applying this analytical framework to three French case studies shows that recent French policy instruments aimed at farmland preservation tend to neglect justice issues and do not address issues related to local food provisioning. Around Montpellier, they exclude new farmers and allow dominant farmers or farmers’ unions to capture resources such as agricultural land and rights to build farm structures, hindering the renewal and diversification of farms that would be necessary to develop multifunctional agriculture and local food systems.