#agroecological farming

[farmer-v]

[...] a productive critique of capitalism is essential to the struggle for food sovereignty and agroecology. The pillars of the capitalist food system – concentration of market power, vertical integration, exploitation of labour, and increasing corporate control of the resources required for food production – are completely at odds with the pillars of food sovereignty. The farm income crisis, food insecurity, diet‐related disease epidemics, and the externalization of environmental destruction are all just symptoms of a deeper root problem.

Ayla Fenton, National Farmers’ Union, Via Campensina 

[farmer-v]

Herrero et al. (2010) estimate that mixed crop and livestock systems supply 50% of the worlds’ cereal, 60% of the world’s meat and 75% of the world’s dairy production. Much of this production is locally produced and consumed, and provides the main source of food for the world’s 1 billion poor (defined as living on less than $1/day).

Kremen et al. “Diversified Farming Systems: An Agroecological, Systems-Based Alternative to Modern Industrial Agriculture”. Ecology and Society, Vol. 17, No. 4 (2012).

[farmer-v]

Here is a sneak peak at my recent presentation on Traditional Peasant Agroecology! I will be uploading a video/voice recording of the presentation on here soon and would be glad to hear any of your interests or questions relating to this topic. 

Would you like access to relevant peer-reviewed literature on this topic via Google Drive or another sharing source? Do you want to learn more about traditional agriculture? Would you like book recommendations? Let me know! [email protected] 

[foodramblings]

Climate Change and Food Movements

Jedediah Purdey has an interesting piece in the Huffington Post today (Link)

Here is part of this article:

"Personal action, even ordinary collective action, is frustratingly ineffective against climate change. Greenhouse gases emitted in one place are equally diffused through the global atmosphere a year later. Self-restraint, even by fair-sized countries, gets swamped by everyone else's self-indulgence.

  By contrast, a person can draw the circuit of eating close enough to make a real difference in her own health and, if she coordinates with growers, in the health of a piece of land. Community springs up naturally around growing, selling, preparing, and eating food, where every step of the process makes a difference. There isn't much community around climate change because it so thoroughly frustrates the personal and shared acts that form a community practice.

This comparison raises a distressing thought. It's often said about eating disorders that people who feel their lives are out of their control focus great acts of will on the small area they can control, their own eating. A cynic could see the food-conscious United States as frantically engaged in a symbolic environmental micro-practice that we can understand and control, while an all-pervading macro-problem broods and prepares to wreck large parts of the world we know. Maybe there is something to this.

But there's another way of looking at the two issues that is more hopeful. For all their practical differences, climate and food are both cardinal examples of the ecological insight that made environmentalism possible: everything is connected, so what we drop into rivers, winds, or soil ends up in our bloodstreams. Flashes of this thought appeared in the nineteenth century and much earlier, but as a guiding principle it really dates from after World War Two. Widespread appreciation of it goes back no further than Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, published fifty years ago, which detailed the silent, terrible, invisible journey of pesticides through the capillaries of a poisoned world."

He raises the useful question of how do we stop the current food movement from simply being an elitist fad and into something that profoundly changes the culture and ethic of how we eat, which in turn shapes how we engage with broader ecological principles. Sitting here in Cape Town with a much smaller, much more elite food movement and yet with a food system that still retains some elements of a more ecological approach, and a strong export sector we're left with a slightly different set of variables, but the same fundamental challenge. 

[foodramblings]

La Via Campesina in Africa Statement

"Positions of La Via Campesina in Africa Region 1

We believe that…

Agroecological farming as practiced by small holder farmers, and Food Sovereignty policies, offer the only reasonable and feasible solutions to these multiple challenges facing our Region.

Only agroecological methods (also called sustainable agriculture, organic farming, ecological agriculture, etc.) can restore soils and agroecosystems that have been degraded by industrial agriculture.  Even chemicals do not work after severe degradation, but with agroecology we can restore soil organic matter and fertility, along with functional agroecosystem processes and services like nutrient recycling, soil biology, natural pest control, etc.  We have seen that small holder agroecological systems have much greater total productivity than industrial monocultures, with little or no purchased inputs, reducing the dependency and increasing the autonomy and well-being of rural families while producing abundant and healthy food for our peoples. Global research by La Via Campesina demonstrates that Sustainable Peasant Agriculture Can Feed the World, based on endogenous knowledge and agroecology.

The global food system currently generates between 44 and 57% of global greenhouse gas emissions, almost all of which could be eliminated by transforming the food system based on the principles of agroecology, agrarian reform and Food Sovereignty.  Sustainable Peasant Agriculture Cools the Planet, and this is our best solution to climate change.

In order to adapt to a changing climate we need the greater resiliency of diversified agroecological systems (and water conservation and harvesting, watershed management, agroforestry, ground cover, etc.) and the genetic diversity of local peasant seeds and peasant seed systems.  We demand that our governments withdraw support from the corporate seed industry with it’s standardized and often genetically modified seeds, and instead support peasant seed systems based on recovering, saving, multiplying, storing, breeding and exchanging seeds at the local level.

Our national education and research systems are heavily biased toward the very industrial agriculture practices that are killing our planet and contributing to the failure of Africans to feed ourselves.  We demand the reorientation of research toward farmer-led methods and agroecology, and the transformation of curricula at primary and secondary schools levels, and in higher education, to focus on agroecology.

We call for an end to trade liberalization and the renewed protection of domestic markets so that African farmers can receive the fair prices that will enable us to boost production and feed our peoples.

We call on governments to create comprehensive programs to support agroecological farming by small holders and to rebuild Food Sovereignty, including genuine agrarian reform and the defense of peasant lands from land grabbing, the reorientation of government food procurement from agribusiness toward purchasing ecological food at fair prices from small holders to supply schools, hospitals, institutional cafeterias, etc., as a way to support farmers and to provide healthy food to children, sick people and government employees, and programs of production credit for small holders engaged in ecological farming instead of subsidies tied to chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

At the COP-16 in Cancun, Mexico, the governments of the world (except Bolivia) met to conduct business with TNCs who traffic in false solutions to climate changes like agrofuels, GMOs, carbon markets, REDD+, etc., instead of meeting to seriously and effectively reverse global warming through real emission reductions by Developed Countries and the transformation of our global food, energy and transport systems.  We demand that our governments behave more responsibly at COP-17 in Durban, South Africa, refusing to sign agreements imposed by the North and by TNCs, instead supporting the Cochabamba Principles on the Climate and the Rights of the Mother Earth."  (FOR MUCH MORE SEE HERE)