Originally published by Food Tank

Bonnie Haugen and her family run a grazing dairy farm in Southeastern Minnesota. She recently spoke about the impacts of corporate concentration on her community in front of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform: “When we bought these acres 29 years ago, there were about 12 dairy farms within a three mile radius of us. Now, there’s only one other dairy with approximately 400 cows aside from us. What I’ve seen in my community mirrors national trends: the pressure of corporate ag has taken a fair opportunity away from my neighbors who wanted to keep or pass on dairy farming.” 

Squeezed by inflation that is pushing up the cost of both everyday goods and farm inputs, Midwest farmers increasingly support candidates committed to busting up corporate monopolies in food and farming. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, for instance, in a tight re-election race against Republican opponent Jim Schultz, has led the charge on tackling anticompetitive practices in the agricultural sector that are contributing to inflation. 

“Three of my grandkids ages 8, 6, and 3 want to farm,” continued Haugen in her July 2022 statement, “I want them to have the opportunity to farm without being a serf to corporate ag.” Haugen is a supporter of the Land Stewardship Action Fund (LSAF), dedicated to electing leaders that promote family farming and strong rural economies. 

Farmers Doubly Squeezed

Farmers don’t just grow food, of course; they also consume food–and all manner of basic goods. This means farmers are doubly squeezed by the higher cost of both production and consumption. On the consumption side, farmers and non-farmers alike have felt the increase in living expenses; grocery prices, for instance, are up 13 percent from a year ago. With a few large firms dominating every step in the food chain—from retailers like Walmart to processors like Nestle to seed and chemical giants like Bayer—consolidation is a major contributor to high food prices. 

Former Whole Foods executive and retail market expert Errol Schweizer explains: “Corporate concentration is the strategy, but the goal is extreme profiteering, redistributed upwards to investors and executives. Market concentration increases prices to consumers while hurting worker bargaining power Squeezing farmers is just the first step in a radically inequitable value chain.” 

The Midwest has been beset by precarious farm incomes for decades—dipping into the red more often than not, which means assuming more and more debt. As food analyst Ken Meter points out in his book Building Community Food Webs, between 1996 and 2017, growing corn resulted in an aggregate loss of US$524 per acre while cumulative losses for wheat farmers totaled US$1,236 per acre.

“The commodity system draws wealth out of rural communities,” Meter said. “Over the past century, farmers have really only made money when there was some external crisis, such as the oil crisis of 1973, the global housing finance crisis of 2008, and the war in Ukraine. Otherwise, net income keeps falling even as food prices rise for consumers. But the monopolies in the middle profit every year.”

A new report from Midwest Healthy Ag confirms that Midwest farmers are struggling under the weight of rising costs, including for fertilizers, diesel, and renting land, combined with decreased income from selling milk, grain, and other products. One farmer interviewed for the report said, “Increased fuel prices, along with decreased price for a bushel of corn make me doubt I can survive after 2021.”

Policymakers Rally Against Consolidation

While corporate concentration in agriculture has gone relatively unchecked for decades, food cost inflation has brought the issue front and center. “Corporate profiteering and out-of-control consolidation by big agricultural firms have led to increased prices at every point on the food chain, from the farm to the grocery store,” said Representative Mark Pocan (D., WI—2nd) in a statement announcing the Food and Agribusiness Merger Moratorium and Antitrust Review Act of 2022. 

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has also disparaged corporate concentration in agriculture: “Highly concentrated local markets in livestock and poultry have increasingly left farmers, ranchers, growers, and producers vulnerable to a range of practices that unjustly exclude them from economic opportunities and undermine a transparent, competitive, and open market—which harms producers’ ability to deliver the quality, affordable food working families depend upon,” said Vilsack.

Vilsack’s statement was made in September 2022 as President Biden announced a new US$15 million fund to ramp up collaboration between the USDA and State Attorneys General on enforcement of competition laws, such as the laws against price-fixing. The news follows a December 21, 2021 letter to Secretary Vilsack from a bipartisan coalition of 16 attorneys general offering recommendations for improving competition in the livestock industry.

“One of the ways corporations keep profits high at consumers’ expense is by creating unfair markets where there’s no meaningful competition,” said Minnesota AG Keith Ellison, who spearheaded the letter, “This is especially true in agriculture, where farms and farming communities often face artificially high prices and struggle to afford their lives because antitrust behavior by Big Ag deliberately leaves them with few choices.”

Randy Krzmarzick, a row crop farmer and LSAF supporter in Sleepy Eye, MN, commented, “I’ve been farming some 40 years and I’ve seen continued consolidation in all parts of agriculture, fewer companies that supply our products and buy our commodities.” When asked why he’s planning to vote for Keith Ellison, Krzmarzick said, “I think it’s important to have an attorney general who’s watching out for abuses and who’s on our side—the side of family farmers, of which there’s less and less of us all the time.” 

Photo courtesy of Jed Owen, Unsplash

The post On Eve of Election, Midwest Farmers Squeezed by Inflation Eye Corporate Concentration appeared first on Real Food Media.

The Landless Workers Movement in Brazil (or MST, its acronym in Portuguese) is one of the largest social movements in the world. Born in the early 1980s at the end of the country’s 21-year military dictatorship and in the midst of persistent land inequality, the movement has been at the forefront of land reform in Brazil for decades. Their work is focused on making a reality of the country’s constitutional promise that land should ‘serve a social purpose.’ Against a backdrop of great inequality – 10% of the largest farms occupy nearly three-quarters of agricultural land – the MST has been organizing families to occupy, settle, and farm throughout the country.

In the four decades since its creation, the MST has organized more than 350,000 families to create communities, cooperatives, farms, small-scale food processing enterprises, and farmers markets. An additional 90,000 families still live in informal encampments on contested land, struggling for official land title.

Education and training in sustainable agricultural practices have always been core to the movement’s work, with its commitment to agroecology deepening in 2000 when the MST identified agroecology as key to its strategy of building resilient food systems. Since then, the MST has been developing training centers for agroecology for its members, and beyond.

At the beginning of the pandemic, MST launched an ongoing national campaign to take food from the settlements to vulnerable populations in cities: this collection center organized by ELAA for people living in the outskirts of the state capital, Curitiba, offers a great variety of fresh foods. Image courtesy of Wellington Lenon/ELAA.

Author Anna Lappé interviewed three members of one of the movement’s agroecology schools in southern Brazil, Escola Latino Americana de Agroecologia (ELAA) to learn more about this history and philosophy. The conversation included input from Amandha Silva Felix, management coordinator and policy director at ELAA, and Vinicius Silva Oliveira and Wellington Lenon from the school’s “pedagogic sector.”

This is the third in a series of interviews with key people leading diverse agroecology training programs around the world, view them all here. This interview was conducted by email, translated from the Portuguese, and edited for clarity.

Mongabay: Let’s start with the movement’s commitment to member education. Can you talk about that work?

Felix, Oliveira, Lenon: Throughout its history, the MST has always had a strong commitment to education. The movement has built more than 2,000 schools in land-reform occupied encampments and settlements. In 2000, agroecology became a cross-cutting theme in all MST schools—from kindergarten to higher education. Today, many MST schools offer courses on agroecology in partnership with public universities.

ELAA launched in the fall of 2005. Together with the Latin America Agroecology Institute Paulo Freire (IALA) based in Venezuela, we launched what became IALA’s network of Via Campesina [the international peasant agricultural movement] schools to mainstream agroecological training for farmers, youth, and adults.

Since its founding, ELAA has trained nearly 200 people, offering a 3.5-year “Technologist in Agroecology” course and a four-year degree in Rural Education, Natural Sciences, and Agroecology.

Drone view of ELAA: classrooms are on the right, occupying the main building of a large estate that was expropriated by MST to settle landless farmers, which is now known as Contestado Settlement. To the left are dining halls and student housing. Image courtesy of Wellington Lenon/ELAA.

Mongabay: Can you describe the place itself—what is the school like?

Felix, Oliveira, Lenon: ELAA is located in an MST settlement called the Contestado in the state of Paraná in southern Brazil. It’s truly a movement school: founded by the movement, built by volunteers, and part of the struggle for land reform, the school has 29 acres that include animal production—pigs, cows, sheep, and chickens—a vegetable garden, agroforestry, and field crops such as beans, corn, and manioc.

Mongabay: What is your program’s philosophy?

Felix, Oliveira, Lenon: Our courses are oriented toward young people as well as adults from land reform encampments and settlements in Brazil, and from other regions around the world, including farming communities elsewhere in Latin America such as Paraguay, Argentina, Ecuador, Venezuela, Haiti, Dominican Republic, and Colombia plus Africa, including Afro-Brazilians (quilombolas) and Indigenous peoples.

The program offers on-campus learning and in-community learning; students spend a portion of their time at school and another portion in their community. During their three months on campus, students learn from teachers connected with partner institutions, including the Federal University of Parana State (UFPR) and the Federal Institute of Parana (IFPR). When students return home, they take back the practices and knowledge acquired on campus. We’ve found this allows for powerful exchange and feedback between empirical and theoretical knowledge.

Mongabay: How have the principles of agroecology informed the MST?

Felix, Oliveira, Lenon: The MST adopted agroecology as a core approach in February 2000. After several decades of organizing, the failures of conventional agriculture in land reform settlements were very clear to us. We also learned much about agroecology from partner movements in other countries. La Via Campesina was a particularly big influence for MST to move in this direction.

MST members in the state of Parana have been at the forefront of the process of creating agroecology schools. In 2004, the MST Coordination in Parana State defined the purpose of these schools to create spaces for learning about agroecological production, presenting concrete results to farmers and encouraging an embrace of peasant culture. Just as importantly, these schools are a place for the development of our movement’s humanist values—a place where people work together, educating themselves, learning new perspectives, and having fun!

ELAA students outside the school in early 2020. Image courtesy of Wellington Lenon/ELAA.

Mongabay: How would you describe your Center’s learning approach?

Felix, Oliveira, Lenon: At ELAA we talk about our grounding in rural education or educação do campo in Portuguese. For us, the idea of rural education is based on the pedagogical and epistemological philosophies of popular education, particularly of the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. These are the pillars of the pedagogical praxis of rural education, which seeks a critical awareness of the world, contributing to the transformation of social relations necessary for human development. In this sense, both form and content matter—going from the hands-on and concrete to the abstract and back again. It’s a dialectic that not only creates ownership of knowledge, but also motivates action based on that knowledge. As Paulo Freire said: “We struggle for an education that teaches us to think—not one that teaches us to obey.”

Mongabay: What are some of the key agroecology themes of your program?

Felix, Oliveira, Lenon: Our teaching covers a range of content related to agroecology, linking theory and practice, scientific and empirical knowledge. The school also covers content on class, capitalism, the role of social movements in social change as well as gender, sexuality, and more. In 2022, the MST launched the Dictionary of Education and Agroecology [PDF in Portuguese]. With contributions from 169 authors from 68 different institutions—public universities, federal institutes of education, social movements, and research institutes—it aims to act in formal and informal education, bringing conceptual bases to the field of education and agroecology. ELAA is adding this tool to its pedagogy.

Mongabay: Can you talk about your research approach and favorite examples of research coming out of the school?  

Felix, Oliveira, Lenon: Honestly, for us, every act of research done by our students is remarkable: These students are the sons and daughters of the land, water, and forests—the very people who have historically been denied access to education, especially college.

In terms of our research approach, we work hard at ELAA to ensure that we don’t conduct research for research’s sake, but rather ensure it is a process that gives a return to the community, region, organization, or movement to which the researcher belongs. Our students have conducted research in different areas, including agroecology, politics, gender, sexuality, social movements, and education. Specific research themes have included strategies for environmental protection, sustainable development, digital inclusion of rural families, conservation and management of agrobiodiversity, the saving and sharing of seeds, and more.

Mongabay: What’s one of the biggest challenges you face?

Felix, Oliveira, Lenon: We need to improve our infrastructure. We are at a moment when we need to expand the school building and improve the old ones. This is necessary to meet growing demand and offer better conditions both for students and teachers.

ELAA occupies 29 acres of land that provide practical training for students, a place for agroecology research, and gardens that supply the dining hall. This photo shows agroforestry production plots at an early stage. Image courtesy of Wellington Lenon/ELAA.

Mongabay: How do you think about the concept of agroecology?

Felix, Oliveira, Lenon: When we talk about agroecology, we are not just referring to a way of producing food without pesticides or chemical fertilizers. It is much more than that. We understand agroecology as a broad project of life: We see its political, economic, social, cultural, and environmental dimensions, too.

Agroecology combines sustainable production with a dignified way of life, both for those who produce (rural workers, peasants, traditional communities) and for those who have access to healthy food. Agroecology benefits the whole of society by being based on renewable sources of energy and respecting the biodiversity of the soil, fauna, and flora.

The diversification of production through agroforestry ensures countless benefits to society and the environment: biological insect control; soil biodiversity; long-term productivity from the integrated production of crops; greater financial security for farmers; more nutritious crops; strengthening local and regional economies; preserving of water/groundwater tables to ensure the proper functioning of hydrological cycles. Agroecology is today essential for the mitigation of global warming impacts, curbing the emission of greenhouse gases, and stimulating the sequestration of carbon by biodiversity.

Mongabay: How has ELAA worked to mainstream agroecology and climate action?

Felix, Oliveira, Lenon: To give one example, ELAA is part of the National Plan of Planting Trees and Producing Healthy Food, launched by the MST in 2020 to plant 100 million trees in a decade. MST partners developed a mobile application called Arvoredo to monitor tree planting across the country, and the agroecology schools’ students are playing a key role in promoting the tree planting in their communities.

MST farmer delivers food to the collection center organized by ELAA for people living in the outskirts of the state capital, Curitiba. Image courtesy of Wellington Lenon/ELAA.

Mongabay: How do you respond to the concern that agroecological farming cannot scale to meet the world’s food security needs?

Felix, Oliveira, Lenon: Our MST settlements already show that it is possible to produce healthy and abundant food using these methods. We also see how agroecology is economically more viable, because it prioritizes renewable energy and because it is appropriate for family farming, which is responsible for more than 70% of the food produced in the world. Agroecology is also socially just because it values life in the countryside while promoting the universal right to healthy food. It is culturally necessary because it is in tune with nature’s seasonality, the localization of food systems, and local food traditions. Agroecology has the commons as a core value, which requires participatory governance and the involvement of different agents of civil society and the state to be successful and expand.

Mongabay: What are the greatest hurdles to wider adoption of agroecology?

Felix, Oliveira, Lenon: Our biggest challenge is to define agroecology as the model for food production to achieve food sovereignty and to further make clear that the counterpoint—the agribusiness model, which prioritizes monoculture plantations with intensive use of pesticides, chemicals, and GMO seeds, plus the international trade of commodities—is unsustainable. To achieve this paradigm shift, we need to make progress on public policies to support agroecology, such as smallholder access to credit, and expand training in agroecology. For us, we are meeting these needs by continuing to invest in agroecological education at all educational levels, including launching the “Education and Agroecology in Rural Schools in Agrarian Reform Territories” initiative whose purpose is to expand access to education and agroecology in settlements and land reform camps all over the country.

See related: Land conflicts in Brazil break record under Bolsonaro

Beans are one of the staple foods of Brazilians, and each region has a preference for one type or another. These were harvested in the Contestado settlement and donated to MST’s food solidarity campaign. Image courtesy of Wellington Lenon/ELAA.

Mongabay: What inspires you the most in your work?

Felix, Oliveira, Lenon: What inspires us? To promote the practice of solidarity and social justice on a daily basis, enabling the families of agrarian reform workers to be agents of their own destiny through popular organization. This is the way to promote popular sovereignty in favor of human dignity and respect for fundamental rights.

Mongabay: What is it like to do this work at this particular moment in Brazil?  

Felix, Oliveira, Lenon: The MST emerged decades ago at a historical moment of struggle for the democratization of Brazil. Today, to fight for land reform means to deepen the ongoing process of democratization. Agroecology is at the center of the persistent land reform debate, pointing a way to food sovereignty for those who live in the countryside and for those who live in the city. Faced with the immense recent setbacks in the country—the advance of deforestation, especially in the Amazon, and the genocide practiced by the federal government during the pandemic—the MST has reaffirmed its commitment to fight for social justice and solidarity.

The post ‘Viable, Just & Necessary’: Agroecology is a Movement in Brazil appeared first on Real Food Media.

In 1979, an idealistic 44-year-old Black woman named Nettie Mae Morrison moved with her husband to Allensworth, 75 miles south of Fresno, in California’s Central Valley. 

“She wanted to be a part of history,” said her son, Dennis Hutson, who was in his mid-20s at the time. The town had a distinctive past. It was founded in 1908 by Allen Allensworth, a man born into slavery who became the first African American to reach the rank of lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army. About 3 square miles in size, , it was the first town in California founded and governed by Black people—and it served as a beacon of possibility for Black people all over the nation, its population growing to around 1,200 people. 

But the community soon fell on hard times.

In 1914, the Santa Fe Railroad Company moved its rail stop from Allensworth to nearby Alpaugh, a majority-white town, dealing a major blow to Allensworth’s economy. That same year, Col. Allensworth died after being struck by a motorcycle during a visit to Los Angeles. 

It was access to water, however, that proved the most challenging. 

According to California’s water regulatory agency, “The company that sold the land to Col. Allensworth,” the Pacific Farming Company, “didn’t fulfill its promise to build an adequate water system, leaving the growing population with debt and dry wells. Drought struck the Central Valley soon after the town was founded, which led to poor crop yields and further decreased vital water supplies.”

In 1966, the town suffered another blow when officials discovered arsenic in the drinking water, and by the 1970s Allensworth no longer appeared on most maps.

The town’s storied past and ongoing challenges were what drew Morrison there, Hutson said of his mother. She dedicated the rest of her life, from 1979 until her death in 2018, to Allensworth, where she joined church efforts and nonprofit campaigns against local polluters and rallied to secure clean drinking water for the community. On weekends, her five grown children joined her in her efforts.

Decades later, two of her children—twins Dennis Hutson and Denise Kadara, felt a similar calling to Allensworth. Hutson, a Methodist preacher and Air Force chaplain living in Las Vegas at the time, remembered his frustration that little seemed to have improved for local residents despite his mother’s many efforts. As recently as 2020, nearly one-third of the population still lived below the poverty line. 

“[I asked myself], ‘Why doesn’t the government do something?’” Hudson recalled. “A voice [in my head] responded, ‘Why don’t you do something?’”

So in 2007, Hutson and Kadara, age 54, and Kadara’s husband, Kayode Kadara, decided to buy 60 acres from a retiring farmer in Allensworth, calling it the TAC Farm (TAC originally stood for The Allensworth Corporation, an entity that has since been dissolved.) Over the next few years, Hutson moved from Las Vegas and the Kadaras from Half Moon Bay, California, to settle in Allensworth full-time.

Their goal was to create a Black-owned, Black-operated farm that would honor Allensworth’s legacy and boost the local economy in the Valley. They began to farm a mix of collards, okra, mustard greens, watermelon and black-eyed peas because, as Hutson said, “I’m going to grow food that I know Black people want to eat.”

The Central Valley is sometimes called the nation’s breadbasket, producing about 8% of total agricultural output and nearly 40% of the country’s fruits and nuts. But climate change poses a serious threat to the region’s farms. Annual average maximum temperatures in Allensworth, and the surrounding San Joaquin Valley, which is part of the Central Valley, increased by 1 degree F from 1950 to 2020. That figure is projected to increase another 4 or 5 degrees F in the next 30 years, according to a state-commissioned report released earlier this year. The region is also experiencing its most severe drought in a millennium, according to a separate study published earlier this year in the journal Nature.

The extreme heat and drought don’t just threaten crops. These conditions make farm work more dangerous for workers and pose critical health risks for surrounding communities, according to Chantelise Pells, a water-systems researcher at UC Merced and co-author of the state-commissioned report.

“When you compound the expenses of air conditioning, poor air quality and limited access to water, [the climate crisis] is a huge economic burden for low-income communities,” Pells said. “They have to make a choice of whether to suffer in the heat or not have enough money to meet their basic needs.”

According to the same report, hundreds of thousands of residents in the San Joaquin Valley—many of whom are farmworkers—do not have access to clean drinking water and instead rely on store-bought bottled water. More frequent heat waves, which are often accompanied by poor air quality, increase the economic burden on low-income communities in the region that already experience disproportionate rates of asthma and heat-related illnesses.

Lack of rainfall and snowmelt runoff also mean farmers rely more heavily on groundwater, a practice that has become unsustainable, experts say. And amid the water scarcity, small-scale farmers like the Hutson-Kadaras are struggling to compete with larger farms.

“Most small-scale farmers don’t have the means to dig deeper wells and compete with large farms for access to groundwater,” said Angel Santiago Fernandez-Bou, a researcher at UC Merced and another co-author of the state-commissioned report.“During a drought, this can be a big problem for small or disadvantaged farmers.”

In 2007, for example, Hutson dug a 720-foot well on his family’s property, only to discover that his neighbors, who operate larger-scale operations, have wells thousands of feet deep. He realized that meant his well—and the farm’s lifeline—would be at risk of drying up long before his well-financed neighbors’ water sources would. (Around 42% of public wells in the San Joaquin Valley are at risk of drying up due to current drought conditions, according to the state-commissioned report.)

”When you are in the midst of a drought in a state that is having severe water challenges, it seems to me that you would rethink how you do your farming,” Hutson said, “—that it would encourage you to consider other ways to provide for your livestock [while] at the same time trying to provide for your environment.” 

In 2011, the Hutson-Kadaras participated in an organic farming training program, where they learned adaptive practices, such as enriching their soil with organic compost and installing windbreaks—hedges of trees to protect crops against wind—that would limit their reliance on synthetic fertilizers, reduce soil erosion and conserve water. 

In the past decade, the TAC Farm has adopted other climate friendly practices, including closed-loop agriculture—a technique in which farmers recycle nutrients and organic matter material back to the soil.The Hutson-Kadaras also raise rabbits, feeding them organic alfalfa and using their nutrient-dense manure as fertilizer. 

Hedgerows and windbreaks reduce soil erosion, minimizing soil disturbance, which in turn leads to less dust and fewer pollutants in the air. Healthy soil increases water retention, leaving more water in the aquifers. The cover crops add fertility to the soil, reducing the need for agrochemicals that pollute the air and water. The benefits of these farming practices, if adopted widely, reverberate throughout the surrounding community, according to Pells.

“Using regenerative practices [like cover cropping and reducing tillage] is a win-win,” Pells said. “It improves water and air quality, while lessening the economic burden on the farmers themselves.”  

The experiences over the past 15 years have convinced the Hutson-Kadaras of the importance of small-scale and cooperative farming. The benefits aren’t just environmental, Hutson said. Surrounding communities have been shown to benefit economically as small farms generate jobs and circulate income among local establishments. 

State officials are now looking to the Hutson-Kadaras’ farm as a model for developing a new generation of small-scale, sustainable farmers. Earlier this summer, state lawmakers earmarked $10 million in funding to help Hutson and Kadara develop a farmer training program that focuses on sustainable practices and cooperative methods that can help fight the tides of climate change and transform the Central Valley into a more economically and environmentally sustainable region. 

The program will primarily recruit burgeoning Black, Indigenous and other farmers of color in an effort to close some of the racial disparities that are rampant in food and agriculture. After 7 months of training, participants can lease a small plot of land on the Hutson-Kadara’s farm for the next 2½ years and sell their goods to local cooperatives. (While land access has been, and continues to be, an issue for many beginner farmers, organizations like Minnow exist to facilitate the transfer of land into the hands of California’s farmers of color while advancing Indigenous sovereignty.) 

Drought and extreme heat notwithstanding, Hutson said his dream—to make Allensworth once again a beacon of hope for Americans of color—is slowly becoming a reality. In June 2022, California state Governor Newsom set aside an additional $32 million dollars in the state budget for Allensworth—a majority of which will go to building a new visitor center that will connect the town’s history of Black self-determination with its future as a sustainable and equitable farming hub.

“I want Allensworth to be known for training and producing the next generations of cooperative, small-scale, sustainable farmers—whether they are Black, Latinx, Indigenous or Asian,” Hutson said. “That’s what I hope for and that’s what we are working toward.”

This article was made possible by a grant from the Open Society Foundations for Nexus Media News.  Nexus Media News is an editorially independent, nonprofit news service covering climate change. 

Header image: LA Times

The post How a Methodist Preacher Became a Champion for Black-Led Sustainable Agriculture appeared first on Real Food Media.

Just east of Birmingham in the U.K. sits the sixth-largest university in the country, Coventry University,  home to 38,000 students and a relatively new center for the study of agroecology — a burgeoning field of social and environmental science.

Founded in 2014 and nestled on 9 hectares (22 acres) at Ryton Gardens, the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience (CAWR) provides an academic home to 45 full-time research staff and more than 50 Ph.D. students, nearly half hailing from outside the U.K., including Africa, Asia and Latin America. From its inception, the center has taken a transdisciplinary approach, employing the knowledge and skills of social scientists, natural scientists and artists-in-residence. More than 50 master’s students and 42 agroecology practitioners are graduates of its program, and it’s recognized internationally for its work on alternative food networks and “agroecological urbanism” — the concept of bringing agroecology principles like diversity and mimicking natural ecosystems into urban food planning — and is now at the forefront of pushing agroecology and food sovereignty forward.

Following her feature for Mongabay about agroecology as a leading solution to climate change in response to the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report calling for urgent action, author and sustainable food advocate Anna Lappé is interviewing leaders in the field of agroecology education, research and extension. She begins with Michel Pimbert, founder and director of the center, to better understand Coventry University’s work bringing agroecology to much wider attention. The interview was conducted by email and has been edited lightly for length and clarity.

Mongabay: Let’s start at the beginning. What’s the birth story of the center?

Michel Pimbert: In 2013, the university invited staff across the schools to pitch ideas for new areas of research. Much to my surprise, my proposal for a significant new center on agroecology and sustainable food systems was very well received! The university understood that hardly any research was going on in agroecology at the time, whether in the U.K., Europe, or beyond. Lucky for us, the vice chancellor and his team were quick to see that creating a new agroecology center would be a unique selling point for the university. This led to the birth of the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience. Since then, we’ve received significant investments to recruit staff and Ph.D. researchers, attract international talent, and build a strong global research program on agroecology and sustainable food systems. Across all this work, and from the very beginning, we’ve emphasized the need to include peoples’ knowledge in ways of knowing and the co-creation of knowledge.

Mongabay: You’ve talked about the concept of “cognitive justice.” I had never heard that phrase before I heard you use it. It’s quite provocative. Can you share what you mean by it and how it relates to your approach to teaching, learning, and knowledge dissemination?

Michel Pimbert: The term comes from our philosophy of knowledge. Unlike many mainstream institutions, we reject the idea that academic knowledge is superior to the knowledge of Indigenous peoples and peasant farmers. This is what we mean by a commitment to “cognitive justice” — and I see it as key for agroecology, which aims to combine farmers’ knowledge with ecological science. But it also matters more generally for our work on decolonizing curriculum and transforming research for a just and sustainable society.

Mongabay: “Resilience” has become quite the buzzword, but it’s always been central to your work — it’s even in your name! How do you bring a study of resilience into your programs?

Michel Pimbert: When we focus on developing agroecological practices for resilience, we mean resilience to the climate crisis and to market volatility. We focus on how building farmer and citizen knowledge to improve agroforestry, intercropping and polycultures, evolutionary plant breeding, integrating livestock in agricultural systems as well as promoting shorter food webs to link producers and food eaters are all key to such multifaceted resilience. Another research strand is community self-organization. By that, we mean a focus on how — and under what conditions — communities can collectively mobilize their knowledge and agency to respond to crises like floods, droughts, and other natural/man-made disasters, and self-organize for managing alternative food networks and local governance.

Mongabay: Right. You often emphasize how agroecology is not just about what happens on the land but what happens in power structures, too. How does that show up in the CAWR’s research?

Michel Pimbert: Yes, exploring strategies for transforming governance — for agroecology, food sovereignty, and the right to food for all — is a key priority for the center. For that reason, research at the center also focuses on local to global policy choices that are needed to tackle threats to people and nature, and to promote agroecology and sustainable food and farming systems. We also look at institutional choices such as land tenure that can support large-scale shifts towards agroecology. 

Mongabay: Can you share an example of a research project that embodies your center’s cross-disciplinary approach?

Michel Pimbert: Yes! I think the contributors from all around the world who used stories, poems, photos, and videos to create Everyday Experts: How people’s knowledge can transform the food system demonstrate well this transdisciplinary approach. It’s also a powerful showcase of how people’s knowledge can help transform the food system towards greater social and environmental justice.

Mongabay: You talk about the co-creation with movement partners for your research?

Michel Pimbert: Our partnerships grow out of conversations with social movements and peasant organizations. We are often asked to include them in funding bids or to provide research support for projects they have prioritized. One of the challenges is the typical donor approach, which does not allow open-ended, flexible, process-oriented projects of co-inquiry that social movements often require. Donors often have what I call a “log frame mentality” — one that is rigid and overemphasizes quantitative objectives.

Mongabay: In a recent Mongabay feature, I talked about how the latest IPCC report centers agroecology as a key climate solution. Are you excited by its new popularity?

Michel Pimbert: Yes, it’s exciting to see the greater acceptance and understanding of the potential of agroecology since the center was founded eight years ago. However, it’s important to stress that funding for agroecology remains pitifully small — the lion’s share of public funds continues to support industrial and “green revolution” agriculture. Agricultural policies and subsidies continue to support larger farmers and the use of agrochemicals that massively harm people and the land, and fuel runaway climate change. What’s more, I would caution that as agroecology becomes more popular, we have to resist the watering-down of ideas and cooptation; it’s important to continue to commit to an agroecology that transforms the dominant food regime rather than one that seeks to conform with it.

See more of Mongabay’s agroecology coverage here.

Mongabay: How does biodiversity intersect with teaching agroecology?

Michel Pimbert: Conserving and enhancing biodiversity — both domesticated and wild — is key for agroecology. Moving from uniformity to diversity on the farm and the wider landscape requires an emphasis on much higher levels of biodiversity. Take pest management, for instance: instead of relying on petroleum-based pesticides, agroecological solutions address on-farm pests by diversifying local ecology to enhance the abundance of natural enemies of pests and diseases. To reduce soil erosion and loss of water, these methods focus on planting diverse cover crops and terracing. To buffer against climate extremes, diversity-rich agroforestry creates micro climates, and on and on and on. Agroecological practices based on the use of greater biodiversity also enhance dietary diversity that is essential for improving health and combatting malnutrition.

Mongabay: How has the climate crisis impacted how you approach research? 

Michel Pimbert: A focus on climate change was built into the center’s program from the start. The center’s climate scientists have been modeling changes to develop better prediction for droughts, floods, and forest fires in Africa, Europe and Asia. Agroecological approaches to climate adaptation are explored in Africa and Europe as well as Central America. We also do policy research aimed at exposing corporate greenwashing and the threats posed by nature-based solutions and net-zero plans that are now promoted by post-COP26 finance for climate change.

Mongabay: From your center’s research, what are you seeing about how agroecology can scale to meet global nutritional needs?

Michel Pimbert: Agroecological practices have been shown to increase production in the developing world. By harnessing more biodiversity on the farm and in food chains, agroecology can increase dietary diversity, something that is so badly needed today, including in wealthy societies hooked on junk food and highly processed foods. However, to be clear: Agroecology should not be seen as another technical fix for hunger and malnutrition. Agroecological production that enhances the availability of a diversity of foods needs to be part of a wider societal process of transformation that prioritizes equitable access to land and other means of production, fair access to — and distribution of — food, and supports people’s agency to claim and realize the right to food for all.

See related: From traditional practice to top climate solution, agroecology gets growing attention

Mongabay: It’s clear that what you’re calling for is massive transformation. From your vantage point, what are its greatest hurdles?

Michel Pimbert: In this moment, there are two starkly contrasting models of development, each seeking to radically transform food and farming. The first focuses on modernizing and sustaining capitalism through the promotion of what is being called the fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). The 4IR relies on robots, gene editing, remote sensing, big data, drones, vertical farms, cell-cultured “meat,” digital technologies, and the “internet of things” to manage plants, animals, and the wider farming environment, as well as the entire agri-food chain. The second pathway emphasizes food sovereignty and agroecology.

Mongabay: Let me guess which pathway your center promotes.  

Michel Pimbert: Clearly, food sovereignty and agroecology — and we are not alone: I’m inspired by countless programs around the world who share our vision. But the dominant discourse on modernity and progress, government policies, and funding priorities still favor the energy-intensive 4IR — and thus, frustratingly, continue to fuel the climate crisis, mass species extinction, and the economic genocide of farmers. It should come as no surprise to anyone that the financial and corporate actors who disproportionately benefit from the emerging 4IR are its biggest boosters and pose the biggest hurdles for a transformative agroecology based on diversity, decentralization, autonomy, and democracy.

Mongabay: It’s such a dark time in so many ways — from a persistent global pandemic to senseless wars and climate crisis-induced weather extremes — what inspires you amidst all this?

Michel Pimbert: Despite all the odds, I am inspired by the many people-led initiatives that are helping to reinvent food and farming for a more convivial, just, peaceful, and sustainable world.

The post Food for All: Q&A with Michel Pimbert of the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience appeared first on Real Food Media.

by Anna Lappé, Mongabay

The satellite imagery is staggering: an Antarctic ice shelf roughly the size of New York City collapsing into the ocean. Its demise, captured and reported by NASA scientists in mid-March, was only the latest startling news from a region where temperatures have soared up to 40° Celsius (72° Fahrenheit) above average.

From melting ice sheets to tornadoes ravaging New Orleans and wildfires sweeping Texas, it’s ever clearer that the climate crisis is here, now. In its sixth major report since 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) conveyed the urgency: “The scientific evidence is unequivocal: climate change is a threat to human wellbeing and the health of the planet,” said IPCC Working Group II co-chair Hans-Otto Pörtner. “Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a livable future.”

Responsible for roughly one-third of the world’s carbon emissions, the global food system is one of the key places for transformative action. Among the 3,675 pages of Working Group II’s report on climate impacts, adaptations, and vulnerabilities, the authors — 270 of them from 67 countries — share evidence for strategies that can be adopted rapidly to reduce the food system’s climate impacts while strengthening resilience and improving health, food security, and the well-being of food producers.

One strategy the IPCC highlights is agroecology. Defined in the report as a “holistic approach” to farming, agroecology as a practice includes techniques such as intercropping and planting cover crops, integrating livestock and trees into landscapes, and deploying organic farming methods to enhance biodiversity and soil health while eliminating dependence on external inputs like pesticides and synthetic fertilizer. It’s a nature-based solution that can “contribute to both climate mitigation and adaptation,” the IPCC stresses. It’s also a solution grounded in an embrace of the human rights of Indigenous and small-scale producers, as articulated in the 13 principles of agroecology from the United Nation’s High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition.

A science, a practice, and a movement

While its principles trace back millennia, agroecology’s roots in academia originate in the 1920s and 1930s as agronomists increasingly looked at how farming and ecosystems could be integrated. The term itself dates to Mexico in the late 1970s: It was there that a group of researchers were beginning to raise the alarm about a suite of relatively new agricultural practices being promoted there and in other key regions of the world. Dubbed the “Green Revolution” and underwritten initially by the Rockefeller Foundation, the approach centered on high-yielding hybrid seeds, whose vigor was only possible with annual seed purchases and massive investments in irrigation systems along with heavy use of fossil fuel-based fertilizers, herbicides, and other pesticides.

As Liz Carlisle, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, describes in Healing Grounds: Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming, Mexican scientist Efraím Hernández Xolocotzi, Mexican plant pathologist Roberto García Espinosa, and Californian ecologist Steve Gliessman were documenting how agricultural practices long embraced by Indigenous Mayan farmers in Mesoamerica were producing high yields without the financial and ecological costs of Green Revolution methods. As they spent time in the field, the colleagues “came to believe that these farmers’ approaches were far more effective than the ones being promoted by their own institution,” Carlisle writes. They decided to develop a new academic program, one that would put these farmers’ voices “front and center.”

It was the summer of 1978 when they launched a master’s degree program at the Colegio Superior de Agricultura Tropical. The focus? What they called “agroecology.” From the beginning, they grounded the concept in wisdom from Indigenous communities and in the voices of farmers themselves. Echoes of this work reverberate in the IPCC report today, whose authors stress agroecology’s roots in Indigenous and local knowledge around the world.

Agroecology proponents are quick to underscore that the concept refers not simply to these agricultural practices and the academic field that has blossomed around them, but as Maywa Montenegro, an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told Mongabay, “The field of agroecology includes the academy, but very importantly is not limited to it. Agroecology is a science, practice, and a movement.”

Shifting resources and local resilience

While the new IPCC report helps underscore just how much potential agroecology holds, the movement element of agroecology is critical because achieving the mitigation and adaptation potentials of agroecology will require major transformations in policy — and a substantial shift in public and private resources.

The report shows what benefits could accrue from such a shift, particularly for greater climate resilience. By building healthy soil, agroecological practices like agroforestry provide “buffers against drought,” note the IPCC authors, and “reduce soil erosion during storms.” Adopting agroforestry — integrating trees into farming landscapes — “shelters stock and crops in heat waves.” And agroecology, which emphasizes multi-cropping, leads to increased “resilience to disease and pests,” say the authors. With “high confidence,” they write, “adoption of agroecology principles and practices will be highly beneficial to maintaining healthy, productive food systems under climate change.”

Agroecology also significantly reduces food system emissions. In one study the IPCC cites, a European Union-wide shift toward agroecology would cut the region’s emissions by 47% compared with 2010 levels without affecting its food security. Another cited study echoed this finding, showing that these practices don’t just hold yields steady, but can actually increase them: Small-scale farmers adopting agroecological practices across Asia, Africa and Latin America on farms of 2 hectares (5 acres) or smaller saw their yields jump by 25%.

The resiliency benefits of agroecological practices in the face of the climate crisis have been well-documented. Perhaps nowhere has this mattered more than in the Philippines. Made up of more than 7,600 islands, the country’s geography has made it one of the most at risk from the climate crisis, but leaders in the agroecology movement there have seen the results of decades of work. Cris Panerio, the national coordinator of a food and farming NGO called MASIPAG at the forefront of that organizing, told Mongabay that their farmers have reported recovering faster after being hit by typhoons and floods — extreme weather events made worse by the climate crisis — compared with their conventional counterparts. They credit agroecological practices, including planting rice varieties their farmers have bred for adaptation to such conditions.

Through farmer-led and participatory rice-breeding projects, MASIPAG has collected and developed more than 2,000 rice varieties since 1985. “In contrast to the hybrid rice developed by IRRI [International Rice Research Institute] or PhilRice [Philippine Rice Research Institute],” Panerio explained, “seeds that need to be purchased year after year and require synthetic inputs to deliver high yields, MASIPAG varieties can be saved and shared among farmers, and flourish without pesticides or synthetic fertilizer.” Today, MASIPAG farmers are independent from the formal rice breeding sector, says Panerio, tapping their own seed banks and a central backup seed bank should they need it.

Panerio’s group fosters farmer-to-farmer learning, emphasizing rice and habitat diversity. In the rice fields of their members, Panerio describes fish ponds integrated with raised beds growing a variety of vegetables, and livestock incorporated onto farms. Native forest and fruit trees are also included whenever possible. “You can only imagine the biomass from such a farm system,” Panerio said, “with everything, except the food itself and firewood, turned into biofertilizers through composting or mulching.” All this adds up to a much smaller carbon footprint than that of a farm dependent on purchased seeds and fossil fuel-based pesticides and fertilizer.

An ‘explicit’ climate solution

The benefits of such agroecological approaches led the authors of this IPCC report to emphasize their feasibility and effectiveness as a climate solution. As Cornell University professor Rachel Bezner Kerr, a coordinating lead author on the chapter on food, fiber and ecosystem products, told Mongabay, previous IPCC reports have mentioned agroecology, “but this report is highlighting the emerging and increased evidence around agroecology as an adaptation and mitigation solution.” Indeed, agroecology is mentioned throughout the report, including in the chapter on health and, importantly, Bezner Kerr notes, it’s included in the Summary Report for Policymakers. For Bezner Kerr, this is a sign of the “deeper understanding of humanity’s dependence on biodiversity and healthy ecosystems. Agroecology is one of those strategies that links people to nature in a very explicit way.”

It’s this dependency Bezner Kerr has been documenting through decades of research in partnership with farming communities, particularly in Malawi where she’s been conducting fieldwork in partnership with a local nonprofit as part of a 22-year-long research collaboration. When reached by Skype, Bezner Kerr described the work there, partnering with farmers to document food security, nutrition and biodiversity on the landscapes where farmers have adopted agroecology approaches. Bezner Kerr emphasized that this is exactly the kind of participatory learning the report lauds: “The report emphasizes the evidence that inclusive adaptation strategies are essential, and agroecology is one of those approaches that emphasizes co-knowledge production, participatory and inclusive methods. It’s not just about adding compost to soil, it’s much more than that.”

For agroecology critics, a common charge is that it cannot scale, but Bezner Kerr argues it’s quite the opposite: agroecology “lends itself to scaling out because it relies on farmer-to-farmer methodologies, local knowledge, available resources, and adaptation to local context.” Indeed, many agroecological efforts around the world operate across significant landscape scales: Panerio’s organization in the Philippines includes a network of hundreds of organizations reaching 30,000 farmers directly, and roughly three times as many through those farmers’ relationships. In another example, community managed natural farming efforts in Andhra Pradesh, India, now include 700,000 farmer participants. Globally, La Via Campesina, which was founded in the mid-1990s, now represents more than 300 million smallholder farmers, pastoralists, fisherfolks, Indigenous peoples, agricultural and food workers, landless peoples, women, youth, consumers, urban food-insecure people, and NGOs.

In his 1981 book The Gift of Good Land, U.S. farmer and poet Wendell Berry urged us to address our thorniest crises by “solving for pattern.” A poetic phrase for systems thinking, solving for pattern is a call for solutions that create a cascade of co-benefits. Agroecology is just such a solution. For those farmers in the Philippines, it has meant resilience in the face of extreme climate shocks while producing nourishing food for their own communities and achieving independence from expensive inputs. For the farmers Bezner Kerr is working with in Malawi, it means agricultural approaches that boost local biodiversity, not diminish it.

The counterpoint — what my mother Frances Moore Lappé and I called “solving by dissection” in our book Hope’s Edge — is the tactic of applying a technical fix to a discrete aspect of a crisis, without considering the whole and triggering a cascade of consequences. As Berry wrote, such a “solution” is dangerous “because it acts destructively upon the larger patterns in which it is contained. It acts destructively upon those patterns … because it is formed in ignorance or disregard of them.”

For years, the IPCC has warned against “solve by dissection” responses to the climate crisis, and in this latest report the authors underscore the concern even more clearly. As Maarten van Aalst, a contributing lead author, noted: “We have explicitly added the notion that responses to climate change can generate significant risks of their own: maladaptation inadvertently creating or aggravating risks.”

For Bezner Kerr, a food system maladaptation would be the rush to respond to droughts by promoting irrigation, for example. “In the short term, irrigation can reduce climate risks for producers and consumers,” she said, “but if done in an area with limited groundwater and with capital-intensive irrigation, it can lead to groundwater depletion, salinization, and worsening inequalities and debt loads for small-scale producers.” In contrast, agroecology can help farmers thrive in drought conditions by using seeds bred for drought tolerance, building soil organic matter so the land can retain more water, or using swales and other techniques to capture rainfall — all of which are good for the ecosystem and for the farmer.

Panerio sees maladaptation in the promotion of glyphosate-based herbicides like Roundup to reduce plowing and thus soil carbon loss. While glyphosate can reduce the need to till for weed control, Panerio has seen the consequences of widespread use of this herbicide: Setting aside its health risks which are now widely known, the introduction of genetically engineered corn and other crops resistant to glyphosate — the two are marketed together heavily — traps farmers in debt. “Corn farmers get their inputs from traders, the same people who buy the farmers’ corn,” Panerio said. “In the end, the traders profit two ways: One from the sale of inputs (engineered corn seeds, pesticides, and fertilizer) and the other for the low price of the corn.”

He also sees the ecosystem impacts: the widespread use of glyphosate causes soil erosion year-round. “In the dry season, areas sprayed with glyphosate have no vegetation and are devastated by wind erosion,” Panerio said. “In the wet seasons, the topsoil is washed away by rain after the corn is harvested.”

Mounting evidence and growing momentum

For agroecology advocates, its multiple benefits are its superpower. As this latest IPCC report documents, evidence of these benefits continues to mount. Other recent studies have pulled together evidence from the field, including “The Politics of Knowledge” from the Global Alliance for the Future of Food, which emphasizes how small farmers and Indigenous peoples are co-creators and scientists in demonstrating agroecology’s impact. (Disclosure: The foundation where the writer works is a member of the network.)

Worldwide, the momentum for agroecology is growing, within the academy and beyond. Since the first academic agroecology program launched in 1978, the field has exploded. There are now dozens of agroecology schools and programs around the world. UCSC’s Montenegro notes the Sustainable Agriculture Education Association’s growing list of degree-granting programs in agroecology as well as applied student farm programs, where students learn experientially. Her own university has had a long-standing, esteemed agroecology program and recently launched a new agroecology major. Even in the United States, where the vast majority of agricultural land goes to high-input commodity production, and half of all corn is diverted to ethanol, there is “palpable excitement about the resurgent interest in agroecology,” Montenegro said.

The movement beyond the walls of the academy is growing, too. Its advocates know, however, that for agroecology to really take hold, it will require a significant transformation of how agriculture is financed and incentivized, and where research dollars go. Today, relatively little public and private funding is geared to these approaches. One study found that among European donors, less than 15% of agricultural budgets were directed toward agroecological approaches. Among philanthropies focused on climate solutions, food systems funding has historically been a tiny fraction — with agroecology representing even less. That is changing, too, with efforts like the Agroecology Fund and other networks within philanthropy promoting agroecological solutions.

“Given the very limited investment in agroecological research and implementation to date,” Bezner Kerr said, “the fact that there is such evidence points to even greater potential should it be given more investment and attention by governments and other groups interested in adaptation and mitigation solutions.” This is one of the reasons why it’s important, advocates stress, that agroecology be considered holistically: it’s not just what happens on the farm, it’s the social movements needed to move policy and shift power into the hands of farmers themselves.

Nearly half a century ago, when those researchers sought a way to describe the practices they were documenting in the fields of Indigenous farmers in rural Mexico, the term agroecology resonated. Today, it’s a concept that provides a pathway for tapping long-held local wisdom to address one of the world’s most pressing crises.

Anna Lappé is a bestselling author or co-author of three books, including Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It, and a contributing author to 14 others, most recently the 50^th anniversary of Diet for a Small Planet. The founder and strategic adviser of the communications nonprofit Real Food Media, Anna also directs a food systems-focused grant making program for a family foundation.

The post From Traditional Practice to Top Climate Solution, Agroecology Gets Growing Attention appeared first on Real Food Media.

Fifty years ago, my mother exposed the damage caused by our energy-intensive, environmentally devastating food production system. The struggle to change it continues.

The post The Long Fight for a Just Food System appeared first on Real Food Media.

Alongside a public health emergency, Covid-19 has unleashed a staggering spike in global hunger. More than a quarter of a billion people are expected to face acute food insecurity as a result of the pandemic. Among the hardest hit are Black, brown, and Indigenous small-scale food producers – and the consumers they feed – from countries already scarred by colonialism, import dependence, and the climate crisis. Yet, these are the very people who are leading movements to address the roots of hunger while responding to the disruptions wrought by Covid-19. 

Recognising the precarity of an industrial food system that drives farmers into debt and poisons their soil and water, these producers are increasingly embracing agroecology – a way of farming that coexists with natural ecosystems to produce healthy food. At the Agroecology Fund, we acted swiftly to support their mutual aid and solidarity responses to Covid-19 – channeling nearly $1 million through an emergency fund to 59 grassroots organisations across five continents earlier this year.

In the process, we learned several key lessons on how to respond to an acute crisis, while deepening transformative change.

Lesson 1: Take the lead from grassroots organisations and BIPOC communities

Traditional grantmaking deliberations often place an onerous burden on grassroots groups with limited resources for funder engagement. Funders must make their decision-making processes more equitable and expedient. For this emergency fund, we simplified requests for proposals, and streamlined grant disbursements. But making funding processes more accessible is critical beyond moments of crisis. We stand with our peers calling for such transformations in philanthropic practices, including the US-based network HEAL Food Alliance, which urged food systems funders to do more to center racial equity and resource BIPOC communities who are already scaling critical solutions.

Lesson 2: Support food sovereignty and food security

Last month, the United Nations’ World Food Programme was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for providing food aid to almost 100 million vulnerable people globally. While a powerful recognition of just how urgent food security is, food aid – too often consisting of imported genetically modified (GMO) grains, ultra-processed foods, and surplus commodities – actually undermines local economies and small food producers.

For nearly a decade, the Agroecology Fund has prioritised food security without compromising food sovereignty – the right of peoples to determine what they eat and how it is produced. Social movements like our partner, La Via Campesina, representing 200 million peasants worldwide, remind us that we can only end hunger by supporting the small producers who already feed the majority of the world’s population. 

Increasingly, governments and UN agencies such as the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the Environment Programme (UNEP) endorse principles of agroecology. It is becoming clearer to policymakers that strengthening local resilience means supporting communities to grow and distribute emergency relief in times of crisis even as they steward ecosystems and ensure a sustainable food supply through the year.

Lesson 3: Invest in long-term resilience

To some, addressing the Covid-19 hunger crisis may seem an impossible trade off between providing urgently needed handouts or investing in long-term solutions. Our emergency grantees show it’s possible to rapidly mobilise mutual aid while strengthening long-term food security in their communities. 

From the Philippines to Argentina, through interventions as diverse as online marketplaces and microcredit programs, our grassroots partners are helping their communities’ weather the crisis and build resilience. In Zimbabwe, when market closures left thousands of farmers stuck with perishable produce, our grantee Pelum Zimbabwe mapped local supply chains to reveal healthy food options to consumers and policymakers. In India, Amrita Bhoomi launched a producers’ cooperative so farmers could supply healthy, locally grown food at fair prices.

Grantees we support have also been working to shape the policy response to the crisis. In Brazil, for example, the Landless Workers Movement (MST) has been advocating for public procurement sourced from agroecological farmers. 

Lesson 4: Tap the power of pooled funds

Faced with the scale of today’s interlocking crises, collective action is essential. Pooled funds help individual donors move swiftly to make well-informed investments. Groups like ours – a pooled fund of more than 30 donors – and other networks including Thousand Currents and Grassroots International have deep connections to social movements that can help steer resources towards transformational change. As one of our fund donors said, ‘On my own, I would never know which grassroots groups in the Philippines or Brazil or Uganda to support to address the food crises unfolding there.’

Pooled funds also help generate positive peer pressure among collaborating organisations to give more. Promisingly, many of our peers are offering matching grants, disentangling donations from asset returns, and even initiating spend downs in response to this global crisis.

Today’s challenges are immense; tomorrow’s will be no less so. We must work together to fund grassroots-led humanitarian relief and activism that builds toward lasting, systemic change, ensuring our charitable dollars function not as a Band-Aid, but as part of a global effort to eradicate the roots of hunger in all its complexity.

Amrita Gupta leads communications at the Agroecology Fund and Daniel Moss is its executive director. Anna Lappé directs the food and democracy program of the Panta Rhea Foundation and is a member of the fund.

The post Food Today, A New Food System Tomorrow appeared first on Real Food Media.

The World Food Programme’s Nobel prize is timely – but food security depends on radically transforming our food systems

During the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic, as lockdown restrictions scrambled supply chains, the national peasant movement Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas set up an online farmers’ market and delivery system on Facebook, so urban dwellers in Manila could access locally grown grain, fruits, and vegetables. 

In Argentina, as thousands lost their jobs and homes, the grassroots organization Union de Trabajadores de la Tierra (Union of Land Workers), supplied vulnerable communities with fresh food. These “sovereign food canteens”, said UTT’s Lucas Tedesco, are powerful reminders that small producers “are the ones who feed our fellow citizens.” 

In Zimbabwe, when markets shuttered and farmers’ crops were left to rot in their fields, the farmers’ organization Pelum Zimbabwe mapped farmers, transporters, processors, and other vendors, to connect them to consumers and demonstrate to Zimbabwean policymakers that better access to locally-grown healthy foods reduces hunger, and strengthens community resilience. 

With the pandemic leaving so many families uncertain about their next meal, the Nobel Peace Prize award to the United Nations’ World Food Programme is timely. COVID-19 has plunged millions around the world into poverty; global hunger is likely to double. By the end of 2020, the number of people facing acute food insecurity could swell to a quarter of a billion. 

But let’s be clear: We’ll never be truly food secure without radically transforming our food systems. 

Even as it acknowledged the honour, the UN agency, which provides food assistance to almost 100 million people worldwide, noted that aid is not a long-term solution. Gernot Laganda, head of climate and disaster risk reduction at the WFP, stated clearly: “You won’t get to zero hunger with humanitarian aid alone.”

As food systems funders supporting agroecology, we have seen that food handouts are not an effective antidote to hunger.

Agroecology goes beyond tackling the incidence of hunger to uproot its structural causes. In recent months, we have seen clearly how movements for agroecology fostered networks of producers—in the Philippines, Zimbabwe, and beyond— able to feed themselves and their communities in this moment of crisis. 

By farming in sync with nature, agroecological farmers grow abundant and diverse foods, regenerate natural ecosystems, strengthen resilience to health and climate shocks, and bring healthy food to local markets.

More than a set of farming techniques, agroecology is a movement for social justice, improving nutrition without compromising food sovereignty—the right of peoples to determine what they eat and how it is produced. 

Agroecology resists the misguided Western policies that have impoverished smallholders worldwide, policies like promoting synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and hybrid seeds through the Green Revolution historically, and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa today.

By directly empowering family farmers, agroecology diminishes the need for imported food aid – too often ultra-processed foods, surplus commodity crops, and GMO grains that are a boon to agribusiness while undermining small farmer livelihoods. 

In the past few years, agencies within the United Nations have publicly recognized the importance of agroecology to end hunger. In 2018, former U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization Director General José Graziano da Silva issued an urgent challenge to the global community: “It’s time to scale up the implementation of agroecology.” 

We’ve been pleased to see that initiatives such as the World Food Programme’s Home Grown School Feeding Initiative link “school feeding programmes with local smallholder farmers” in 46 countries including Kenya, Honduras, and Haiti. But the agency must do far more to strengthen local food economies.

In 2018, only one third of the 3.6 million metric tons of WFP’s total food purchases were characterized as “locally grown commodities,” and less than 4% of the organization’s food aid ($31 million) was purchased directly from smallholder farmers. (WFP data does not report what percentage may have been agroecologically produced.)

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize is a powerful recognition of just how urgent food security is. We urge the WFP to seize this moment to embrace agroecology, and address the roots of hunger, learning lessons from the food leaders we’re funding in the Philippines, Argentina, Zimbabwe, and beyond. 

Private philanthropy alone cannot offer sufficient support to the vibrant, global agroecology movement. We need the WFP to play a lead role, deploying public resources to support innovative civil society organizations and government agencies.

When we support humanitarian relief that builds lasting change, we ensure our dollars don’t just deliver one-time handouts, but drive a fundamental transformation of our food systems. Only then will we yank up the roots of hunger and seed a more peaceful, equitable, and resilient world. 

Header photo: Romeo Ranoco/Reuters

The post Food Security Can Bring Peace—But Agroecology Makes It Last appeared first on Real Food Media.

If companies are really committed to Black lives, their statements of support should include an honest reckoning with their own products and practices.

In a virtual town hall in June, Coca-Cola’s Chairman and CEO James Quincy said: “Diversity and inclusion are among our greatest strengths … We must put our resources and energy toward helping end the cycle of systemic racism.” Dow Chemical’s Chairman and CEO Jim Fitterling similarly committed to being an “ally” helping overcome “systemic oppression.” And Johnson & Johnson’s Chairman and CEO Alex Gorsky stated, “unequivocally that racism in any form is unacceptable.” These three proclamations echo others penned by Fortune 500 companies since the public reckoning with police violence and systemic racism has swept across the country in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in May.

But examine the impact of these companies on the lived experience of Black people and it’s clear these commitments fall far short of restitution. Consider Johnson & Johnson. Internal company documents have revealed that the company knew since at least 1957 that its talc-based powders could be contaminated with asbestos, a possible carcinogen, for which there is no known safe level of exposure. Despite these concerns, the company pushed these products in the United States and beyond, specifically targeting Black and Brown women. The company’s marketing plans included a race-based distribution model, moving baby powder samples through churches and beauty salons in African American and Latino neighborhoods, and seeking marketing agencies specializing in promotions to “ethnic consumers.” The impact is clear: A study of Black women who used these powders found they had more than a 40 percent increased risk of ovarian cancer compared to Black women who didn’t use them.

Several weeks after its CEO’s Black Lives Matter statement, a Missouri court ruled Johnson & Johnson must pay $2.1 billion in damages to nearly two dozen women whose ovarian cancers were linked to its talc-based powders.

Or consider Coca-Cola, whose CEO made a $2.5 million commitment in June to racial justice charities. Put aside, for a moment, that such a pledge is a paltry 0.27 percent of the company’s annual US advertising spend. The company could have used this political uprising to honestly reflect on how its business practices continue to harm Black communities. Its signature sugary drinks, for example, are a driving force behind one of the biggest public health crises of our time — diet-related illnesses like type 2 diabetes, kidney diseases, and heart disease — that disproportionately impact African Americans. Drinking as little as one 12-ounce sugary drink a day increases your chances of diabetes by 26 percent. A staggering fact made more worrisome in the face of findings that people with type 2 diabetes have a significantly increased Covid-19 mortality rate.

Yet a recent report on sugary-drinks marketing found Coca-Cola and its peers still disproportionately target Black consumers, particularly young Black people. As a result, Black teens have been seeing roughly 2.3 times as many ads for sugary drinks and energy drinks compared to White teens.

Then there’s Dow, whose Chairman and CEO’s Black Lives Matter statement made no mention of the impact the company’s manufacturing plants and products have had on communities of color. Dow, one of largest petrochemical producers in Louisiana, for example, is one of the many corporations that have located toxic manufacturing facilities along an 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, home to many predominantly Black communities. The rates of cancer in the region are a staggering 50 times greater than the US average, giving the area the unwelcome name, Cancer Alley.

Dow. Johnson & Johnson. Coca-Cola. These are just three of the many companies claiming allegiance with those fighting racial injustice around the country. But as the old cliché reminds us: Actions speak louder than words. If these companies were really committed to Black lives, their statements would have included an honest reckoning with their own products and practices, past and present, and a pledge to act on such a reckoning.

Header photo by Austin Kirk.

The post Decoding Corporate Spin of Black Lives Matter appeared first on Real Food Media.

Are humans truly destructive at our core, or is there another story to be told?

By Day 81 of shelter-in-place, I’ve had a lot of time to ponder human nature: I’ve read about corporate executives forcing meatpacking workers to toil shoulder-to-shoulder without any protections from Covid-19 and also about emergency room workers rushing into hospital rooms to save dying patients. I’ve heard about swindlers hawking defective personal protective equipment and chefs working seven days a week to transform restaurants into emergency feeding centers. I’ve seen my own daughters, ages 8 and 10, tease each other relentlessly and comfort each other in ways I never could. As this article goes to press, I, along with millions of others, have watched in horror as a police officer was captured on video extinguishing the life of George Floyd and have seen communities all across the country rise up to demand justice and fundamental change.

The history of Easter Island has long been used to reinforce the notion that humans have an inexorable propensity for environmental devastation. Photo by Lee Coursey.

A global pandemic and public reckoning of systemic racism serve as potent reminders that we’re all we’ve got on this tiny blue orb in the universe. And, so, amidst it all, I’ve wondered what do we really know about the nature of our nature? Are the violent cop and the illegal land grabber the true reflection of human nature, and the selfless humanitarian and rainforest protector the aberration? Or is it the other way around?

I was thinking about all of this when I stumbled on the latest book by the Dutch historian and journalist Rutger Bregman. (He’s the guy who rumpled the feathers of Davos elite last year by daring to suggest they should all be taxed a hell of a lot more). Called Humankind, Bregman’s book explores these thorny questions of human nature.

As he describes in a May Guardian excerpt that went viral, Bregman knew when he started his book that he’d need to tackle one of the tentpole stories of the humans-are-ruthless narrative: Lord of the Flies. The 1954 novel by Nobel Prize–winning author William Golding tells the story of British schoolboys stranded on a deserted island. Whether you’ve read the book or not (I vaguely remember its details from high school English class), you know what happened next: It got ugly. By the time the boys are rescued, three of them are dead — and the narrator laments “the darkness of man’s heart.”

But it’s a novel, of course, a made-up story. What would happen if a band of boys were really stranded on an island, all on their own? Would they descend into the chaos of Lord of the Flies? Those questions led Bregman on a quest to discover whether there was such a story out there, a real one. Ultimately, with some serious sleuthing — and good luck — Bregman discovered the tale of six boys marooned on an island in the South Pacific in the 1960s and discovered after 15 months by an Australian sea captain. What the captain found wasn’t the dark violence of Golding’s novel, but love and solidarity, boys who survived alone through shared work, song, and prayer for all those many months.

On his Twitter feed, Bregman writes how he has been moved by the popularity of his Guardian excerpt: “Wow. Really overwhelmed with the response to my story about the real ‘Lord of the Flies’. So so happy that this extraordinary tale is finally – after 50 years! – becoming famous.”

It makes sense to me why people are drawn to this story now: We are hungry to hear about the good in us at a time when there is so much darkness. We’re hungry for a story of self that speaks to our deeper kindness. We’ve certainly had enough of Lord of the Flies.

At this moment of global pandemic, nested in the other global crisis of our time, climate chaos, there’s another narrative I’ve been thinking about — another one that needs a rewrite. If Lord of the Flies is the dominant tale of humans’ true relationship to each other, the sorry story of Easter Island is the tale we’re told about our true relationship with nature. And it’s not pretty.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve heard the history of Easter Island used to reinforce the notion that humans have an inexorable propensity for environmental devastation, a notion that makes the potential for us to solve climate change — or, frankly, any environmental crisis — seem that much more daunting. We can’t help it, we’re taught to believe, it’s just what humans do.

The dominant theory of Easter Island — that mysterious speck in the southeastern Pacific Ocean dotted with more than 1,000 iconic tributes to deities — is that the native population decimated the island’s natural resources, driven by a need for food but also by a myopic, and ultimately deadly, obsession. In Collapse, anthropologist Jared Diamond writes, “Eventually Easter’s growing population was cutting the forest more rapidly than the forest was regenerating. The people used land for gardens and wood for fuel, canoes, and houses — and of course, for lugging statues.”

Diamond was drawing on the archeological work of Paul Bahn and John Flenley who wrote Easter Island, Earth Island (just in case the metaphor wasn’t clear already). Bahn and Flenley write: “The person who felled the last tree could see that it was the last tree. But he (or she) still felled it. This is what is so worrying. Humankind’s covetousness is boundless. Its selfishness appears to be genetically inborn.”

Whoa. Pretty dark stuff. This story — that humans a “genetically inborn” with a disregard for the environment around us — is certainly the prevailing message. But what if something else happened on that island so many years ago? Something that cracks one of the most powerful metaphors about human nature and ecological harmony.

Indeed, a few years ago I stumbled on just such a history. Anthropologist Terry Hunt and archeologist Carl Lipo have a different theory about the island, its inhabitants, and those statues. In their book, The Statues that Walked, Hunt and Lipo argue that the archeological record reveals how the island’s palm cover was decimated not by “covetous natives,” but by an invasive rat. And timber wasn’t harvested to roll gargantuan statues along logs. Instead, the statues were moved upright, rocked on sturdy vines. They “walked.” What’s more, Easter Island’s barren, rock-strewn landscape isn’t a reflection of the Tragedy of the Commons. Rather, the rocks are remnants of a sophisticated food cultivation practice called “lithic mulching,” which uses carefully placed stones to prevent soil erosion and create micro-climates. Hunt and Lipo count 2,553 of these formations across the island.

“These findings,” Hunt and Lipo write, “suggest that rather than a case of abject failure, [Easter Island] is an unlikely story of success.” The prevailing story — with its racist undertones of a barbaric Indigenous population driving itself to collapse — comes undone. (There’s a side note here: The native folklore on the island has long told tales of “chiefs and priests imbued with a supernatural power who simply ordered the statues to walk,” tales that had been widely dismissed as simply fantastical folklore. Now, the idea of teetering statues rocking along vines — walking — is backed up by the archeological record.)

Human nature is messy, for sure, but for too long the dominant story of it in the Western canon of literature, archeology, and more has been written by one branch of the human family, codified in novels like Lord of the Flies and in histories like that of Easter Island. It’s a story that tells us we are innately ruthless, savage to each other and the planet.

It’s a story many of us are still raised on. More than half a century after it was published, Lord of the Flies still finds itself in the ranks of the best young adult books of all time — a recent UK poll placed it third among books for students. From textbooks to random websites, we can find the dominant story of Easter Island still reinforcing this notion that the island is a microcosm of a planetary story of humans at odds with nature, unable to contain our destructiveness.

I, for one, am ready for a new story. As I continue to shelter-in-place, and my Twitter scroll fills with more terrifying news of both the pandemic and the weather shocks of the climate crisis, I take solace in this other story of ourselves, one that need not ignore our darkest traits, but that lifts up the intrinsic kindness and environmental stewardship of the human family — a family to which we all belong.

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