Tanya Kerssen Archives - Real Food Media

Hunger for Justice Broadcast: Tanya Kerssen in Conversation with Elizabeth Mpofu

Tanya — Thu, 27 Aug 2020 17:47:03 +0000

As part of the Hunger for Justice webinar series hosted by A Growing Culture, Tanya had a fascinating conversation with Elizabeth Mpofu, General Coordinator of the international peasant confederation La Vía Campesina and founder of the Zimbabwe Smallholder Organic Farmers’ Forum. They talked about how women—and rural African women in particular—are affected by the pandemic; why ending violence against women is necessary for advancing food sovereignty; and why we must look to African women farmers for solutions. It was a special honor to speak with Elizabeth about these important topics during this moment of crisis and widespread protest in Zimbabwe and around the world.

Featured image: Global Justice Now

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Anna Lappé Talks Food and Climate on the Real Food Reads Podcast

Tanya — Mon, 17 Jun 2019 18:45:44 +0000

Real Food Media founder and co-director Anna Lappé joined Tanya Kerssen on the Real Food Reads podcast to talk about how our food system drives the climate crisis, how food must be part of the solution, and how this conversation has evolved in the nearly ten years since the publication of her book Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It. Listen below or on Apple Podcasts.

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The Death of Fabián Tomasi

Tanya — Tue, 11 Sep 2018 19:31:58 +0000

Argentine farmworker and outspoken advocate against agrochemicals Fabián Tomasi passed away last week, leaving behind a defiant call to action

By Tanya Kerssen, Medium

The historic victory last month in the case of Dewayne Johnson v. Monsanto reverberated around the world. It confirmed what, sadly, hundreds of thousands of people already knew: the chemicals we apply to kill weeds and pests are killing us, too. Perhaps no country knows this better than Argentina.

After Monsanto’s (now owned by Bayer) Roundup Ready soybeans were introduced to the country in 1996, the crop took over. Along with parts of Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Uruguay, it is now known as the “Republic of Soy.” Between 2010 and 2016, soy has blanketed between 53 and 60 percent of the country’s total agricultural land — up from 28 percent in 1996 and 17 percent in 1986, according to FAO data.

Almost all of the soy grown in Argentina today is Monsanto’s Roundup Ready soy, genetically modified to resist Monsanto’s own glyphosate-based Roundup herbicide. Between 1996 and 2016, glyphosate use in Argentina jumped from 19.90 million liters to 237.6 million liters — a 1,089 percent increase. During roughly the same period, the area planted to soybeans in Argentina increased from 14.7 million acres to 47 million acres — a 216 percent increase.

In other words, glyphosate use has far outpaced the rate of crop expansion. This dispels the agribusiness-propelled myth that genetically modified crops decrease agrochemical use. The benefit of Roundup Ready soy, from the point of view of agribusiness and large-scale producers, was that you could now spray herbicide indiscriminately over large areas, without needing to carefully target “weeds.”

In Argentine provinces like Entre Ríos, where Fabián Tomasi lived and worked, communities are besieged on all sides by chemical-intensive plantations.

Such widespread use created what are sometimes referred to as “superweeds”, plants that began to develop resistance to Roundup herbicide. To keep up with these superweeds, growers ramped up Roundup applications and also started mixing in other chemicals like 2,4-D and paraquat, both also linked to major health risks.

In Argentine provinces like Entre Ríos, where Fabián Tomasi lived and worked, communities (those that haven’t yet been pushed out by the sea of soy) are besieged on all sides by chemical-intensive plantations. The high rates of birth defects, infertility, stillbirths, miscarriages, chronic respiratory illnesses, and cancers have led to rural community organizing against agribusiness and the formation of organizations like Medicos de Pueblos Fumigados (Doctors of Fumigated Communities).

An AP story from 2013 profiled Argentina’s public health crisis, including Tomasi’s story, with harrowing photographs. It describes Tomasi, a former farmworker and crop duster who had been regularly drenched in poisons, as “a living skeleton, so weak he can hardly swallow or go to the bathroom on his own.” On September 7th of this year, Tomasi finally succumbed to complications related to severe toxic polyneuropathy, a debilitating neurological disorder that doctors attribute to his occupational exposure to agrochemicals. But not before making an impassioned call to action to rid the world of these dangerous chemicals.

Tomasi wrote about the silence and fear surrounding the suffering caused by fumigation, saying: “I do not want to swallow my words. I want to scream.”

In the years before his death at 53 years of age, Tomasi frequently spoke at schools and other community spaces about his story. He was also the protagonist of a 2013 book titled Envenenados (The Poisoned Ones) by journalist Patricio Eleisegui, which featured Tomasi’s emaciated body on the cover.

In an article written a few months before his death, Tomasi wrote about the silence and fear surrounding the suffering caused by fumigation, saying: “I do not want to swallow my words. I want to scream.” He talked about the numerous threatening phone calls he received for speaking out (presumably from area soy growers), and the corrupt collusion between governments and multinational corporations: “They are not business people, they are agents of death.” (Read an English translation of the article here).

Below is a transcription, translated to English, of an open letter he read to school children in his hometown of Basabilvaso.

Open Letter to Elementary School Students of Basavilbaso

by Fabián Tomasi

You are children, but I have to explain something very difficult to you.
My story is not a nice one.
You can see that I am sick, and I want you to know why.
I used to work in the soybean fields.
I flew the planes that fumigate the soybean plants.
To fumigate is to spray poison on the plants.
This poison doesn’t kill the soybeans, it kills everything else.
The fields are full of different plants that grow naturally,
without asking for anyone’s permission, of course.
But the men who grow soybeans don’t want any of these other plants to grow.
So they call all the plants that they don’t like “weeds”
And that’s why they poison them, to kill them.
When I started this job, I didn’t know quite what I was doing.
And I would ask myself: is this good work?
But of course, after I got sick, I realized:
To kill all the forms of life that we don’t like is wrong.
It’s wrong to kill all the quails, the rodents, the daisies, and the songbirds,
only to grow a single type of plant that makes money.
It’s wrong, because it harms the earth.
Because the earth needs all of its plants, birds, and critters.
And also because it ends up hurting us humans, like it hurt me.
Even though we seem very different from one another — the animals, plants, and flowers — we’re actually very similar.
We’re all made of building blocks called “cells”
So the poison they apply to the plants hurts us too.
Plus, those plants become resistant from receiving so much poison.
They become harder and harder to kill, so more and more poison has to be used. And that’s how more and more people get sick.
Did you know it’s possible to grow crops without using poison?
But they don’t do it, because they forgot how.
And the people who sell the poison don’t want them to remember.
They don’t want us to remember that we used to grow beautiful corn and wheat without using any chemicals at all.
That’s why it’s important for you, the adults of tomorrow, to know
that people and nature have to be friends.
If we harm nature, we end up harming ourselves.
As you get older and you make decisions about your lives, whether to go to work or continue studying, I hope you’ll remember this letter.
And realize that we, the adults, did a lot of things wrong.
That you shouldn’t emulate us.
You can’t do well on your path if you harm others.
Put simply: don’t kill.

A big hug to you, my new friends.
My name is Fabián Carlos Tomasi. I hope you won’t forget me.

Translated from Spanish by Tanya Kerssen. Source: https://youtu.be/RiJmAAxzAGY

Header image: Fabián Tomasi, photographed by Pablo Piovano in Basavilbaso, Entre Ríos province, Argentina, 2014

This article originally appeared on Medium

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The New Food Activism: Opposition, Cooperation, and Collective Action

Tiffani Patton — Sun, 03 Dec 2017 23:00:40 +0000

The New Food Activism explores how food activism can be pushed toward deeper and more complex engagement with social, racial, and economic justice and toward advocating for broader and more transformational shifts in the food system. Topics examined include struggles against pesticides and GMOs, efforts to improve workers’ pay and conditions throughout the food system, and ways to push food activism beyond its typical reliance on individualism, consumerism, and private property. The authors challenge and advance existing discourse on consumer trends, food movements, and the intersection of food with racial and economic inequalities.

Our December podcast will feature two contributing authors, Joann Lo and Tanya Kerssen, and co-editor Alison Alkon. This will be a good one!

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The New Food Activism

Tanya — Fri, 25 Aug 2017 00:08:06 +0000

New book with contributions from Real Food Media staff and partners

The just-released book includes a chapter authored by Real Food Media team member Tanya Kerssen on land access and a chapter by Joann Lo from our partner Food Chain Workers Alliance on food worker organizing. Check it out!

The New Food Activism: Opposition, Cooperation, and Collective Action (available from UC Press) explores how food activism can be pushed toward deeper and more complex engagement with social, racial, and economic justice and toward advocating for broader and more transformational shifts in the food system. Topics examined include struggles against pesticides and GMOs, efforts to improve workers’ pay and conditions throughout the food system, and ways to push food activism beyond its typical reliance on individualism, consumerism, and private property.

“A convincing roundup that demonstrates that the food movement is (finally) coming of age, The New Food Activism is a chronicle of a dozen important victories around agriculture, justice, public health, and more, which points the way toward a future in which food is increasingly a focus of crucial rights movements. A must-read for food organizers and their allies.”—Mark Bittman, food columnist and author of How to Cook Everything

“People want to eat ethically, and to do that, they need to care about the well-being of workers throughout the food system. This book highlights a promising direction for food activism, one that puts the lived experience of those who grow, cook, and serve our food at the center of its call for systemic transformation.”— Saru Jayaraman, author of Forked: A New Standard for American Dining

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Grabbing Power: The New Struggles for Land, Food, and Democracy in Northern Honduras

Christina — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 22:44:30 +0000

In 2009, Honduran elites financed a coup to grab land and power. The peasants of the Aguán Valley are fighting to grab it back…for their families, local economies, and the future of democracy.

In Grabbing Power, Tanya Kerssen outlines the history of agribusiness in Northern Honduras—from the United Fruit Company’s dominance in the 20th century to the rise of a powerful class of domestic elites in the 1980s and 90s, including the brutal landowner Miguel Facussé, also known as the “oil palm grower of death.” The power of these elites is bolstered by international aid, “green” capitalism, a corrupt media, and US-funded militarization in the name of a tragic War on Drugs. This book also tells the story of the fierce resistance of Aguán peasants and Afro-indigenous communities in northern Honduras, and their fight for the democratization of land, food, and political power.

Food First Books, 2013.

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