—SHALMALI GUTTAL, FOCUS ON THE GLOBAL SOUTH

World hunger is on the rise—783 million people worldwide don’t know where they will get their next meal. The climate crisis, ongoing conflicts, financial speculation, and high prices driven by corporate profit-seeking are key contributors to rising world hunger. In a July press conference, representatives from the People’s Autonomous Response (with over 1,000 signatories) to the UN Food Systems Summit highlighted the urgent, coordinated actions needed to overcome the global hunger crisis and address the human right to food.

Unfortunately, the corporate capture of the UN Food Systems Summit continues to prioritize silver bullet “solutions” led by industry giants rather than the proven-effective methods led by those who face the brunt of food and agriculture-related problems. Small farmers and Indigenous peoples have centuries of knowledge from which to create real solutions to the climate crisis and food insecurity. 

The movements and organizations opposing the Summit call for an urgent shift away from corporate-driven industrial models and towards biodiverse, agroecological, community-led food systems that prioritize the public interest over profit-making. Communities on the frontlines of intersecting crises are already leading the way for food systems change and should be centered in, and lead, all discussions and efforts to reduce hunger worldwide and change how food is produced and distributed. 

Perla Álvarez of La Via Campesina, one of the signatories to the People’s Declaration, urges the UN to “change direction and support our demands and efforts for a food sovereign future based on human rights and the principles of agroecology, care, justice, diversity, solidarity and  accountability.”

In community and solidarity,

Tiffani, Tanya, and Christina 

Featured image: The international peasant confederation La Vía Campesina is one of the 1,000+ signatories to the Autonomous People’s Response to the UNFSS.

This editorial was Adapted from Food Systems 4 People’s July 13th press release.

Read Issue No. 65 of the Real Food Scoop

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The Growing Liberation Podcast, produced by Midwest Farmers of Color Collective with support from Real Food Media, aims to reclaim the narratives of BIPOC farmers and reveal crucial connections to the land, food, culture, political power, and economic autonomy. Growing Liberation guests come from farming backgrounds and endeavors and share their untold stories to foster a community of farmers of color by sharing stories left out of the mainstream conversation about the food system and land equity.

Learn more about Midwest Farmers of Color Collective, listen to the Growing Liberation Podcast, and look for Growing Liberation on your favorite podcast platform. 

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Argentine farmworker Fabián Tomasi was an iconic voice against the use of pesticides until his death from cancers caused by pesticide exposure in 2018. He was, as many have been and continue to be, a literal body of evidence of the dangers of pesticides.

Research has shown that more than 90 percent of Americans have traces of pesticides in our bodies, most of which comes from the food we eat. Yet, despite the mass amounts of evidence of the dangers of pesticide use, the world has never used as many pesticides as it does today. The United States uses more than any other country, including some of the most dangerous pesticides that are banned in other countries. 

With the release of the US edition of the Pesticide Atlas, a powerful compendium on the state of pesticide use and why it matters, leaders at prominent US civil society organizations working for common sense pesticide action (including Pesticide Action Network (PAN) North America, the Center for Biological Diversity, Hawaii Alliance for Progressive Action, and Real Food Media) highlight the alarmingly persistent use of toxic pesticides in the United States—and what we can do about it. 

In community and solidarity,

Tiffani, Christina, Tanya, and Anna

Read Issue No. 62 of the Real Food Scoop

Download the Pesticide Atlas

The post Real Food Scoop | No. 62 appeared first on Real Food Media.

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

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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

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Nestled in a verdant valley in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, about a four-hour drive southwest of Bangalore, the agroecology learning center Amrita Bhoomi is one of dozens of farmer-to-farmer training hubs around the world focused on agroecology. The center was born out of organizing efforts of the local farmers’ movement KRRS (Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha) founded by Professor Mahantha Devaru Nanjundaswamy in the early 2000s. The movement’s leadership envisioned a teaching center where farmers could share their agroecological practices, learn new techniques, and situate themselves in a Ghandian tradition of organizing for social justice.

In 2002, movement leadership purchased the land that the center still occupies today, a biodiversity haven home to 80 cultivated acres growing dozens of varieties of crops from dryland horticulture – like mangoes and jackfruit – to coconuts and bananas, modeling rainfed farming in lieu of expensive irrigation. Shortly after breaking ground, Nanjundaswamy passed away, but his daughter Chukki Nanjundaswamy, who was 22-years old at the time and having been raised in the movement, joined the center’s leadership and has been growing the organization ever since, working to create an organization that can be an inspiration for local farmers, and many more who visit from around the world.

As part of a series on agroecology for Mongabay, author and sustainable food advocate Anna Lappé had a chance to catch up with Nanjundaswamy. The two last met in person in early 2020 just before COVID-19 lockdown, when Lappé traveled to Amrita Bhoomi as part of an international learning exchange organized by the Agroecology Fund, a global collaborative of funders invested in supporting agroecology worldwide.

In this conversation, Lappé talks with Nanjundaswamy about her work bringing the movement and practice of agroecology to life. The interview was conducted by Zoom and has been edited for length and clarity.

Agroecology practitioners share views and experiences during an international learning exchange in early 2020 at Amrita Bhoomi Learning Centre. Image by Anna Lappé for Mongabay.

Mongabay: Let’s start with the Amrita Bhoomi Learning Centre’s origin story. What was the spark?

Chukki Nanjundaswamy: The idea of starting a center for farmers run by and managed by the farmers themselves was born out of the organizing of the farmers’ movement here, Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha, known by its acronym, KRRS. It was sparked by the farmers’ desire to defend the right to their local seeds.

In the early 1990s, the Indian government had opened up its market for multinational corporations, including for agribusiness giants. The American company Cargill was the first to enter India’s seed sector. Cargill started selling seeds like sunflower and corn—all hybrid seeds [so farmers need to purchase them annually] and all expensive for farmers.

India has had long-held traditions of conserving and sharing seeds within the community and family. For the very first time, corporations were talking about patenting seeds and new global trade regimes like the GATT [the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs] were creating frameworks to enable them to do so, to claim intellectual property rights over seeds.

The movement here saw its organizing as part of fighting back. Dr. Vandana Shiva was very close to the farmers’ movement here and she had started a campaign to protect the farmers’ rights to neem, challenging multinational companies that were trying to patent this plant, which had been grown here for centuries. In 1993, KRRS conducted one of their biggest direct actions, ransacking Cargill’s offices in Bangalore where the company was headquartered.

I was in primary school at the time, but I still remember the action so clearly. After the Cargill demonstration, KRRS members decided to set up a center to save and share local seed varieties. KRRS was organizing to protect our sovereignty, our seeds, our agricultural systems and our biodiversity.

Mongabay: What’s the center’s pedagogical approach?

Chukki Nanjundaswamy: We’ve been influenced by Dr. Rammanohar Lohia, an Indian Socialist thinker whose slogan was spade-prison-vote—where spade symbolized constructive activity, prison stood for peaceful struggle against injustice, and the vote for political action. For us in KRRS these three symbols are very important.

When we, the next generation, took over Amrita Bhoomi, we learned from agroecology schools in other parts of the world, in Cuba, for instance, and in South America. In these schools, they use a methodology of farmers teaching farmers. It’s an approach we brought to our work. We also take an intergenerational approach, because most senior farmers were farming pre-Green Revolution and we’re losing that knowledge. They’re a treasure.

For nearly two decades, we have also been a teaching center for an agroecological practice known as Zero Budget Natural Farming [ZBNF, also known as Community Managed Natural Farming or Subhash Palekar Natural Farming].

We believe one of the reasons why the farming sector is in such crisis is because our so-called agricultural universities are not doing research for the farming community here. They’re mostly funded by transnational corporations and their research benefits those transnational corporations, like Syngenta, Cargill, Bayer [which bought agrochemical company Monsanto in 2018]. Our farmers have nothing to learn from the scientists; they basically all teach Green Revolution technologies [the hyper-reliance on synthetic inputs like pesticides and fertilizers and the use of hybrid seeds.]

Agroecology practitioners share views and experiences during an international learning exchange in early 2020 at Amrita Bhoomi Learning Centre. Image by Anna Lappé for Mongabay.

Mongabay: Can you tell me more about your programs?

Chukki Nanjundaswamy: We’ve tried different approaches over the years. The center is open for farmers to come to the land and learn. Agriculture departments and agricultural universities have run ‘exposure visits’ where researchers come to the land to learn. We also target young people who want to get into farming, and we offer a three-month course where they can come on the weekends. A few times, we have done ‘mega trainings.’ In 2015, for instance, we worked with La Via Campesina to bring 1,000 people, including several dozen from nine other countries, for a seven-day training.

Mongabay: When we visited the center with the Agroecology Fund we saw firsthand some of the techniques practiced under the banner of Zero Budget Natural Farming. Let’s dig into what that is.

Chukki Nanjundaswamy: There are two schools of thought on sustainable farming methods in India. One, organic farming, emerged in the 1980s. Organic farming here had class and caste dimensions, because even though it doesn’t use synthetic fertilizer or pesticides, it does depend on external inputs—often costly ones. It is still an input-based farming system which makes farming expensive and dependent. The farmers’ movement here embraced ZBNF because it is a method that helps farmers become totally self-reliant. It’s not a recipe, there is a lot of scope for farmers to design it according to their own specific conditions, according to their own soil conditions. They don’t have to purchase anything; it’s a knowledge-based technique.

In ZBNF, we refer to fertilizer as a ‘stimulant.’ It is made with jaggery [a traditional cane sugar found in India], some protein, cow manure and urine, and a handful of soil from your own farm. Commercializing it is impossible because you need bacteria from your own farm to multiply. You can’t sell it. In this approach, Mother Earth is everything: you just have to take care of her and nurture her. We just have to give her love.

Making a farmer self-reliant is part of the Gandhian principle of Swaraj which means autonomy. Agroecology is also a fight for such agrarian autonomy.

Agroecology practitioners share views and experiences during an international learning exchange in early 2020 at Amrita Bhoomi Learning Centre. Image by Anna Lappé for Mongabay.

Mongabay: Have you done formalized research at the center?

Chukki Nanjundaswamy: No, not exactly, but we consider every farmer a scientist. To give you an example: the fall armyworm is a notorious corn pest. It’s been causing chaos all over the world. Pesticide companies like Syngenta have been pushing products to deal with it. In the past couple of years, in countries in Africa, farmers who were growing corn started using pesticides for the first time to manage armyworm infestations.

But after only a couple of years of experimentation, farmers here came up with a simple technique: spray the corn with a combination of milk and jaggery in the evening. Ants, attracted by the sweet milk, are drawn to the corn where they discover, and eat, the worms. You don’t need pesticides. To me, this is a great example of a simple innovation by farmers on their own farm.

It’s amazing when you learn about what’s possible to do yourself, when big companies are making millions of dollars selling toxic fungicides or pesticides. We’re told, you can’t grow certain vegetables without pesticides. That’s just not true. We have proven it’s possible with very simple techniques, like the fall armyworm approach or using fermented buttermilk as a fungicide. We have shown you can spray it to control pests on vegetables like cabbage or cauliflower, for example. This is the kind of research we’re doing.

Mongabay: What is the response you’re seeing from farmers learning about agroecology through your center for the first time? 

Many agroecology techniques were discussed during an international learning exchange in early 2020 at Amrita Bhoomi Learning Centre. Image by Anna Lappé for Mongabay.

Chukki Nanjundaswamy: It takes time for farmers to change, because the majority here have become addicted to chemicals and believe it’s difficult to change. It takes time for any kind of transformation, but we believe that it’s not a choice anymore. If you want to get out of the hands of corporate agriculture and the corporate system, you have to be self-reliant. Gandhi talked about this when he spoke about what he means by autonomy: self-rule. We have to reclaim agriculture, starting by reclaiming our seeds and reclaiming our knowledge system, which has been given away to pesticide dealers. And, it means reclaiming our biodiversity, because the Green Revolution has taught that monoculture is better, economically. We have seen this is false. We have seen farmers committing suicide [due to their indebtedness from the high costs of commercial seeds and chemical inputs like fertilizer and pesticides, plus irrigation] in the areas where the Green Revolution was brought in the sixties and seventies, states like the Punjab are now totally dominated by wheat and rice.

Mongabay: One criticism of agroecology is that it’s labor-intensive and young people don’t want to go into farming.

Chukki Nanjundaswamy: Agroecology is welcoming young people back to agriculture. We saw this during Covid—how young people, especially educated young people, were coming back to learn agriculture here.

Mongabay: Can you say more about what you’re seeing in terms of more support for agroecology from consumers?

Chukki Nanjundaswamy: In terms of the popular support, we are finding people living in cities are very aware now about the food they’re eating. During COVID, we started doing more direct marketing of vegetables and fruits and we found there’s definitely a great consciousness about the kind of food people want to eat. They are asking for better food and want to support farmers. This is the kind consciousness rising we’ve witnessed.

Let’s talk about the Green Revolution. There’s still a belief among some foundations and governments that it is still the only farming practice that can work at scale. We’re seeing the Alliance for the Green Revolution in Africa, for instance, working to roll out similar practices across that continent based on that argument. What do you say to those who argue that we need Green Revolution technology in order to meet the food security needs of the world?

Chukki Nanjundaswamy: Well, first, using our natural farming techniques, we have seen that you can actually double yields with local varieties and these practices. Farmers in our network are producing a variety of foods—from rice to pulses—without using any chemicals and they still have better yields. It’s clear to us that the Green Revolution is just propaganda to sell products. Unfortunately, at most agricultural universities, nobody shares the stories we’re seeing among our farmers—so we speak among ourselves. We need to create platforms where we work with scientists to build the kind of evidence, the kind of data, that is required by our opponent.

Agroecology is a global practice and movement, including in this village in Lao PDR. Image via Asian Development Bank, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Mongabay: We’ve been talking a lot about yields and food security, but biodiversity is a key element of agroecology as well. I’m curious how you see biodiversity intersect with agroecology teaching.

Chukki Nanjundaswamy: Agroecology emphasizes intercropping, multi-cropping, and the symbiotic relationship between crops and the symbiotic relationship with friendly pests. You are creating an environment for your crops to grow happily and to take care of each other. It’s like a traditional, large family; it’s not a nuclear family. It’s a giant family where everyone takes care of each other. This is why biodiversity is so much a part of agroecology.

Mongabay: What’s a hope you have for the future of the center?

Chukki Nanjundaswamy: We would love to have more in-house trainers and offer a more formalized program, where we can also offer a diploma. Especially for those children of farmers who are not getting into university and who are disappointed by the kind of farming that their family has been doing—who want to try agroecology.

The post Farmer to Farmer Agroecology: Q+A with Chukki Nanjundaswamy of Amrita Bhoomi Learning Centre 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.

Carlos Vicente –

Gustavo Esteva – We also said goodbye this past week to the Mexican activist and organic intellectual Gustavo Esteva. The founder of Oaxaca’s Universidad de la Tierra (University of the Earth), Esteva dedicated his life to scholarship and solidarity with peasant and Indigenous peoples. He participated in the Zapatista uprising and became one of the movement’s key advisors and negotiators. He authored, co-authored, and edited more than 40 books and thousands of articles. He was an ardent critic of Western/Northern-led “development projects,” the ideologies of superiority that justify them, and the violence they inflict. Read an interview with Esteva at In Motion Magazine.

We offer our deepest condolences to Carlos’ and Gustavo’s families, friends, and colleagues.

The post Rest In Power: Two Latin American Food Sovereignty Activists Join the Ancestors appeared first on Real Food Media.

Concerned about what this transition means for the future of food, scientists, farmers, and eaters have sought to protect fruits, grains, and vegetables they consider endangered. They have organized high-tech genebanks and heritage seed swaps. They have combed fields for ancient landraces and sought farmers growing Indigenous varieties. Behind this widespread concern for the loss of plant diversity lies another extinction narrative that concerns the survival of farmers themselves, a story that is often obscured by urgent calls to collect and preserve. Endangered Maize draws on the rich history of corn in Mexico and the United States to uncover this hidden narrative and show how it shaped the conservation strategies adopted by scientists, states, and citizens.

In Endangered Maize, historian Helen Anne Curry investigates more than a hundred years of agriculture and conservation practices to understand the tasks that farmers and researchers have considered essential to maintaining crop diversity. Through the contours of efforts to preserve diversity in one of the world’s most important crops, Curry reveals how those who sought to protect native, traditional, and heritage crops forged their methods around the expectation that social, political, and economic transformations would eliminate diverse communities and cultures. In this fascinating study of how cultural narratives shape science, Curry argues for new understandings of endangerment and alternative strategies to protect and preserve crop diversity.

The post Endangered Maize: Industrial Agriculture and the Crisis of Extinction appeared first on Real Food Media.

The post Healing Grounds: Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming appeared first on Real Food Media.