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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A powerful work of history, essay, testimony, and polemic, Amitav Ghosh’s new book traces our contemporary planetary crisis back to the discovery of the New World and the sea route to the Indian Ocean. The Nutmeg’s Curse argues that the dynamics of climate change today are rooted in a centuries-old geopolitical order constructed by Western colonialism. At the center of Ghosh’s narrative is the now-ubiquitous spice nutmeg. The history of the nutmeg is one of conquest and exploitation—of both human life and the natural environment. In Ghosh’s hands, the story of the nutmeg becomes a parable for our environmental crisis, revealing the ways human history has always been entangled with earthly materials such as spices, tea, sugarcane, opium, and fossil fuels. Our crisis, he shows, is ultimately the result of a mechanistic view of the earth, where nature exists only as a resource for humans to use for our own ends, rather than a force of its own, full of agency and meaning.

Writing against the backdrop of the global pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests, Ghosh frames these historical stories in a way that connects our shared colonial histories with the deep inequality we see around us today. By interweaving discussions on everything from the global history of the oil trade to the migrant crisis and the animist spirituality of Indigenous communities around the world, The Nutmeg’s Curse offers a sharp critique of Western society and speaks to the profoundly remarkable ways in which human history is shaped by non-human forces.

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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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Too often, the environmental discourse has failed to include and uplift the very communities on the frontlines of environmental justice movements. Despite the undeniable fact that Indigenous communities are among the most affected by climate devastation, Indigenous science is nowhere to be found in mainstream environmental policy. And while holistic land, water, and forest management practices born from millennia of Indigenous knowledge systems have much to teach all of us, Indigenous science has long been ignored, otherized, or perceived as “soft”—the product of a systematic, centuries-long campaign of racism, colonialism, extractive capitalism, and delegitimization.

Too often, the environmental discourse has failed to include and uplift the very communities on the frontlines of environmental justice movements. Despite the undeniable fact that Indigenous communities are among the most affected by climate devastation, Indigenous science is nowhere to be found in mainstream environmental policy. And while holistic land, water, and forest management practices born from millennia of Indigenous knowledge systems have much to teach all of us, Indigenous science has long been ignored, otherized, or perceived as “soft”—the product of a systematic, centuries-long campaign of racism, colonialism, extractive capitalism, and delegitimization.

Here, Jessica Hernandez—Maya Ch’orti’ and Zapotec environmental scientist and founder of environmental agency Piña Soul—introduces and contextualizes Indigenous environmental knowledge and proposes a vision of land stewardship that heals rather than displaces, that generates rather than destroys. She breaks down the failures of Western-defined conservatism and shares alternatives, citing the restoration work of urban Indigenous people in Seattle; her family’s fight against ecoterrorism in Latin America; and holistic land management approaches of Indigenous groups across the continent.

Through case studies, historical overviews, and stories that center the voices and lived experiences of Indigenous Latin American women and land protectors, Hernandez makes the case that if we’re to recover the health of our planet—for everyone—we need to stop the eco-colonialism ravaging Indigenous lands and restore our relationship with Earth to one of harmony and respect.

The post Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes through Indigenous Science 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.

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Last week, President Joe Biden signed a declaration marking Juneteenth (June 19th) —the day in 1865 enslaved Black people in Texas found out they were freed, two years after the Emancipation Proclamation—a federally recognized holiday. In the same week, however, the teaching of critical race theory in Texas was banned, with other state bans making their way through the courts. The week before that, a Wisconsin judge issued a temporary restraining order against the USDA to stop the payment of much-needed debt relief to Black, Indigenous, and People of Color farmers (see the statement from the HEAL Food Alliance here). And as we write this, GOP opposition is using the filibuster to block Democratic attempts to pass voting rights legislation, arguing it tramples upon “states’ rights”—an argument used to suppress Black peoples’ rights since the 19th century.    

These actions serve as a chilling reminder that the quest for liberation is ongoing. And, that any day that celebrates freedom (federally recognized or not), is a celebration of the possibility of true liberation and a recognition of the work that many are doing to create a future filled with opportunity for all. At Real Food Media, we get to collaborate with folks who are working towards a future of possibilities, groups like: the Food Justice League in Gainesville, FL, working to get prison slavery out of their university’s food system; the National Black Food & Justice Alliance following in the steps of Black freedom fighters before them in the struggle for liberation through food and land justice; and the Food Chain Workers Alliance whose members have been organizing for dignified working conditions across the food chain. 

We hope you will join us in supporting these coalitions, and the many others that center abolition, anti-racism, and Black liberation in their work. We also invite you to join us in insisting that policies in celebration of Black freedom must be accompanied by structural changes that channel resources, land, and safety to Black communities.

Yours in co-creating futures of nourishment, abundance, and joy,

Tiffani, Anna, Christina, and Tanya

 
Read the full issue of the Real Food Scoop

Featured image: Black Futures Farm of Portland, Or. Photo by Noah E. Thomas
 

The post Real Food Scoop | No. 45 appeared first on Real Food Media.

Gazan cuisine, says cookbook author Yasmin Khan, is known for its abundant use of dill. The fragrant herb joins garlic and chillies to form a “holy trinity” that gives its fish and seafood-centered dishes a distinct flavor palate.

It’s easy to view the occupied Palestinian territories only as a battle zone. And it’s important to highlight the routine indignities of living in a colonized land. But Palestine is also a place where peasant farmers and seedkeepers manage precious ecosystems and resources and where ordinary people find ways—through food, music, and daily life—to preserve and celebrate culture. In Khan’s book Zaitoun: Recipes from the Palestinian Kitchen, Gazan blogger and journalist Omar Gharib shares:

“People in Gaza really love life… We don’t take life for granted. If there is darkness, we manage to find some light; if there is ugliness, we manage to find some beauty; if there is despair, we find or create some hope. It is something that we have developed, like a skill. This is the image of Gaza I would like people to know about. It’s not just a place of death and destruction and bombs and dying and Hamas and Fatah and Israel and war and borders, we are not only that. We are two million people, just humans like everyone else in the world, waking up to life every day and looking for the chance to be happy.”

The best antidote to the daily barrage of tragic news from around the world—from the colonial occupation of Palestine to Covid-19 devastation in India to violent repression in Colombia (bound by a common thread of racial capitalism & imperialism)—is not to shutter ourselves from these tragedies, but to find meaning in connection.

In the US, many of us regularly enjoy the flavors of the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America through restaurants, food trucks, and cookbooks from the diaspora. Instead of disconnected consumption, we can choose to be in relationship with the places we enjoy through food… and that means solidarity: holding our policymakers accountable for US foreign policies (like arms sales) and supporting mutual aid, grassroots media, and activist groups when we can afford to do so.

We’ve listed a few actions you can take, and Palestinian organizations to follow and support, below (let us know of others we can share by tagging @realfoodmedia). 

In global solidarity,

Tanya, Tiffani, Christina, and Anna

 
Read the full issue of the Real Food Scoop

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The 12^th Oxford Real Farming Conference (ORFC) will be online and worldwide from 7-13 January 2021, in a groundbreaking seven-day event featuring more than 150 hours of talks and workshops from partners around the world.

We’ve worked with ORFC to bring you a mix of sessions to help connect you with people and movements worldwide. With this broad mix of interactive workshops, engaging panels, and inspiring keynotes, you’re sure to find numerous sessions that pique your interest. Here are just a few of the sessions we’re excited about:

• Food and Democracy, with Frances Moore Lappé 
• Spinning Food: The Stealth PR Tactics Industry Uses to Shape the Story of Food, with Anna Lappé (BONUS: Anna will be leading a limited-capacity workshop to dive deeper into the tactics and what we can do about them. Sign up for it on the website). 
• Perilous Bounty: How the US Model of Industrial Farming Threatens the Global Food Commons, with Tom Philpott
• Against Philanthropy: The Role of Foundations in Colonizing the Food System with Raj Patel and Rupa Mayra, and Anna as chair. 
• Gender Diversity & Ecology with Edgar Xotchil, Clare Riesman, Paula Gioia, Alessandro Santos Mariano, and Tiffani moderating. 
• Message from the Future II, with Naomi Klein, Nnimmo Bassey, and Jamie Hartzell 
• Neo-colonial Economies and Ecologies, Smallholder Farmers and Multiple Shocks in Africa: Confronting False Solutions Towards Decolonization with Vandana Shiva, Tim Wise, and Mariam Mayet

As you can see, this conference is stacked with sessions to ground your knowledge, expand your thinking, and make new connections. 

Check out the full program here and make sure to get your tickets now. 

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