Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The Farmers Movement in India has inspired millions around the world who are fighting for justice, democracy and solidarity. The farmers held their ground in the face of threats, intimidation and relentless propoganda, and forced the Modi government to repeal the farm bills.
Our legal status [as a GAEC or farm cooperative] allows us to do a lot of things: from growing vegetables to hosting classes, tourists, cultural events, catering… It encouraged us to open the field of possibilities. You can do things but at the same time stay true to yourself and the life you want.
The sustainable and gainful interaction between humans and the rest of the living world will not be created on a drawing board but rather be developed by people being grounded, being terrestrial, being nature.
For Stéphane and his associates on their six-hectare horticulture farm, GAEC Le Jardin des Pierres Bleues, every choice is calculated to yield the best outcomes for people and planet.
Providing sufficient access to affordable food for its population is an underpinning prerequisite for any properly functioning society, and given the clear risks posed by the UK’s current heavy reliance on imports, far more domestic – particularly locally based – food production must be established as a matter of urgency, i.e. before people begin to go hungry.
Stéphane loves numbers, and it’s a formula for the success of the six-hectare horticulture farm, GAEC Le Jardin des Pierres Bleues, that he runs together with three associates and one employee in Vay, north-west France.
Ever since it launched its first audacious land occupations in the mid-1980s, in which groups of impoverished farmers took over unused estates in Southern Brazil and turned them into cooperative farms, the Landless Workers Movement has stood as one of the most innovative and inspiring social movements in the world.
Despite a lack of tools, knowledge, infrastructure and support, woefully few routes to market, and suffocating restrictions on production and use of the crop, meet the British hemp growers who are ploughing ahead. Now a campaign of civil disobedience hopes to provoke policymakers to rethink regulations.
Agroecological processes, like the ones promoted by this exemplary project, are an essential part of the reconstruction of a local, balanced, fair and sustainable economy, which will keep young people in the region and contribute to a transformation of the countryside where the values of sustainability and food sovereignty prevail over an extractivist tradition that has wreaked havoc in the region for too long.
What we don’t know how to do is give collective organisations the means to emerge and not just follow the political funding. We must have the capacity to make time to think out the structure collectively without losing the political thinking.
Recognising the damage caused by synthetic fertiliser, the SFT and others in the sustainable farming sector have long been advocating a switch toward more agroecological farming systems.
On International Women’s day, March 8, 2022, we launched an animation called ‘For feminist agroecologies’ that invites you to ask yourself questions about your food, and about what food system you want to contribute to.
