Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Food culture means a diet and a cuisine geared to whatever is produced by Enlightened Agriculture – which in most countries, and certainly in Britain, should cause no hardship at all. Though first we would need to re-learn how to cook.
A cohort of actors including philanthrocapitalists, aid agencies, governments, academic institutions, and embassies are all working to make this narrative a reality. They talk about transforming African agriculture but what they are doing is creating a market for themselves cleverly couched in a nice sounding language.
The food system was broken long before coronavirus came along. The current crisis has exposed the fault-lines and renewed urgency to tackle root causes. This means asking hard questions and digging deeper for solutions.
How do we take back control and ownership of our food? It’s my belief that before we can change something, we need to understand it.
Today, danger confronts all of us on this Earth. “We were already facing climate change, and now there is the pandemic,” Skye says. The seeds will always be there, to provide both food and a spiritual connection to the Earth, he says. “They are how we will survive.”
In our work to build the Agrarian Commons, Agrarian Trust participates in this work: to confront systems and structures that have resulted in inequitable access to land, and thus impeded the most vulnerable and historically disadvantaged among us from having true control over their food supply.
Thus, what has to be done? Since the cause of right-wing populism is the failure of neoliberalism, cosmetic changes will not have a long-lasting effect, we need to rethink the entire system. We need to put food producers – not multinational corporations and supermarket chains – at the centre of the European food system and decision making.
It’s not as hard as you might think. If you have the right action for a couple of seasons — the Earth actually wants to be full of life. That’s it’s nature. We actually have to work to get it to not do that. So if we just get behind her and breathe life into what she’s already doing, it can change pretty fast. But we need the tools and we need the skills and we need the knowledge and most of all the wisdom that supports all of these things.
In this post I aim to elaborate my belief that, to build or spread food sovereignty, there is an increased need for diverse Peoples, communities and social movements to strengthen relationships and coalitions with one another. Our exchange of knowledges, strategies and practices will keep producing tangible results, and on the less tangible but equally important side, our solidarity will reinforce our resilience in the face of increasing unpredictability.
Food security, traditional agriculture, and local self-reliance are key to regenerative societies of the future, say water protectors taking the movement’s lessons forward.
The West African part of the action-research programme – Democratising Agricultural Research for Food Sovereignty – has made a conscious effort to include members of both advocacy and practitioner movements.
Four food advocates from across the United States may challenge your preconceptions of today’s farmers. They shared their views recently on the challenges of providing healthy, sustainable food and ending hunger.
