The following is an excerpt from my forthcoming cookbook, a fundraiser for the micro-abattoir here at Jonai Farms. Grab a copy to support the revolution here!
Up until the 1990s, Australia produced its own layer chicken genetics. However, because of the genetic advances for increased productivity achieved internationally, the commercial industry in Australia today imports fertile eggs for its layers from a few multinationals overseas. SBA imports the ISA Brown and Lohmann Brown from Hendrix Genetics in Europe, and the Hy-line Brown from Hy-line International in the US. Even pastured egg producers are nearly all reliant on this very narrow supply of ‘genetically-improved’ birds, who have been bred to be prolific layers at the expense of instinctive behaviours. They are renowned amongst pastured growers for poor foraging habits, making them more reliant on expensive grain feed; a lack of protective instincts in the face of aerial or ground predators; and often aggressive and even cannibalistic behaviours in the flock.
As well as breeding layers for productivity rather than health and welfare, the companies producing commercial layers destroy the 50% of chicks born male by dumping them into giant macerators – wheels of spinning blades like a blender – considered the most ‘humane’ way to dispose of the unwanted males and deformed females. While carbon dioxide gassing is also used in some factories, it is also a cruel practice that makes animals feel like they are suffocating before death.
For the hens that survive this origin story, life is not that great, though for many, it is better than it was up until the 1990s, as nearly all eggs available until then came from chickens who spent their whole lives in battery cages. Day old chicks or pullets (chickens reaching point-of-lay) are sold by the breeders to farms to commence their lives as commercial layers. By the early 2000s, the industry was changing rapidly in Australia, and ‘free-range’ eggs now constitute over half the eggs on the shelves. However, with minimal government regulation to improve animal welfare standards, the shift has come from changes in market demand and pressure from animal welfare organisations, meaning most standards are voluntary and developed by industry themselves. In 2022, compulsory guidelines were introduced to phase out battery cages by 2036. Compare this woefully unambitious target with Europe, where battery cages have been banned since 2012. Today, just two ‘farms’ (companies) produce nearly 70% of eggs sold in Australia – Sunny Queen and Pace Farm – which run caged, barn, free range and organic egg farms. Sunny Queen recently sold 50% of its shares to PSP, a Canadian pension fund, while Pace was acquired in 2023 by Roc Partners, a private equity firm.
Since changes in 2018, the voluntary national standard for free range certification has allowed up to 10,000 chickens per hectare, which is about one chook per square metre. In fact, most are not outdoors at all – they merely have to have ‘regular and meaningful access’ to outdoors, which typically means they spend their days in a shed with small doors through which they can, in theory, exit to the barren dirt outside. Research is divided on whether caging the birds would actually be more humane, because being kept in flocks of 10,000 is stressful for chooks, who can’t establish a pecking order – their social hierarchy – so fight a lot more than a small flock with an established order. These limited options are both pretty terrible for the chooks, who I forgot to mention are debeaked as chicks for these reasons.
While you can see that intensive systems don’t have much to recommend them except cheap eggs, it gets worse. The pathogen load in intensive animal production is exponentially higher than in their pastured counterparts, including poultry, which have the highest pathogen loads amongst all meat and dairy options. Salmonella is the leading cause of food-borne illness in Australia, mostly from contaminated eggs. Although Australian standards leave it up to producers to determine whether to clean eggs through a wet (chlorine) or dry wash, I often think that if you are eating industrial eggs, you probably want them to be sprayed with chlorine.
While this may leave you unsure about buying eggs from even a local pastured egg farm, I don’t recommend boycotting all eggs. Similar to the dilemma small-scale pastured livestock farmers face in taking our animals to industrial abattoirs, we have no good choices until we recreate them, and that takes time. As with other good whole foods, eggs from genuine pasture-raised chickens will come from farms with names and farmers with faces, raising healthy animals on healthy soils, and they will typically be nearby with short or direct distribution, such as farmers’ markets, farm gate sales, and CSA. Help them radically transform the system from the ground (and DNA) up!
Hierarchy of decisions
GROW: If you have a backyard, get some chickens! They are a delight to watch and kids love them, they eat your scraps and in return, give you an egg nearly every day!
BARTER: It is pretty hard to find someone in the city with so many eggs they will be willing to barter, but for those in rural areas, if you can’t keep chooks for some reason, ask your neighbours whether they can barter some.
BUY: As is usually the answer to the vexed question of, ‘so which brand of eggs can I trust?’ – avoid industrial brands entirely if you are able. If you can purchase from a farmer directly, best. From an independent retailer is the next best – your local greengrocer or butcher often sell local eggs. Finally, if you have to shop at the duopoly, look for eggs grown closer to you, and try to find a brand certified by Humane Choice or Pastured PROOF.
The politics of dessert are largely played out at the household level – do you have a sweet tooth or not? Do you want fruit in that or keep the chocolate pure? Why is flan so slimy? Here at Jonai, Stuart is the sweet tooth, and as mentioned elsewhere in my recipes, I have a very savoury palate. Sometimes I can convince him to add salt to his recipes (mmm, salted caramel ice cream), but more often, he just chucks in a bit of pig feed like out-of-date cranberries or date syrup.
Seriously, though, the politics of sugar have a long colonial legacy, and some say that the history of sugar is the history of capitalism. A key issue in cane sugar production has long been unjust labour conditions, including the enslavement of millions of people that made sugar the commodity it is today. In Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1986), Sidney Mintz examined the production and consumption of sugar, revealing sugar’s explosion onto the global market as a crop grown in Europe’s tropical colonies across the Americas on the back of enslaved labour. Sugar has its origins in India and a long history in China and Persia as an extravagant luxury of the elites, but the brutal emergence of the Atlantic slave trade transformed sugar from a limited luxury to a staple of the diet of the new industrial proletariat from the 19th century onwards. In Australia, cane workers were largely indentured labour from the Pacific Islands, many of whom were ‘blackbirded’ – a euphemism for kidnapping or otherwise coercing people to leave their homes to work for little or no pay in Australian cane fields. The work was difficult and dangerous, and many exploited workers were injured or died.
The biggest sugar company in Australia is what you will find on most supermarket shelves today – CSR – an abbreviation of Colonial Sugar Refining Company, which was bought by Singaporean multinational Wilmar in 2010. In case the labour exploitation in its sugar interests wasn’t enough, CSR expanded into the building industry in the early 20th century, and is the company responsible for Australia’s worst industrial disaster immortalised in Midnight Oil’s ‘Blue Sky Mine’ – the Wittenoom asbestos mine. More than 2000 workers and their family members have been diagnosed with a fatal disease (predominantly pleural mesothelioma and lung cancer) due to exposure to blue asbestos at Wittenoom, as CSR willfully ignored regulated limits to exposure up until 1966. Whether the commodity is sugar or asbestos, the capitalist profit motive devalues human labour and neglects workers’ rights.
The sugar industry was built not only at the expense of human rights, but also that of ecosystem health. Coastal cane fields are major contributors to ocean pollution, which is causing mass coral bleaching, storm damage and soil erosion from deforestation and pesticide and fertiliser runoff. More than one government inquiry has concluded the industry needs to change farming practices, but the Great Barrier Reef continues to die.
As with beef, lamb, grain and cotton, most sugar produced in Australia is exported, an average of 85% makes Australia the fourth largest exporter in the world after Brazil, India and Thailand. Yet while the majority of the 4400 sugar cane farms are family farms with an average size of around 100 hectares, there are just 24 sugar mills owned by eight companies, with 75% of manufacturing owned by foreign corporations. A result of de-regulation and trade liberalisation of the industry in 2006, sugar has gone the way of dairy, with a steady drop in farmers’ income (some sources say only 11% of cane farmers are profitable), and a concomitant loss of small-scale farms. The foreign-owned mills are increasingly importing raw sugar from countries who subsidise production overseas, and even refined white sugar is now often cheaper for these companies to import for sale domestically than to process Australian sugar cane.
There are alternatives to the highly refined white and brown sugars in most Australian pantries, however. Of course, there is honey and maple syrup, neither of which have legacies of human rights and ecosystem abuses. Muscovado and palm sugar are also both available in some grocers, and both have a much lower environmental impact, though because muscovado is from sugarcane, treatment of workers may still be a concern, depending on where and how it is produced. Originally from Barbados, where it is still produced traditionally by smallholders, India and Colombia are also large producers of muscovado. It goes through minimal processing, thereby retaining much of molasses, which gives it a slightly wet, dark brown character, and more flavour than white sugar. Panela is a less commonly found cane sugar very similar to muscovado, produced mostly in Colombia. Palm sugar is even better on the labour and ecological side of things, produced by smallholders from sap extracted from a few different varieties of palms, which are maintained for the sap, and can live up to 100 years. Of course, if everyone was to suddenly demand palm sugar, it would almost certainly go the way of other commodities, with a decline in environmental and labour conditions.
But wait, I haven’t even got to the health impacts on eaters once this unnecessary, extractive, exploitative and damaging crop makes it into the food chain. The average Australian consumes around 50 kilograms of sugar per annum (in the US it is 60kg!), which includes sugar from all sources, not just cane. While honey and the sugars in fruit juices and the like are included in this figure, the majority of intake comes from refined sugars like cane, sugarbeets, and high fructose corn syrup. Although sugar as a nutrient has been a small part of ancestral diets for millennia, the way it is consumed in modern diets is responsible for several adverse health effects, including excess energy consumption, the displacement of nutritious foods, and tooth decay. There is a scientific consensus that the consumption of sugary drinks has contributed to the obesity epidemic, and the health effects associated with sugar consumption place a significant burden on the quality and length of individual lives, as well as on society in the multi-billion dollars in public health costs.
At the risk of moralising, the moral of the story is to limit your sugar intake for your own health, but also the health of the planet and the world’s sugar workers. And preference minimally- or human-scale processed sweeteners like honey and maple syrup, or muscovado or palm sugar, over more highly refined sugars. That’s what I’m doing after researching the sugar industry for this book! And don’t jump to the false solution of artificial sweeteners – UPF is never the answer. But of course more importantly than what you can do alone, it is what governments can and should do to regulate industries such as sugar to prioritise planetary and human health over profits.
NB: This is an excerpt from my forthcoming cookbook Eat Like the Jonai: Ethical, ecologically sound, socially just and uncommonly delicious, a fundraiser for the collective micro-abattoir we are building here at Jonai Farms, due out in November. Read more about that project and grab a copy here!
The war against animal fats was launched by corporations and has led to shockingly high rates of diet-related diseases largely attributable to the consumption of ultra-processed foods (UPF), including the ubiquitous ‘vegetable oils’ and their derivatives. From margarine to canola oil, this stuff just isn’t good for you. Whenever I go home to visit Mum and Dad, I open the fridge, announce that I can ‘still believe it isn’t butter!’ and throw out the tubs of margarine in a never ending quest to get them to eat more whole foods. I could write a lot more about this, but I love and respect my parents and how they raised us, in spite of the industrial diet, which infiltrated the majority of American households as I grew up. But a quick observation – Dad grew up in rural Alabama in the 1940s and 50s, the youngest of 11 children in a Southern Baptist family, which left him a lover of real butter, fresh fruit, and black walnuts cracked standing under the tree. Mama, on the other hand, grew up in small-town Oregon in a working class family that was the first generation to revere commercially canned foods, with a mother who baked a mean cherry cobbler but wasn’t otherwise fond of cooking, leaving my mum with a palate for whatever was quickest to dump out of the can. Their division of labour left what little cooking occurred to Mama, so processed food was the norm in our house, and for them, still is.
My parents’ relation to food and nutrition is not unlike the patterns seen globally, as proletarianisation has seen people transitioning, willingly or not, from rural producers of food to urban workers reliant on industrial food, with devastating consequences for individual and public health and the ecosystems ravaged by industrial monocultures. Stuart and I have been fortunate to travel widely and deeply, and in our 35 years of travelling together, we have seen and tasted the decline in the quality of ingredients in nearly every corner of the globe, from America and France to Japan and Malaysian Borneo. The impact is still most obvious in cities, such as we saw most recently in Sarawak, where next to food markets featuring a kaleidoscope of local produce are streets of restaurants serving up ultra-processed noodles topped with vegetables imported from China. Only in traditional villages cut off from this toxic supply can you still taste the nutritious and culturally-rich flavours of place. Those where multinationals like Nestle have intentionally, colonially penetrated such as many riverside villages in the Amazon, foodways are being lost to the onslaught of packaged crap sold as ‘modernity’.
Read up on the industrial history of margarine – a.k.a. ‘coal butter’ – for a glimpse into the corporate tactics to turn industrial sludge into everyday staples, and the resulting twin crises of under- and over-nutrition. The definition of ultra-processed foods (UPF) is quite simple – if there are any ingredients in the food-like product that you can’t find in a home pantry, it is UPF. ‘Vegetable’ or seed oils (canola, palm, rice bran, corn, etc) are by definition UPF – they can only be produced in factories. The exceptions are cold-pressed oils such as olive, grapeseed and some sunflower oil, which are the only oils we use to make aioli. We cook everything in pork or beef fat, or butter or ghee, or very occasionally in olive oil.
Palm Oil: Dust to Dust
While basically all monoculture seed and grain crops are ecologically disastrous systems designed to grow non-nutritious ingredients for UPF (or cosmetics, animal feed or biofuels), none matches palm oil, which is in nearly every packaged food product in the supermarket, and makes up 40% of global oil production. 85% is produced in Indonesia and Malaysia, with devastating consequences for biodiversity and the survival of many species of plants and animals, including Orangutans, pygmy elephants and the Sumatran rhino, amongst others. Driving the length of Sarawak in Malaysian Borneo in early 2024, we bore witness to the devastation firsthand. On one stretch between Bitiang and Miri we saw nothing – not one thing – that was not oil palm plantations as far as the eye could see. What really shocked us was the amount of earthworks apparently required – the land is bulldozed and terraced for each line of palms, which take three to four years to fruit. They continue to produce for up to thirty years, and the average life cycle of a plantation is 25 years, after which it is bulldozed and begins again. The erosion from this production model is intense, and you can see it in the colour of the rivers, which the Dayak (the general term for Indigenous Peoples in Sarawak, made up of several distinct Indigenous Peoples) say used to be clear. The silt and fertiliser impacts on the quality of the water to the extent that fish stocks are severely depleted, in addition to the biodiverse jungle foods once bountifully available to the Dayak peoples.
From the destruction of soil, waters, and entire ecosystems, oil palm does not even deliver food as we know it. It is refined, bleached, and deodorised (RBD in industry parlance) to be transformed into a plethora of ingredients, including: Vegetable Oil, Vegetable Fat, Palm Kernel, Palm Kernel Oil, Palm Fruit Oil, Palmate, Palmitate, Palmolein, Glyceryl, Stearate, Stearic Acid, Elaeis Guineensis, Palmitic Acid, Palm Stearine, Palmitoyl Oxostearamide, Palmitoyl Tetrapeptide-3, Sodium Laureth Sulfate, Sodium Lauryl Sulfate, Sodium Kernelate, Sodium Palm Kernelate, Sodium Lauryl Lactylate/Sulphate, Hydrated Palm Glycerides, Etyl Palmitate, Octyl Palmitate, and Palmityl Alcohol. Ultra-processed food – none more so than palm oil – destroys everything in its pernicious path – starting with the traditional lands of Indigenous Peoples and peasants, and consummating its life cycle annihilation by taking people’s health and lives.
One last anecdote about palm oil. While we were in Malaysia, travelling aghast through the plantations, news broke that the Malaysian government had raided a shop selling products labelled ‘no palm oil’ and confiscated all of them. One report explained ‘In Malaysia, it is illegal to sell products with the “No Palm Oil” label which is seen to be discriminatory against products containing the widely used vegetable oil, an economic mainstay for Malaysia.’ Let that sink in for a bit.
Quite unlike what I would have written a decade ago in response to these daily horrors of the modern food system, I’m not going to urge you to boycott products with palm oil (though where possible, that’s great too). And I’m not going to press the individual responsibility to educate yourselves about the insidious complexities of food(ish) production and processing (though clearly I would not discourage anyone – knowledge is power, after all). Instead, I’m going to urge you to join democratic collectives like the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance or the many local organisations of farmers, allies, hunger activists and more, to add your support to those of us working together to radically transform the food system from the ground up, while lobbying for reforms to protect everyone from the worst ravages of industrial food systems. This is neither the first nor the last time I will recommend collectivising, the best hope we have to ensure a world of radical sufficiency for all, not only those privileged enough to know and access nutritious, ethical, ecologically-sound and socially-just food.
Read like the Jonai: Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn’t Food, by Chris van Tulleken. 2023. W.W. Norton & Company.
NB: This is an excerpt from my forthcoming cookbook Eat Like the Jonai: Ethical, ecologically sound, socially just and uncommonly delicious, a fundraiser for the collective micro-abattoir we are building here at Jonai Farms, due out in November. Read more about that project and grab a copy here!
I am writing from the lands of the Dja Dja Wurrung, and pay my respects to their elders past and present, and acknowledge that their land was never ceded. We are listening and learning from the Land, and the Djaara and other First Peoples how to enact a custodial ethic in all that we do here.
I am going to briefly review some of the worst consequences of capitalist industrial agriculture for biodiversity before turning to agroecological solutions.
Biodiversity for food and agriculture is all the plants and animals – wild and domesticated – that provide food, feed, fuel and fibre. It is also the myriad of organisms that support food production through ecosystem services – called ‘associated biodiversity’ in policy speak. This includes all the plants, animals and micro-organisms (such as insects, bats, birds, mangroves, corals, seagrasses, earthworms, soil-dwelling fungi and bacteria) that keep soils fertile, pollinate plants, purify water and air, keep fish and trees healthy, and fight crop and livestock pests and diseases.
In 2019 the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the UN released the first Global Assessment of Biodiversity for Food and Agriculture. The report found that ‘many key components of biodiversity for food and agriculture at genetic, species, and ecosystem levels are in decline’ and that ‘evidence suggests that the proportion of livestock breeds at risk of extinction is increasing’.
For too long, biodiversity has been considered incompatible with agriculture — something that happens on the other side of the fence, or only in shelter belts. Even the current work by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) towards a post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework takes a productivist approach in its limited attention to agriculture, and a colonial approach to conservation in proposals to lock up more land away from sustainable human use — this is a fundamental violation of First Peoples’ right to land and denial of the thousands of years of care and co-production with Nature.
Australia is among the top seven countries worldwide responsible for 60% of the world’s biodiversity loss between 1996 and 2008, and we are now facing the sixth mass extinction event in 4.6 billion years (Muir 2014).
Agricultural biodiversity globally is disappearing rapidly, as industrial agriculture, forestry, and fisheries systems use homogeneous, proprietary seeds, trees, breeds and aquatic species, scientifically bred and genetically modified to include limited traits, which are useful to industry. They are grown in simplified agroecosystems that are heavily contaminated with biocides and other agrochemicals.
Of some 6,000 plant species cultivated for food, fewer than 200 contribute substantially to global food output, and only nine account for 66 percent of total crop production.
The world’s livestock production is based on about 40 animal species, with only a handful providing the vast majority of meat, milk and eggs. Of the 7,745 local breeds of livestock reported globally, 26 percent are at risk of extinction.
Nearly a third of fish stocks are overfished, more than half have reached their sustainable limit.
Wild food species and many species that contribute to ecosystem services that are vital to food and agriculture, including pollinators, soil organisms and natural enemies of pests, are rapidly disappearing.
It is timely in this period of COVID to remind ourselves of the risks of these extreme losses of biodiversity in agriculture. The production of a constantly narrowing range of species and breeds of animals and plants is leading to greater risks in our food system. In the case of the rise of zoonoses like coronavirus, one of the most significant risks is from intensive livestock production, and the expansion of industrial agriculture into remote areas of forest, giving rare pathogens new opportunities to access vulnerable hosts, giving rise to new and more virulent strains of influenza and coronaviruses such as COVID-19.
Some of the key risks posed by intensive livestock production include: the separation of breeding animals from farms where their offspring are raised and later harvested for food, and the narrowing of genetic resources to very few breeds of genetically similar animals that are then crowded into unhealthy conditions that suppress their immune systems. This creates the perfect breeding ground for illness — these intensive sheds are literally ‘food for flu’.
Biodiversity-friendly practices are on the rise
The good news is that the FAO report highlights a growing interest in biodiversity-friendly practices and approaches. 80 percent of the 91 countries indicate using one or more biodiversity-friendly practices and approaches such as: organic agriculture, integrated pest management, conservation agriculture, sustainable soil management, agroecology, sustainable forest management, agroforestry, diversification practices in aquaculture, ecosystem approach to fisheries and ecosystem restoration.
While most have surely heard of regenerative agriculture, agroecology is much less known or understood in Australia. Agroecology is a science, a set of practices, and a social movement that fosters the democratic participation of farmers in the food system. I briefly mention this distinction to show that agroecological and regenerative farmers are all working to recuperate ecosystems from centuries of colonial damage, but also to highlight that the agroecology movement is underpinned by notions of social and economic justice as well — putting solidarity with Indigenous Peoples first, and solidarity economies that reject corporate power and capitalism next.
A Custodial Ethic
There is an ancient ‘custodial ethic’ amongst Indigenous Peoples and peasants globally, and a growing one amongst agroecological and regenerative farmers in the Global North, stemming from place-based understandings of country, reactions to climate change and loss of biodiversity, and an increasing willingness to grapple with what it means to hold title to the unceded lands of First Peoples (while working out local strategies to ‘pay the rent’, share land, or give land back to its Original Custodians). I want to share a couple of examples of farmers and First Peoples collaborating on Country and furthering the agroecological transition with you here in Australia.
Nguuruu Farm is a diverse biodynamic farm of 220 acres on Ngunnawal land in the southern tablelands of NSW, with heritage breed Belted Galloway cattle, and rare breed Silver Grey Dorking chickens and eggs, fruits and vegetables. Murray and Michelle have shared that they are making a part of their land available to local Indigenous custodians ‘for bush tucker, a native nursery, agroforestry for traditional implements, a cool burn school, or perhaps a place for guided tours. Could be all of those things, or something else.’
They wrote that ‘the partnership is struck and governed under ‘Yindyamarra’ – the Wiradjuri lore of respect for all things. It means to ‘go slow, be patient, take responsibility, and give respect’. They are engaging in a relationalism intrinsic to much Aboriginal political ordering, a way of knowing and being where the very land is the Law, and one’s relationship to it is based on a mutualism that creates an ethical impulse to care for Country and everything on it. Embracing these ways of knowing is a critical and much-needed step in the right direction for agriculture in Australia.
Millpost Farm, also in the southern tablelands of NSW, transitioned a family sheep farm to a broadacre permaculture farm in the late 1970s. They produce wool and a small offering of organic garlic and tomatoes in addition to providing most of their own food for three generations living together on the farm. Millpost have also been working to make the land to which they hold title available to Ngunawal/Ngambri mob to reconnect with their ancestral country, while also providing access to researchers to a stone axe quarry identified on the farm. Guided by the local mob, the Watson family then provide guidance to academics on how to protect a sacred place while letting it be appreciated as a cultural place for the Original Custodians.
Our farm – Jonai Farms and Meatsmiths – is an agroecological example of a circular bioeconomy working to enact our custodial ethic. We are a community-supported agriculture (CSA) farm, with pastured heritage breed Large Black pigs, Speckleline cattle and purple hard-necked garlic.
Livestock are fed so-called ‘waste’ – surplus, damaged, or unwanted produce from other food and agriculture systems in Victoria (e.g. brewers’ grain, eggs, milk), creating a net ecological benefit by diverting many tonnes of organic waste from landfill, and exiting the fossil-fuel-intensive model of segregating feed production from livestock farming.
Water is moved around the property by old piston pumps powered by secondhand solar panels via treadmill motors salvaged from the local tip, as the farm strives to reduce its dependency on fossil fuels.
While animals are slaughtered off site, carcasses are returned for further processing and value adding in the on-farm butcher’s shop and commercial kitchen. I lead a small team to produce a range of fresh cuts, and smallgoods including ham, bacon, and seasonal sausages with nothing but salt, pepper, and ingredients grown here or by neighbouring farms. Pigs’ heads become pate de tete, excess fat makes beautiful soap, and bones are transformed into bone broth. Bones that remain are then pyrolised in a retort. They are super-heated in a low-oxygen environment to create bonechar – a kind of charcoal of bones that maintains the carbon as well as trace minerals such as phosphorus, magnesium, and potassium, which is then activated in barrels of biofertiliser and used to grow our small commercial crop of garlic.
95% of produce is sold to 80 household CSA members in Melbourne and the region, who commit to a minimum of one year, sharing the abundance and the risks of the farm in a genuine solidarity economy, and the small remainder is sold through the farm gate shop.
Like millions of other smallholders around the world, we are maintaining biodiversity at the genetic, species, and ecosystem levels – living a life made in common with Nature, we conserve and sustainably use the biodiversity in our care, and share the benefits of our sustainable use with the Original Custodians by paying the rent.
AFSA is also launching our First Peoples First Strategy at this year’s Food Sovereignty Convergence, which aims to concomitantly achieve both Indigenous sovereignty and food sovereignty for all. We are working with farmers and allies who are embracing and espousing a custodial ethic to understand how they/we are currently or may in the future be able to extend care for Land to care for its Original Custodians, bringing settler descendants full circle to find ways and means of restitution of land and rights to First Peoples.
There are various complexities involved in settler descendants being on this land. To consciously think of oneself as a settler means being conscious that we live on an Indigenous Peoples’ Land. Importantly for the food sovereignty movement, this carries with it an obligation to support those defending their homelands, and to support ongoing attempts to unsettle the settler conscience by staying with the trouble of colonialism (Haraway 2016).
In my experience, there is often an unwarranted generosity from First Peoples in Australia towards settler descendants and other more recent migrants in the face of ongoing colonisation of unceded Aboriginal lands – a generosity Indigenous scholars have written is born of the same ways-of-being at the root of the custodial ethic. Mary Graham, a Kombumerri person, and her settler colleague Morgan Brigg (2021) recommend moving forward with ‘autonomous regard’ between Indigenous and settler peoples, ‘which can be an ethical relation that acknowledges and sits with the brutality of dispossession through settler colonialism.’
We know as a historically and currently non-Indigenous led organisation, AFSA’s National Committee and our members still have a lot of deep listening, learning and acting to do.
AFSA has worked for 10 years in solidarity with the global food sovereignty movement to assert everyone’s right to nutritious and culturally-determined food grown and distributed in ethical and ecologically-sound ways, and our right to democratically determine our own food and agriculture systems. We invite you to join us in our work to be active in our own optimism in these challenging times.
Long-time activists know all too well how the powers that be work to divide us to maintain their power base. They use coercion, ego stroking, and straight up misinformation to entice some of us to dance with them, while others see the devil for what he is.
This time the devil, or shall we call him the wolf, comes dressed in sheep’s clothing. The wolf is the World Economic Forum (WEF), the World Bank, an assortment of global and regional think tanks, and front men for Big Food and Big Pharma. The fluffy white fleece is none other than the United Nations itself, now fleeced by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. Grandma’s house is the UN Food Systems Summit, full of the scent of warm cookies and a bright future, but in reality, housing the world’s most powerful corporations waiting with cameras and recorders to focus group the f*** out of anyone who walks in.
Join the boycottand People’s Autonomous Response to the UN Food Systems Summit. These are the key global voices for smallholders and Indigenous Peoples with 25 years’ experience in global governance – if they refuse to legitimize a corrupted UN process, you should listen.
When the world’s least powerful ask the most privileged to stand with them against exploitation, land grabbing, and corporate capture of the governing mechanisms we have to fight with, it’s our responsibility to listen. Shut up and listen. Shut up, listen, then speak up. Speak as one to lift the voices of the marginalized. Don’t marginalize them further by turning up in the spaces they have intentionally vacated because they have spent decades fighting to be heard, only to realise that in this case the only ones listening are the multinational corporations, market researchers and those interested in profit over people and the planet. The peasants of the world refuse to be focus grouped.
Breaking with the long history of multilateralism – a process of organizing and negotiating between states – the UNFSS has taken a multistakeholder approach from the beginning, giving multinational corporations equal footing with democratic states in discussions about how to achieve the transformation of the food system we need – to ensure everyone has access to nutritious and culturally appropriate food, produced and distributed in socially-just and ecologically-sound ways.
How did we get here?
The UN partnered with the World Economic Forum (WEF) to run the Summit – you know, the world’s peak body for multinational corporations like Bayer, Cargill, Facebook, JBS, and Syngenta. Then the Secretary General appointed the leader of the Alliance for the Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) Agnes Kalibata as the Special Envoy to coordinate the Summit. AGRA is substantially funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (also a member of the WEF), which has been aggressively promoting the uptake of biotechnology in Africa for the past couple of decades. Our sister AFSA – the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa – has called for donors to stop funding AGRA and show support for smallholders.
The Gates Foundation has a well-documented Big Tech bias in the ‘solutions’ it backs. This is not a Foundation that funds programs that empower communities to be self-sufficient, resilient, and resourceful – Gates is not here for food sovereignty. His projects in Africa have steadily increased farmer reliance on annual purchases of GM seed, and his investments in lab meat startups along with two of the world’s biggest meat companies, Tyson and Cargill, clearly demonstrate the cynicism and self-interest of his philanthrocapitalism.
Kalibata and her secretariat have promoted Food Systems Dialogues at the global and national levels as well as ‘Independent Food Systems Dialogues’, which ostensibly can be hosted by anyone who chooses to. There have apparently been over 800 independent dialogues led by everything from corporations to civil society organizations across the world. According to UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Michael Fakhri, these have produced nothing substantive that has been taken up by the secretariat, and in fact not ‘everyone’ is granted the privilege to host a dialogue – the secretariat holds the decision-making power.
Food Systems Dialogues are still occurring in the name of the UN around the world, including in Australia. We believe most people who participate in these do not understand the extent and gravity of the corporate capture of multilateral global food governance. Hence, AFSA has shared as much as possible to get the word out and keep well-intentioned healthy and sustainable food systems advocates from being duped into legitimizing an illegitimate and damaging process.
Four ‘levers of change’ have been selected by the secretariat from the obscure processes of food systems dialogues, champions, Action Tracks, and the Scientific Group. This is where Machiavelli pops in for a cuppa. In preparation for the Summit to be held online entirely over one day (23 September), these ‘levers of change’ are being developed into a compendium. The lead organisations for each lever are, wait for it:
Human Rights – a consultant hired by the UN Secretary General (!)
It’s worth noting that the Gates Foundation provides funding to all of these bodies in addition to its support for AGRA, as does the Rockefeller Foundation. These private funders are controlling narratives and negotiations under the guise of the UN – discussions that should rightly be led by the Committee for World Food Security (CFS), which has the mandate for food systems transformation, informed by the full participation of civil society.
It gets worse. Once our corporate overlords have led the drafting of proposed solutions to the problems they have created in the world, this body of work is intended to guide the development of ‘National Pathways to Food Systems Transformation’. What that means is that many countries will at last create National Food Plans[i] – in theory a good thing – but the plans will be guided by corporate solutions.
According to the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, ‘Even representatives of Indigenous Peoples who participated in the official Pre-Summit feel disappointed that the human rights of Indigenous Peoples were not taken into account in the conclusions, nor did FSS approve a Coalition of IPs, as they had requested. Today these IP representatives say they will be out of the Summit until their demands are met.’
If you are involved in UNFSS dialogues or action tracks, or being invited to participate in its processes, engage critically and consider boycotting if rights-based governance and epistemic justice demands are not met.
If you are boycotting or otherwise resisting the UNFSS, consider working with others! #foodsystems4people #boycottUNFSS
[i] Fun fact – the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA) was formed in response to the federal government’s commitment to a first-ever National Food Plan. Released in July 2012, the National Food Plan Green Paper reflected a heavy bias towards corporate agribusiness, large-scale food manufacturing and big retailing interests. The limited and perfunctory nature of the government’s ‘consultation’ process suggested that most or all of the key decisions had already been taken elsewhere.
In response, a small group of activists who had formed AFSA resolved to develop and implement its own process to establish a People’s Food Plan that would reflect the concerns and aspirations of eaters, farmers, community organisations, food businesses and advocacy groups. The People’s Food Plan process was open, inclusive and democratic, and brought together some 600 people across the nation in ‘kitchen table conversations’ to develop the content collectively. The People’s Food Plan reflects the needs and desires of people, not corporations. Should Australia take up the challenge to develop a National Food Plan at last, AFSA is ready to ensure small-scale farmers and eaters have a seat at the negotiating table this time around.
This blog started in 2006 as a place to record my musings as I undertook a PhD in cultural studies around practices of consumption (which I did not finish). 15 years later, this is my first post of a new PhD project in anthropology focusing on practices of production – how some farmers are working to radically transform the food system from the ground up.
Below is the minimally edited text of the research proposal seminar I delivered last Friday as a milestone for my PhD at UWA. Feedback welcome. 🙂
***
I’m sharing this today from unceded Dja Dja Wurrung country in the central highlands of Victoria, the traditional and ongoing lands of the Jaara people, to whose elders past, present, and emerging I pay my respects. I’d also like to pay my respects to any Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders reading this.
The development of agriculture over the past 12,000 years resulted eventually in what James Scott argues is ‘a contraction of our species’ attention to and practical knowledge of the natural world, a contraction of diet, a contraction of space, and perhaps a contraction, as well, in the breadth of ritual life’ (Scott 2017: 87). As a farmer myself, I find this description of my livelihood somewhat alarming.
Much later, monotheistic religions grew on foundational discourses of human dominion over nature, contributing to the move from more ecologically-sensitive traditional farming practices to the highly mechanised conventions of capitalist industrialised agriculture. This latter form of agriculture has systematised human mastery over nature (Tsing 2012) with devastating consequences, including the sixth mass extinction event in 4.6 billion years (Muir 2014).
In 2019 the UN reported that ‘many key components of biodiversity for food and agriculture at genetic, species, and ecosystem levels are in decline’ and that ‘evidence suggests that the proportion of livestock breeds at risk of extinction is increasing’ (FAO 2019: xxxviii). In Australia as elsewhere, the rise of fast-growing, high-yielding industrial genetics has led to a concurrent loss of rare- and heritage-breed livestock. While there is a movement to preserve heritage breeds led by the Rare Breeds Trust of Australia, it is still relatively nascent and unsupported by government policy (Jonas 2017; Iles 2020).
There is in fact a notable lack of research in Australia on the importance of biodiversity in agriculture (Walton 2019). Recent initiatives such as the Australian Farm Biodiversity Certification Scheme Trial funded by the Federal Government and run by the National Farmers Federation (NFF 2018) demonstrate all too clearly how far Australia has to go in understanding the urgent need for a transformation of agriculture, as to date it does not even explicitly include any focus on increasing biodiversity in agricultural produce, only in the landscape surrounding production areas. That is, in work concerned with the loss of biodiversity in agriculture in Australia, none of it appears to be concerned with the loss of biodiversity in the food we grow and eat, and very little addresses the biodiversity in the soil in which it is grown, which we increasingly understand to be of critical importance to all life.
Happily, my PhD is part of a larger project funded by a DECRA grant entitled ‘Raising Rare Breeds: Domestication, Extinction and Meat in the Anthropocene’, led by my principal supervisor Dr Catie Gressier, which aims to address this dearth of research through developing greater understandings of rare and heritage breed farming across Australia.
My involvement in the broader project around rare breeds is born of my life as a former vegetarian tree-hugging greenie turned pig-farming butcher tree-hugging greenie. My husband and I farm on the ancient volcanic soils of Dja Dja Wurrung country, the traditional and unceded lands of the Jaara people. We moved here a decade ago, motivated by our desire to help grow the movement of ethical and ecologically-sound livestock farmers in Australia. Inspired by the rare breed movement and its biodiverse values, we chose to raise heritage-breed Large Black pigs and a variety of heritage and modern-breed cattle on pasture to fulfil this goal. We were strongly driven by our ethics to raise animals in a high welfare system on pasture, only later coming to realize the full complexity of ecological, social, and political entanglements our path would reveal.
While non-indigenous farmers who identify as ‘regenerative’ or ‘agroecological’ promote their/our innovations on social media, at conferences, and during farmer field days, Altieri & Holt-Gimenez (2016: 2) remind us that ‘the true roots of agroecology lie in the ecological rationale of indigenous and peasant agriculture still prevalent…’ and the UN provides empirical evidence that, globally, Indigenous Peoples and local communities are the best custodians of biodiversity (FAO 2019; IPBES 2019), emphasising the need to look to Indigenous knowledges, and to respect the customary laws and sovereignty of Australia’s First Peoples.
As we have deepened our experience and knowledge of Dja Dja Wurrung country in our relatively short time as custodians, we have also come to better understand the compelling need to ‘decolonize ourselves’ (Land 2015), and to affirm solidarity with First Peoples in order to grow a future for Australia that is ecologically sustainable and socially just for all. Indigenous Knowledges scholar Tyson Yunkaporta (2019: 19) of the Apalech clan of Far North Queensland asserts, ‘We rarely see global sustainability issues addressed using Indigenous perspectives and knowledges. […] It is always about the what and never about the how’.
With interest in Yunkaporta’s ‘how’, the project aims to examine the ways in which Australia’s ‘new peasantry’ (van der Ploeg 2017) can be informed by Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies to combat and adapt to climate change. I ask:
How can small-scale farmers inhabit and care for land in such a way as to maintain healthy agroecosystems and their human and nonhuman communities, while advancing Indigenous peoples’ sovereignty?
What are the discrepancies, and what convergence in Indigenous and non-Indigenous epistemologies is needed (and possible) (Plumwood 2005)?
I aim to contribute to the movement of small-scale non-indigenous farmers as they/we come to terms with our colonial privilege through a process of critical self-reflection alongside ‘public political ally work’ (Land 2015: 164) supporting Indigenous struggles, and to actively promote the ecologically sustainable and socially just work I find.
To explain why I use the term ‘peasant’ in Australia – a country with no history of a peasantry, the 2018 UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas defines a peasant such as to include Australian smallholders:
any person who engages or who seeks to engage alone, or in association with others or as a community, in small-scale agricultural production for subsistence and/or for the market, and who relies significantly, though not necessarily exclusively, on family or household labour and other non-monetized ways of organizing labour, and who has a special dependency on and attachment to the land.
Given my position as a farmer-activist-scholar deeply embedded in the communities of interest to this project, I will undertake multi-sited ethnography as an insider anthropologist. The fieldwork with farmers will be guided by the following broad questions:
Why do some farmers choose rare and heritage breeds of livestock?
How are these farmers fostering biodiversity and multi-species flourishings?
How and where are these farmers accessing agroecological knowledge and experience?
Why and how are farmers engaging with local Aboriginal people and their ecological knowledge? (Do they engage with the local Jaara people, or with others outside our bioregion? Directly or indirectly – why?)
What are the constraints and enablers of agroecological farming with rare and heritage breeds? (genetic, technical, legislative, economic, social, ecological)
Three farms will be chosen in the central highlands of Victoria (Dja Dja Wurrung country) for participant observation, based on criteria that they grow rare breed cattle and/or pigs for the commercial sale of meat and/or dairy, and that they sell their produce through direct channels. In addition to participant observation, interviews will be conducted with semi-structured questions designed to elucidate data ranging from the values and paradigms that shape the farmers’ actions, through the everyday practices of rearing heritage breed livestock, to farmers’ relationships with other farmers, those who buy their produce, local Aboriginal peoples, and the state. Questions will also focus on the extent to which the farmers are collectivised – are they associated with agroecology and food sovereignty as a social movement, do they belong to any local, regional, or national organisations, and if so, to what end? Observations of land and water use and health, animal husbandry practices and perceptions of animal welfare will help achieve the aims of the project.
Focus group discussions with more farmers of rare and heritage breeds within and outside my region will also be held online and in person, with some questions adapted from the semi-structured interviews with my key participant farmers. Drawing on the work recounted in Chambers (1989) on ‘reality mapping’ and ‘ecological mapping’ undertaken with farmers in the Global South, farmers in focus groups will be asked to draw a politico-biocultural map of their farms to gain insights into their perspectives on the ecological, social, and political contexts in which they farm.
One of the questions that orients my research is revealing the experiences of other heritage-breed livestock farmers:
What is the relationship between a focus on breed conservation and an awareness of the importance of greater biodiversity at all levels of food and agriculture systems?
By examining the grounded practices, decision-making processes, and stated values of farmers who raise rare- and heritage-breed livestock – exotic non-industrial counter-hegemonic animals – this project seeks to uncover the paradigms farmers bring to their work.
What underpins the decision to raise slow-growing, low-yielding animals to earn a livelihood?
Does the choice to raise rare and heritage breeds sit alongside other values and practices that support more ‘multispecies flourishings’ (Haraway 2016) on farms?
A guiding theme will be to ask how farmers are responding to the burden of responsibility carried by the ‘human condition of living with and for others’ (Bird 2004) as they negotiate entanglements with country and human and nonhuman animals. Yunkaporta (2020) asserts the importance of Aboriginal social structures in achieving sensitive community and land management, describing his clan as, ‘autonomous individuals syndicated together in a collective’. With this framing in mind, I seek to understand the importance of existing connections amongst autonomous small-scale farmers that contribute to cultural and ecological reparations and social organisation, and to learn what collaborative and deliberate practices they engage in to diversify breeds (and grasses and crops) within the region, and to advocate for agroecology-friendly policies. I further aim to identify pathways towards a place-based co-management of Aboriginal lands so damaged by colonial mining and agriculture that the Jaara people call it ‘upside down country’ (Dja Dja Wurrung 2016).
My project is in part a response to the UN’s critical assessment of biodiversity loss and its recommendations, which identified the need to conserve breeds as well as the need for multidisciplinary research to understand the role of greater biodiversity in agriculture more broadly. It is also a continuation of a lifetime concern about the treatment of animals in agriculture, and a long history of food sovereignty activism that ultimately led me to where I now farm with Stuart and a like-minded community that has glimmers of Yunkaporta’s ‘autonomous individuals syndicated together in a collective’.
Ultimately, my project aims to identify the ecological, social, and political factors that contribute to the successful practice of agroecology in Australia. My specific focus is on the practice of raising rare- and heritage-breed pigs and cattle in agroecosystems, and the work being done by small-scale farmers to decolonize agriculture with what I propose are counter-hegemonic breeds. Using insider activist anthropology to work with a selection of farmers in Dja Dja Wurrung country, I aim to understand the values, epistemologies, and politics that lead farmers to choose rare- and heritage-breed livestock and to farm agroecologically.
Ultimately, acknowledging that small-scale farmers operate within certain norms and rules of the state, which have material impacts on their autonomous capacity to farm in ecologically-sustainable and socially-just ways (Wolf 1966; Scott 1998; van der Ploeg 2017), I aim to understand and make visible existing state and supra-state instruments and processes that currently constrain farmers’ activities, and those that can enable agroecology and rare-breed farming in Australia.
In the face of a massive global loss of agricultural biodiversity over many decades, this research can provide critical information and recommendations to slow and address losses, and to support increases in biodiversity in farming. I will engage with local smallholder and Indigenous knowledges and practices on Dja Dja Wurrung country to uncover the diverse stories of Indigenous and non-Indigenous custodians of country. The significance lies in actively working to uncover, support, and promote the biodiverse and decolonizing practices of agroecological farmers of rare- and heritage-breed livestock, to serve the urgent need to value and protect biodiversity in food and agriculture systems in the face of multiple threats from climate change and the emergence of pandemics such as COVID-19.
The project is part of and manifests the values of the social movement for food sovereignty and agroecology. In addition to my life as a farmer, I have been president of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA) since 2014, which is actively working across all six ‘domains of transformation’ to an agroecological future identified by Anderson et al. (2017). The domains include: access to natural ecosystems; knowledge and culture; systems of exchange; networks; equity; and discourse. This project will contribute to AFSA’s ongoing work for agroecology and food sovereignty, including to AFSA’s project Farming on Other People’s Land (FOOPL), which is developing resources to support diverse share-farming arrangements and farming cooperatives, and acknowledging that all non-Indigenous farmers are farming on other peoples’ land in Australia. This research will also contribute to the food sovereignty movement’s efforts to transform policies at all levels of government to support a transition to agroecology. It will contribute to AFSA’s new Agroecological Action Research Network (AARN), established in 2020 to network scholars and farmers across Australia to grow the body of participatory research towards an agroecological transition.
In following the deeply embedded stories, practices, soils, plants, human and nonhuman animals, and microbes on agroecological farms working to preserve rare- and heritage-breed livestock, as well as the rather more abstract yet specific stories and practices of the state, this project will assert an ontological politics – a politics of materiality and not just representation of ‘what is, what should, and what might be realised’ (Law 2018).
If you’ve
been paying any attention to the myriad articles talking about the likely
causes of the current COVID-19 pandemic, you’ll have read that the hippies were
right – rampant destruction of the environment has led us into a global crisis,
and industrial agriculture is a solid contender for worst offender. Whether
this particular coronavirus came from bats, pangolins, or another creature isn’t
really that important – the knowledge that it’s a zoonotic disease (passed from
animals to humans) – and that all of the other most recent outbreaks (SARS,
MERS, Ebola, Nipah, Zika…) were too – offers more-than sufficient evidence to
act on. In fact, the FAO tells us that more than 70% of all infectious diseases in
humans since the 1940s can be traced to animals.
Rob
Wallace, author of Big Farms Make
Big Flu can answer a lot of your pressing questions on these theories,
so go listen
to him here. (And then google him and find the hundreds of other interviews
and papers he has produced on this topic since well before the outbreak began. (One
of the hardest things about being Rob right now must be resisting the daily
urge to shout ‘I told you so, you bastards!’)
The jury is in – industrial agriculture is a menace to society.
Some of us
have been banging on for many years about the dangers of intensive livestock
production, massive global losses of biodiversity, and the narrowing of genetic
diversity in agriculture specifically, fast animal turnover in industrial systems,
separating breeding and growing operations (with attendant loss of potential herd
immunities), and habitat fragmentation, and it’s turned out we were right all
along. So what’s going to happen? And what alternative futures lay before us?
First, a
quick look at impacts, and then some hopeful possible solutions…
Impacts on the food system
The impacts
are unfolding fast, and in many countries they are awful. I’m not going to
write about the devastation the pandemic is having in countries where health
care systems have been undermined by neoliberal regimes that have
systematically implemented policies that have rejected the public interest, and
nor am I going to offer analysis of the structural racism and classism that
will see the most disadvantaged in society feel the brunt of this crisis. My
expertise is in food systems, so that’s what I’ll stick with. I’m also going to
focus primarily on Australia, because you simply can’t extrapolate the
disruptions to social cohesion, well-being, and domestic economies from one
country to another without making some terrible generalisations and misleading
blunders.
What are
the initial impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on Australian food systems?
Supermarket
shelves emptied fast as panic buying set in. Their ‘just-in-time’ model of
distribution has proven to be as precarious as food security researchers have
told us for many years. But they have also aggressively hired the newly
unemployed to stack shelves more rapidly – a move that could cast them in the
light of savior in spite of decades of predatory behaviour.
Many
farmers’ markets have been closed, either by risk-averse (and ill-informed, I
would say) councils, or the organisers themselves, though others remain open,
with social
distancing protocols in place. This has left many small-scale farmers in
the desperate position of having to rapidly find other ways to connect to their
eaters, and forced some farmers’ market shoppers back into the arms of their jilted
supermarkets.
Most
restaurants and cafes are either closed or doing takeaway or delivery services
only. The future of the hospitality sector is in question as food service
workers scramble to survive. It remains to be seen whether the government’s
bailout packages will be enough to keep people fed and housed through this
crisis.
Farmers
whose usual market is food service were thrown into crisis along with the
nation’s chefs and other workers, and they have had to rapidly find new markets
for their produce. For small-scale farmers, there has been a greater capacity
to pivot to selling directly to households, though in many cases this has meant
arduous
hours doing direct deliveries without any time to develop these new systems.
The legends
at Open Food Network have risen
to the challenge to bring a thrilling wave of new farmers onto their platform
to directly connect with eaters looking for alternatives to the stupidmarkets.
For
large-scale farms, there is no such agility in a global pandemic. If you’re a
watermelon grower in the Northern Territory whose market is primarily
restaurants, caterers, and airlines, there is nothing to do but watch your
melons rot in the fields. When you’re talking 600 tonnes v. 6 tonnes of produce
to sell, selling direct to eaters is not an option.
For those just tuning in, my hypercompetent husband Stuart and I are small-scale pastured heritage breed pig and cattle farmers, and while our farm exists largely separately from the commodity food system, we remain reliant on two critical umbilicals to the industrial machine: feed and abattoirs.
When we
shifted to an entirely
waste-stream feed supply from our local brewery and other produce from
other surplus yield, we thought we had exited commodity feed production. But
the majority of our feed supply is detritus from the industrial system built on
growth and volume – so we lost most of our feed sources overnight as pubs were
shut down and the brewery stopped brewing. We’re still receiving occasional
container loads of muesli bar ingredients amongst other diverse oddities as
food waste in fact just got worse with the sudden disappearance of food service,
but the reliability of the nutritional quality of our feed took a steep dive.
And we’re not the only ones – small-scale pig farms across Australia have been
egging each other on in our pursuit of non-commodity grain and
ecologically-beneficial feed options, and many of us now face the loss of this
resource and need to return to commodity grain direct from the feed supplier. A
year ago this wasn’t even a viable option as the drought drove prices up to
more than double in some cases. I’ll return to possible solutions that don’t
involve commodity grain in a future post once we’ve given it more thought.
So more
expensive and ecologically dubious feed is one direct impact small-scale livestock
farmers are grappling with, and the other threat we face is the potential closure
of abattoirs, as
is already happening in the US. The problem of a highly centralized food
system is that there are so few facilities left, nearly all owned by a handful
of multinational corporations, and if they are forced to close, farmers of all
sizes lose their options. Given the low margins most abattoirs operate on in
the best of times, one can only assume that many may not be able to continue in
the face of a prolonged shutdown. While Australia’s control of the virus is
leagues ahead of the US and our case numbers still quite low, an outbreak in a
large, vital facility could still be devastating.
Together, we’ve got this
Some of you
reading this have read and/or heard my positions on how to solve the world’s
problems before, and you, like me, may have thought, ‘sounds great, but a bit
utopic, hey? I mean, capitalism isn’t going anywhere…’ But then the current consequences
of humanity’s failures have offered us an opportunity to ‘test the model’,
shall we say. Guess what we’re finding?
Globalised
food systems, capitalism, and disconnected atomized populations are just as
brittle as some of us said they were.
Local food
systems, solidarity economies, and strongly networked and collectivized communities
have got this.
The upsurge
in people seeking memberships with community-supported agriculture (CSA) farms
is breathtaking. Farms that had struggled to compete with peoples’ addiction to
‘convenience’ and achieve full subscriptions are now turning people away. Others
are increasing production to let some more in. Those of us who were already
full are doing what we can to support our members who’ve lost their jobs – our turn
to look after them, because that’s how solidarity economies work – it’s a
two-way street.
A very
smart comrade asked me whether I thought small-scale farmers (aka ‘peasants’) ‘can enter and exit the market as they need
to. When times get tough, cut back to subsistence (in a way corporate farming
can’t).’ It’s an interesting question about the variables that might offer
resilience at different scales. While I think that peasants in the Global South
might have some of this flexibility where they have remained quite separate
from industrial food systems, the ‘new peasantry’ that has arisen across the
world over the past decade (like farmers such as ourselves) probably has less
capacity to expand and contract in the same way, primarily due to carrying high
levels of debt. Flirting with capitalism while trying to crush it is a
dangerous game. Which is not to say that taking on debt makes one a capitalist,
but rather entwined in a system that has made it genuinely difficult to make it
obsolete.
But what I will say for the peasants of the world, be we from a long line of people of the land or relatively newly boots on soil is that resourcefulness and frugality are our bedfellows. Unlike our industrial counterparts, most of us eat what we grow, and we grow what we eat. We savour the products of our labour, and we maintain old traditions of preserving for the lean times. These are the hallmark attributes of peasants the world over, and as I’ve watched my peasant comrades from Australia to Italy, China to America, South Africa to Brazil, I’ve seen their self- and community- sufficiency as the world’s original preppers have found ourselves prepared. We guiltily share how much we’re enjoying lockdown, because farmers eat lockdown for breakfast – it’s like most days of the week for us, but better because we’re forced to be where we most want to be, and so have more time for growing, preserving, and planning a better system.
And planning we are, on our farms, with our communities, and in our collectives. Buckminster Fuller famously said that ‘You never change things by fighting against the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.’ We have been building the new one (while also fighting the old one), and now we’re (mostly) ready. The old system is eating itself, the new one is going to feed you.
Remember – together, we’ve got this. That means all of us. If you’re unemployed or looking for ways to foster your community – find or start a local Mutual Aid Group. If you’re a farmer or an eater in Australia, join the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance. In the US, join the US Food Sovereignty Alliance. Every country has its collectives – join yours. Wherever you are, collectivise, organize, and ACT.
The seminar
was not particularly well advertised amongst farmers and their representative
bodies, and I believe AFSA was the only representative organisation for farmers
who attended. In fact, I learned about the seminar from activists and FAO staff
in Rome – not through any local channels. Conversely, Bayer was there – the
world’s largest supplier of seed and agri-chemicals after last year’s merger
with Monsanto – they now control about 25% of the seed & pesticide market
globally.
The event
started out promisingly enough, with assertions that it used to be ‘agriculture
versus the environment’ but that ‘that time is over,’ and repeated assurances
that we are beyond the time for business-as-usual approaches given the urgency
of the need for radically different agricultural practices in the face of a
rapidly changing climate.
The Chair
of the HLPE Steering Committee Patrick Caron gave an insightful overview of the
context of the report on agroecology and ‘other innovations’, in which he
pointed out that ‘when people talk about agroecology, sustainable
intensification, precision agriculture – they have very different things in
mind…’. Caron explained that this report’s role is to understand disagreements
and to shape the international agenda.
He was
followed by Fergus Lloyd Sinclair of the Agroforestry Institute in Nairobi, the
HLPE Project Team Leader, who presented a very encouraging update on their work
on the report to date. He first candidly shared what a ‘schizophrenic terms of
reference’ the HLPE was given by the CFS, pointing out that ‘agroecology’ and ‘other
innovations’ can be distinguished on the basis of principles. Sinclair asserted
that ‘agroecology is a dynamic space, with many actors… not prescribed… locally
defined in different ways by the people who are practicing it…’ and that there
is a ‘strong connection between indigenous knowledge, traditional agriculture
systems, and science.’
He went on
to explain that agroecology as an innovation is easily distinguished from other
approaches such as ‘sustainable intensification’ (and ‘climate smart agriculture’,
‘nutrient sensitive agriculture’, because agroecology (which may broadly include
aspects of organic agriculture, agroforestry, silvopastoralism, and permaculture)
is labour intensive rather than capital intensive. It relies on the humans in
its system for knowledge and labour rather than capital intensive technological
innovations that seek to largely replace human labour and often even knowledge.
Sinclair also
explained the HLPE’s pitch to include ‘agency’ as a fifth pillar of food
security – a concept already fundamental to food sovereignty, which asserts
everyone’s right to collectively participate in food and agriculture systems.
After this
rousing start, we watched as the CSIRO took to the podium. After thanking her
colleagues from the HLPE and agreeing that we cannot continue with ‘business as
usual’ approaches, the Acting Deputy Director of Food and Agriculture gave a
20-minute presentation on business as usual. She started with some stats:
Australia is 6th largest
land size country in world and 55th largest population
Major exports: wheat, beef, wool,
dairy, wine – mostly to China, USA, and Japan
Farmers are 2.5% of total workforce
90% of our population lives on .2%
of our land
Australian ag workforce: 82% live in
regional areas, 73% work full time, 32% female (more likely to try non business
as usual approaches, more likely to earn off farm income), 1% indigenous
Change areas for Australian ag:
increasing competition, Asia’s growth, evolving consumer, biosecurity &
provenance, resource scarcity, climate change, digital ag, energy disruption
She then
asserted that ongoing innovations are needed to protect our natural resources
as well as agriculture, requiring new forms of surveillance. Wait, what? Next, regarding
upcoming innovations, she said, ‘I aspire for a future where Australian ag is a
price-setter in the global market.’ Okay, but what about agroecology?
Here’s a
list of some of the non-business-as-usual
innovations cited by the CSIRO at this seminar on agroeocology and other
innovations:
yield maps
canola yield based on average
rainfall
nitrogen application impact
virtual fencing (‘quite happy cows
with their lovely collars on’)
genetic engineering for broad-spectrum
disease resistance, novel oils, nitrogen fixing plants, fixing heterosis
through apomixes, pest-resistant legumes, boosting photosynthesis, and biofortified
foods
New grains for human health –
engineering health outcomes into food people eat such as barley and wheat. High
amylose wheat, BARLEYmax, novel fibre wheat, gluten-free cereals, thick
aleurone cereals
Leaf oils – ‘game changer for global
oil production’ – a seed output as well as a leaf output
I guess the
CSIRO is more in the ‘other innovations’ camp. (In fact when a like-minded
colleague asked the CSIRO speaker between sessions why she didn’t speak about
agroecology, she responded that she was ‘instructed not to.’ Let that sink in
for a minute.)
Our mates
from Bayer were the first question off the rank after the opening speakers, revisiting
a point Sinclair made about an ‘increasing moralisation around food.’ The Bayer
rep asked Sinclair how he believes the ‘moralisation of food’ impacts on
equity. It is a tried and true rhetorical trick from industrial ag proponents,
who often seek to establish their own moral position with appeals to equal access
and the role of (presumed but not always proven) cheap technologies (that they
own) to ‘feed the masses.’ They may as well exclaim, ‘Let them eat cake!’ and
be done with it. Whether posed as a question or an assertion, this device always
willfully ignores earlier expert points that hunger is not caused by scarcity
of food, but rather by failures in governance and distribution.
During the
break I was introduced to another CSIRO senior staffer as the president of the
Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance. His response was to raise his eyebrows
and yelp, ‘Food sovereignty? That raises alarm bells with policy people!’ To
which I calmly responded, ‘Really? Policymakers are alarmed by peoples’ right
to democratically participate in the food and agriculture system?’ ‘Yes!’ he
intoned, ‘Internationally it impedes trade!’
I think
that rather than bore you with the rest of what we heard from the CSIRO at the seminar,
all of which is in line with what’s cited above and demonstrates their slavish
devotion to free trade in capitalist global markets to the detriment of most farmers
and eaters everywhere, I’ll leave you with some more interesting input from the
HLPE.
Caron gave
a summation of the status of the current report on agroecology and ‘other
innovations’, which has passed Version 0 and a period of public consultation,
with draft Version 1 due to be released soon.
Part one of
the report asks: What has changed in past 20 years regarding food security
& nutrition (FSN)?
Acknowledgement through different
definitions of FSN of the right to food. FSN until creation of FAO in 1945 was
a national issue, became a global issue in second half of the century.
Increasingly realised that sufficient supply doesn’t ensure FSN.
In 80s and 90s we were talking about
starvation, and now we talk about 800mil suffering hunger & starvation –
mostly rural poor.
We are mainly focusing on yield improvement
when we are wasting a third of production.
Hunger is not decreasing quickly
enough and overweight & obesity are increasing rapidly – well beyond
infectious diseases – and are the number one problem in public health.
Part two of
the report examines the ways in which food systems are changing, and reminds us
that the question is not how to feed 9 billion people, it’s how to feed them in
a sustainable way while providing decent livelihoods for producers. We can use the
food system as a lever to address all the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
‘We thought that improving supply and access to markets would help everyone but
we were wrong.’
The third
part of the draft report has the much-anticipated draft recommendations – what’s
needed to make food systems sustainable? The answers warm a food sovereignty
activist’s heart. How to improve food supply? It could be through investing in
knowledge and technology, reducing food waste, internalizing externalities – they’re
all possibilities. It must be through strengthening resilience – investing in
small-scale ag, securing land and tenure rights, securing social equity and
responsibility with social protection systems, supporting women and youth,
creating decent jobs in agriculture, through investing in education for all.
The HLPE
reminds us we can’t forget the need to change consumption habits, and that to
do so we need to change the food environment – advertisements, subsidies, and banning
some types of food like we have with alcohol and tobacco. The CFS is supposed
to draft voluntary guidelines to be agreed in 2020.
Caron
insists that we must improve governance of food systems and the capacity of
stakeholders to participate. He says that the changes will be knowledge
intensive and we have to invest in knowledge – the answers are not the ones
already on the shelves. We must design new governance of food systems at all
levels – including national levels.
Before
closing we had a final opportunity for questions or comments, so I took the
opportunity to express concern at the CSIRO’s focus over the course of the day
on exports, growth, and increasing yield in spite of the obvious environmental
degradation witnessed up Australia’s eastern coast over the past two years due
to extreme levels of drought in a changing climate, and also in spite of the
expert position presented here and for decades now that we don’t need to grow
more food, we need to make food systems more democratic. The response from the
CSIRO was, ‘we’re an independent science research body – we can’t take sides.’
Well AFSA
can, and we choose a habitable planet for generations to come. By not joining
the heavy weight of evidence showing the changes needed in our food and agriculture
systems, CSIRO are taking a side too – commonly known as the wrong side of
history.
A younger, more optimistic me died last week. Not even 50,
she was far too young.
As I sat with the governments of the world at UN meetings in
Rome, I couldn’t get Midnight Oil’s iconic 1987 song Beds are Burning out of my head, the line ‘how can we sleep while
our beds are burning’ playing over and over, drowning out the monotone of the
oft-repeated refrain that ‘Canada would like it noted that the guidelines are
voluntary’ and ‘specific actions are a matter for national governments’.
I want to apologise to my children for the way the
generations before them have trashed the planet they need to live on – we are
leaving them an inheritance of climate
chaos and almost
certain social collapse globally. And we’ve known we were spending the
resources they’ve loaned us for decades, but our governments have continually
bowed at the altar of industry, accepting tithes to retain their seculo-papal
power.
I want to fall to my knees, weep, wail, tear my hair out, and retreat to a nunnery. I want to drought proof our farm and close the gate. I want to open the gate and let them all come. I want to stand on every stage and in every screen and shout ‘WAKE UP! IT’S TOO LATE! WAKE UP! IT CAN’T BE TOO LATE!’ I want to believe it’s not too late, I know it’s too little, too late.
Over a week of mind-numbing bureaucratic tedium in a theatre
in the house of the dead – the mausoleum that is the buildings of the Food
& Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations (UN) – we heard over
and over that the FAO and its committees know very well and in fine detail what
has caused and is causing climate change and loss of biodiversity.
We heard the world’s most powerful highly developed nations
shrug off responsibility and distract the audience with insistence on a word
change here, a denial of FAO’s role there, oh, and ‘we don’t support monitoring’
of their activities by the FAO. The US nasally reminds us (as if we could
forget) that ‘we agree with Canada.’ Argentina and Brazil form their own bloc –
two of the south’s biggest industrial ag countries – sometimes agreeing with their
North American counterparts, sometimes not. It’s hard to get their measure –
these major global exporters of soy, wheat, maize, sugarcane, and beef have
some of the language of farmers’ rights and biodiversity loss, but are also
averse to scrutiny and vocal supporters of further developments in
biotechnology for agriculture.
The meeting was the Seventeenth Regular Session of the Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. Members of the secretariat noted that in the past two years they have ‘firmly planted biodiversity in the global agenda’, and that ‘the Convention on Biological Diversity’s (CBD) 13th Conference of the Parties (COP) heralded a reinvigorated relationship with FAO, marking the beginning of a new era of synergies between agriculture and the environment.’ This hopeful note was for many of us the first stroke in a week of a thousand deaths, as senior bureaucrats repeatedly ‘heralded’ the realisation of things we learned in primary school.
We heard of their revolutionary work to ‘mainstream
biodiversity’ – that awkward, outcast kid who has trouble getting along with
all the homogenous blonde little Johnnies in her class, with her chemical-free,
whole foods diet, and the rich microbiome helping her digest her morning glass
of raw milk. That’s right – we’re so far down the industrial path that we now
need the UN to teach us how to ‘mainstream’ biodiversity back into agriculture,
forestry, and fisheries.
Some of my notes from the meeting read more like the lines
from Idiocracy, where characters from
the past have to teach our future selves not to put a Gatorade-like product on
plants. It’s worth quoting the movie at length here to give you a better sense
of where I just was.
Joe: For the last time, I’m pretty sure what’s killing the crops is
this Brawndo stuff.
Secretary of State: But Brawndo’s got what plants crave. It’s got electrolytes.
Attorney General: So wait a minute. What you’re saying is that you want us to put
water on the crops.
Joe: Yes.
Attorney General: Water. Like out of the toilet?
Joe: Well, I mean, it doesn’t have to be out of the toilet, but, yeah,
that’s the idea.
Secretary of State: But Brawndo’s got what plants crave.
Attorney General: It’s got electrolytes.
Joe: Okay, look. The plants aren’t growing, so I’m pretty sure that the
Brawndo’s not working. Now, I’m no botanist, but I do know that if you put
water on plants, they grow.
Secretary of Energy: Well, I’ve never seen no plants grow out of
no toilet.
Secretary of State: Hey, that’s good. You sure you ain’t the smartest guy in the
world?
Joe: Okay, look. You wanna solve this problem. I wanna get my pardon.
So why don’t we just try it, okay, and not worry about what plants crave?
Attorney General: Brawndo’s got what plants crave.
Secretary of Energy: Yeah, it’s got electrolytes.
Joe: What are electrolytes? Do you even know?
Secretary of State: It’s what they use to make Brawndo.
Joe: Yeah, but why do they use them to make Brawndo?
Secretary of Defense: ‘Cause Brawndo’s got electrolytes.
I feel for the FAO staff at these meetings. Their website admonishes
us to ‘eat local’ and ‘diversify your diet’, noting as per the Report on The
State of the World’s Biodiversity for Food & Agriculture’s findings
released at the meetings, we are losing biodiversity at an alarming rate.
Just nine crops account for 66% of total crop production.
Nine. Crops.
26% of livestock breeds are threatened with extinction. Bees
and other pollinators are dying. The FAO are clear on the facts that lay before
us, and they’re clear that the worst contributor to this dismal outlook is
industrial agriculture. The report tells us that changes in land and water use
and management are the biggest offenders, with de-forestation to clear the way
for industrial monocultures – much of which is fed to animals in intensive
livestock systems – leading our demise.
While the FAO knows WTF is wrong, governments look side-eyed
at each other and angle for a bigger piece of the world’s shrinking genetic
pie. They have made huge advances in recent decades on digital sequencing
information (DSI, aka genetic sequencing data or ‘de-materialised genetic
resources’). We heard from an FAO senior staffer that where the human genome originally cost USD $100
million to sequence, it can now be done for just $600. What are the real
implications for this?
Although
DSI is a de-materialised form of genetic data, it can be used to reproduce its
source synthetically in the lab. Practically speaking, this means that anything
that has been sequenced is available to corporations to reproduce, ‘improve’,
and you guessed it, patent. They can take peasant seeds, re-fashion them as
they like to be pesticide resistant or to increase yield, patent them and
pocket the profits. Meanwhile, the original custodians of these seeds – the Indigenous
Peoples, peasants, and small-scale farmers of the world, get nothing for their
centuries and millennia of toil that made these seeds available in the first
place.
Realising
the inequity of this situation, the UN put in place measures to try to ensure
access to genetic resources and benefit-sharing (ABS) of developments of these
resources by the world’s colonisers of seed. You can see how well that is going
in my
account of last year’s meeting of the Ad Hoc Technical Expert Group on
Plant Genetic Resources for Food & Agriculture on farmers’ rights. Spoiler:
not so well.
Here we
have two key issues battling for our attention – DSI and ABS – and they are
deeply intertwined as physical seeds become irrelevant when multinational
corporations like Monsanto-Bayer and Syngenta sequence them, and countries like
the USA and Canada sit in Rome and assert that they ‘do not support monitoring
or evaluation of countries’ implementation of ABS’, and insist that ‘DSI is
separate from ABS’. Still with me?
In case
there’s a risk that I’ve misinterpreted the motives of the north Americans, let
me highlight a significant revision they demanded in the Commission’s
Multi-Year Program of Work, changing the wording on the Commission’s plan for ‘biotechnologies’
in 2021 and 2025 from ‘Review of the development of biotechnologies and their
potential impact on the conservation and sustainable utilisation of GRFA
(genetic resources for food & ag) to ‘Review of the work on biotechnologies
for the conservation and sustainable use of GRFA’. That’s right – they don’t
want the Commission to review the impact
of biotech on genetic resources – they’ve erased that potential and codified
the notion that biotech is ‘for conservation and sustainable use’.
Next on the
agenda, the Commission ‘requested FAO to prepare a scoping study on the role of
GRFA in adaptation and mitigation of climate change, taking into account the
forthcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special reports on
terrestrial and marine systems…’ A scoping
study. And if they determine that the role of genetic resources for food and
agriculture are ‘pertinent’, then the
working groups should provide guidance to the Commission on preparation of a ‘global
country-driven assessment for review […] and consideration by the Commission in
this next Session’ (in 2021).
We don’t
need to scope a study on the
importance of biodiversity – we don’t even need another study to tell us what we already understand quite well. The State
of the World’s Biodiversity for Food and Agriculture report spells it out and
underscores the urgency of the problems of rapid biodiversity loss. Sure, keep
studying the particularities of the problems, but meanwhile, STOP CUTTING DOWN
FORESTS IMMEDIATELY.
IPC made an
intervention on the agenda item on biodiversity
and climate change, virtually begging the governments to act more swiftly
to slow the terrible impacts of climate change already felt in Australia and
across the globe. While we were congratulated by a number of non-state actors
and a handful of state representatives from the global south, I fear that too
many vested interests cotton the ears of most in the global north.
There were
lengthy deliberations on the role of aquatic, animal, and forestry genetic
resources for food and agriculture, punctuated with the same heel digging from
North and South America’s wealthiest nations, hand wringing from Africa’s
poorest, and calls for more and stronger action from countries like Ecuador and
Iran. Aside from Japan’s regular alignment with the North Americans, Asia was
remarkably reserved on most topics.
Perhaps
this line from our
intervention on animal genetic resources most succinctly highlights the
interrelationships between all plants, animals, and soil that have been
segmented by much of the work in governmental fora:
‘De-forestation
is largely driven by industrial livestock agriculture as trees are felled to
make room for monocultures of soy, corn, and other grains to be fed to animals
in intensive production models. Both intensive industrial livestock production
and monocultures of grain are significant contributors to loss of biodiversity
and polluters of waterways, thereby also contributing to the loss of
biodiversity in terrestrial and marine waters.’
Sadly, while
these realities of the impact of industrial agriculture are well known,
reported on, and provided the sub-text for the entire week of the Commission’s
meetings, there was a unified reluctance to speak on the specificities of the problems, which might have required the Commission
to debate the specificities of the solutions.
Aligned with work already undertaken by the
FAO, the IPC recommended very specific urgent action by all governments of the world
to address practices that are undermining the sustainability of food and
agricultural production, including but not limited to:
pesticide use;
synthetic fertiliser use;
repeated tilling of soils;
intensive livestock production;
over-grazing;
de-forestation; and
over-fishing & intensive
aquaculture.
We also urged member states to join the FAO in its efforts to promote
the use of production models and management practices that promote and preserve
biodiversity, such as agroecology, including approaches that integrate
biodiverse forestry practices such as agrosilviculture, agrisilvipasture, and
silvopastoral systems; and artisanal and small-scale fisheries.
Finally, we supported the Commission’s plan to facilitate the
participation of relevant stakeholders in decision-making, and asked that where
they have not done so already, the Commission and its member states put in place frameworks that
effectively respect, preserve, and maintain knowledges, innovations, practices,
and rights of indigenous peoples, small-scale farmers, fishers, and fish
workers, and local communities, in particular assuring farmers’ rights as per
the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food & Agriculture.
Our final words to the Commission were:
We understand that governments are reliant
on, responsive to, and at times answerable to the various industries of your
nations. But no industry – including commodity agriculture – should ever have
unfettered power to act against the public good. We come here as
representatives of the peoples of the world, and ask that you consider your
people’s interests above all. The time for decisive action to end destructive
industrial agricultural practices was fifty years ago. The time for action is
now.
Now it’s
time to pick myself up and continue to be active in my own optimism – to be an
active optimist. Our children’s future depends on us.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you,
then they fight you, then you win.
What this homily
so popular with activists and politicians is perhaps missing is the feature that
arose in late capitalist society – then they
buy you – and it’s unclear whether that happens before or after the fight,
or in place of the fight.
There is
currently a dramatic increase in attention paid to regenerative and agroecological
farming to combat climate change – something we activists and farmers are celebrating
– but with the cheers must come sobering cautionary tales.
Big Ag and
Big Food have a long history of cooption and destruction of positive changes in
the system – take the farce that is ‘free-range eggs’ in Australia today, where
chickens need only have ‘access to outdoors’ from giant, stinking sheds where
they spend most of their time, and stocking densities can be up to 10,000 birds
per hectare. Industrial organics, ‘naturally grown’ claims, and now the
emergence of lab-grown meat as a clean, green alternative are further examples
of the subterfuge built into the industrial system.
But what
about the content of the report? Are the recommendations any good?
Not really.
It starts with the reductive nutritionalist discourse that we need to shift globally
to healthy diets, and they’ve got the diet for us (but no roadmap for how we’re
going to shift The Entire World to said diet). First off the menu is meat –
with no distinction between production models for meat, so pastured pork,
poultry, beef, and lamb are treated as though they have the same environmental
impact as raising animals in sheds and feedlots. And although the report calls
for a reduction in sugar, it curiously recommends you get more calories from
sugar (120 kcal/day) than from meat (‘optionally’ up to 92 kcal/day). An astonishing
291 kcal/day should come from nuts – astonishing because the push to eat more
almonds is wildly at odds with the negative impacts those thirsty monocultures
are having on places like the central valley of California or along the Murray
River in Victoria. It’s like the report was written by vegans – because it largely was. In another
slightly bizarre turn, potatoes are about as low on the list as meat (sorry,
Peru).
While the
report purports to address personal and planetary
health, its focus on production models is myopic at best, and contradictory at
worst. It totally ignores agroecology –
the form of agriculture promoted by the Food & Agriculture Organisation
(FAO) of the United Nations – and it recommends an increase in nitrogen application in places like Africa. One could
almost believe a fertilizer company helped write it. Oh, yeah, they
(essentially) did. (See above.) Where are the peasants who produce up to 70% of
the world’s food in this report? Strangely absent.
Oops – I
forgot to do the feedback sandwich with a whole-grain positive bun around the
vegetables of dubious origin. There are redeeming features in the report – a reduction
in meat consumption in the Global North is a good thing to recommend, but
should come with an ‘eat better meat, less’ explanation. Taking animals out of
the system is not in fact a sustainable proposal, as
many have written already. But eradicating intensive livestock production
would be a great outcome – had the report suggested that specifically. Perhaps
the ties with Unilever (who
are now investing in lab meat) made that unpalatable?
The authors
call for halving food loss and waste – this is a good call. But the means to do
so remain fuzzy – ‘improving post-harvest infrastructure, food transport,
processing and packaging, increasing collaboration along the supply chain,
training and equipping producers, and educating consumers.’ Okay. Or how about
we radically depart from the productivist mindset, long supply chains, and disconnected
retail decisions made by massive corporations who reject bananas based on how
much or how little they curve.
As I tried
to work out how and what to write about the Eat Lancet Report, I stopped caring
what the diet recommends or the lack of internal logic between their recommendations
around production and consumption, and shifted back to the fundamental
questions we ask in the food sovereignty movement – does this ‘solution’ put
more power back in the hands of the people or does it remain with multinational
corporations? Do people get to participate democratically in the decisions
being made about where, by whom, and how their food is produced, processed, and
distributed? No? Then I’m not interested. It’s another false solution offered
by those who stand to profit from it.
I’ll finish
where I started – then they buy us.
The likes of the Eat Foundation, the Bill
and Melinda Gates Foundation, Richard
Branson, Kimbal
Musk – and so many other charitable foundations, organisations, and people
like them – aren’t advocating for a better food system because they’re just
really great people – it’s because they smell the money. They’re working with
the very multinationals who have created a food system that is devastating
ecosystems – Unilever, Cargill, Monsanto – who are now shifting to ‘sustainable’
production of plant-based foods and lab-grown meat in a bid to ‘save the planet’
they’ve trashed.
You may
(rightly, I reckon) think the philanthrocapitalists have some good intentions, but their multinational corporate partners
sure don’t. They’ve just discovered their next market – and you’re it.
