These anti-capitalist principles are great, but I still have to pay the rent somehow.
These words have stuck with me since they were uttered by a young would-be farmer last year. They resonated, as, by contrast, I am in a position of undeniable privilege, holding title to unceded Djaara lands, with a well-established and viable livelihood from farming. We are embedded in a community where reciprocity is a way of life and ‘favours’ are remembered rather than recorded on a balance sheet. So what should I say to the 31% of Australians who, like the young-would-be farmer, lwho still have to pay the rent, or to the vanishingly small number who can find a way to stump up a deposit, let alone service a lifetime of mortgage repayments? The cost of land and access to money to buy it is a major impediment to growing more farmers, especially young ones. That is why the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA) established Farming on Other Peoples’ Land (FOOPL) several years ago, to support the emerging movement towards land sharing, and why we are developing an Agrarian Trust to get more people onto land.
Access to and affordability of land is here only part of the challenge farmers are facing in the ever-increasing neoliberalisation of agriculture in Australia. With recent development in abattoir closures, we need to also consider those already farming who are losing access to the few remaining abattoirs , and who desperately (and urgently) need to build local micro-abattoirs? Surely taking out a loan from the bank is the most expedient and logical pathway? We see trends here with similar challenges that occurred decades ago after the loss of equitable access to dairy and grain processing facilities.
For our purposes here today – to debunk the naturalised assumption that going into debt to get what you want is normal and unavoidable – I am going to talk about why and how to avoid debt to build micro-abattoirs. This is the most pressing issue in the food sovereignty movement in Australia right now. Abattoirs owned by vertically-integrated Australian and multinational corporations steadily bar smallholder from access to slaughter, meaning we are on the cusp of losing small-scale family farms, local butchers, and access to any local meat from animals raised on pasture. (Take these out of rural communities and you also erode the fabric of regional Australia.)
My views on the topic of debt are strongly informed by both our experience of avoiding it here at Jonai Farms while funding major infrastructure projects, and by a lifetime of reading about capitalism and its alternatives, including Indigenous ways of being and thinking, and the rich literatures around diverse economies and degrowth.
First, let’s unpack the deeply imbued culture of guilt and shame around ‘paying one’s debts,’ which co-exists with a universal despisal of usury – the practice of lending money at unreasonably high interest rates. Who gets to determine what is a ‘reasonable’ interest rate anyway? (Fun fact – usury is illegal in Australia, and the highest legal interest rate is 48% on some unsecured loans! Reasonable?) How did we get to a point where it is reasonable to expect more money back than what you loan somebody? Not so long ago, more people got loans from friends and family than from commercial lenders, but as in so many aspects of modern society nowadays, we transact for more of our needs than we relate for. In fact, going to the bank instead of cousin Dave is now so ingrained in our national psyche that many would never consider asking for help before applying for it, with interest.
Contrast this with a shared belief amongst many First Nations communities here and around the world that we are born in mutual obligation with Land – our mother – and we must meet these obligations to be in good relations with each other. In this world view, our responsibility is ‘to each according to their need, from each according to their ability’ or as we say at Jonai, everyone should contribute and receive ‘commensurate with needs and capacity.’ Nobody is ‘owed’ anything except Country, and nobody has a right to extract more than another can afford to give. Instead, each of us owes the land and the human and more-than-human world care and consideration of their needs. As Tyson Yunkaporta puts it, we are here to look after the land and the sky and everything in between – that’s our niche in the ecosystem. This is in stark contrast to the liberal tradition, which shirks communal responsibility in the narcissistic belief that ‘we don’t owe anyone anything.’
The degrowth movement follows this philosophy about needs and capacity, embracing the notion of how much is enough, celebrating frugal abundance to ensure radical sufficiency for all. ‘Live simply, so that others may simply live’ encapsulates the philosophy well. As Theodore Munger put it in the late 19th century, ‘debt is the secret foe of thrift, as vice and idleness are its open foes.’
Before anybody worries that I’m going to debt-shame people, that is not where this is going. Carrying debt in today’s world is far more common than not – in Australia only 35% of the population has no debt, and the average household debt is a whopping $261,000. The average debt to income ratio (DTI) here is 2:1 – that is, most people owe twice what they earn in a year. This ratio has increased dramatically since the 1970s, and Australia now has one of the highest DTIs in the world. While a longer conversation could be had about why this is so (relatively low interest rates and neoliberal policies that have contributed to the escalating cost of property are central), the key takeaway is that to own property, there are few options other than taking on a hefty bank debt.
But, back to the abattoir issue. What if we step away from prohibitively expensive land costs, and look at something like a micro-abattoir? If you need $150k or $200k to build one, why not take out a bank loan, find some investors, or leverage your existing mortgage? One important reason not to do that is purely pragmatic – because abattoirs are not easily made into profitable enterprises, and even the big ones struggle to service debt on top of operating costs, whether it is accrued from the capital expenditure of the build, or through rent or lease payments. Nearly every small-scale farmer (and other small business owners) knows that while you can forego some expenditures in the lean times, loan repayments are not one of them, or you risk losing everything. So why wouldn’t you try to build a system that is not reliant on debt?
From the pragmatic to the political, let me offer two anecdotes to hopefully de-naturalise our culture’s acceptance of debt.
Say you find some ‘angel investors’ for your project, who only want ownership equity or a relatively low return (apparently 10-20% is considered low in much of that sector, justified they argue because these are usually considered high risk investments). What I see is some wealthy people who are interested enough in your community project to want to support it, but only if they also make some money from it, which is just business as usual. I have never heard of ‘angels’ in the traditional theological sense who need a return for their good work. Having that return on the balance sheet could make the difference between a successful community-controlled facility, or one that is ‘saved’ by said wealthy folks when it cannot service the return, only to be run into the ground by following the old extractive logic of capitalism and trying to extract surplus value from an enterprise that does not generate a surplus.
Now a shorter story. Someone asked me recently if I thought it was okay to charge people rent to help you pay your mortgage, and I said, ‘sure, if they get to keep part of the land too.’ The food sovereignty movement is not seeking to become the rentier class, we are seeking to overturn the rentier class and create a society where everyone has what they need for a dignified life and livelihood. A rentier is someone who earns income from capital without working. Sure, many if not most rentiers work for a living themselves, but grow their wealth not by increasing their productivity, but by extracting the surplus value from the labour of others, who hand over an average of 31% of their income in rent.
One of the principles of emancipatory agroecology is to question and transform structures, not reproduce them. To build the new version of the intrinsic infrastructure of agroecology – collective abattoirs and boning rooms, dairy processing and grain mills – we must be more creative and collaborative than the capitalist system has taught us to be. You can’t borrow your way out of debt, no matter what the masters tell you. Well, not until you are a billionaire I guess, because they say that if you owe the bank 1 million dollars, the bank owns you, but if you owe the bank 100 million dollars, you own the bank. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be either of those guys. Another principle of emancipatory agroecology is to cultivate autonomy rather than dependence, and debt quite obviously fosters the latter.
So how do you raise $200k to build a micro-abattoir for a dozen or so local farms?
First, peasants need to pool your change and then figure out how much more you will need. This won’t be done alone: we need to collectivise.
Second, what do you have beyond your current operational revenue and within your human capacity to sell to earn some extra cash? In our case, it has been my cookbook, which I chose to self-publish so that all earnings became part of the Meat Collective @ Jonai fundraiser. (There is a long-running theme here of in-sourcing rather than out-sourcing the work to retain the value ourselves, rather than letting third parties extract it.)
Third, what fundraising events could you host? We partnered with our favourite and most dedicated local restaurant Bar Merenda, and together at a spectacular nose-to-tail feast hosted here on the farm, with loads of support from other farmers, chefs, CSA members, and generally excellent humans, we raised $16,200. The raffle and dinner brought together 15 farms, 16 makers, 10 restaurants, 3 retailers, and a tourism operator, who pooled our collective efforts with a healthy dose of ‘here’s something I prepared earlier’ to deliver an epic prize pool for a raffle, raising a further $39,500! A surprise auction raised another $9,700 on the night.
Rounding all of this out, some of our longstanding (and a few new) supporters and CSA members have donated significant dollars because they see the value to the community and the food sovereignty movement, and they have the capacity to contribute. And back at the beginning of the fundraising, our then-farmhand Adam and a couple of mates had a practice run at raising 10 of our pigs on a nearby property as a learning exercise (handling everything from feed and pig moves in a mobile system to advertising, selling, butchering and delivering the meat), and donated their earnings from the experiment to the future abattoir.
Of course there is also a role for governments in funding the transformation. Matched grants to collective projects can hugely speed up this much-needed revolution. In our case, we had matched funding to build Audrey – our rotating composting drum who is integral to nutrient cycling surplus yield from the abattoir into rich fertiliser for the market garden.
I wrote in an early COVID post in April 2020, ‘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.’
I elaborated…
‘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 have watched my peasant comrades from Australia to Italy, China to the US, South Africa to Brazil, I have seen their self- and community- sufficiency as the world’s original preppers have found ourselves prepared.’
I was asked at a talk recently how we re-build trust in a society built on transactions that has lost that communal faith in decency and the common good. My response?
Role model it. If not me, who? If not now, when?
We have been strengthening our trust muscles here for a long time, exercising them through regular trusting (and trustworthy) behaviours.
When another person asked me what return farmers would get if they put money into the abattoir, I said we all get a f*cking abattoir. What more do we need?
[This post is cross-posted from our farm blog The Farmer & the Butcher.