Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance

Fair food for all Australians

Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance attends global food sovereignty forum in India

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AFSA’s engagement in the international food sovereignty movement has been strengthened with attendance at the General Meeting of the International Planning Committee (IPC) for Food Sovereignty in Gujarat, India from 30 August to 3 September.

“This meeting underlines our responsibility, as the lead food sovereignty alliance in our country and the region, to hold our government to account both at the national level and in global governance forums”, said AFSA President Tammi Jonas, who attended the meeting with Secretary Nick Rose.

“This is a key way in which we can demonstrate and enact our solidarity with our small-scale producer comrades everywhere, but especially from the global south.”

The IPC is an autonomous and self-organised global platform of small-scale food producers and rural workers movements actively advance the Food Sovereignty agenda at the global and regional level.

Facilitating the engagement of civil society in the reformed Committee on World Food Security (CFS) within the Food & Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the UN, the IPC has great capacity to influence policy.

In Gujarat Tammi and Nick met with leading farmer, indigenous, women and fisherfolk organisations from Latin America, Africa, Europe and Asia in 40C heat over four days to discuss the progress of negotiations on global food security at the FAO.

The relevance of the engagement with the FAO to Australia is particularly clear in the three areas of agroecology, livestock and access to markets. AFSA has nominated members to join the IPC working groups in each of these areas.

Imogen Ebsworth already represents Australasia as a delegate for the Civil Society Mechanism within the CFS.

AFSA’s involvement in the IPC meeting is the latest step in establishing close personal and working relationships with leaders of the global food sovereignty movement, women’s movement, and indigenous people’s movements.

“It confirms that we are on our way to becoming a member organisation of La Via Campesina, a strategic goal that pre-dated the formation of AFSA.”, said Tammi

Significant for AFSA’s role in the region is the development of ties with farmer movements in India and Asia, and direct integration into the regional structure of the IPC and the FAO.

These outcomes will provide opportunities for significant capacity building, through AFSA representation at regional agroecology forums and regional meetings of the IPC and the FAO.

President’s Report 2015

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It’s been an exhilarating and challenging year as President of AFSA as I’ve worked with an amazing team of committed fair food activists to further the interests of food sovereignty in Australia.

Part of the focus for the five-year-old Alliance this year has been to improve our internal operations with clearer processes for decision making and communications, and better financial management. I am delighted to be finishing the year with a surplus and a healthy bank account, largely thanks to the fundraising made possible by the Fair Food documentary screenings, DVD sales, and generous support from the City of Melbourne. As at the end of the 2014-15 financial year, the doco had profited AFSA $6,679.

Both the Fair Food doco and anthology edited by AFSA Secretary Nick Rose have greatly helped spread the word of the good work happening across the country as producers, chefs, connectors, knowledge workers, local governments, and activists build a new, fairer food system for all.

We have hopes of crowdfunding a second documentary focusing on the plight of farm and food workers in Australia, and how these systems of exploitation prop up the duopoly and concentration of power here and globally. Watch this space. ;-)

The year has seen AFSA leading the fight for fair and consistent regulation of the food system, with participation at the Regrarians-led #EatBuyGrow rally a highlight. Speaking alongside lunatic farmer Joel Salatin on the many ways in which ‘folks, this ain’t normal’ and the need to contest the orthodoxy of industrial food was both an honour and a great opportunity to amplify the message locally.

We’ve worked to spread the word of the plight of dairy farmers in Victoria affected by the Government’s hasty decision to make it more difficult to sell raw milk, as well as the difficulties faced by livestock producers in processing and distributing their produce, especially in Victoria, where we’ve helped trigger a review of the meat regulator PrimeSafe (yet to report). I visited the Executive Director of the America Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund in Kentucky to learn how we might build such a fund here, and work is well advanced towards the establishment of a legal defence branch of AFSA.

I’ve already recounted the #epicfairfoodtour I made of the US in June, where AFSA’s food sovereignty relationships and networks were further developed with some of the most popular voices in the movement, including Joel Salatin, Temple Grandin, Dan Barber, and Michael Pollan.

Back home, I was delighted to host the inaugural Deep Winter Agrarian Gathering (conceived by fabulous farmer Fraser of Old Mill Bio Farm in NSW) in August with the able assistance of local Sarah Chignell. Two days of discussing the issues and opportunities in production, connection, regulation, and regeneration of the food system were heralded by fair food pioneer Costa Georgiadis as ‘the Woodstock of Australian agriculture’.

We recounted and plotted, feasted and posited, and frankly talked fair food ‘til the cows came home.

The high proportion of young farmers and future farmers attending was especially encouraging – just goes to show how much more appealing fair food farming is than industrial agriculture! I’m already looking forward to the next one (perhaps somewhere a tad warmer…)

In the first week of September I had the honour and privilege to attend the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (IPC) meeting in Gujarat, along with my comrade Nick Rose. You can read our separate report on the outcomes of the meeting here. In short, the meeting clarified the need for AFSA to stand up to our own government in solidarity with our comrades in the Global South, to protect them as well as our own producers from the ravages of free-trade agreements that benefit nobody except large, transnational agribusiness.

The impact of cheap imports is devastating for farmers everywhere – from fruit growers in Victoria to small-scale beef producers in Kenya.

Our involvement with the IPC has also connected us to the ongoing dialogue with the Food & Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the UN, where we can add our voice to the global movement for agroecology and the fight against industrial livestock production, amongst the many other issues.

In spite of the continued centralized control of our food system, especially by the duopoly Coles & Woolworths, and in spite of the burdens and unfairnesses of regulation for small-scale, transparent food production, and even in spite of the ongoing exploitation of the labour of farm and food workers across Australia, I feel hopeful.

I feel hopeful because more people are choosing to buy directly from farmers and leave the duopoly out of their shopping bag. I feel hopeful because we’ve got the regulators’ attention, and reform seems possible. I feel hopeful because of the work of Four Corners to expose the treatment of farm workers and the tireless work of the NUW to support workers everywhere.

I feel hopeful because I’m a tragic optimist who takes every tiny grain of hope and plants it deeply in the rich soil of this fecund movement.

I am especially grateful for the work and support of Secretary Nick Rose, Communications Officer Alana Mann, Memberships Officer Michele Lally and our wonderful intern Katarina Munksgaard, who have contributed tirelessly all year. Thank you also to Vice President Jeff Pow, Treasurer Nadine Ponomarenko, and Louise Abson for your contributions, and finally thank you to the members who resigned earlier in the year due to challenging circumstances, Clare Richards and Michael Croft. And of course thank you to long-term volunteers and co-founders of AFSA Russ Grayson and Fiona Campbell for your many years of work to build and support the movement through the website and AFSA communications with members.

So long as we all continue working together, we’ve got this. Here’s to another great year for the fair food movement!

Viva la revolucion!

‘Folks, This Ain’t Normal’ – the fight for free-range farming

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I met a beautiful farmer yesterday whose story I’ve been following with dismay for the last couple months. We walked around her paddocks admiring groups of healthy, happy pigs as she described her system for breeding, weaning, and feeding.

Jo’s farm smells of nothing but fresh air, sounds of birdsong and the occasional curious grunt from a well-fed pig with nothing to fear, and is in a rolling green valley well covered in lush spring grass.

In 2014, Jo Stritch of Happy Valley Free Range won Livestock Farmer of the Year.

In 2015, Jo was ordered by her local council to cease farming.

How could this happen? Because the Victorian planning scheme deems her operation ‘intensive’ due to more than 50% of the pigs’ nutritional needs being met by feed Jo imports onto the farm, and the Yarra Ranges has a ban on intensive production.

A ban on intensive agriculture is surely a welcome reflection of community sentiments that are turning against intensive animal agriculture. But when a small pastured pig farm is defined as intensive, something is wrong.

Let me unpack the issues.

‘Intensive animal husbandry’ is defined in the Victorian planning scheme as ‘Land used to keep or breed farm animals, including birds, by importing most food from outside the enclosures.’

Clearly this applies to nearly all pig and poultry operations, no matter whether the animals are confined in sheds or out on the pastures. No matter whether the pastured pigs are on bare dirt or well-covered paddocks. It therefore also applies to many equestrian and dairy farms that import a lot of their animals’ feed. Oh, and cattle farms, even just those who feed hay to their cattle in the leanest months of winter and the dry end of summer.

And to what purpose do we want to define these operations as ‘intensive’? In common parlance, most people consider animals that are confined and quite restricted in the extent to which they can move to be raised ‘intensively’. Pigs like Jo grows are not what the public thinks of as ‘intensive’.

What does bringing in feed do in reality? It builds fertility. What happens if you bring in feed for more animals than the land can sustain? It sours. If you concentrate stock numbers, such as in intensive animal agriculture, you can overly nutrify and indeed toxify the soils.

The ‘outdoor bred: raised indoors on straw’ production system for pigs have a practice of moving the ‘eco-sheds’ every two years and then not returning to that same spot for another two years to deal with the issues of souring.

A system like Jo’s, where the pigs are rotated regularly and stocking densities are vastly lower, shouldn’t actually encounter this souring of the soil. The regenerative farming movement is constantly grappling not with letting soured soil recover, but rather how to continually regenerate and build fertility in the soil.

One thing the neighbours who testified against Happy Valley commented on was ‘the condition of the paddocks’, which had improved since Jo decreased her stock numbers in November 2014. Free-range pig farmers talk a lot amongst ourselves about soil health and good coverage. And yet in the potato-growing region I’m in the paddocks are bare for months at a time, sprayed heavily with herbicide and fungicide so that nothing grows while they lay fallow.

Jo admits that in the first couple years of farming pigs her paddocks had less coverage than they do now. She says, ‘I did have stocking issues last winter with the grower pigs and I did lease extra land to solve that problem. I keep banging my head against the wall in wondering why they don’t see our business just like any other business, that has to bend and manoeuvre and restructure to suit its operating and functioning challenges!’

The so-called expert who gave evidence in the VCAT case against Happy Valley is an expert in intensive agriculture. ‘APL submitted that based on science it is not feasible for pigs to obtain most of their dietary requirements from pasture/forages alone.’ Right. Except for in nature.

Pigs also don’t build houses anywhere except in fairy tales but the intensive industry would have you believe that it is difficult for pigs to survive outdoors.

We’re not on a level playing field. While the government endorses high chemical inputs, barren vegetable-growing paddocks, thousands of animals confined in the stench of industrial sheds, and an increasing focus on exporting Australia’s bounty, Jo Stritch and other small-scale farmers are facing a fight to raise happy animals out on the paddocks to feed our communities. As one of our farming heroes Joel Salatin says, ‘folks, this ain’t normal.’

New team will take food movement forward, says President

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tammi-300It's going to be a great year for food sovereignty in Australia with an exciting new national team elected to lead the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA). Along with our members and supporters we have the opportunity to move towards a more diverse, ecological, and egalitarian food system in this country… one that delivers delicious, ethical food to Australia's eaters… a food system that is fair to all, from soil to stomach.

And so it is with great pleasure as the newly elected President of AFSA to welcome the new and returning members National Committee for 2015. I am delighted to be surrounded by a fantastic team of talented, knowledgeable, skilled & committed people all united in our desire to make Australia’s food systems fairer for everyone.

Welcome to:

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  • Vice President Jeff Pow (WA)
  • National Secretary Nick Rose (VIC)
  • Treasurer Nadine Ponomarenko (VIC)
  • Communications Officer Alana Mann (NSW)
  • Clare Richards (far north QLD), and
  • Michele Lally (SA).

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[button_link url="http://afsa.org.au/about/our-team/management-committee-2014-15/" target="" style="" title="" class="" id="" onclick=""] You can see all their amazing bios here... [/button_link]

 

I’d also like to thank Lorraine Gordon, Annie Richmond, and Louise Abson for their nominations, and look forward to having them actively involved in supporting the Committee through working teams and sub-committees. On that note, I would encourage any AFSA member who wants to contribute time to the organisation to get in touch, because there will be plenty of opportunities going forward.

Thank you to the equally talented and passionate outgoing committee members for your work over the previous year (or years in the case of most!) – Michael Croft, Carol Richards, Nick Staniforth, Cat Green, Alice Blackwood, Kali Madden, Sandy Murray, Sonya Pryor, Harry Wykman and Lauren Mathers.

And a special thank you to members Fiona Campbell, Russ Grayson for their tireless and ongoing efforts to help AFSA communicate the many and complicated issues we face in progressing a fair food agenda, and to Jennifer Richards, Marie Kelly-Davies, and Amory Starr, each of whom have made significant contributions during the year.

As retailer power in Australia continues with just two major supermarkets controlling nearly 80% of market share, a new free trade agreement with China that allows Chinese corporations to sue Australian government if there is a change in Australian environmental protections or animal welfare, and the significant threats of coal seam gas extraction from productive agricultural land, food sovereignty is an ever more critical issue for our time.

We need regulatory reform to support the growing agroecological farming movement in Australia. The current regulatory framework was designed for the old industrial model of long supply chains and total lack of transparency. The new way is the old way where eaters are reconnecting to growers and can judge the fairness in the food system firsthand.

The right to grow food instead of grass on your nature strip, the right to know what’s in the food you buy, and the right of everyone to access clean, safe, locally grown food are all central to the mission of AFSA and the thousands of fair food activists working in local communities across the country.

These and many other issues are vital reasons why we need a strong, committed and national movement working for food sovereignty in Australia. AFSA is a volunteer, member-based organisation. Our capacity and our strength is drawn from and depends on our members.

If you’re not already a member of AFSA, sign up today and be part of the solution. We need your voice.

Tammi Jonas
President

No need for ag-gag laws when there’s radical transparency

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Story by Tammi Jonas, 3 June 2014 (story first appeared on Tammi Jonas: Food Ethics)
jonai-farm-meats
Jonai Farms is seeking crowd funding for their Farmstead Salami

The debate is raging once again around animal welfare activists trespassing on private property to obtain footage of conditions in intensive livestock farming. The activists’ stated aim is to expose what they believe are unconscionable practices in the rearing of animals. It seems the debate recently was re-ignited by a column by a celebrity personal trainer.

A number of farmers have reacted with concerns about biosecurity on their farms and risks to their entire herd from disease and distress, as well as dismay at invasions of their privacy, and some have expressed support for so-called ‘ag-gag laws’ as introduced in the US. These laws make it illegal to film or photograph practices on farms without permission from the owner. There’s also been a mildly amusing open letter from ‘Bill the Farmer’ to the celebrity above asking her to live under constant video surveillance.

[pull_quote align="right"]But ask a recently arrived asylum seeker from Afghanistan if they think animal welfare activists are terrorists and I suspect you might gain a little healthy perspective.[/pull_quote] The hyperbole around factory farming and ag-gag laws includes allegations of activists as ‘terrorists’, factory farms as places of ‘horror’, and vegan ‘secret agendas’.

Calling people who trespass to film animals in cages ‘terrorists’ is rather puerile and misinformed. Call them trespassers – because they are. Call them activists – because they are. Hell, call them criminals – because for those found guilty of said alleged trespass, they are.

Some terms I'd like to use

Inflammatory rhetoric aside, I’d like to consider what’s at stake in this debate. I’ll start by setting out some terms I’d like to use.

Intensive Farming

I usually steer away from the phrase ‘factory farming’ as I know it gets most intensive growers’ hackles up. To be clear, I don’t avoid it because I think it’s wrong (raising hundreds or thousands of animals in sheds in an industrial model is, in my view, rather accurately referred to as factory farming). But I want everyone in the discussion to be able to listen, so I try to avoid red flag phrases. I therefore use ‘intensive farming’ (and for the record, free-range farming is known as ‘extensive’).

Animal welfare activists

I won’t refer to ‘animal rights activists’, instead I’ll use ‘animal welfare activists’, because the movement is a broad church, and not all people who believe it’s immoral to cage animals share the view that non-human animals have rights as such. I also know intensive farmers who consider themselves animal welfare activists. I’m a free-range pig farmer, and I’ve considered myself an animal welfare activist since I was 19, but a vegan abolitionist would say I am in fact a murderer. And yet I would say we’re both animal welfare activists.

Ag-gag laws

I will use the label ‘ag-gag laws’, as I think they’re well understood now, and we don’t have a common alternative of which I’m aware. I appreciate that those who support these laws may take umbrage at the phrase, and ask that you bear with me.

As I see it, there are a number of stakeholders in this debate. There are the animals in intensive systems. There is the soil and water on and around the farms. There are the people who work on these farms, including those who own the farms. There are the families of the owners – I’m thinking particularly about the family farms where they live somewhere on the property. And then there is the local community, and the broader community of people (from vegan to omnivore) who have differing levels of concern about the ways animals are raised on farms, whether they eat meat or not.

Of course there are property rights, and trespass is illegal in Australia. So we already have a law that prohibits entering another’s property without permission to obtain footage of their practices.

Vegan abolitionist

I accept and share the concern about fear and feelings of violation at someone trespassing on your property with an intent that is contrary to your interest. Anyone who has had their home broken into knows the feelings of vulnerability that arise after a burglary or theft. If a vegan abolitionist entered our farm without our knowledge to film our pigs, I would be worried about their other possible motives, whether my children were out on the paddocks by themselves at the time, and whether they took anything except images away with them.

Radical transparency

But they have no need to do that on our farm, because we practice radical transparency. We have documented and outlined on national radio all of our farm management practices in great detail. And we invite the public in regularly – in fact people are welcome any day of the weekthat we’re here (which is most).

[pull_quote align="right"]I reflect on how we really just need to move the pigs, not stop the visitor taking a photo.[/pull_quote]You’re welcome to photograph or film anything you see while you’re here, and when I find myself thinking, ‘oh, I hope they don’t take a photo of that mud patch where the pigs have turned the soil completely because we’ve been a bit slow in rotating them to another area,’

What we need are not more laws that will stop people trying to expose what they believe is an injustice. We already have laws to protect your right to property and privacy.

Ag-gag laws must surely re-affirm the public’s concern that farmers have something to hide. Instead we should do as Australia Pork Limited (APL) did last year when footage was secretly filmed of an intensive piggery in NSW – APL got footage of the same piggery in daytime and stood by it.

I personally was still unhappy with what I saw, and so continue not to buy nor eat intensively-raised pork.

Bangalow Sweet Pork is another example of an intensive pig farm that has been prepared to be transparent about their farming practices. In 2009, they opened the doors for a Super Butcher video, and showed everything from their farrowing stalls to the group housing for growers. Again, seeing all those pigs confined in that fashion doesn’t sit well in my ethical code, but the information is there to empower the public to make ethical decisions.

The court of public opinion is real, and whether we like it or not, largely determines what is and is not acceptable. It’s a blunt jury, often led by a vocal minority, and yet when the minority exposes practices to the majority in a compelling way, the majority start to demand change.

[pull_quote align="right"]How I would love to see ‘caged pork’ written on labels!.[/pull_quote]Look at the growth of free-range eggs in Australia. Whatever issues there may be with the certification systems (and they are many), we didn’t have free-range eggs just 20 years ago unless you were a farmer or one of the rare suburbanites with chooks in your backyard. That movement has grown enormously, and we even have ‘caged eggs’ labeled as such.

It is surely in nobody’s interest to criminalise those intent on exposing injustice, rather than welcoming greater scrutiny of industrial agriculture’s impact on animals?

The more farmers practice radical transparency, the more the public will trust us, and the more we will continue to improve our practices. And if we’re transparent about our practices, we can combat the invisibility and lower animal welfare standards of imported pork smallgoods in Australia (70% of the total).

Radical transparency is a powerful motivator to do your best, and I for one welcome it.

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