Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance

Fair food for all Australians

Declaration of the IPC on the draft Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework

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In late February, governments and civil society organisations, along with NGO and private sector representatives convened in Rome to discuss the Zero Draft of the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework.  The Framework will set the targets and directions for addressing an urgent problem – the ongoing loss of biodiversity that is crucial to the landscape functions that we rely on for food, fibre, fuel, and clean water.

AFSA President Tammi Jonas joined these discussions as part of the International Planning Committee on Food Sovereignty. The IPC has called for more ambitious and transformative targets to be set for the post-2020 framework, noting that while many governments and civil society organisations support a more transformative agenda, this has yet to be included in the draft Framework.  AFSA, along with the IPC and many grassroots movements, urges the parties to adopt targets that will lead significant, widespread, and transformative action to halt biodiversity loss and crucially, to recognise the major contribution of agroecology and ecologically-sound farming to maintaining global biodiversity.

See the full statement of the IPC below

(AFSA members’ participation in these events is funded by the IPC via U.N. funding mechanisms)

 

Declaration of the IPC on the Zero Draft of the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework

The International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (IPC) is an autonomous platform representing 6000 grassroots organizations and social movements of Indigenous Peoples and small-scale food producers involved in the conservation, sustainable use, development and governance of agricultural biodiversity, which is the basis for food sovereignty.

Agricultural biodiversity is guaranteed by the women and men of the world who are peasants, small-scale farmers, pastoralists, artisanal fishers, forest dwellers, indigenous peoples and other small-scale food producers who feed the world.  The targets of the Post-2020 Biodiversity Framework cannot be achieved unless the role and the individual and collective rights of the Indigenous peoples, who have distinct rights guaranteed in the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and small-scale producers, who have distinct rights recognized in the Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas, with particular regard for women and youth, are recognized and protected. People must be allowed to live in rural areas in harmony with nature, as indigenous peoples and local communities do while enhancing the world’s biodiversity.

Our first comment on the Zero Draft is that while our people grapple with the worst impacts of the climate crisis induced primarily by industrial agriculture and extractive industries, this draft strategy to protect & conserve biodiversity in perpetuity is worryingly lacking in ambition. While the draft itself acknowledges the need for transformative change, it fails to deliver the ambitious goals and targets needed to achieve this.

One example of the lack of ambition in the draft is the reference to ‘no net losses’ – at a time when we are losing the very biodiversity on which our lives depend, this draft proposes that industries may still choose to wipe out biodiversity in one forest so long as somewhere else somebody is planting trees. We call on parties to reject this weak approach to securing the aims of the Convention to conserve biological diversity, and instead to set targets for no losses. We further note that this is emblematic of the growing movement to put a price on nature – such as so-called ‘nature-based solutions’, with the attendant damaging practices of speculating within new markets around carbon and soon perhaps, biodiversity, to its detriment.

Moreover, the zero draft fails to address issues of land tenure in an adequate way. The Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework should set targets to strengthen the legal recognition and protection of peasants’ and indigenous peoples’ tenure rights and systems, in particular those currently not protected by law.

We call upon parties to ensure that the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework reaffirms the precautionary principle and contains concrete guidance to parties about how to protect biodiversity and peasants’ and indigenous peoples’ rights in the context of technologies, in particular biotechnologies and digital technologies. This should include to implement effective measures at national level to identify, prevent and manage any potential or real adverse impacts effects of biotechnology and new and emerging technologies on biodiversity, taking also into account risks to human health. We were disappointed to hear parties with powerful biotechnology interests assert that the Framework should recognize the alleged positive benefits of biotechnology, when the only demonstrated benefit of biotechnology has been to create profit for a select few.

We note that small-scale food producers, also called ‘peasants’, are defined in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas as any person engaged in artisanal or small- scale agriculture. However, neither the CBD nor the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework specifically acknowledge the rights of peasants, in spite of the fact that they produce 70% of the world’s food on 30% of its land, therefore having a critical role in preserving biodiversity.

The industrial food system, from production to consumption, is one of the main causes of biodiversity loss and the destruction of ecosystems. A transition to more diversified and sustainable systems of food production is therefore urgent. Through agroecological production and management, peasants, fishing communities, pastoralists, and indigenous peoples preserve and enhance biodiversity. Agroecology is based on the rights of small-scale food producers, indigenous peoples and communities, in particular rights to seeds and biodiversity, as well as rights on knowledge, innovation and practices. We question what special interests have made it so difficult to include explicit recognition of the critical role of agroecology in the zero draft of the post-2020 Biodiversity Framework.

At the recent meetings in Rome, we have had renewed hope, having heard many Parties recognize the role of agroeocology as the most sustainable means of providing biodiverse, nutritious, and culturally-determined food to millions of people and communities around the world. It is also urgent to recognize the unique role of small-scale food producers in the management and sustainable use of biodiverse ecosystems.

The industrial food system and extractive industries are the primary causes of climate change, biodiversity loss, and the destruction of ecosystems, as witnessed in the recent devastation of over 16 million hectares of Australian forests and farmlands. A transition to more diversified and sustainable systems of food production and a rapid transition away from unsustainable energy, manufacturing, and transport industries is therefore urgent. Setting targets that increase the areas controlled and managed by Indigenous Peoples and small-scale food producers is one sure way to reverse the biodiversity losses the world is currently suffering, and we are relying on the governments of the world to show the vision needed to deliver a biodiverse and sustainable future for all.

Finally, we sadly must highlight how difficult it was for non-English speaking peoples to actively participate in the second Open-Ended Working Group for the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework processes, where the future of their land, rivers, and seas was addressed without interpretation.

We ask that Parties to this Convention who have been similarly excluded from the work of the Contact Groups to join us in demanding interpretation at all future meetings to ensure full participation of all countries and civil society in this critical work.

Local Laws submission to defend the right to common resources

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Last week AFSA made a submission to the Hepburn Shire Council to defend residents’ rights to forage, collect firewood, have more than 20 chooks, and salvage materials from the tip and roadside without need for a permit.

We were concerned that these laws originated from overzealous risk management policies rather than residents’ interests. Further, they were proposed without transparent community consultation, and would hinder sustainable public use of public goods.

You can see the full submission here.

Local council laws have significant potential to facilitate or limit democratic community control of local food systems and common resources, so it’s important to speak up to make sure councils get it right!

If your council is doing good things, or you’d like to see them do things differently – let us know over at the Ideal Councils Survey so we can tell councils what our members want to see to improve food sovereignty support in local regulations.

2019 President’s Report

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What a delicious year of growing and eating and winning and celebrating it’s been for AFSA! And yet while the food sovereignty movement has had many successes, I’d like to acknowledge the very real struggles farmers across Australia, especially in the east, are facing in the worst climate-change-affected areas. The past year has seen the loss of countless farms as the rains simply haven’t come, dams and water allocations have dried up, and grain stores run out. Australian dairy farms are in crisis, as are pig and poultry farms reliant on grain inputs that have had astronomical price rises, and horticulture farms reliant on rain that hasn’t fallen or water stolen further upstream by big irrigators with the support of corrupt government policies. AFSA is committed to supporting farmers in climate-proofing their farms and business models with agroecological and degrowth practices to ensure a future of radical abundance is possible for all.

This time last year we saw the introduction of simplified guidelines for pastured pig and poultry farms in Victoria. It was a hard-won result after three years of working closely with the Victorian government to achieve acknowledgement of the low risk small-scale pastured pig and poultry farms pose to community amenity and ecosystems.

Meanwhile, we were also working hard on AFSA’s second book Farming Democracy: Radically transforming the food system from the ground up – launched in March 2019. Farming Democracy is the story of eight diverse and fascinating small-scale regenerative farmers from around Australia. In telling their stories each farm identifies and illustrates many of the issues they have faced in their quest to establish a fair, democratic, sustainable and resilient food system on their farm.

The farms in the book are as diverse as the food they produce, some with full or partial control of their supply chains, with varying levels of diversity and integration in their models, and at different places in their thinking about the role of growth in their businesses, all thoughtful in their approaches. They opened their hearts, their farms, and even their books to show what it costs (and earns) to grow and distribute food in ethical and ecologically-sound ways.

We launched the book at Farm Day Out at Jonai Farms in the central highlands of Victoria, a region that is an epicentre of the small-scale regenerative and agroecological farming movement. While the event itself was not a successful fundraiser for AFSA as intended, it was a joyful day of like-minded people working towards a food sovereign future fuelled by good tunes, great vibes, and excellent food. Important lessons about the way we try to fundraise for the food sovereignty movement were learned.

In April, we welcomed the visit by the UN’s High Level Panel of Experts to Canberra, where they explained their newest report on agroecology and ‘other innovations’ for sustainable agriculture, and noted with dismay the stark difference in the CSIRO’s understanding of and demonstrable lack of support for agroecology, a position we’ve witnessed regularly in the Australian government’s participation in international meetings of various governing bodies of the UN.

AFSA happily accepted an invitation to become a member of the newly constituted Regenerative Agriculture Alliance established at Southern Cross University (SCU). Together with new and old comrades from across all scales of the regenerative farming movement, we’re working to influence policy at all levels to support the management of healthy soils to repair Australia’s degraded landscapes and assure a prosperous and long future for Australian agriculture.

Many AFSA members and Committee members attended the fifth annual Deep Winter Agrarian gathering at Willunga in South Australia, renewing and striking new friendships and camaraderie with the movement of small-scale regenerative and agroecological farmers and our allies. We issued a declaration calling for recognition of the long experience and deep traditional knowledge of the Traditional Owners’ food production and care for land, increased attention to our critically endangered soils using holistic management and regenerative practices in agriculture, and for increased farmer and community control of the means of production – supply chain infrastructure such as abattoirs, boning rooms, grain mills, and the like.

AFSA are part of a global movement opposing the introduction of GMOs into the food chain without adequate regulation and scant consideration for human health. In solidarity with other organisations and individuals working to stop the de-regulation of GMO in Australia and globally, we have written to politicians and attended meetings advocating for safe regulation and labelling of GMO. New moves to de-regulate ‘new breeding techniques’ put all of us at risk of eating untested, unlabelled genetically modified (GM) foods – including animals. Powerful scientific evidence shows that new GM techniques such as CRISPR pose risks that require expert assessment and management. It’s vital that gene edited organisms are assessed for safety before being released into our environment and supermarkets.

While we reluctantly farewelled the exuberant Sarah de Wit, our excellent inaugural AFSA Legal Defence Fund paralegal, it was with great pleasure that we hired Airlie Morris, a lawyer with 20 years’ experience, to build on Sarah’s foundational work supporting and advocating for small-scale farmers, food producers, and eaters in Australia.

It was another busy year writing government submissions advocating for small-scale farmers and everyone’s right to nutritious and delicious food. Amongst a number of other submissions around the regulation of veterinary and agri-chemicals, protection of valuable agricultural land around Melbourne, animal welfare standards, and the impact of animal rights activists on livestock farmers, we put a strong case against FSANZ’s proposal to require a licence to sell lettuce, which we cautiously believe looks unlikely to proceed.

Our international work (funded by the Food & Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the UN) has remained strong, with participation at the UN Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (CGRFA) as sub-regional members of the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (IPC), where the first Report on the State of the World’s Biodiversity for Food & Agriculture was launched. The world is losing biodiversity at an alarming rate, and the UN is under no illusions that industrial agriculture is playing a significant part in the problem, while agroecology can play a major part in the solutions. We were honoured to be part of seed sovereignty meetings in northern Italy and learn some of the ways communities of farmers are wresting back control of seeds from the handful of multinational corporations who control the global seed supply.

Two of our farmer members of the National Committee attended the annual regional conference of La Via Campesina in Japan, and another the regional women’s conference in Thailand, working with our comrades from across South East and East Asia to shine the light on the negative impacts of multinational corporations controlling the food system and promoting the rights of peasants and Indigenous Peoples to collectively determine their own food and agriculture systems.

AFSA Secretary Ruth Gaha-Morris was selected for the sub-regional role on the Coordinating Committee of the Civil Society Mechanism (CSM), which articulates to the UN World Committee for Food Security (CFS), and joins us at this year’s Food Sovereignty Convergence directly from meetings in Rome.

Scanning the horizon, AFSA have our sights set on legalising sales of raw milk from the farm gate as one means of saving Australia’s dying dairy industry while giving people the choice to consume unprocessed foods from a safely regulated industry. We’re also closely monitoring the rise of false solutions to the problems of industrial agriculture such as the corporate-controlled rise of mass-produced vegetable-based protein patties and lab meat. We reject all ‘solutions’ that simply maintain corporate control of the food system in an undemocratic capitalist economy.

I’d like to thank the 2019 National Committee and staff for your work and commitment to the food sovereignty movement locally and globally, as well as your camaraderie and many shared feasts over the year. To those who are leaving us to focus on fertile grounds at home and in your local communities – Anna Treasure, Fraser Bayley, Kat Munksgaard, and Jess Brugmans – a special thank you and fare thee well!

We fight for what we eat, we eat what we fight for!

Viva la revolución!

Tammi Jonas, President

22 October 2019

AFSA 2019 Work Plan!

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Strategic Retreat, 12-14 December 2018

The National Committee of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA) met for its sixth strategic planning retreat on the traditional lands of the Dja Dja Wurrung people, paying our respect to elders past and present.

We recognise the Original Owners and their role in caring for this land for over 60,000 years, their long history of growing food in ethical and ecologically-sound ways, and their careful maintenance of biodiversity before and since Invasion.

We acknowledge the ecological devastation caused by industrial agriculture since European invasion, and commit to ongoing conversations with communities of Indigenous Peoples. We again commit to supporting our members to seek stronger ties to Indigenous communities and work towards a day where everything we do is in connection and mutual accountability with community.

During our meeting, the Committee was delighted to have the support of the legendary Costa Georgiadis of ABC Gardening Australia fame. Members of our team joined Costa on a livestream to discuss AFSA’s crowdfunding campaign to publish Farming Democracy, eight stories of small-scale agroecological farmers of how they grow, process, and distribute their produce, including what it costs them and what they ultimately live on in an effort to bring radical transparency to the food system. We are even more delighted to have reached our target this morning, and look forward immensely to printing the book and launching it at AFSA’s inaugural Farm Day Out at Jonai Farms on 17 March 2019!

We have developed a plan to continue collecting the stories of the growing number of farmers producing and distributing food in ethical and ecologically-sound ways and publishing them on the AFSA website to show what is not only possible, but happening across Australia and the world.

We are grateful to the Victorian Government for its dedication to working with small-scale agroecological farmers to reform the planning provisions over these past three years in close collaboration with AFSA and our allies. The reforms better reflect the low-risk nature of these farming systems, and we look forward to working further with other states undertaking reform, in particular New South Wales, which is already in progress.

We’re also working to refute claims that those of us opposed to intensive livestock agriculture are ‘anti-science’ and the spurious claims that we can only feed the world with large-scale intensive agriculture systems, and to build an evidence base that in fact small-scale agroecological farming is the best way to feed a growing world population. Biosecurity is biological security and food and agriculture systems that are based on single species are not biologically secure.

We’re building a database of communities that have been fighting for their right to determine their own food & agriculture systems – fighting to stop the incursion of large, stinking sheds full of pigs and poultry. We’re analyzing the reasons some have won their battles to protect their air, water, soil, and communities, and why some have lost. And we’re seeking to connect communities fighting the same battles to share the winning strategies and support more in their struggles.

AFSA have heard from our members that they hold deep concerns about the over-use of agricultural chemicals such as glyphosate, and have made a submission to the current Senate Inquiry into the Independence of Regulatory Decisions Made by the APVMA (the agvet chemical regulator). We are committed to better understanding our members’ concerns and to developing a robust, evidence-based position on the use of agvet chemicals in agriculture.

We have plans to seek dedicated funding to deepen our capacity to increase the number of farmers taking control of the means of production, especially but not only around the current exciting movement to build small-scale regional abattoirs and grain mills.

We’ll be seeking input from members across Australia of best practice examples of councils enacting food sovereignty with specific policies and activities, such as the proposed Victorian Central Highlands Premium Produce Hub, which aims to provide knowledge, networks and practical opportunities to local farms to support its many producers’ viability. We look forward to sharing these examples on the AFSA website to encourage more councils to support food sovereignty for their communities.

We are working on the curriculum for a Buckminster Fuller Series of farmers’ workshops that aim to help more farms run viable models that reject the false promises of endless growth, gain control of their value chains, and sell directly to the people who eat their food grown in ethical and ecologically-sound ways. Once fully developed, AFSA will host these workshops across the country, training more farmers to run their own workshops to continue growing the new/old system.

AFSA look forward to supporting our wildly successful event that began as Slow Meat in 2017 and will be re-badged in response to participant feedback as REAL Good Meat: ethical, ecological, delicious.

This year we are extremely fortunate to have the capacity to have formed an international team within the committee, which will deepen and strengthen our work in the global movement with La Via Campesina and the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty, including attendance at a range of meetings and workshops convened by the Food & Agriculture Organisation and other bodies of the United Nations. We are grateful to the FAO for its commitment to fund the social movements, which, along with funding from other external bodies, enables the participation of civil society without creating a drain on AFSA’s and other organisations’ scarce resources.

Finally, we are thrilled to announce that the 2019 Food Sovereignty Convergence will be held in Brisbane, hosted by the pioneering dynamic duo Robert Pekin and Emma-Kate Rose in their newly equity crowdfunded Food Connect Shed in October 2019.

Here’s to another great year of progressing the ambitious aims of food sovereignty, to ensure everyone has access to culturally-appropriate and nutritious food produced and distributed in ethical and ecologically-sound ways, and our right to democratically determine our own food & agriculture systems!

Viva la revolución!

Declaration from the 2018 Food Sovereignty Convergence

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We representatives of small-scale farmers, fishers, agricultural workers, indigenous peoples, women, youth, eaters, and NGOs came together from across Australia to meet on the traditional lands of the Ngunnawal, Ngambri, and Ngarigu peoples, paying our respect to elders past and present. At the 2018 Food Sovereignty Convergence we celebrated the opportunity to meet each other to continue weaving alliances, building solidarity, and strengthening our commitment to defend our right to democratically participate in food and agriculture systems.

We recognise the Original Owners and their role in caring for this land for over 60,000 years, their long history of growing food in ethical and ecologically-sound ways, and their careful maintenance of biodiversity before and since Invasion. We re-affirm our support for the Uluru Statement from the heart, which asserts that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tribes were the first sovereign Nations of the Australian continent and its adjacent islands, and possessed it under their own laws and customs.

We affirmed our commitment to food sovereignty, which promotes everyone’s right to access culturally-appropriate and nutritious food grown and distributed in ethical and ecologically-sound ways, and our right to democratically determine our own food and agriculture systems.

The Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA) today celebrates an historical achievement as we unanimously voted to amend our constitution to make AFSA explicitly farmer led. While in practice we have for some years been an alliance of farmers and allies with a clear focus on radically transforming the food system from the ground up, the new constitution gives farmers control of decisions that have a material impact on their efforts to grow food ethically and ecologically. If you’re not a farmer, you must be an ally, and if you’re not an ally you have to ask yourself why not? AFSA’s farmers are not interested in the old silo mentality – we work in solidarity with the full range of other actors in the system for the radical transformation so desperately needed.

Agroecology is recognized by the UN as the best way to feed the world. In Australia, regenerative farming is on the rise, and AFSA hopes to support an evolving conversation that acknowledges agroecology’s potential to extend the movement’s progress on ecological improvements to farming to also include social and economic improvements embedded in the principles and practices of agroecology.

Small-scale farmers are struggling to maintain access to critical supply chain infrastructure that is owned by a shrinking number of corporations. AFSA is committed to supporting communities to take control of the means of production, and are helping farmers and allies to network and develop cooperative models to build supply chain infrastructure such as abattoirs, grain mills, and other collaborative processing and storage facilities. We see this work as essential to the project of building a new food system that will ultimately make the old one obsolete.

AFSA champions the work of leaders such as farmer and agrarian intellectual Charles Massy (author of Call of the Reed Warbler), who is supporting an underground insurgency of broadacre farmers transitioning to more regenerative and agroecological models of farming. We applaud the many farmers across the country who are developing practices that are creating resilient systems so needed in the face of the negative impacts of climate change. We extend a message of care and concern for the farmers suffering from the devastating impact of the current drought who are trapped in the industrial system, and hope they receive more than just bales of hay that don’t address the core issues with industrial production methods that have left them so vulnerable.

Solidarity is critical to any movement, and AFSA re-affirms our commitment to working productively with the many excellent organisations acting for food sovereignty in Australia and globally, such as but not limited to Open Food Network, the Right to Food Coalition, the Victorian Farmers’ Market Association, Melbourne Farmers Markets, Regrarians, Sustainable Table, Friends of the Earth, Food Connect, Gene Ethics, ActionAid, ORICoop, the many Slow Food convivia around the country, and internationally the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (IPC), La Via Campesina, and Urgenci: the International Network for Community-Supported Agriculture.

We recognize the important role played by local councils in supporting their farmers, makers, and distributors of food, and commit to developing ‘ideal council guidelines’ to assist them with a food sovereignty framework to help guide their decision making around matters spanning from verge gardening to capturing rainwater for drinking to having animals on smallholdings and safely converting home kitchens to commercial kitchens for cottage industry.

On World Food Day we celebrated the recent UN Human Rights Council’s ratification of the Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas. We bear witness to the Australian Government’s retrograde vote against the Declaration, an egregious undermining of the rights of the world’s most oppressed peoples who do the world’s most critical work to grow more than 70% of our food globally. The Declaration defines peasants as:

a man or woman of the land, who has a direct and special relationship with the land and nature through the production of food and/or other agricultural products. Peasants work the land themselves, rely above all on family labour and other small-scale forms of organizing labour. Peasants are traditionally embedded in their local communities and they take care of local landscapes and of agro-ecological systems. The term peasant can apply to any person engaged in agriculture, cattle-raising, pastoralism, handicrafts related to agriculture or a related occupation in a rural area. This includes Indigenous people working on the land.

The farmer members of AFSA identify with the definition of peasants as we work the land, caring for our agroecological systems embedded in our rural communities. We look forward to strengthening social relationships and opportunities for farmer-to-farmer knowledge sharing with regular gatherings of ‘Peasants at the Pub’ across the country.

The movement is diverse, and we recognize the particular struggles some of our members experience because of discrimination or lack of recognition. We affirm our support for Indigenous Peoples, rural women and youth, and queer and gender diverse people, many of whom are leaders in the new farming movement.

The forces we’re struggling against may have the money, but we have the people. We’re looking for more food sovereignty warriors to help do the work before us – volunteers are essential to our ultimate success in radically transforming the food system. Whether you are good at writing letters and petitions, providing website support or graphic design skills, have legal experience or could help prune fruit trees to free up our committee members to take their activism off their farms and into the halls of power, the food sovereignty movement needs more people to get active in creating the future we wish to see.

We acknowledge the ecological devastation caused by industrial agriculture since European invasion, and commit to ongoing conversations with communities of Indigenous Peoples as we work towards deeper understanding and genuine relationships with the Original Owners. We are conscious of the risk of hollow acknowledgements of country, and commit to supporting our members to seek stronger ties to Indigenous communities and work towards a day where everything we do is in connection and mutual accountability with community.

All this and more we commit to in our struggle for food sovereignty locally and globally. We have again democratically elected a committee of farmers, food workers, educators, and academics to lead the important work ahead of us.

Viva la revolución! Viva la via campesina!

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