Indigenous Archives - Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance

Declaration from the 2018 Food Sovereignty Convergence

October 18, 2018 by Tammi Jonas

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!

We Want Water Sovereignty for Australia!

February 24, 2018 by Tammi Jonas

The Murray Darling Basin’s capacity to provide water to all its communities is at risk. The Federal Government last week put forward an amendment to allow 70GL more than the 2012 Murray Darling Basin Plan (MDBP) recommended be withdrawn for big irrigators’ consumption in the Northern Basin, an amendment that was voted down in the Senate. The Government rather confusingly refers to the amendment as an ‘adjustment to the Sustainable Diversion Limits (SDL)’ in the Northern Basin – ‘recovering water’ from ‘environmental flows’ rather than ‘allowing irrigators to use it for commercial gain’.

While the process of formulating the MDBP was long and fraught with governance issues, the four affected states (QLD, NSW, VIC & SA) agreed to implement it in 2012 for the health of the river and its many and diverse communities and uses.

It appears that lobbying from Big Ag – in particular the cotton industry, which by its own admission uses a staggering 26% of all Australian agricultural irrigation water and then exports 99% of their product – resulted in the proposed amendment to take 70GL out of the system further upstream instead of retaining this resource downstream as environmental flows.

Withdrawing more water upstream against community sentiment is deeply flawed and a rejection of the tenets of water sovereignty because it’s allowing commercial use to quite literally ship our scarce water resources overseas for profit.

When we export cotton, rice, beef, wine – any agricultural product – we are exporting our water.

Environmental flows control the timing, quality, and volume of water flows to sustain river ecologies and the communities that depend on them. Calling them ‘environmental’ seems to be part of the problematic discourse that allows governments and the media to pit ‘greenies’ against ‘farmers’, instead of enabling a holistic discussion that acknowledges the importance of healthy river ecologies to all life, including that sustained by farmers.

Removing a further 70GL of environmental flows for the benefit of cotton farms and other big water users (I’m looking at you, rice farms) is a threat to the very existence of those downstream. Broken Hill is running out of clean drinking water – the issue is critical, and not even about the more complicated questions around water rights for commercial activities and how to balance these with ecological health, recreational use, and basic human needs – it’s the basic human need at stake here.

In a related but separate current issue around the MDBP, works have commenced to run a pipeline from the junction of the Murray and Darling Rivers at Wentworth 300km north to supply fresh drinking water to Broken Hill – which for more than 60 years has obtained its water via a pipeline from the Menindee Lakes, part of the Darling River system, a lake system which is now often empty or nearly empty.

The pipeline from Wentworth will cost half a billion dollars, and travel through the traditional lands of the original owners without regard for songlines or other intangible cultural heritage, though there is surveying being undertaken to identify sacred sites, which are meant to be avoided. When I met with some of the original owners from diverse parts of the vast region at the protest in Wentworth, they were adamant that while the government said the original owners had been “consulted,” they had not in fact given consent for the pipeline to disrupt and divide their land.

I’m not an expert on water systems, but I do understand the fundamental principles of water security and sovereignty. All peoples have a right to clean, safe water – water should be distributed and used equally and on a sustainable basis.

Water should not be privatised, commodified, and sold back to people – we all need water to survive – it is a public good.

The Darling River’s flow is famous for being ‘extraordinarily irregular’ – much of its storage, such as the shallow Menindee Lakes, is highly prone to evaporation – and it dried up at least 45 times between 1885 and 1960. But in the face of climate change and what appears to be ongoing mismanagement, it doesn’t stand a chance of reaching South Australia for much longer (and not at all at the moment). Such a fragile ecosystem must surely be supported to enable flows to persist, and that will not happen if over-allocation of water rights to big irrigators up north continues.

On a panel in Mildura we heard from the Federal Assistant Minister for Water and Agriculture, Liberal Senator Anne Ruston from South Australia, who told us that ‘sustainability is not what Sarah Hanson Young thinks it is – she thinks it’s returning the river to its natural state.’ Senator Ruston told us that actually sustainability ‘is not leaving it any worse than we found it’ – an aim I called out for being depressingly unambitious.

As with regenerative agriculture, which seeks to leave the land healthier than we found it, we must do more than sustain our sickly river systems. We must regenerate them to ensure we have a future where everyone has access to clean, safe, nourishing and delicious food and water.

Without water, humans can survive about three days. We need water sovereignty now!

~ Tammi Jonas, 24 Feb 2018

Bruce Pascoe on Indigenous land management and regenerative farming

January 14, 2018 by Courtney Young

Bruce Pascoe, Bunurong man and highly acclaimed author of ‘Dark Emu: Black Seeds‘, sat down with AFSA President Tammi Jonas at the Food Sovereignty Convergence in Canberra, 2017. Bruce spoke about connection to country, respecting the land and the history and culture of people imbedded within it, and how we can work towards ‘conciliation’ as farmers, eaters and activists in Australia. Thank you Karina and Kimmo Vennonen for the recording!

AFSA – response to the Turnbull government’s rejection of the The Uluru Statement from the Heart

November 28, 2017 by Katie Johnston

AFSA’s national committee members were saddened to hear of the rejection of The Uluru Statement from the Heart, and as such, have released the following response. We believe the rejection of the report’s findings is a step backwards for reconciliation with the Traditional Owners of this country. As Bruce Pascoe recently reminded us at the Food Sovereignty Convergence, conciliation will take time – people will get hurt, and it will be hard…but it is necessary. We reckon this would have been a pretty good start.

The Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA) urges the Prime Minister to reconsider his response to the findings of the Final Report of the Joint Select Committee on Constitutional Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Peoples.

The Uluru Statement from the Heart proposed the inclusion of Australia’s Traditional Owners’ voices via an Indigenous advisory body in parliament.

This body proposes to offer non-binding advice on relevant matters.

The outright rejection of this modest proposal is a step backwards for reconciliation, and disrespects both the people, and the process, which entailed a long period of consultation and collaboration among a broad cross-section of Indigenous Australian communities.

Top down approaches have failed to reverse the disadvantage of Indigenous Australians. National representation and self-determination are essential steps in moving beyond the gross injustices of the past.

As stewards of the land, our farmer members are endeavouring to work with the original owners of this country to create a more socially equitable and ecologically sustainable nation, and a truly food sovereign future.

Through AFSA’s ongoing engagement with the international organisation, La Via Campesina, we stand in strong solidarity with the global movement for recognition and inclusion of indigenous and First Nation Peoples everywhere, without whom there can be no true food sovereignty.

We support the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples recognising “the urgent need to respect and promote the rights of indigenous peoples affirmed in treaties, agreements and other constructive arrangements with States”.

AFSA wishes to remind the parliament of the encouragement in the Declaration that “States comply with and effectively implement all their obligations as they apply to indigenous peoples under international instruments, in particular those related to human rights, in consultation and cooperation with the peoples concerned”.

We therefore implore the parliament to revisit its decision, and to begin implementation of the recommendations of this historic report and statement.

A gross infringement of food sovereignty and basic rights

April 26, 2015 by Food Sovereignty

Media release 26 April 2015

The Western Australian Government’s proposed closure of remote Aboriginal communities

The Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA), supported by the Public Health Association of Australia (PHAA), express our strongest opposition to the forced removal of Aboriginal peoples from their communities, as proposed by the Western Australian government.

Such a removal would infringe fundamental human rights, and further diminish the food sovereignty of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

Government in breach of obligations

ABS data released this week indicates that more than one in five Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people live in a household which had run out of food and was unable to buy more, a rate of food insecurity six times higher than the rest of the Australian population. AFSA supports the combined call by the Public Health Association of Australia, Red Cross and Dietitians Association of Australia for increased resourcing of nutrition and food supply strategies to respond to this crisis.

This appalling rate of food insecurity shows that our Federal and state governments are in breach of their obligations to ensure that all Australians, and especially the most disadvantaged, enjoy the fundamental human right to adequate and culturally appropriate food, guaranteed by Article 10 of the United Nations Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Australia is a signatory to that Covenant and has ratified it. The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples outlines a range of rights of indigenous peoples which would be contravened by the forced removal of Aboriginal peoples from their communities and lands.

We believe it is a fundamental and ongoing act of reconciliation, respect and celebration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and their culture that as a nation we support their right to remain on their traditional lands. This is where they are able to maintain the crucial relationships to the land, animals, plants, and ancestral and spiritual beings.

We acknowledge also that language, culture, spirituality, health and wellbeing and nutritional and medicinal knowledge are inextricably linked to peoples’ traditional lands and are strengthened, deepened and replenished by being on their traditional lands.

In Western Australia, dispossession continues

The history of colonisation of Australia demonstrates that when Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are removed from their traditional lands there is a loss of skills and knowledge of the nutritional, medicinal and spiritual properties of traditional foods and the language to describe them. These processes of removal constitute a form of cultural genocide. It is unacceptable for this to happen yet again.

In the historical frame of the last 230 years, the current proposal by the WA government to remove basic services and infrastructure support from some remote Aboriginal communities is, whatever the rhetorical and ‘pragmatic’ justifications, yet another dispossession of both people, and the country to which they belong and owe the duty of custodianship.

With rapidly declining soil health and water availability in Australia, the living bank of sustainable land management knowledge held by Aboriginal people who have been able to maintain their language, culture and connection to country is an irreplaceable resource, not just to the people themselves, but to the whole nation. The impacts on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ lives that have occurred through colonisation mean that remaining knowledge and skills are vulnerable to loss. Closing remote Aboriginal communities would all but guarantee that loss.

Should the Western Australian government proceed with the closure of remote communities it would set a disturbing precedent for the denial by governments of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders rights across Australia to remain on their traditional lands. Such action would also have broader implications for infrastructure in rural and remote areas of Australia particularly regarding critical issues such as road maintenance and health services which are shared by all.

A better way forward

What is required of our governments are responses to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples human rights which are driven not by governments but by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people themselves.

AFSA calls on the Western Australian government to confirm that no remote Aboriginal communities will be stripped of essential service and infrastructure supports.

The reoccurring failures of governments to adequately and consistently respect and uphold Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ rights to food sovereignty and food security is reflected in the lack of national, coordinated policy, funding and practice regarding food sovereignty and food security.

We call on governments at all levels to come together as a matter of urgency to develop in collaboration with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations and communities, health and community sector peak bodies and other key stakeholders, a policy framework, funding commitments and national action plan for food sovereignty and food security.

………..

About the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance and food sovereignty

The Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA) is working towards a fair, diverse and democratic food system for the benefit of all Australians. We are a civic organisation of Australian producers, communities, organisations and individuals committed to upholding the rights of peoples to food sovereignty.

Food sovereignty asserts the right of peoples to nourishing and culturally appropriate food produced and distributed in ecologically sound and ethical ways and their right to collectively determine their own food and agriculture systems.

The degree to which peoples experience food sovereignty has a direct bearing on their food security. Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food which meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. The greater peoples’ food sovereignty, the greater the level of control they have over their food choices and the sources of their food.

Contact:

Clare Richards, National Committee member for North Australia, Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance:

Mobile: 0409 944 136
Email: clare@clareskitchen.com

Michael Moore, CEO, Public Health Association of Australia:

Mobile: 0417 249 731

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