From 4-21 October 2024, AFSA convened a series of Agroecology Roadshow events along the east coast of Australia. We kept a diary of each event so that you could learn with us from a diverse range of communities. The Roadshow is just the beginning – we will be convening more Agroecology Dialogues across Australia over the coming years. If you think your community would benefit from a dialogue, drop us an email on admin@afsa.org.au!
Agroecology Roadshow diary
4 October 2024, Dharug Country, Bilpin Springs Farm
We convened the first farm dialogue of the AFSA Agroecology Roadshow on unceded Dharug Country at Bilpin Springs Farm, where Ned and a group of mostly young active and aspiring farmers came together to share the struggle of equitable and viable access to and secure tenure on land, and the challenges they face in trying to reject (let alone overturn) the colonial capitalist system and still pay their rent. Their community is finding strength in collective autonomy, with many interdependencies and collaborative efforts across farming, land sharing, and connecting art with agroecology. In line with the principles of agroecology, they seek synergy between enterprises, economic diversification in production and distribution in the Blue Mountains and into Sydney, and the highest standards of soil and animal health across their farming enterprises. Yet for those who are landless, the risk of a failed land sharing agreement is a heavy burden to carry, while still offering some opportunities for a livelihood on the land.
The cost of living crisis which has made land ownership increasingly out of reach, applies equally to others who simply want to enjoy the human right to nutritious and culturally determined food that is produced and distributed in ethical, ecologically sounds, and socially just ways. We spoke of the importance of structural reforms, such as the need for a universal basic income (UBI) to assure everyone’s right to food and livelihood.
We dwelled on one of the principles of emancipatory agroecologies – to create autonomy, not dependency – as the land and debt questions are the biggest hurdles young farmers face. The principle frames the deep injustice of a minority of elites hording private property, driving prices up, charging astronomical rents, and increasingly, developing peri-urban agricultural land in ways that forever remove it from farming.
Article 17 of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants asserts that ‘peasants and other people living in rural areas have the right to land, individually and/or collectively […] including the right to have access to, sustainably use and manage land and the water bodies, coastal seas, fisheries, pastures and forests therein, to achieve an adequate standard of living, to have a place to live in security, peace and dignity and to develop their cultures.’ Clause 6 goes on to urge governments to ‘limit excessive concentration and control of land, taking into account its social function.’
On the Roadshow, we’re diving deep into what it means to be a peasant – literally, ‘a person of the land’ – whether by choice like those in Australia, or by heritage as in most parts of the rest of the world. We are delighted to have connected with another small community of an emerging peasantry in Australia – people who put planet over profit – and are looking forward to meeting more over the coming weeks!
Viva la vía campesina! Viva la revolución!
6 October 2024, Birpai Country, Grazed & Grown Farm
On unceded Birpai Country, a passionate group of farmers and allies convened at Grazed and Grown Farm, who have recently closed the loop with an on-farm micro-abattoir for their pigs and poultry, eliminating the 6-hour one-way trip to the nearest accessible abattoir. Peter and Bec are an inspiration to many in the local community with their unwavering focus on highest animal welfare standards in highly mobile livestock systems, now also deepened through on-farm slaughter, removing stressful transport for their animals on their final day. This context underpinned our discussions around the increasing corporate control of essential food system infrastructure – the intrinsic infrastructure of agroecology – such as abattoirs, boning rooms, grain mills and dairy processing facilities, arguably the biggest threat to growing the new peasantry in Australia, along with access to and secure tenure on land.
We spoke at length what it means to be a peasant – a person of the land – as opposed to an entrepreneur, the latter an identity with which many small-scale farmers may identify. Entrepreneurs typically have a strong risk appetite, not only for financial risk, but also for risks of unintended consequences, including to environment and animal welfare, as they pride themselves on learning from failure and being recognized as innovators clever at growing their bank account as a primary aim of what are often ‘projects’. Peasants, on the other hand, identify with and have a special attachment to the land, and their focus is on sustaining the ecosystem in which they are in relations of reciprocity and mutual obligation for lives and livelihoods. Farming is not a ‘project’ to be superseded by the next one, and peasants are not usually in it for the money, but rather for a dignified livelihood that acknowledges when they have enough, usually with a strong awareness that if one takes more than one’s share, others will suffer somewhere down the river, so to speak. Peasants, along with First Peoples, are the world’s great innovators, as they shift between sowing, harvesting, moving livestock, building, butchering and keeping both their environmental and financial accounts in order. The farmers here on Birpai Country all wanted ‘peasant’ hats by the end of the lively discussion.
As locals shared the familiar story of the demise of the small-scale dairies that used to dot the dramatic, hilly landscape, we reflected on the fact that Australia had 14,000 dairies in 2000 – the year the industry was de-regulated – but only around 4,000 today, with numbers still falling. This has not happened by accident. As governments around the world took a strongly neoliberal turn from the 1980s onwards – nowhere more so than Australia – policies have favoured free rather than fair trade, and corporations have feasted on the now much-diminished pool of once public goods. AFSA calls on all levels of government to support smallholders’ work to re-localise our food and agriculture systems, and stop selling out to multinationals who value profit over people.
Article 16 of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants (UNDROP) asserts that states must protect peasants’ right to an adequate livelihood by facilitating access to infrastructure, tools and markets. We call on small-scale farmers and farm workers across what is now called Australia to recognize yourselves as part of the new peasantry – in solidarity with the strong, vibrant peasantry represented internationally by La Vía Campesina – and demand that your rights be upheld by the state, rather than allowed to be crushed by corporations!
Viva la vía campesina! Viva la revolución!
8 October 2024, Gumbaynggirr Country, Levenvale Farm
On a warm, humid day on unceded Gumbaynggirr Country, a dozen more new peasants gathered to strategise together about how to take back control of the food system. While most had not considered themselves peasants before the dialogue, as they considered the characteristics of people of the land, acting in reciprocity and mutual obligation as conscientious custodians, the language resonated strongly with all present.
We discussed the increasingly familiar history of the region – the decline of small-scale dairies, and the rise and fall of commodity bananas, kiwi fruit, macadamias and avocadoes, each of which brought a raft of agri-chemicals that run off into the sea, with the obvious negative impacts on the oyster farmers reliant on those once-pristine waters. Blueberries are the next commodity promoted by the government, subject to the same toxic loads as their predecessors, just the latest crop promoted to feed distant populations rather than local communities.
As everywhere, abattoirs are in vanishingly small supply and those remaining are steadily foreclosing smallholder access. As AFSA has heard from communities not only on the Roadshow, but for much longer, there was talk of the need to simply focus on feeding communities rather than adhering to industrial regulatory frameworks that are seriously undermining local food security and the livelihoods of peasants. There was even a call to action for elders of rural communities to step up and protect the next generations from regulatory overreach, taking the heat as parties responsible for strategic non-compliance. In today’s world, one could consider it a widespread ‘quiet quitting’ of the crushing superstructure of industrial society.
The community in Bellingen Shire is already collectivized in many ways, such as via the Women Who Farm network, which brings rural women together for support, knowledge sharing and camaraderie. Article 10 of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants (UNDROP) asserts that states must protect peasants’ right to participate in the implementation of policies, programs and projects that may affect them, whether directly or through their representative organisations. It’s time for local and state governments in Australia to encourage and support the participation of local groups like Women Who Farm in making decisions about whether to direct funding into more large-scale industrial agriculture or the intrinsic infrastructure of agroecology – abattoirs, boning rooms dairy processing and more.
9 October 2024, Bundjalung Country, Namabunda Farm
The mullet don’t run anymore in the Richmond River, Bundjalung elder Uncle Mickey told us as we gathered at Namabunda Farm on Bundjalung Country for the fourth Agroecology Dialogue of the Roadshow. Uncle Mickey and Aunty Marie shared yarns about their childhood growing up on the river, enjoying its bounty as well as the abundance of bush tucker they could gather as they roamed along its banks as children. They spoke of the trauma of separation when the state determined that ‘Gran was a pauper’ who could not feed them, while they were nourished on their traditional land in ways invisible to the colonial authorities. Theirs is a story writ large globally as Indigenous Peoples and peasants who have long lived in reciprocity with the land are denigrated for their resistance to colonial capitalist systems of economics and governance, and forcibly removed from the very places where nourishment is provided by Mother Earth to be left to subsist at best on industrial rations from an unjust system that ravages ecosystems and human bodies.
We heard the ways that the meaningful cultural and physical work being done at Namabunda is healing the river while healing young bodies, minds and hearts. We canvassed ideas to strengthen the work of so many people trying to protect the rivers from agri-chemical runoff – pesticides and fertilisers, and sanitisers from the dairy industry washing daily into the water. Along with the Riverkeeper initiative, which supports work from restoration to submissions to the Lismore flood inquiry, thoughts were shared about how local landholders can work with neighbours to help more farmers shift from the harmful practices killing the river systems.
Examples were shared of projects in the Pacific from Vanuatu to Fiji, from reforestation to complex gardening and agroforestry initiatives, with the comment that ‘we can learn a lot’ from these agroecological approaches. This echoed AFSA’s long learning from our international work that the peasants and Indigenous Peoples of the Majority World have maintained and/or regained so much traditional knowledge in spite (and because) of colonial capitalist systems that seek to exploit, extract and oppress local knowledge and autonomy.
The Bundjalung Tribal Society is working to restore the Namabunda land after the damaging impact of monocultures of lychees planted on the pastures of a degraded former dairy as a cash crop on advice from previous governments. The lychees were subsequently abandoned as they proved unsuitable in ways of most monocultures, and the community is steadily toiling to convert the land to an abundant food forest, with bananas and finger limes under canopies of bunya trees, hoop pines and the remnant colonial weeds – camphor laurel and privet – which are being managed and coppiced and cut down as appropriate to mend the ecosystem at a pace that respects the needs of soil and all the life it supports. Some are even being inoculated with fungi spores, standing as dying colonial sentinels while mushrooms, refusing to be kept in the dark, bloom to herald a new decolonial era.
11 October 2024, Githabul Country, Ediblescapes
Our fifth Agroecology Dialogue took a peri-urban turn on Friday as we headed up to Kombumerri Country – what is now called the Gold Coast – to join long-time AFSA member and crusader for agroecology Jorge at the incredible oasis he has created amongst a sea of houses and manicured, unproductive lawns. We carried a gift of lady finger bananas from Jorge’s comrades Flavia and Bunya of Living Agroecology at The Farm an hour south, an edible link between two thriving examples of highly diverse and productive beacons for sub-tropical agroforestry. The abundance in these gardens cannot be overstated – there is food growing at every level from the perennial herbs and native leafy greens at ground level, brassicas sown as green manure and plucked for our vibrant salad at lunch, and shrubs and trees providing fruits and shade. John took us through the gardens to forage for lunch, delightedly sharing the medicinal roles of several varieties of sweet, salty, sour, spicy, bitter and umami leaves with us.
The community enjoys free access to the gardens to see and taste the food, and experience satisfaction when that food is distributed to people in need. We delved into the social function of the gardens, as participants debated the complex and problematic role of food relief in a world in need of structural transformation to eliminate its need (a topic AFSA explored briefly in a recent blog post and in depth in the Peoples’ Food Plan). Unlike systems of top-down aid, Ediblescapes is owned by the community and operates to benefit the community.
We found ourselves down several rabbit holes of individualising responsibility instead of challenging the structural forces of neoliberal colonial capitalism that systematically deny some people access to nutritious and culturally-determined food while affording others the privilege to own a home and maintain a garden. We stressed the importance of collective work for the good of everyone, of ensuring everyone has radical sufficiency, and the need to unlearn what we have been too-often told by elites is an individual’s burden to ‘make better choices’ and simply work harder and ‘grow your own food.’
Many in the group were interested in AFSA’s Farming on Other Peoples’ Land (FOOPL) program of work, supporting land sharing between landholders and would-be farmers. This topic exemplifies the importance of understanding systems of privilege that enable some to buy land while others cannot – leaving entire generations now without great hope of secure tenure in their lifetimes. We must unlearn the ideology of private ownership and relearn what we all learned in kindergarten, that it is best to share what you have, not horde it for yourself. Those of us who own land did not simply ‘work harder’ than those who do not, a furphy so profound we dare you to say it to a migrant field worker’s face.
Increased government funding and support for initiatives that improve access to and affordability of local, nutritious, and culturally-appropriate food, such as that found at local growers’ markets and community initiatives like Ediblescapes, have the potential to prevent or reduce the significant burden diet-related non-communicable diseases place on the Australian population and health care system. A Universal Basic Income (UBI) is one obvious way to address structural economic inequalities that lead to food insecurity. A UBI is not very widely canvassed (yet) in Australian policy debates due to the ‘common sense’ that conflates work with paid work, which is specific to the western world of the last 100 years or so. We are in the midst of an evolving crisis in which the market for paid work only values certain groups of people, leaving the rest to a growing population dubbed the ‘precariat’ due to the uncertain and intermittent, often underpaid work options. A UBI is a policy response that responds to this crisis, ‘expanding the potential space for social power within the economy.’
UBI could accomplish three things:
- Mitigate the worst effects of inequality and poverty, contributing to better public health and social stability;
- Make many self-employment opportunities more attractive (e.g. farming, art, and child and aged care) even without a liveable income (increasing autonomy); and
- Enable people to actively participate in democratic processes and decision-making that has material impacts on their lives.
‘Why are you calling it a weed?’ asked one of the children as we harvested our lunch, knowing from his regular hours spent at Ediblescapes that ‘there is no such thing as a weed, just plants out of place.’ As John and Jorge taught us about the delicious plants often framed as weeds all around us, we reflected on our role as the original invasive species, and how we would never suggest eradicating all of us, or asking us to bear the blame for our very existence on these unceded Aboriginal lands. Instead, as with so-called weeds, we should ask what role we have to play in the world – to be good custodians of the land and the sea and the sky and each other – to find ways to nourish those around us and provide them with ways to access the fundamental building blocks of a dignified and healthy life.
13 October 2024, Githabul Country, Echo Valley Farms
For the sixth dialogue, we gathered on Githabul Country, which gives birth to the Murray Darling Basin. The Basin is of critical importance to a vast population of the human and more-than-human world it nourishes, as the rivers flow thousands of kilometres to the mouth of the Murray on Narrindjeri Country. Given the aims of the agroecology dialogues to foster and raise awareness of the importance of connectivity and care across ecosystems and communities, it was a fitting place to build the movement before turning southwards once again. Echo Valley Farm is an oasis amongst the industrial agriculture surrounding it, a place where the health of land, animals, and people are paramount – their mantra is the ‘4 Goods’: farming that is good for land, animals, people, and farmers.
With its deep chocolate self-composting soils, and situated in a tending brittle environment that would once have been rich and fertile under Githabul custodianship, this Country is gasping for air and reprieve from constant chemical application. Locals say that because the soil is so good and forgiving, industrial practices that have been abandoned elsewhere continue here. They spoke of the smell of 2,4-D – a common herbicide banned in several countries – wafting across the valley. Sharing stories of the changing land use in the region, from Githabul traditional management to broadacre grain interspersed with dairy, and more recently to small crops such as onions, tomatoes and carrots, they noted that many of these properties are now owned by corporations (Moffatts and Rugby are the big two). Corporate ownership comes with contract staffing, and the loss of community members in charge of farming means less concern for others in the region. The result is more frequent spraying of herbicide on windy days, leading to spray drift, a practice the APVMA restricted in 2018 and 2019. While the food sovereignty movement has long bemoaned the consequences of loss of connectivity in the food system, perhaps we don’t talk enough about the impact of contractors managing land without any relations with that land and the communities it supports.
As if the chemical load isn’t destructive enough, the shift to small-crop horticulture has also come with increased water extraction in a water-scarce environment. Pivot irrigation and ‘turkey dams’ are everywhere to be seen these days, with terrible consequences for the aquifer and those who rely on that water for life and livelihood. Over-use of chemicals and water are not the only costs either, as some described the labour conditions for Sudanese, Chinese, and Pacific Islander workers as ‘modern day slavery’. We heard of onion pickers working from before dawn to past dusk picking onions you can smell across the valley, with only a kerchief over their mouths and sunglasses to protect their eyes from the damaging fumes.
This beautiful, damaged country exemplifies the worst of what happens when land’s exchange value divorces it from its use value, and is rendered increasingly useless to those it could once nourish. At Echo Valley and the other farms we have visited along the Roadshow, land is valued for its very existence and the abundance it can provide when treated with respect and mutual obligation, reflecting one of the principles of emancipatory agroecology. Their custodianship of Githabul Country, here at the head waters of the Murray Darling Basin, demonstrates their commitment to their relations with those downstream who are also reliant on healthy, clean and sufficient waters. Metaphorically speaking, we all tend rivers that nourish someone and it matters deeply how we do that.
Following more of the principles, we heard how in addition to working for the past decade to heal Country, farmers are cultivating collective autonomy, such as through the establishment of an on-farm boning room to deal with the distances and vagaries of contract butchery for themselves and other new peasants. They reject the paradigm of productivism that is so ironically reductive, valuing culture to guide their work to feed their community sufficiently, not wastefully.
Together we celebrated the fact that 70% of the world’s food is produced by smallholders – peasants – and that we are part of that 70%. Together with our comrades around the globe we build the movement to feed the world! Viva la vía campesina! Viva la revolución!
14 October 2024, Anaiwan Country, Armidale NSW
As we have found in every community visited over the course of the Roadshow, the Anaiwan People and their unceded lands have suffered from nearly 200 years of colonial agriculture, from the 1830s onwards. We were honoured to be joined by elder Uncle Steve Widders, a long-time activist for self-determination and recognition of the rights of Anaiwan.
The waves of agriculture in what the settler-invaders called New England have included pastoralism (for beef, dairy and lamb) and grains – in particular wheat – though the all too familiar decline in dairy has made space for a rise in canola and cotton, as well as increased wheat production once more alongside mostly cattle grazing. Where there were once 800 flour mills in NSW, there are now just 12. Abattoirs have declined to just nine in this large eastern state, with the nearest at Kempsey on the coast three hours away. As we have heard elsewhere, there was talk of modern slavery, as Pacific Islanders work in the few remaining abattoirs under exploitative and often dangerous conditions, as their traditional lands back home are sold out from under them for corporate oil palm plantations. Locals also shared the familiar story of increasing corporate purchase of land driving prices up beyond young and would-be farmers’ reach, producing commodities such as strawberry seedlings in greenhouses to be trucked up to the corporate farms in the Lockyer Valley to be grown out under extreme chemical loads. Origin Energy, we were told, are locking up agricultural land for carbon offsets in the region.
Some of those present are actively involved in bringing together discussions around agriculture, forestry and conservation, valuing the importance of such convergences of interests and growing awareness of how ecosystems and humans can harmoniously co-exist. We presented the community with the UNDROP definition of a peasant:
any person who engages or who seeks to engage alone, or in association with others or as a community, in small-scale agricultural production for subsistence and/or for the market, and who relies significantly, though not necessarily exclusively, on family or household labour and other non-monetized ways of organizing labour, and who has a special dependency on and attachment to the land.
We then went on to share the importance of growing the shared consciousness of the life and plight of the global peasantry under colonial capitalism, and were once again delighted to find ourselves in the excellent company of a room of peasants who are freshly galvanised to collectivise in shared struggle. With plans for a regular ‘peasants at the pub’ – as per the spontaneously organised event we are headed to tomorrow in Dungog – this community has set its intentions on establishing a meat collective to build a micro-abattoir, while considering a Chamber of Peoples as a means of democratic association to interact with local government.
We leave Armidale full of hope for future collective action, for as Aiden Ricketts (an SCU academic who researches and teaches social movements) reminds us, ‘the key is to find the places where you are powerful, where you are hopeful and where you have the opportunity to make a difference.’
15 October 2024, Gringai Country, Royal Hotel – Peasants at the Pub
After our hosts in Maitland needed to cancel the local dialogue, farmers reached out to ask AFSA whether we might be able to stop in anyway on our route south. Thus the inaugural Peasants at the Pub took place in the town of Dungog, on Gringai Country in what is now called the Hunter Valley. These motivated farmers are working together towards a micro-abattoir as they steadily lose access to the few remaining facilities, a story very familiar to anyone following the roadshow or indeed, small-scale livestock farming over the past two decades.
On our drive back into NSW from Queensland the day prior, travelling from the violently altered and devastated landscapes of Githibul Country, the landscape changed steadily until we reached the green hills of the Northern Tablelands – Ainawan Country. Many of these verdant hills are overgrazed, but thankfully not so sick as the Darling Downs, which suffer from more than a toxic century of chemicals. As we then dropped 900 metres into the Hunter Valley, we passed beautiful waterways whose health is critically dependent on the decisions of those upstream, protected in part by the national parks they traverse.
The Dungog community was a great example of innovation and collaboration already in action, with farmers coming together to design, fund and build a micro-abattoir, local food cooperatives turning up to support the farmers, and generational transitions towards regenerative agriculture and greater connectivity between farmers and eaters. There was even a particularly inspirational example of land sharing between an older farmer and non-family young farmers, in which the former is annually granting a growing percentage of land ownership to the young farmers in return for their labour and collaboration on the abattoir and other shared projects. The landholder’s adult children have no intention of returning to the land to farm, and he wishes to see it farmed in perpetuity, knowing the near impossibility for most young people to afford land these days. AFSA hopes to see more such arrangements in future, especially as we develop the Agrarian Trust, which aims to hold and heal land such as this in trust to ensure secure tenure for agroecology-oriented farmers and First Peoples.
While the farmers of this region had not heard a lot about agroecology and the global peasantry prior to our visit, we once again left many with a deeper systemic understanding of what transformation of the food system will take, and their respective roles in the work to get there. Where they had already been working on the incremental transitions towards sustainable food systems: recycling, input reduction, soil and animal health, greater biodiversity and synergy in the agroecosystems they manage, and increased economic diversification, they are now moving into the transformational phase, including through co-creation of knowledge, fair labour and secure tenure, greater connectivity between farmers and eaters, participation in decision making and getting involved in strengthening land and natural resource governance. We look forward to watching the new peasants of Dungog grow the change they wish to see in the world!
16 October 2024, Dharawal Country, University of Wollongong
We were welcomed to Dharawal Country by Aunty Shas, a proud Kamilaroi-Yuin elder, who graciously reminded us of our collective responsibility to care for our mother – the Earth – so that she can also care for us. As we later listened to Gundungurra woman and University of Wollongong academic Crystal Arnold talk about the ways plants yarn with us, asserting the sovereignty of Country, we reflected deeply on our relations with land and the more-than-human world, and the ways that colonial capitalism has disrupted these relations with devastating consequences for Mother Earth and the multitude of life she supports. We were joined at the university by a vibrant mix of First Peoples, new peasants, community gardeners, coordinators of social enterprises, and public health academics and students, delighted to be collaborating with the Nutrition Society of Australia as we unravelled the worst excesses of colonial capitalism and shared thirty years of food sovereignty and agroecology movements working to repair relations globally.
Once again, we heard of the loss of the last dairy in the Illawarra not so long ago, and of most valuable agricultural land to development and urban sprawl, as well as the long impacts of mining and refineries now being cleaned up (as much as one can clean up scars and pollution as deep as these). The entire south coast of NSW has been heavily impacted by repeated floods and fires in the past five years, compromising especially marginal reclaimed land and making it increasingly difficult to grow food locally. While a new resident expressed surprise at the lack of farmers’ markets in Wollongong, others responded that it simply reflects the lack of farmers nearby.
Our host Professor Karen Charlton asked an excellent question about the food sovereignty movement’s response to whether veganism is the right solution to the animal welfare and environmental ills of intensive industrial livestock production. We responded that food sovereignty takes a systemic approach to dealing with colonial capitalism, not an individual dietary approach. Eating more carrots won’t solve the massive imbalances in power and control of the food system – collectivising will. Agroecology demands that we farm and live in harmony with nature, and if people – rather than corporations – enjoyed autonomy to grow, process and distribute our food, diverse diets that respect social and cultural values would result.
People in the Illawarra are not sitting idly by as access to nutritious and culturally-determined food diminishes, and the area boasts 25 community gardens and many home growers and informal and formal produce swaps. We learned of Green Connect, an incredible social enterprise working to support young people and refugees with fair work growing healthy, affordable food for over 150 local households, with a focus on recycling and reducing waste, so interesting we couldn’t resist a visit on our way down the coast to this year’s Food Sovereignty Convergence the next day.
As we talked about the under-utilised public lands dotted around Wollongong, there was clear interest in growing food on some of them, and talk of forming a Chamber of Peoples to advocate for peoples’ right to nutritious and culturally-determined food, and your right to democratically participate in all aspects of the food system – from growing and cooking food to making decisions about the food system you want. We think there may be a rather delicious revolution fomenting there for justice on unceded Dharawal Country to grow food sovereignty – not merely food security – for everyone.
21 October, Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country, Canberra Food Co-Op
Following on from a lively and successful Food Sovereignty Convergence on the weekend, we closed our Agroecology Roadshow dialogues on Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country, at the Canberra Food Co-Op. Ending the Roadshow here felt somewhat poignant in the wake of the ACT election, as the Labor Government secured an historic seventh term of government. We gathered with a diverse group of producers, academics and co-op members, some of whom were feeling slightly apprehensive about the outcome of this election, as a loss of Greens seats signal the loss of support for the Local Food Strategy which local producers have been involved in. AFSA National Committee member, Lucy Ridge, took this time to remind locals that even as governments change and evolve “we are the ones who can keep doing the work on the ground to keep things moving!”.
We were reminded that the ACT Government has allocated funding to run a feasability study for a food hub in the region, and so centered our dialogue around envisioning how this could work best for both farmers and eaters to strengthen local food systems. Right now, this concept has simply been centred around the establishment of a retail and wholesale space to support local food supply to Canberra, and so there’s a clean canvas for the community to imagine how this could best work. Like the dialogues beforehand, the closure of abattoirs in the region–most recently Cowra in NSW–has left producers with no other option but to make six hour round trips to the closest abattoir offering service kills for smallholders. Lucy is currently in the process of organising meat producers straddling the ACT and NSW region to form a collective and establish a micro abattoir that will ease this burden, and provide opportunities for eaters to have access to local and ethical meat. This led to the question of whether or not the Canberra Food Co-Op should look to sourcing and selling local meat to its members, a question which will be explored further by the board following the dialogue.
Other questions that came around regarding the establishment of a food hub in the region included:
- How can we ensure the governance of the food hub is managed by community?
- Will it include necessary infrastructure like a commercial kitchen to make it a central community space?
- How can the hub support community ownership and access for various groups (e.g., seed savers, urban farms)?
We drew ideas and inspiration from models in other states, such as the VicHealth Future Healthy Food Hubs, to make sure we take away key lessons about what does and does not work well under government funded models. In addition, it was also suggested that we look to Green Connect Farm in Wollongong as an example of how migrant and refugee workers could be employed at the food hub, to gain critical job skills and build relations with local community members.
Land affordability is a major issue for farmers in the ACT, with smallholders struggling to purchase or even lease land to farm agroecologically. Many aspiring farmers in the room were interested in AFSA’s Farming on Other People’s Land as a way to match landholders with growers to make it possible to scale out local food production.
We also touched on a sticky issue related to the ACT’s local food policies and the reliance on food grown in NSW. Collaboration across state lines is vital, but can often be challenging due to funding and jurisdictional boundaries. However, Lucy provided some clarity on this concern, as the Local Food Strategy does acknowledge food grown and produced in NSW is often distributed to the region. In addition, some producers keen on being involved in the local meat collective are also based in NSW, but supply to the ACT region, so we’re keen to support how producers can navigate these challenges effectively.
The dialogues followed the flow of the four key themes discussed at Convergence in the days prior to the final dialogue: land, labour, infrastructure and policy.
As this marks our final Agroecology Roadshow diary entry, stay tuned for the Convergence Declaration which sets into motion a plan to tackle these four key themes, and build on the insights we’ve gleaned from the Roadshow.