Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance

Fair food for all Australians

The Willunga Agrarian Declaration

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For 60,000 years Indigenous Australians have eaten food as their medicine, and yet today Australia, like most of the world, has a disease industry largely caused by a highly industrialised food system.

Over two days in June 2019, 150 small- and medium-scale, mostly young farmers, farm and food workers, educators, and other allies came together from across Australia to meet on the traditional lands of the Kaurna people, who have cared for this land and maintained biodiversity through careful observation, cultivation, and judicious use of fire since long before and after Invasion.

At the fifth annual Deep Winter Agrarians gathering in Willunga, South Australia, we celebrated the opportunity to meet each other to continue weaving relationships, alliances, and solidarity. We strengthened our commitment to grow and distribute food in ethical and ecologically-sound ways, and to assert our collective right to democratically participate in food and agriculture systems.

The weekend was rightly framed and founded on considerations of soil and climate, with a stirring address from climate scientist and soil microbiologist Walter Jehne, who declared that promises of 5% reductions in emissions are political obfuscation. Walter called for a dramatic draw down of carbon – and assured us we can do that simply and naturally by fostering the fungi in our soils that digest carbon. Only with rapid transitions away from the destructive practices of over-tilling, over-grazing, and feckless application of agrichemicals can we regenerate the wasteland we have created.

Healthy soils are the primary reservoirs for Australia’s scarce water resources, with the potential to hold far more water than they currently do. The solution is to build the soil carbon sponge – we must urgently increase the carbon in our soils to improve its capacity to hold water, and the most obvious and clear pathway to that solution is through agroecological practices.

Agricultural producers spend millions of dollars and hours of labour killing things that want to live and growing things that want to die. A weed though, is simply a plant that doesn’t fit our dogma. Weeds are just pioneers that make room for succession. By killing them we constantly recreate the conditions that allow them to prosper – and worse, we kill ourselves while weeds thrive. Ultimately, we agreed that if you can’t beat it, eat it.

There is a paucity of nutritional integrity in food grown in what are essentially hydroponic conditions – fast-growing annuals in tilled soil with regular application of fertilisers. Methods of growing food without tilling are not commonly understood nor practiced. The agrarians in Willunga assert our interest and aims to work to reduce tillage and maintain biomass and healthy mycorrhizal fungi that nurture the roots and ultimately the nutritional integrity of the food we grow.

Farmers have largely lost control of the means of production, and small- and medium-scale farmers are the most vulnerable. Lost access to local abattoirs, grain mills, dairy processing plants, refrigerated storage, and the other infrastructure necessary to transform the produce they grow into saleable products threatens the viability of small and medium-scale producers. Leaders of the emerging grains movement in Australia spoke about their collaborative efforts to localize grain economies, grow heritage grains, and mill them into flour to bake artisanal, nutrient-dense breads.

Some farmers at Deep Winter have already experienced the extremities of our changing climate, suffering such severe water scarcity that they can no longer farm. We re-affirm our commitment to draw down carbon and strengthen the soil carbon sponge on our farms to both mitigate and adapt to climate change, and canvassed ideas to diversify business models and focus on growing biodiverse and resilient species and breeds of plants and animals.

While soil was the foundation of all discussions, we also debated what is the appropriate scale of farming and food businesses focused on feeding people in ethical and ecologically sound ways that are also economically viable. Acknowledging the diversity of scales appropriate to different regions, climates, soils, produce, and production methods, there was consensus that ‘scaling up’ is not inherently good, and should be considered with care for land, animals, farmers, and communities. We acknowledge the strength in collaborative networks of small-scale agroecological farmers and our allies to build diverse and resilient local food economies.

We live in challenging times, and the need for action on climate change has never been more urgent. The ever-growing movement of agroecological farmers embedded in the communities we feed is up to this challenge, and we need everyone to support our efforts to farm responsibly. We call on all of you to pledge to act – one simple action everyone can take is to buy one thing from a farm with a face this week and every week.

Viva la vía campesina! Viva la revolución!

Willunga, South Australia

23 June 2019

Agroecology and ‘Other Innovations’ – Australia on the wrong side of history

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In April, AFSA attended a seminar hosted by the CSIRO in Canberra, giving the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE) a chance to share their current work on Agroecology and Other Innovations for Sustainable Food Systems with the Australian public and policymakers. The HLPE is an expert panel created within the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) to facilitate policy debates and inform policy making with independent research.

What is the CFS HLPE report?

The UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) will launch its High Level Panel of Experts (HLPE) report on “Agroecological and other innovative approaches for sustainable agriculture and food systems that enhance food security and nutrition” on July 3 in Rome. This report is the outcome of a consultation process where participants in the Civil Society and Indigenous People’s Mechanism (CSM) have fought hard to distinguish agroecology as a practice, science, and politics from other “industrial” innovations such as so-called “sustainable intensification”, biotechnology, and biofortification.

The next step – already agreed-upon by governments – is to use the report to guide a policy negotiation process at the CFS Plenary 46 in October 2019. The work ahead is to advocate for governments to commit to developing and implementing policies needed to address the root causes of hunger, malnutrition, and food insecurity. The CFS policy process, despite its many challenges, is a political tool we can use to push governments to realise the right to food for all, respect and protect local regenerative agriculture and indigenous food systems and strengthen biodiversity through an inclusive, bottom-up political process.

Read on for AFSA president Tammi Jonas’ assessment of the Canberra seminar, put together by the CFS HLPE and CSIRO…and the challenges still to come.

Find out more about the CFS and CSM: www.csm4cfs.org

Read about our involvement in the Agroecology policy process and read the HLPE summary:  http://www.csm4cfs.org/working-groups/agroecology/

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The seminar was not particularly well advertised amongst farmers and their representative bodies, and I believe AFSA was the only representative organisation for farmers who attended. In fact, I learned about the seminar from activists and FAO staff in Rome – not through any local channels. Conversely, Bayer was there – the world’s largest supplier of seed and agri-chemicals after last year’s merger with Monsanto – they now control about 25% of the seed & pesticide market globally.

The event started out promisingly enough, with assertions that it used to be ‘agriculture versus the environment’ but that ‘that time is over,’ and repeated assurances that we are beyond the time for business-as-usual approaches given the urgency of the need for radically different agricultural practices in the face of a rapidly changing climate.

The Chair of the HLPE Steering Committee Patrick Caron gave an insightful overview of the context of the report on agroecology and ‘other innovations’, in which he pointed out that ‘when people talk about agroecology, sustainable intensification, precision agriculture – they have very different things in mind…’. Caron explained that this report’s role is to understand disagreements and to shape the international agenda.

He was followed by Fergus Lloyd Sinclair of the Agroforestry Institute in Nairobi, the HLPE Project Team Leader, who presented a very encouraging update on their work on the report to date. He first candidly shared what a ‘schizophrenic terms of reference’ the HLPE was given by the CFS, pointing out that ‘agroecology’ and ‘other innovations’ can be distinguished on the basis of principles. Sinclair asserted that ‘agroecology is a dynamic space, with many actors… not prescribed… locally defined in different ways by the people who are practicing it…’ and that there is a ‘strong connection between indigenous knowledge, traditional agriculture systems, and science.’

He went on to explain that agroecology as an innovation is easily distinguished from other approaches such as ‘sustainable intensification’ (and ‘climate smart agriculture’, ‘nutrient sensitive agriculture’, because agroecology (which may broadly include aspects of organic agriculture, agroforestry, silvopastoralism, and permaculture) is labour intensive rather than capital intensive. It relies on the humans in its system for knowledge and labour rather than capital intensive technological innovations that seek to largely replace human labour and often even knowledge.

Sinclair also explained the HLPE’s pitch to include ‘agency’ as a fifth pillar of food security – a concept already fundamental to food sovereignty, which asserts everyone’s right to collectively participate in food and agriculture systems.

After this rousing start, we watched as the CSIRO took to the podium. After thanking her colleagues from the HLPE and agreeing that we cannot continue with ‘business as usual’ approaches, the Acting Deputy Director of Food and Agriculture gave a 20-minute presentation on business as usual. She started with some stats:

  • Australia is 6th largest land size country in world and 55th largest population
  • Major exports: wheat, beef, wool, dairy, wine – mostly to China, USA, and Japan
  • Farmers are 2.5% of total workforce
  • 90% of our population lives on .2% of our land
  • Australian ag workforce: 82% live in regional areas, 73% work full time, 32% female (more likely to try non business as usual approaches, more likely to earn off farm income), 1% indigenous
  • Change areas for Australian ag: increasing competition, Asia’s growth, evolving consumer, biosecurity & provenance, resource scarcity, climate change, digital ag, energy disruption

She then asserted that ongoing innovations are needed to protect our natural resources as well as agriculture, requiring new forms of surveillance. Wait, what? Next, regarding upcoming innovations, she said, ‘I aspire for a future where Australian ag is a price-setter in the global market.’ Okay, but what about agroecology?

Here’s a list of some of the non-business-as-usual innovations cited by the CSIRO at this seminar on agroeocology and other innovations:

  • yield maps
  • canola yield based on average rainfall
  • nitrogen application impact
  • virtual fencing (‘quite happy cows with their lovely collars on’)
  • genetic engineering for broad-spectrum disease resistance, novel oils, nitrogen fixing plants, fixing heterosis through apomixes, pest-resistant legumes, boosting photosynthesis, and biofortified foods
  • New grains for human health – engineering health outcomes into food people eat such as barley and wheat. High amylose wheat, BARLEYmax, novel fibre wheat, gluten-free cereals, thick aleurone cereals
  • Leaf oils – ‘game changer for global oil production’ – a seed output as well as a leaf output

I guess the CSIRO is more in the ‘other innovations’ camp. (In fact when a like-minded colleague asked the CSIRO speaker between sessions why she didn’t speak about agroecology, she responded that she was ‘instructed not to.’ Let that sink in for a minute.)

Our mates from Bayer were the first question off the rank after the opening speakers, revisiting a point Sinclair made about an ‘increasing moralisation around food.’ The Bayer rep asked Sinclair how he believes the ‘moralisation of food’ impacts on equity. It is a tried and true rhetorical trick from industrial ag proponents, who often seek to establish their own moral position with appeals to equal access and the role of (presumed but not always proven) cheap technologies (that they own) to ‘feed the masses.’ They may as well exclaim, ‘Let them eat cake!’ and be done with it. Whether posed as a question or an assertion, this device always wilfully ignores earlier expert points that hunger is not caused by scarcity of food, but rather by failures in governance and distribution.

During the break I was introduced to another CSIRO senior staffer as the president of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance. His response was to raise his eyebrows and yelp, ‘Food sovereignty? That raises alarm bells with policy people!’ To which I calmly responded, ‘Really? Policymakers are alarmed by peoples’ right to democratically participate in the food and agriculture system?’ ‘Yes!’ he intoned, ‘Internationally it impedes trade!’

I think that rather than bore you with the rest of what we heard from the CSIRO at the seminar, all of which is in line with what’s cited above and demonstrates their slavish devotion to free trade in capitalist global markets to the detriment of most farmers and eaters everywhere, I’ll leave you with some more interesting input from the HLPE.

Agroecology and Other Innovations – Summary of the HLPE Draft Report

Caron gave a summation of the status of the current report on agroecology and ‘other innovations’, which has passed Version 0 and a period of public consultation, with draft Version 1 due to be released soon.

Part one of the report asks: What has changed in past 20 years regarding food security & nutrition (FSN)?

  1. Acknowledgement through different definitions of FSN of the right to food. FSN until creation of FAO in 1945 was a national issue, became a global issue in second half of the century. Increasingly realised that sufficient supply doesn’t ensure FSN.
  2. In 80s and 90s we were talking about starvation, and now we talk about 800mil suffering hunger & starvation – mostly rural poor.
  3. We are mainly focusing on yield improvement when we are wasting a third of production.
  4. Hunger is not decreasing quickly enough and overweight & obesity are increasing rapidly – well beyond infectious diseases – and are the number one problem in public health.

Part two of the report examines the ways in which food systems are changing, and reminds us that the question is not how to feed 9 billion people, it’s how to feed them in a sustainable way while providing decent livelihoods for producers. We can use the food system as a lever to address all the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). ‘We thought that improving supply and access to markets would help everyone but we were wrong.’

The third part of the draft report has the much-anticipated draft recommendations – what’s needed to make food systems sustainable? The answers warm a food sovereignty activist’s heart. How to improve food supply? It could be through investing in knowledge and technology, reducing food waste, internalizing externalities – they’re all possibilities. It must be through strengthening resilience – investing in small-scale ag, securing land and tenure rights, securing social equity and responsibility with social protection systems, supporting women and youth, creating decent jobs in agriculture, through investing in education for all.

The HLPE reminds us we can’t forget the need to change consumption habits, and that to do so we need to change the food environment – advertisements, subsidies, and banning some types of food like we have with alcohol and tobacco. The CFS is supposed to draft voluntary guidelines to be agreed in 2020.

Caron insists that we must improve governance of food systems and the capacity of stakeholders to participate. He says that the changes will be knowledge intensive and we have to invest in knowledge – the answers are not the ones already on the shelves. We must design new governance of food systems at all levels – including national levels.

Before closing we had a final opportunity for questions or comments, so I took the opportunity to express concern at the CSIRO’s focus over the course of the day on exports, growth, and increasing yield in spite of the obvious environmental degradation witnessed up Australia’s eastern coast over the past two years due to extreme levels of drought in a changing climate, and also in spite of the expert position presented here and for decades now that we don’t need to grow more food, we need to make food systems more democratic. The response from the CSIRO was, ‘we’re an independent science research body – we can’t take sides.’

Well AFSA can, and we choose a habitable planet for generations to come. By not joining the heavy weight of evidence showing the changes needed in our food and agriculture systems, CSIRO are taking a side too – commonly known as the wrong side of history.

Tammi Jonas

President, Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance

 

 

Micro-organism & pollinators – our intervention at the UN

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The following text was delivered by legendary peasant farmer, activist, and AFSA comrade Guy Kastler, fellow member of the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (IPC) and La Via Campesina, and a founding member of Confédération Paysanne in France.

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Farmers are farmers of billions of microorganisms and invertebrates that populate our soils, water, air and live with and within the plants and animals we raise.

We welcome the taxonomic identification and classification efforts promoted by FAO and the Commission. But we wonder about the relevance of the value chain that is then proposed. The conservation and sustainable use of this immense biodiversity will never be guaranteed if we simply identify the last existing genes, microbes or invertebrates before they disappear, in order to reproduce bad copies with synthetic chemistry and biotechnology and then sell them to farmers and other economic operators who need them.

We farmers know that only balanced ecosystems that respect the laws of natural evolution guarantee the conservation of the right microorganisms and invertebrates that we need, which allows them to control the proliferation of pathogens. Spreading micro-organisms and invertebrates in an environment where they cannot multiply, or destroying pathogens that proliferate in an unbalanced environment without correcting this imbalance, is never sustainable.

We welcome the Commission’s ambitious programme concerning pollinators who are essential, inter alia, for the reproduction of plants that provide a sufficiently diversified and balanced diet. But pollinators are not the only insects that disappear. In Europe, the latest scientific studies confirm what we have long observed, namely that we have lost 80% of insects in the last 30 years. They add that they could all disappear from the planet within 100 years. With them, the birds that feed on them have also left. Silent spring is now a reality in our fields, the last surviving birds only fly over city rooftops and insects that are pathogenic to our crops proliferate without any predators regulating them. To avoid using the pesticides responsible for this disaster, we are forced to spread auxiliary insects that often survive only a few days in our fields… until the day we no longer have enough money to buy them.

We call on the Commission to focus first on rebalancing ecosystems to ensure the conservation and sustainable use of the diversity of micro-organisms and invertebrates rather than on the unsustainable industrial production of genes and micro-organisms that are merely a dressing designed to hide a wooden leg very temporarily.

Biodiversity & Livestock: our intervention at the UN

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The following text is the intervention delivered by AFSA President Tammi Jonas in regards to animal genetic resources for food and agriculture at the recent meetings of the UN Commission on Genetic Resources for Food & Agriculture in Rome.

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We would like to congratulate the Commission on its critical work around the role of animal genetic resources for food and agriculture, with an impressive set of reports that unfortunately tell a grim story.

We welcome the Review of methods for identification and valuation of the ecosystem services provided by livestock breeds, which, along with the report on the Status and Trends of Animal Genetic Resources provides sharp detail on the role and status of livestock in agriculture and ecosystems. The former clearly spells out the positive potential of livestock while acknowledging that in the world’s industrial livestock systems that potential is mostly transformed into a net negative impact. The latter report highlights the loss of biodiversity caused by industrialisation and a narrow focus on yield.

Selective breeding and genetically engineering livestock to increase yield has been an animal health & ethical disaster. Even Perdue, one of the world’s biggest producers of chicken, was reported to say in 2017 that they had taken the breed too far and were working to bring the genetics back towards a healthier animal than that which inhabits most intensive sheds across the globe. The FAO tells us that extinct breeds have mainly been reported among chickens.

Industrial meat producers in North America have aggressively pursued yield in highly industrialised intensive production models, and according to the FAO Report on Status and Trends this has resulted in the least number of local breeds of cattle, pigs, and poultry of any region. The countries of this region regularly work in these spaces to block urgent progress to shift away from destructive production models.

The public health risks and costs of sheds of pigs and poultry are profound. The combination of genetically similar animals in unhealthy production environments (with their attendant over-use of antimicrobials that threaten our ability to combat the most basic diseases due to the rise in antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria) is what evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace calls ‘food for flu’ – a global pandemic in the making.

The 2016 HLPE Report on ‘What Roles for Livestock?’ report highlights the need for coherence and integration among agriculture, economic, nutrition, education and health policies at the national level, and we strongly support this recommendation.

Pulling together the issues facing forest genetic resources with animal genetic resources, countries must take more holistic actions and consider ecosystems, not merely sectoral concerns. De-forestation is largely driven by industrial livestock agriculture as trees are felled to make room for monocultures of soy, corn, and other grains to be fed to animals in intensive production models. Both intensive industrial livestock production and monocultures of grain are significant contributors to loss of biodiversity and polluters of waterways, thereby also contributing to the loss of biodiversity in terrestrial and marine waters.

We small-scale farmers of the world want the governments of the world to support us in our efforts to farm agroecologically. We don’t need to upscale agroecology, we need to multiply it. Governments should move rapidly to remove barriers to small-scale livestock farmers and pastoralists, and stop subsidising industrial livestock agriculture that is destroying ecosystems from the genes up.

Biodiversity and climate change – we need action now!

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18 February 2018

AFSA President Tammi Jonas is with our allies in the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty representing civil society at the Commission on Genetic Resources for Food & Agriculture.

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The people are speaking!

Huge first day at the Commission on Genetic Resources for Food & Agriculture here in Rome, with many interventions from those of us here representing civil society as part of the IPC for Food Sovereignty. I’ll report more fully when I get home (and am not in the midst of 10-hour-meeting days), but below is one of my interventions today on the role of genetic resources for the mitigation of and adaptation to climate change:

 

Back home in Australia, climate change is manifest and devastating. Over the past year we have suffered unprecedented drought across the eastern states, with serious loss of livestock and wildlife as pasture turned to dirt, and then the topsoils blew away. The drought was followed by extraordinary flooding, which led to the deaths of as many as 500,000 cattle, and subsequently resulted in flood waters rushing into the sea and smothering the Great Barrier Reef, which has already suffered repeated bleaching events and is rapidly losing biodiversity as sea temperatures rise.

While the north flooded, fires burned in parts of Australia’s southernmost island of Tasmania, only to be covered by snow as they declined – in the middle of summer. It is estimated that 2% of the world’s pencil pines perished in the fires – a non-recoverable loss – some of the trees lost in the fires were over 1000 years old.

To personalize the impacts of climate change on small-scale farmers in Australia, let me share that amongst the members of the committee of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance, in the past month alone, one of our farmers lost half his flock of heritage poultry in the northern floods, another has completely de-stocked and is carting water in for basic needs in southern Queensland, and the town of 600 people nearest my own farm was evacuated for two days under threat of a severe bushfire at its borders. Meanwhile dozens of our farmer members in Tasmania were repeatedly evacuated under threat of fire in regions that are not traditionally considered a fire risk.

I tell these stories because the sub-sectoral reports for these meetings and indeed the proposal for a scoping study on the role of GRFA in mitigation of and adaptation to climate change do not go far enough for the level of emergency we face. We must act now – every country has a responsibility to its people and the generations that will come after them to immediately transition away from logging and clear-felling of biodiverse forests for the purposes of planting monocultures – imagine standing passively while someone ripped the lungs out of your body – this is what we’re allowing with continued de-forestation across the globe.

While the Commission nor national governments can force the practitioners of industrial agriculture to sow more genetically diverse plants nor grow more diverse breeds of livestock, they can regulate the conditions under which these homogenous seeds and breeds are grown, and limit the use of harmful agri-chemicals such as the much-cited pesticides and antimicrobial pharmaceuticals for livestock. If countries ban these band-aids that are repeatedly applied to the cancer of industrial agriculture, the production models will have no choice but to shift to healthier, more resilient practices.

Every person in this room – like every child in a primary school science classroom – knows that biodiversity is critical for a resilient and sustainable food system, and that we need now more than ever resilience to deal with the impacts of climate change. It is up to the governments of the world to do what is necessary to build this resilience back into our food and agriculture systems, by supporting best those who have always and will continue to maintain and develop biodiversity – the indigenous peoples, peasants, and small-scale farmers and fishers of the world.

Viva la via campesina!

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