Food Sovereignty Convergence Declaration 2024
Djiringanj Country
The Crossing Land, Bermagui, NSW
18 October 2024
On Friday 18 October 2024, First Peoples, peasants, educators, advocates and allies converged at The Crossing Land, a permaculture education camp for young people, situated on the unceded lands of the Djiringanj clan of the Yuin Nation near Bermagui on the beautiful south-eastern coast. It was an historic occasion for the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA), which has been deepening its decolonial work every year, and this year elected the inaugural Focal Point for First Peoples – Walbunja man Jordan Nye. With permission from Djiringanj elders, Jordan smoked us onto Country so that we entered the space cleansed of negative energy and ready for revolutionary organising for food sovereignty.
A constitutional amendment was passed that omitted the hierarchical roles of president and vice-president made provision instead for a Focal Point for First Peoples and a Focal Point for Farmers. The constitution now also reflects the reality of AFSA’s engaged and energetic National Committee, and appoints all committee members as spokespeople for the organisation, subject as always to the mandate given by members at the annual Food Sovereignty Convergence and AGM, and responsive to member input throughout the year at regular Solidarity Sessions.
The committee reported back on what we have achieved since the 2023 Convergence, noting completion of the updated Peoples’ Food Plan and distillations by theme to help communities and organisations use it as a lobbying tool, as well as completion of a Legal Guide for the eastern states (with plans to expand this to SA and WA soon). We also reported back on the success of the Agroecology Roadshow, from which Tammi (formerly President, and now Focal Point for Farmers) and Jess (AFSA General Coordinator) rolled directly into Convergence. The dialogues reflected our 2023 commitment to horizontal knowledge sharing, as well as recognition of the urgent need to move from mobilising to organising for food sovereignty and agroecology as the climate becomes increasingly unstable and corporations and financial elites accelerate global and local land and infrastructure grabs.
While still a space of radical democratic organising in the form of an unconference, the committee proposed four themes to frame the topics put forward by members: land, labour, infrastructure and politics.
LAND: We spoke of the need to strengthen relations between peasants and First Peoples, with Jordan proposing to work within the First Peoples sub-committee to engage with local First Nations organisations in places where our members are active. The aim of this engagement is to facilitate respectful dialogue and discussions regarding ongoing reparations, as well as integrating First Nations’ perspectives in food production and land management. It is then everybody’s responsibility to continue those relations, and work the second nations committee members can bring to our regular decolonial circle.
We also reaffirmed our commitment to the establishment of an Agrarian Trust, for which we are currently seeking funding or pro bono support to design a governance structure reflective of the decolonial, non-capitalist aims of the Trust. We spoke of how land held by the Trust will provide secure tenure to all farmers (whether they transfer land to the Trust or gain access through it) while protecting it for agroecology-oriented farming in perpetuity. But while the Agrarian Trust is an important step towards securing land tenure for farmers as land prices are driven out of several generations’ reach, we also committed to land reform in Australia. A significant task, the right time to start was 30 years ago, and the next best time is now.
LABOUR: Farm and food system workers are some of the most exploited in the world, and we are determined to change that. During the Agroecology Roadshow, we heard smallholders decry the exploitation of migrant farm and abattoir workers from the Pacific Islands, China, Sudan and more, and express interest in ending what was often described as ‘modern day slavery’. In line with our work to convince the Australian Government to ratify the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP), rural workers should be able to realise their right to dignified work, as assured in the 2018 Declaration. We committed to working with labour unions on a campaign to help farm and food system workers to organise and act collectively to achieve fair working conditions. We also agreed to investigate a potential long service leave or other entitlements for farmers and other workers, as exists for Australian tradies already.
INFRASTRUCTURE: The steady and now accelerating loss of the intrinsic infrastructure of agroecology – abattoirs, boning rooms, grain mills, dairy processing, and distribution facilities – has put this item on every Convergence agenda since we began. Members across the country are getting more organised and forming Meat Collectives to build micro-abattoirs as one after another industrial abattoir is bought by multinationals or vertically integrated and forecloses access to smallholders. We committed to ongoing support to these emerging collectives, including through establishing focal points for each state, whose primary role will be to engage with state governments, such as Tammi has done in Victoria for the past decade to great effect. We also committed to surveying members to map existing community infrastructure, to help promote existing initiatives and inspire more like them. Our next book, with the working title Feeding Democracy, aims to collect the stories of communities collectivising to take back control and radically transform the food system. We committed to scoping and researching the book this year, with intentions to publish it in 2026.
POLICY: While politics obviously cut across every aspect of the food system, we chose to undertake focused work around the UNDROP and how it should work in allegiance with the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) once the Australian Government ratifies it (we are one of just four countries who vetoed it, along with Canada, the USA and Aotearoa/New Zealand). We will continue our work to raise the peasant consciousness of smallholders in order to demand our rights to land, infrastructure, fair labour, and food sovereignty assured in UNDROP. As part of this work, we will send communities a stencil of La Vía Campesina’s important slogan, ‘Peasants Feed the World’, so that they can screenprint it onto their old t-shirts and grow the movement through agroecology dialogues and local ‘Peasants at the Pub’ events. We will also liaise with local human rights organisations that were instrumental in the fight for UNDRIP’s ratification to identify key strategies and successful initiatives for UNDROP’s ratification by the Australian government.
COLLECTIVE NON-COMPLIANCE: There was a lot of discussion at Convergence and in the Agroecology Dialogues about the role of strategic non-compliance, undertaken collectively to protect everyone’s right to produce and distribute food in ethical, ecologically sound and socially just ways. In the past month, two abattoirs (in WA and NSW) have told smallholders they will no longer do service kills, leaving them with no alternative but to stop farming or break the law without access to a licensed facility. Everyone agrees that we should not accept the seemingly inevitable consequence that farmers must give up if we lose access to processing facilities. There is nothing natural about these losses or the way the food system is structured; it is merely a result of this epoch of elites structuring things to their benefit, and AFSA members are ready to fight back in earnest before everything is lost. As livestock farmers rapidly collectivise to build micro-abattoirs, there may need to be emergency measures along the way. State governments should choose to get behind these efforts, both towards the emergency measures, and to fast track planning approvals and construction of new facilities.
As we have every year since the first Convergence in 2015, we came away energised and with a sharp focus on the work ahead. As the colonial capitalist system wavers between crushing us and falling apart itself, we stand ready to help push it over the edge into the bin of history, while standing arm in arm to build a better, more just, nutritious and delicious world together.