Jack Daw’s COP15: Inspiring alternatives at COP-15 about food sovereignty and access to land

Instead of just being cynical in my reports, I also wanted to write about some of the inspiring alternatives at Copenhagen.

For me, one of the most fundamental things we have to do is change how we grow, distribute and control food. Food is central to our lives and genuine alternatives to the current destructive system need to start with it. If we are faced with severe climate disasters or resource shortages in the future– such as oil – food shortages will be one of the first and biggest problems that we would face. As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, around 3 million people starved to death after significant resource shortages happened in North Korea. Therefore it is crucial that we prepare for resource shortages, especially given that we know that global peak oil is fast approaching (if we haven’t reached it already), if we are not to face a similar catastrophe. Agriculture is often thought of as an activity of the past but it will have to be an activity of the future for much more people if we are to live without industrial agriculture.

There are many reasons why we need to shift away from industrial agriculture, such as its dependence on fossil fuels, the vast carbon emissions and other pollution it produces and its destruction of soil fertility. Rather than repeat the many critiques of industrial agriculture and the reasons why we have to do something about it, I’d recommend reading ‘Small scale sustainable farmers are cooling down the earth’ by Via Campesina and the ‘Manifesto on climate change and the future of food security’ by The International Commission on the Future of Food.

I was especially excited to see permaculture and landuse activism centred around the countryside at COP-15. Much activism in Europe around agriculture and landuse, such as guerilla gardening, squatting and Reclaim the Streets, is often city based. This is not surprising given that around 80% of the population of Europe lives in cities (and globally it is now around 50%), and in the UK, around 1-2% of the population work in the Agricultural sector. Over the last few hundred years there has been a massive population shift to the cities which has left us with most politics being city based.

If cities are unsustainable, as I’ve written before, then it is vital we move out of them and back on to the land to learn and develop a more sustainable existence. It is vital that we shift politics back on to the land where it once was. Issues such as land redistribution and food sovereignty are completely off the political radar in many European countries. However, without access to land, we can not build houses out of local natural materials, grow food and try to live a genuinely more sustainable existence (I will write more about what the term ‘sustainable’ actually means in a later post).

This is a very serious issue. In Britain, as the books ‘Who Owns Britian’ and ‘Who Owns the World’ by Kevin Cahill shows, a few hundred thousand people own around two thirds of all the land (I’ve heard that the UK has a higher concentration of land ownership than Brazil!). In Sweden land distribution isn’t as concentrated as many small land holdings exist, but corporations like Sveaskog and big private landowners still own large parts of the country.

Nowadays it is very difficult and expensive to buy – and build on – land in England. It is cheaper in many places in Sweden although it can still cost a lot of money to buy land and get permission to do what you want to do on it.

Land redistribution is still a political issue in some European countries, such as Scotland, as the book ‘Soil and Soul’ by Alastair McIntosh shows, but this is maybe because the Highland Clearances happened more recently and many old grievances are still remembered by the living. In England, most people don’t seem to know about the enclosure of the commons which evicted people from the land over a few centuries so that the rich could profit. Without access to land to grow food and provide other resources necessary for life, the landless poor were forced to become the soldiers of empire and the cheap sweatshop labour of the industrial revolution.

In the cities we are forced into being consumers because almost everything is commodified. Most of us need to work long hours for a big part of our lives in jobs we’d rather not be doing to pay large amounts of money to the rich and corporations for rent/mortgages, food, utilities, entertainment, transport, etc. This takes us away from our friends, family, communities and what we really want to be doing. The land can – but not always – give us an area to grow on, provide resources for cheap buildings made of natural materials, provide firewood if you have access to forest (or you can plant some) as well as giving us something beautiful to look at and work together on. Eco-communities or villages on the land, if they don’t cost too much money to set up, have the potential of freeing us of being so dependent on the individualistic, consumerist and commodified system in the cities (more on eco-villages in a later post).

As land redistribution and food sovereignty are such important issues, I was very happy to meet people from Reclaim the Fields (RtF) and a Swedish offshoot, Mykorrhiza. RtF are calling for ”access to land, seeds and water for all” as well as ”keeping the climate cool by producing local food.” They describe themselves as ”Young European peasants, prospective peasants, landless people, supporters of food sovereignty.”

RtF came out of a youth camp that Via Campesina was holding at the September 2008 European Social Forum in Malmö. The aim was not to just be a youth group of Via Campesina but create a group of European young people who want to gain control of food production, grow organic food locally and dream of living on the land self-sufficiently. The aim was for it to be a practical group which focuses on alternatives rather than one which opposes the existing system.

The Swedish RtF group Mykorrhiza, originally formed at a school (folkhögskola) outside of Malmö which teaches small scale organic farming (and has one of the few forest gardens in Sweden), started at around the same time. At their first few meetings they decided they wanted to work on four main activities:

1) Grow food for the COP-15 meeting and serve it as a peoples kitchen

2) Connected with people who want to create eco-villages

3) Pursue guerilla gardening in the city

4) Promote a campaign to stop further intellectual property rights on plant varieties and the monopolization of seeds by transnational corporations

In Copenhagen they served delicious home grown food for donations and gave away free “illegal” seeds. They had grown the food on their school land – which they could use for free – through organising weekly gardening afternoons with 8 or more people.

Mykorrhiza haven’t focussed on land redistribution so far, possibly because the price of land is relatively low in Sweden and it is far easier to get access to land to grow there than in other countries. So far they haven’t had to do land grabs to grow – as is necessary in many other countries – but found places to grow at their school, their relatives gardens and have even arranged with the municipality to get land to grow on.

Unlike in many Southern countries, where access to land is grow is a matter of life and death, it can be seen as a luxury in the North. We can buy heavily subsidised cheap food in the supermarkets. Even if we don’t have money, we can often get state benefits, support from homeless charities or go dumpster diving. Our comfortable position in the North, which is dependent on wars for resources and the exploitation of the global poor in sweatshops, prevents us from resisting to the scale of the Landless Workers’ Movement (or MST) in Brazil or the 2000 Cochabamba protests in Bolivia against water privatisation. I wonder how much we will ever seriously resist or revolt for land redistribution without being much more oppressed and dependent on the land for our existence? Maybe future shortages or climate change will create these conditions, although I wouldn’t recommend just waiting for them to happen, as eco-Marxists might suggest.

However, there is some hope for land resistance in Sweden as a RtF group based in Gothenburg are planning on occupying an abandoned bit of land with an underground basement to grow food on. I know of another group squatting a forest west of Stockholm which are learning how to grow, fish and gather. Supposedly other RtF groups around Europe have land access as more of a focus.

Since forming last year, RtF groups have sprung up around Europe. There is now a group based in Stockholm as well as two new groups in Norway based in Oslo and Bergen. Word seems to be spreading fast and in the future RtF are planning on creating a network of organic farms which offer education for people who want to learn how to grow. It is a similar idea to Wwoofing but they plan to organise volunteering opportunities for longer periods of time so people can really learn how to grow through the seasons.

RtF and Mykorrhiza are inspiring examples of what Europeans can start to do to prepare for future resource shortages and climate change. They show us how we can start to learn to grow and live on the land, regain our food sovereignty and maybe even fight for access to land or land redistribution. In other countries, these strategies are much more developed. For example I met some people from Aranya Agricultural Alternatives, an Indian organisation, which has been working for many years empowering thousands of people in rural communities in permaculture practices. In the North we are underdeveloped in our knowledge and experience in these matters and need to learn what we can from the South before it is too late.

/Jack Daw, COP15, 15 december 2009

Further reading (some of which I need to properly read!):

Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature – Jules N. Pretty
Forest Gardening – Cultivating an Edible Landscape – Robert Hart
Permaculture: A Design Manual – Bill Mollison
Soil and Soul: People versus Corporate Power – Alastair McIntosh
Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security: The Impact of Globalisation – edited by Vandana Shiva and Gitanjali Bedi
The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth – Lewis Henry Berens
The Earth Care Manual: A Permaculture Handbook for Britain and Other Temperate Countries – Patrick Whitefield
The One Straw Revolution – Masanobu Fukuoka
The Making of the English Working Class – E. P. Thompson
The Natural Way of Farming: The Theory and Practice of Green Philosophy – Masanobu Fukuoka
The Permaculture Garden – Graham Bell
The Rebel Farmer – Sepp Holzer
Utopia Britannica – British Utopian Experiments: 1325-1945 – Chris Coates

Some websites:

http://www.agroforestry.co.uk/
http://www.inpermcou.org/

(http://www.guerrillagardening.org/)

~ av iamhampus den 15 december 2009.