Tag Archives: Biophysical contradictions

Capitalism, Ecology, Ecosystems, Water

Ecocide, and the building of critical consciousness

The death of a million fish

On or around the 6th January 2019, a tragic combination of circumstances led to a massive fishkill, estimated to be in excess of 1 million native species, in the Menindee Lakes region on the Darling River.

Native fish species impacted in the January 2019 #fishkill

While the immediate cause for the massive #fishkill was the sudden die-off of a massive bloom of blue-green algae (and the resulting collapse in oxygen levels in the water), the obvious question is: how was the ecosystem allowed to reach this parlous state of extreme vulnerability? Industry bodies such as the NSW Irrigators Council immediately went into damage control mode, blaming the drought, while Cotton Australia sought to deflect attention by claiming that cotton irrigators were ‘sick of being the whipping boys’ for environmental disasters.

Yet, as Fran Sheldon wrote in the Conversation on 16th January, the impacts of excessive irrigation are incontrovertible:

Ecological evidence shows the Barwon-Darling River is not meant to dry out to disconnected pools – even during drought conditions. Water diversions have disrupted the natural balance of wetlands that support massive ecosystems.

NSW Irrigators – blame the drought

Politicians from the governing parties – the Coalition in both NSW and Federally – signally failed to take responsibility. The NSW Primary Industries Minister, Niall Blair, was afraid of meeting meet with locals having received death threats on social media, while it wasn’t until Jan 23rd that the Federal Government  mandated the conduct of an independent study to determine the cause of the fishkill.  To their credit, NSW Labor promptly issued a statement calling for a special commission of inquiry into what it termed the ‘ecological catastrophe‘, while Federal Opposition leader Bill Shorten called for the establishment of an emergency ‘taskforce’ that could lead to a ‘possible judicial inquiry’.

A ecological disaster foretold

An excellent investigation by the ABC Four Corners team that aired in 2017 – Pumped: Who’s benefitting from the billions spent on the Murray-Darling? raised questions of, at best, grossly negligent mismanagement of the river system; and at worst, very serious allegations of political corruption and water theft with the most contemptuous disregard for the health of the river ecosystem.  As a so-called ‘advanced capitalist nation’, Australia prides itself on its rule of law. In theory, this means that laws are enforced equally and properly and that ‘justice is blind’; in other words, it doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, you will be treated the same way in the eyes of the law. In reality, law in capitalist countries has always favoured the interests of employers over workers and landowners over the rights of indigenous peoples and the environment.

What the Four Corners episode revealed, amongst much else, was that once the NSW Department of Primary Industries Special Investigations Unit actually start to make progress and discovery that irrigators were rorting the system (e.g. by not having meters to track how much water they were extracting from the river, or by tampering with the meters so they didn’t work), and when the Manager requested a major investigation, the Unit was then mysteriously shut down and the staff sacked. The only reasonable conclusion to be drawn is that there was collusion between the irrigators and the Department, and an accommodation reached in which no investigation would proceed.

The consequences are now plain for all to see.

A disaster baked into the logic of the system

The logic of endless extraction, heedless of environmental consequences, has its inevitable outcome. We need only look to the experience of Uzbekistan with the Aral Sea, once the world’s fourth-largest body of fresh water. When the USSR commenced large-scale cotton production in the 1960s by diverting flows from the Amu Darya river that had replenished it for millennia, the levels of the Aral Sea began to fall. By 2014, as the image from Wikipedia shows, it was a tiny fraction of its former size.  Ecological vandalism on a grand scale has a price.

The fragility of ecosystems resulting from over-exploitation and over-extraction is now intersecting with the impacts of non-linear anthropogenic climate change, as recent research published in Nature Climate Change demonstrated:

The beginning of this century has seen an unprecedented number of widespread, catastrophic biological transformations in response to extreme weather events. This constellation of unpredictable and sudden biological responses suggests that many seemingly healthy and undisturbed [Australian] ecosystems are at a tipping point.

Reviewing various measures of the destructive impacts of the global industrialised capitalist food system on human and ecological health, I argued in a recent article submitted to the Australian Journal Of Environmental Education that

While these losses and costs are regarded as ‘externalities’ by agri-food corporations, such an accounting sleight of hand will merely delay the day of ecological reckoning. We contend, first, that the current industrial food system is not only undermining the health and wellbeing of large and growing numbers of people and the integrity of local, regional and global ecosystems and climatic stability. Secondly, we argue that by severely diminishing public and ecological health, the industrial food system is at the same time encountering its own biophysical contradictions: it is undermining the conditions of its own reproduction (Weis, 2010). It is thus not only destructive, it is self destructive, and thus unsustainable by definition. The case for transformative change is therefore overwhelming and urgent. How do we get from here to there? Following the pedagogical oeuvre of Paolo Freire (1970), we begin with the premise that critical consciousness-raising amongst large numbers of people is an essential pre-requisite to transformative change.

Building critical consciousness

So how do we build critical consciousness? There are no shortcuts. It will require the sustained and committed efforts of tens of thousands of activists in this country and all over the world.

As the crisis of the system intensifies, the contradictions and absurdities of the current political economy will become increasingly clear to more and more people. We know that is already happening in many, many ways – and the fishkill on the Darling is the latest of a growing ecological cacophony that is calling us to awake from our long decades of consumer apathy and begin to recover our power as political beings.

Rebellions are on the rise. Witness the Gilet Jaunes / Yellow Vests movement in France. The Extinction Rebellion in the UK. The mass strike of maquiladora workers in Matamoros, northern Mexico. These are expressions, both of the advancing distintegration of the hegemony of neoliberalism, as well as the growing levels of critical consciousness around the world as people come together to enter into struggle with the logic of the endless growth and exploitation of the system.

What happens next is up to us.

Selected articles published / linked on the #fishkill catastrophe, January 2019

 

Cry me a river: Mismanagement and Corruption have left the Darling dry, Helen Vivian, Sydney Morning Herald, 9 March 2018

Cubbie Station and Water Allocation Abuse, Tim Alderman, personal blog, 9 January 2019 (tweeted – original article 2 March 2017)

The fishkill is a tragedy, but it is no surprise,  Quentin Grafton, Emma Carmody, Matthew Colloff and John Williams, The Guardian, 14 January 2019

The other Murray-Darling wildlife disaster – it’s what you don’t see, Michael Pascoe, The New Daily,  15 January 2019

The Darling River is simply not supposed to dry out, even in drought,  Fran Sheldon, The Conversation, 16 January 2019

Fishkill highlights mismanagement of Australian waterways, Martin Scott, 25 January 2019, World Socialist Web Site

 

Corporate control of food, Food sovereignty, Small-scale farming, Uncategorized

The Food System Isn’t Just Broken. It’s killing us.

This is the text of the speech delivered by AFSA National Coordinator Dr Nick Rose to the sell-out audience of 200 people, at the premiere of the Fair Food documentary at the National Gallery of Victoria on Tuesday 2nd December, 2014. 

 

AFSA National Coordinator, Dr Nick Rose

Why did we make this film? Because the Food System is broken.

Why is it broken?

Because we have fully applied the technologies and the mindset of industrialisation to food and farming. And because we have combined industrialisation with the logic and the imperative of endlessly increasing production, regardless of the consequences.

What does that mean? It means we have over-exploited our land, degraded our soils, and damaged our river systems. It means we have one of the highest rates of deforestation, biodiversity loss and species extinction on the planet. It means, globally, that the food system contributes as much as 50% of all greenhouse gas emissions.

It means that we have a supermarket duopoly which controls 70-80 percent of the grocery market, forcing farmers and food processors into price-taker relationships. 100 years ago farmers received 90 cents of every dollar’s worth of food they produced; today it’s around 10 cents.

 

Farming has become de-valued in our highly urbanized culture; and not just economically. So it’s shocking, but not surprising, that 7 farmers leave the land every day, and that rates of suicide and depression amongst farmers are twice the national average.

Our industrialised food system produces too much food of the wrong type. So we’re subjected to an endless barrage of advertising, urging us to buy food products laced with excess sugars and salt. Dietary-related diseases are already amongst the biggest public health issues we face.

 Our food system is not merely broken. It’s killing us, and ruining any chance that future generations have for a decent and liveable future. Yet the industrialised food system persists, and is expanding. Why? Because there are very powerful economic and financial interests that make a lot of money from the status quo. Because we are so disconnected from our food system. Because food is apparently abundant and cheap, and because we don’t join these dots.

We made this film, and we formed the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance, because we can no longer tolerate this state of affairs. Because it’s no longer enough just to talk or think in terms of reforms. We need a transformation; we need a revolution.

And that revolution begins in our own minds, in our hearts, in our consciousness. We need to see ourselves as part of the story of the Great Work, the work that matters. As philosopher Thomas Berry puts it:

The Great Work now, as we move into a new millennium, is to carry out the transition from a period of human devastation of the Earth to a period when humans would be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner.

This is the challenge to every one of you here in this room. This is the choice facing every one of us alive today. Do we continue to allow our culture and our society to become ever-more destructive, and ever-more violent? Do we choose to remain in a paradigm which says that the Earth, and indeed ourselves, only exist for endless exploitation so that a tiny fraction of humanity can enjoy obscene levels of wealth?

Or do we choose to be part of the great challenge of our times – the greatest challenge of all times? To create a shared vision of a wonderful, bountiful world, where there is no hunger and no poverty; where soils are thriving, rivers are healthy and forests are abundant; where animals roam freely; and where all of us are healthy and flourishing.

Do we choose to see ourselves as victims of processes and powers beyond our control, and simply walk away and do nothing, resigned to our fate? Or do we choose to see ourselves as subjects and shapers of our own history, as creators and narrators of our own story, as powerful beings with the capacity to effect great changes?

Because I’m here to tell you, that’s who we are. We are powerful.

We made this film because these are messages that need to be heard. This is the story that needs to be told; that we need to tell ourselves, and each other. We made this film because we know that there are women and men all over this state, and all around this country, who have embraced this new paradigm, who are blazing a trail towards the decent, fair and liveable future that all of us want.

We’re here tonight to recognize and celebrate them.

They are our Fair Food Pioneers.

And this is the story of Fair Food.

Argentina, Uncategorized

The complexities of Argentina

Last time I wrote about the harsh poverty endured by millions of Argentines in the so-called villas de miseria that are found out on the outskirts of every large city in country. And the role that urban agriculture is playing in terms of enhancing life satisfaction and quality to many thousands of families, as well as contributing in a very tangible sense to household food security.

As I near the end of a month in the country, having visited five provinces and had dozens of conversations with government officials at all levels, as well as many urban gardeners and small-scale producers, I am constantly struck by the layers of complexity and difficulty that people here are grappling with.

Every country is complex, of course, and has its own particular history and development trajectory. In the case of Argentina, its history casts a very long shadow, which makes the task of change especially challenging.

Many of my conversations centre around la crisis of December 2001 as the period when the urban agriculture movement in this country went to an entirely new level. The Municipality of Rosario, which I mentioned last time, launched its Urban Agriculture program in 2001. The Province of Neuquén, where I visited last week, launched PRODA (Agro-Food Development Program) in 2003, as the country was exiting the worst of the crisis.

La crisis consisted in a localised ‘Great Depression’, starting in 1998 and continuing through to the end of 2002: during those years the Argentine economy shrank by 20%; 50% of Argentines were plunged into poverty and 25% into extreme poverty. By November 2001 Argentines had lost confidence in the banking system and were withdrawing cash en masse. The freeze of withdrawals led to the riots of 19-21 December, 2001, and an intense political turbulence which forced the President to resign and flee Government House in a helicopter.

A 'ticket trueque', used for exchange during the Club de Trueque that at one point included millions of Argentines
A ‘ticket trueque’, used for exchange during the Club de Trueque that at one point included millions of Argentines

Waves of bankruptcies and job losses followed, with the emergence of club de trueques, or swap-meets, not as something nice to do on a Sunday afternoon, but as a basic survival strategy. Another feature of the crisis were the so-called tomas – takeovers of bankrupt factories by workers, desperate to maintain their livelihoods.

As if such a crisis were not enough for the current generation to have to cope with, the country lived through an even more horrendous experience 25 years previously. This was the infamous ‘Dirty War‘ waged by a military dictatorship against its own people, from 1976-1983. Under the guise of ‘fighting’ small groups of leftist insurgents, the dictatorship established a national network of secret detention centres where tens of thousands of students, lawyers, doctors, teachers, trade unionists, social workers – in effect, anyone who was trying to work with poor people to help them assert their rights to a better life – were tortured and then ‘disappeared’, many thrown alive out of planes into the sea.

Some of the tens of thousands of disappeared Argentines, victims of state terror during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship
Some of the tens of thousands of disappeared Argentines, victims of state terror during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship

Most have never been found, and the psychosocial scars of this national trauma – now officially recognised and publicly described as ‘State terrorism’ – run deep indeed.

Over 500 children were born to pregnant women held in the detention centres. These babies were taken at birth from their mothers and placed with military families or their sympathisers. 116 have now been reunited with their birth families, in an ongoing process of national catharsis.

And for twenty years, the country’s economic fortunes have become hitched to the continued expansion of la sojera, a multi-million hectare swathe of territory – two-thirds or more of all arable land in the country – dedicated to one crop: chemical-hungry GM soy, destined for export to feed the pigs and chickens in the factory farms of Europe and China. It is a social and environmental catastrophe, but it brings in foreign currency for the government.

Soy today, hunger tomorrow
Soy today, hunger tomorrow

This is a tragic and troubled history, that would make many despair; yet countless thousands of Argentines are working hard to achieve a better future for their communities. I have been privileged to meet some of those people.

advocate, Corporate control of food, Food policy, Food sovereignty, Global hunger, National Food Plan, Small-scale farming

Globalise the struggle, globalise hope! Viva La Via Campesina!

While peasants maintain their struggle, corporations’ mouths water over the ‘dining boom’

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday, 20th April 2013

Nick Rose

Two events this week mark sharply diverging paths for national and global food systems.

Wednesday (17 April) marked the 17th anniversary of the murder of 19 peasant family farmers in the Brazilian town of Dorado dos Carajas. Members of the million-strong Landless Workers Movement (MST), they were targeted as part of a campaign of intimidation and harassment by big landowners and agribusiness interests, for whom the MST’s demands for more equitable access to land and other resources could not be tolerated.

The global small farmers movement La Via Campesina now commemorates 17 April as the ‘International Day of Peasants’ Struggle’. Each year hundreds of peasant farmers in many different countries lose their lives attempting to resist what appears to be a relentless push for greater corporate ownership and control over land, seeds, water and markets. Thousands more lose their livelihoods and their land as they are forced off their own ancestral lands, often violently, to make way for biofuel plantations and the GM soy mega monocultures that provide feed for the factory farming of pigs and chickens.

All of this is supposedly done in the name of ‘development’, ‘progress’ and ‘efficiency’.

Meanwhile, in Melbourne on Thursday (18 April), the Australian and the Wall Street Journal launched the inaugural Global Food Forum. As reported in the Australian, ‘billionaire packaging and recycling magnate Anthony Pratt’ called for a ‘coalition of the willing’ so that Australia can ‘quadruple our exports to feed 200 million people’.

 

The ‘dining boom’ will replace the mining boom as the next driver of our economy, apparently. Eyes lit up with estimates of an ‘additional $1.7 trillion in agriculture revenues between now and 2050 if [Australia] seized the opportunity of the Asia food boom.’

 

Amongst other measures, this ‘dining boom’ is said to depend on the so-called Northern food bowl: clearing large swathes of Northern Australia and irrigating it with dozens of new dams.

 

But, as Professor Andrew Campbell of Charles Darwin University has pointed out, water is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for successful food production. Good soils are essential, and in our north the ‘soils are low in nutrients and organic matter, they can’t hold much water, they erode easily and they have low infiltration rates’. Other obstacles to the rosy future of being ‘Asia’s food bowl’ include extreme monsoonal weather events, high input costs and higher labour costs due to remote locations.

In short, the so-called Northern food bowl is likely to prove a mirage. And when you add to the picture the parlous state of many wheat farmers in south-west WA, not to mention the Murray-Darling itself, the idea that massively expanding food exports to Asia is going to be this country’s economic saviour looks decidedly like wishful thinking.

And even if it were true, who would be the main beneficiaries? A handful of very large exporting farms, and the grain traders and agri-business that dominate the global food system.

Which brings us back to Via Campesina. They’re campaigning for a food system that’s fair and sustainable, one that works for people and the land, not simply for shareholders and CEOs.

Sam Palmer, from Symara Organic Farms (near Stanthorpe, Qld), who attended the 6th Global Via Campesina conference in Jakarta, June 2013
Sam Palmer, from Symara Organic Farms (near Stanthorpe, Qld), who attended the 6th Global Via Campesina conference in Jakarta, June 2013

In June this year, Via Campesina will be holding its sixth international conference, in Jakarta. For the first time, a delegation of four Australian farmers are hoping to join the other delegates from dozens of countries around the world, to discuss the future of family farming and food systems worldwide. They’re asking for support from the Australian public to get there, to make sure the vo

ices of Australian family farmers are heard in these important discussions.

You can find out who they are, and help them get to Jakarta, by going to http://www.pozible.com/project/20941.

advocate, Alternatives, Ecological constraints, Growth paradigm

Nicole Foss and the End of Growth

New ideas about ‘progress’

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on 21st January 2012

 

“I don’t think anything remotely like business-as-usual is going to come back in our lifetimes, or probably ever again, quite frankly.”

These are the words of Stoneleigh, aka Nicole Foss. One of the world’s leading writers and speakers on the global energy and financial crises, the deep connections between them, and the implications for advanced economies such as our own, Nicole is travelling to Australia next month on a speaking tour. She will be visiting Coffs Harbour on Saturday, February 11, and speaking and answering questions for a couple of hours from 12 p.m. at the Cavanbagh Centre. The Advocate is sponsoring her visit, and will be running a series of articles exploring aspects of her thought over the next few weeks.

Nicole Foss, aka Stoneleight
Nicole Foss, aka Stoneleight

“Business-as-usual” means all sorts of things, of course, but here Nicole is talking specifically about economic growth. An expanding economy is the very definition of ‘normal’, which is why deep recessions, and above all depressions, are regarded as so awful. The idea that we are perhaps on the cusp of entering a prolonged – very prolonged – period of deflationary depression is extremely hard to contemplate with equanimity. Yet this is the no-holds-barred perspective that Nicole offers; and she does so on the basis of a sharp and clear analysis, with the sole motivation of helping individuals and communities inform themselves and prepare for the seismic changes she believes are now unfolding.

Buen Vivir

Let’s assume for a moment that Nicole is right. This raises all sorts of questions, but the one I want to look at briefly here is this: can the end of economic growth actually be a good news story? If you ask any politician of any major party in most parts of the world, the answer would be a resounding ‘no’. The terrible experience of the 1930s has been seared into our collective historical memory as something to be avoided at all costs, and with good reason.

And yet…as time has gone on, many are saying that the costs of growth now outweigh the benefits. More growth means more pollution, more waste. Having more ‘stuff’ doesn’t mean that we’re any happier. Bigger doesn’t always mean better – have you watched SuperSize Me? Maybe it’s time to start thinking in terms of quality, rather than quantity.

That’s what been happening on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, in Ecuador and Bolivia. The citizens of both countries recently re-wrote their constitutions, and in them they included some old wisdom from the Quechua and Aymara indigenous peoples of the Andes as the guiding principle for the new development paradigm they wish to follow. Sumak Kawsay is a Quechau phrase that translates as buen vivir in Spanish; which in English we might understand as ‘good life’ or ‘living well’.

In contrast to individualistic ideas of progress based on economic growth, buen vivir seeks balance and harmony, amongst peoples, and between humanity and nature, as its primary goals. In a recent article, Thomas Fatheuer notes that it is ‘sharply distinct from the idea of individual good life’; and is ‘only conceivable in a social context, mediated by the community in which people live’.

Interestingly, buen vivir is being embraced by two of the poorest countries in the world, whose main source of ‘wealth’ has traditionally been based on the extraction of their natural resources, minerals especially. That they are seeking to strike out on a different path at this point in time should give us pause for thought, as we seek to keep riding on the wave of the minerals boom.

Maybe buen vivir is relevant to us; maybe not. But at the very least it offers a positive story for the future.

—-

Nicole Foss and her co-writer Ilargi Mendoz (touring Australia with her) write at The Automatic Earth: http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/

Thomas Fatheur’s discussion of buen vivir can be read here: http://www.boell.de/publications/publications-buen-vivir-12636.html

advocate, Corporate control of food, Cost-price squeeze, Demographic crisis, Ecological constraints, Food sovereignty, Growth paradigm, Local and regional food economies, Small-scale farming, Supermarket Duopoly

The poverty of farming in the Tweed

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The poverty of farming in the Tweed

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, on 10th December 2011

Last time I introduced Tweed mango grower Mike Yarrow, whom I met recently while in Murwillumbah as part of a team working with the Tweed Council to prepare a strategy for sustainable agriculture.

Mike would like this process to be a success, but he believes that it’s ’30 or 40 years too late’, at least in the case of him and his wife; and other farmers of their vintage (Mike is 67), which is the vast majority of farmers in the region.

Your problem as I see it”, he told us, “is that we, the farmers, have reached the end of our working lives. There are no new young farmers.

The aging of the farming population is an issue that affects the country as a whole. By far the largest category of farmers in Australia is in the 65+ age bracket. In this as in other aspects of food policy, the Federal Government has made the complacent assumption that there is really nothing to worry about, and that what objectively appears to be a demographic crisis will simply correct itself over time. Projections issued after the Australia 2020 Summit in 2008 saw the age of the average Australian farmer peaking in 2011 at just under 55 years, and then gradually declining past 2030.

mangos

Yet no convincing explanation was given as to where the next generation of Australian farmers would come from. On the contrary, all the indications are that the decades-long trend of an aging rural workforce is likely to continue. According to Mike Yarrow, the heart of the issue lies in what he calls ‘the deliberately destroyed profitability’ of farmers.

In Mike’s view, successive Federal Governments wanted ‘to keep the lid on industrial unrest by keeping the gap between a worker’s income and the cost of living apart’. He recalls that when he and his wife arrived in Australia in 1974, petrol was 7 cents a litre, and the minimum wage was $1 an hour. Both have since risen about 20-fold, in line with general cost of living increases. A box of fruit, on the other hand, was $10 in 1974 – and hasn’t gone up much.

You could take issue with Mike; dismiss him as a conspiracy theorist; say that the Government has never intended to screw farmers; that it’s simply a case of the way the markets (and supermarkets) operate. But that’s exactly his point.

By de-regulating rural industries, opening Australia to cheaper imported produce, and generally ‘letting market forces rip’, the market has done what it always does. It’s a competitive system, and it produces winners and losers. In this case, the losers happen to be the majority of Australia’s farmers, and the big winners have been Australia’s two major supermarkets, whose market share has more than doubled since the mid-1970s.

You could argue that in delivering ‘cheap food’ for shoppers, the Australian public as a whole have also ‘won’ in this process.  Yet as five farmers continue to leave the land every day, and very few are stepping into their shoes, the question remains: who is going to produce our food for the rest of this century, and beyond? Agriculture may be less than 3% of Australia’s GDP, but to understand its significance only through an economist’s eyes is unbelievably naïve and short-sighted.

At a deeper level, Mike is quite right. The market system – capitalism – has always depended on ‘cheap food’, in one form or another, to drive its major cycles of expansion. In the Industrial Revolution, it was sugar from the slave plantations of the Caribbean. Last century, it was the mountains of corn made possible by hybrid seeds, agro-chemicals and cheap oil. This century they tell us agricultural productivity will be driven by ‘environmentally-benign’ GM technologies. Meanwhile, food prices are starting to rise, and food riots are becoming more common. Food is too important to take for granted, and so are farmers. We need to be asking some hard questions.

Coffs Coast, Community gardening, Corporate control of food, Cost-price squeeze, Fair Food systems, Food policy, Food sovereignty, Global hunger, Growth paradigm, Local and regional food economies, National Food Plan, Self-sufficiency, Small-scale farming, Uncategorized

Interview: Nick Rose

Thanks to Juliette Anich for the opportunity to create this portrait. Being able to explain at length my motivations is a rare opportunity and much appreciated.

Alternatives, Collaborative cultures and networks, Corporate control of food, Democratic food systems, Fair Food systems, Food sovereignty, Growth paradigm, Local and regional food economies

Environmental Sustainability and Social Justice Requires Democratic Food Systems

This essay outlines the ‘biophysical contradictions’ and crises of legitimacy that the globalising industrial food system is now confronting. It argues that the system has become oligarchic by nature and is incapable of resolving these contradictions and crises within its own terms of continued geographical expansion and technological change, the dialectic of ‘plunder and productivity’. I argue that only a much more democratic food system can achieve lasting environmental sustainability and global social justice; and that developments in food sovereignty from around the world offer much promise towards these ends.

Hand plant

Some excerpts:

As in other spheres of human life, the most clearly apparent legacy of the era of neoliberal capitalism in food and agriculture is sharply rising inequality (Duménil and Lévy 2001: 578; Harvey 2005; Guthman 2011: 62). It is no exaggeration to categorise the global food system as oligarchic, even plutocratic, with a small number of giant transnational corporations controlling the sectors of research and development, proprietary seed, agri-chemicals, grain trading, meat packing, food processing and, increasingly, retailing, to the detriment of most producers and consumers alike (Patel 2007: 12-15). The system is designed to meet the needs of corporations for profit and capital accumulation, with the goals of human health and ecosystem integrity being secondary or tertiary considerations.

…

On one level, the plutocratic global food system faces a crisis of legitimacy, as the perversity of its operation, and the extent of its dysfunctionality, becomes more widely known. A crisis of legitimacy does not, however, translate into a systemic crisis, as long as the circuits of production and consumption can continue to be closed, enabling the system to expand and capital accumulation to persist. On another level, the system is confronted by a series of ‘accelerating biophysical contradictions’ (Weis 2010) which have the very real capacity to undermine its continued conditions of existence.

…

The conclusion to be drawn from the above discussion is that industrialising capitalist agriculture finds itself at a serious impasse; and yet its promoters in Northern governments apparently find themselves capable only of urging its continuation and expansion because their worldview is so constrained by orthodox economics, and the vested interests of large corporations, that they cannot see any alternative. Further, the ‘long waves’ of capitalist expansion over centuries have in turn rested on a series of agricultural revolutions, beginning with the first English agricultural revolution of the ‘long seventeenth century’; succeeded by the second English agricultural revolution of the nineteenth century, and most recently the industrialisation of agriculture, led by the USA, in the twentieth (Moore 2010: 403). These revolutions have played this enabling role by bringing about, through a combination of outright ‘plunder’ (in the form of the dispossession of indigenous peoples of their land and resources) and technologically-driven productivity gains, an ‘ecological surplus’, with ‘cheap food’ at its centre, that has managed to restrain the cost of labour relative to other factors of production, and so enable sustained profitability (Gutham 2011: 54; Moore 2010: 392-3).

The trouble is that as capitalist industrial agriculture encounters its biophysical contradictions in the form of a series of planetary boundaries and a steadily widening ‘ecological rift’ between humanity and nature (Foster et al 2011: 76-79; Rockstrom et al 2009), and as the global capitalist system as a whole now appears to be stagnating and entering a period of crisis, no new agricultural revolution, and thus no new ‘ecological surplus’, is in sight. Large hopes have been, and continue to be, placed in genetically modified organisms, but the evidence to date reveals a disappointing ‘failure to yield’ (Sherman 2009). The current era of cheap food may be drawing to a close, thus elevating the current crisis into a truly systemic, ‘epochal’ one, and intensifying the uncertainties and risks of the decades ahead (Moore 2010: 398).

…

Together, these pillars represent a pathway to a democratic food system. In transitioning away from the destructive oligarchy and plutocracy of market-led industrialised agriculture and agri-food regimes, the democratisation of food systems is a pre-condition to making them sustainable, fair and resilient. Many regions in North America have years of experience with democratic governance of their food systems via Food Policy Councils, and these models are now being embraced and adapted elsewhere (Food First 2009). At the global level, the reformed Committee on World Food Security offers the possibility of a more inclusive space for policy formation; and La Via Campesina have articulated a powerful framework for the protection of peasant and family farmers in their draft Declaration on Peasants’ Rights (La Via Campesina 2009). The food sovereignty movement has momentum: can it shift the power of vested interests?

To read the full article, follow the link below and go to pp33-39:

Political Reflection Vol 3 No 4