Report 02. 2021 is a year of holding each other long enough, to birth seeds for an intact world
modernity, agroecology resources and narratives for your one big new year, the Oxford Real Farming Conference (now till 13 Jan), and workshop-planning
“Diversity always breeds brilliance.”
Chris Newman of Sylvanaqua Farms (USA), which grows pasture-raised chickens and eggs, forested pigs and grass-fed beef
It’s the start of 2021! Looks like we’re all in for food this year—the UN Food Systems Summit and COP26 are BOTH happening this year, and the food and climate change agendas will come together more closely than before.
For many people who lead relatively stable lives, the greatest challenge can be change. How to make sure one part of the world—the one that thought it had solved the problems of humankind—doesn’t break down from encountering trauma and disaster (like the Fall Army Worm)?
The FAW infestations compel us to transition to agroecology, which have dealt far better with pressures like FAW, and would certainly have prevented its emergence as a pest in the first place. However, agroecological transition is inseparable from broader transitions that must confront resource extractivism, undemocratic governments, economic injustice, and strengthen the foundations for social equality.
African Centre for Biodiversity, 27 Nov 2020
“Modernity has won, there is no alternative”
I never realised what the poverty of the imagination meant - that in the centre of modernity, there is no way out, no conceivable way to do otherwise. Art becomes seen merely as entertainment on the wayside. Even provocative art, confrontational or otherwise. How difficult, how constrained that is.
But we don’t have to keep playing that same soundtrack.
I’ve been trying to figure out what my role is: what I’m doing here in Munich. Surely it’s not only about writing up my literature review (about infrastructure and agroecology, yes, but!!). I am still pulled constantly into what is actually happening, and I want it to be so. I need to do my work well, which is to communicate what I am seeing and reading, and use my training to make coherent sense of a complex phenomenon (dispersed agricultural lands and bodies).
Because there are many alternatives.
Ag happenings around the world:
An A(n)gricultural uprising - on the farmers’ —many of them women — “Delhi Chalo” march from Punjab and Haryana to India’s capital
The best stories on food security in the US in 2020 from Civil Eats
Special shout out: I’ve been really enjoying the Oxford (but international) Real Farming Conference, going on till 13 January; programme and registration here.
Resources and what you can do this year
1. Bring attention to agroecology groups - list those in SEA, including those I list below
2. Educate yourself about agroecology and its links to social justice and climate justice
3. Educate yourself on what capital-intensive agriculture is, and how it differs from people-centered agroecology
Change the narrative
If you are producing content about food, ag, social justice, or climate change, here are tips I squirreled from Michael Fakhri’s (the new UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food) excellent presentation on the Oxford Real Farming Conference:
Agroecology is labour intensive - thus it creates resonant solidarities with education, industry, capacity, and migrant rights and needs
We should not base the narrative on family farms - families can be spaces of oppression
Because of the Food Systems Summit many in the Climate Change movement are now turning their attention to food for the first time
The local is always shaped by international forces
People may be committed to regenerative causes but may still be racist to migrant labour, oppressive in their own families
Social movements have done a lot to shift the discussion to agroecology
Yet there is a missing alliance between governments and movements working on agroecology.
There can be strategic relationships to create political energy to adopt agroecology on a national scale.
Resources
On the false promises of the new Green Revolution in Africa:
Timothy Wise’s Failing Africa’s farmers: New report shows Africa’s Green Revolution is “failing on its own terms”; Report here
July 2020 False Promises report on AGRA
Timothy Wise’s Response paper to AGRA here
Resources for growing, learning, reading about agroecology
South Asia: Navdanya Earth University: https://www.navdanya.org/site/earth-university/earth-university
US: AGRA Watch’s Anti-Racism Resources: https://cagj.org/agra-watch/ and https://cagj.org/anti-racism-resources/
The Americas: The People’s Agroecology Process https://whyhunger.org/category/publications/the-peoples-agroecology-process-unlocking-our-power-through-agroecology/
Southeast Asia: ALI-SEA’s Online Library: https://ali-sea.org/online-library/ and https://ali-sea.org/the-official-kick-off-workshop-on-agroecology-and-safe-food-system-transitions-in-southeast-asia/
Africa: Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa: https://afsafrica.org/publications/
How to intervene - Questions from the academy
Discussing Bruno Latour with other scholars, I find it insightful how his popularity within the art world contrasts with the confusion and ambivalence he generates amongst many academics. Yes, the art and design world can be properly critiqued for a degree of superficiality in its gilded propositions, and the scholarly world can be critiqued for being too quick to seek clarity and verbalised theses/arguments. But gilded propositions work outside of formal logical A-leads-to-B language (thus Latour is not properly a ‘philosopher’) and clarity and verbalised arguments enforce discipline in thinking.
So much of what needs to be said needs to arise outside of words.
These are points I find most compelling and useful, in his short book, Down to Earth. (And then I’ll be done with it!)
What is hardest, most abject, can show us what we most want. He discusses Trump and what we now seek to create in the face of monstrous reductionism. The confusion Trump and Trump supporters introduce into the world, about disinformation and misinformation, show us what we do want and need. (For non-artists/art theorists: I think a reading of Deleuze’s 1987 piece What is the creative act? allows us insight to this—when he says that art does not necessarily have to do with counterinformation, but art intervenes in the space of information and communication, and that in that sense, it has a lot to do with resistance.)
Understanding movement and rhythm in our collective orientations, can help us come to new understandings of how to intervene. This diagram can be a little confusing, but Latour’s thought experiment on what gravitational forces attract or propel us (in body/mind/spirit), is admirable.
Orientations are matters of place, situation, and context. Not necessarily geopolitical histories or trajectories. And, they work outside of the discourse of the Local or Global. (In this, Latour would do well to reference Sara Ahmed on Queer Phenomenology because he is doing a bad job of explaining to people why he uses the term orientations and reorientations, and why this creates any shift in how we associate and attend, on a more bodily level, to his “matters of concern”.
Latour may be hard to decipher, but we already see the increasing shift towards terrestrially-focused activity: as a group of people get tired of space missions, the back to the land movement (even on the internet) is re-entering mainstream culture—if not amongst the 90s kids, at least amongst the early 00s’. And surely amongst the ones after.
Decolonial style
Low Tech Magazine
Low Tech offers their own course-correcting way forward. The publication not only educates people about what they term the “weight” of a website, it also demonstrates through its own existence how a website can forego the bloat of advertising, background tasks, and unnecessary files. The entire publication is self-hosted on a single board computer powered by solar energy. Their model also raises the question of scale: unlike Facebook, whose mission has always been to accommodate and connect everyone, everywhere, Low Tech supports the idea that a website can serve a small community connected through common interests. The Internet's global accessibility has lead us to think on a massive scale, but a community that lacks physical proximity can still be “local” in mindset.
It’s a radical way to run a website, and it may be an early indication of the internet’s own back-to-the-land movement. Just as Masanobu Fukuoka believed a deeper understanding of nature is necessary to agriculture, the citizens of the web could certainly benefit from an increased awareness of their virtual environment. Moving off the grid in a digital sense might mean opting out of mainstream internet providers to connect through independent mesh networks, or hosting content on local computers distributed across a peer-to-peer web. Though the driving technologies can be complex to understand, it is important to demystify the inner workings of the web so that individuals may regain control of the tools that build it. The further we are distanced from the network’s core, the more powerless we become in redirecting its growth.
A Growing Culture had an excellent moderated panel with Jon Jandai and Chris Newman, on Democratising Food Sovereignty:
“The best fertilizers are farmers’ footprints”
The farmer means: someone doing something in the ground (taking care of soil - a deeply spiritual and actionable term, needing people there), which is at odds with environmental romanticism (i.e. John Muir’s) ideas of taking care of landscape by depopulating it.
- Chris Newman on the notion of farming, in the language of his Piscataway ancestors
A read from some time ago, which I never got around to till now: YARIMAR BONILLA ON DECOLONIZING DECOLONIZATION
Overall, we have to be really attentive to how increasing calls for resilience and sustainability in the era of climate change can backfire. Resilience—as an ability to sustain shocks and bounce back to a previous state of affairs—might not be what we most want to cultivate at this moment. Instead of seeking resilience and trying to make our current way of life sustainable, we should perhaps be yielding to the earth’s demands and letting the climate crisis transform our entanglements—not just to the environment, but also to each other.
And on the topic of art - here’s a streetside vitrine show in Italy and heady music for your ears: by JESSIKA KHAZRIK NOR THE SOCIETY OF FALSE WITNESSES, Abeyance & Concurrence, 12 Dec - closing date unknown
I am planning a series of workshops on urban participatory food systems - in Southeast Asia. And we’re looking for folks who are amazing at what they do - on social media, writing and research, and organizing and sharing. Please reach out to me (hit “reply” in your email client) or leave a comment here, if you would like to join us - know that we cannot pay at the moment, and we are working independently to put together a proposal for the network - and potential funding - we pull together to run these workshops, this year.
That’s it this month. Be sure to forward this hinge to an agroecological world on to others! We need to hold on together, as many of us as possible, to tip into that world. That’s our alternative.