Politics of food

Yes, food is political. It is political because it is a stolen resource that is produced on stolen land for profit, it is not produced to feed people. Food is a commodity in a dominant economic system that lets people go without food, when it's not profitable to feed people we let them starve. In Aotearoa food is produced on stolen land for export - decolonising food is political because it is a discussion about achieving mana motuhake and tino rangatiratanga. Our food imports are decided by intergovernmental trade agreements, imported food is predominately packaged in plastic, foil, and tin and holds little nutritional value. The labour conditions for food production globally are regularly called into question and industrial food production leans on insecure, seasonal work and migrant workers to maintain the system of production.

I agree with the general sentiments there^ - and want to share a few additional / complicating thoughts 😊

For me, food is political in economic, environmental and social spheres. Each has specific dimensions worth exploring (including their colonial roots) but the overall complexity of our food systems means that food system change is often classed as a ‘wicked problem’ - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem - something that is inherently hard to define, lacks a single clear solution, and changes and shifts over time in complicated and non-linear ways. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try address the many problems of food; rather it cautions against simple solutions, silver bullets, and ‘one-size-fits-all’ approaches. In our politics, as in the garden, diversity wins!

For example, the nz supermarket profiteering identified by the Commerce Commission is an example of economic injustice: it’s a product of overly dominant economic ‘players’ being able to bully and shift risk onto smaller producers who (as the report identifies) are systematically underpaid, making it harder for them to address other dimensions (for example, experimenting with agroecological methods, trying different economic models and/or increasing community engagement). But while important short term, ‘fixing’ the supermarkets’ economic dominance (however that’s achieved… increased regulation around procurement, windfall taxes, introduction of new competitors etc) won’t do anything to shift the status of food as a commodity and the capitalist backdrop / single financial bottom line against which our producers work. It might even make that reality more normal! (ie, by questioning/focusing on the cost of food, we miss an entirely different conversation around whether people should have to pay for food…and what sort of societal organisation might support such a system).

However, in the same breath, targeting supermarket dominance is a strong candidate for quickly reducing the cost of food and the impacts that has on our most left-behind and their hunger - so is still important to address…

For what it’s worth, this isn’t a pitch to target the supermarkets, but rather to show some of the complexity. While de-commodifying food might be an appealing prospect, there is a huge amount of strategy behind where we target (and who is included) in our efforts for food system change along the way.

Would love to hear any more specific thoughts here. What do people think are the most important dimensions to focus on? What strategies hold most promise for building power? Who should or could we target (and how might we go about it)?

Yeah great point with what monopolys and unfair distribution. I epuld love see permaculture principle fair share implemented through our food system.

I think gradual changes are best way forward. Good intentions over night can have negative impacts like Sri Lanka didn't have enough organic matter to make compost.

So grass roots community building is so important. Educating existing farmers on regenerative agriculture & teaching new farmers, more local food Eg urbsn farming. And more direct farmer to table systems.

And also the policy changes in government to support farmers & communities to be able make these changes. Both grass roots and policy change go hand in hand

A lot to delve into in both of your posts, keen to have that discussion as time allows, but first I'm going add the flip side of that discussion to the pot, as we get started here.

Food is also political in that it is a sphere which we congregate around, where there is the potential to be outside of the condition of consumer and producer, a place of sharing and conviviality,

a place of care and reciprocity. A sphere where we can glance a crack beyond markets with the potential of abundance rather than scarcity.

There is enormous political potential in food, as well as it being a site of terrible historic and current injustice.

We need an eye to the examples of The Diggers & Levelers, The Black Panther breakfast program, Ihumatau, the cooperative movement, commons, Zapatista & Kurdish organising amongst many other examples of other possible worlds, in order to counter the hegemony which upholds these injustices.

I’ve been thinking since our last zoom - at which my exhaustion made for incoherence - that I should try to bust open this ‘politics of food’ space (which received the most votes as a thread of dialogue) by putting a flag in the ground and seeing what might flow from there. I’m conscious I’m one of the loudest in this digital space, but hope here to tease out some interaction that balances that and might lead to what our politics are and whether we share / intersect enough to find some sort of harmony around these political aspects of food? Very conscious that I’m quite likely the outlier… but also that there are clear comrades in the mix.

The New Zealand ‘food movement’ mostly avoids this overtly political dimension, tending to focus on techniques: no till, biointensive, regenerative, syntropic, an explicitly apolitical permaculture; obsessing over and congregating around compost and microbes (all things which we are all rightfully passionate about) - but mostly putting historic, systemic, economic issues quietly to the side. I listen to endless podcasts and read endless articles and books and engage in dialogue in this Regn space, and almost exclusively the way the food system intersects with the political-economic-historic order is missed, the environment is central, but overwhelmingly the call is for market based solutions, ‘conscious consumption’, Green Capitalism and policy nudges as paths to transformation. A liberal surrender to Thatchers TINA - ‘There is no alternative’. I see this as an enclosure of the imagination, or “a collapse of possibility” to quote Adrienne Buller whose book The Value of a Whale I’d like to find time to read. Personally, I prefer Gustavo Esteva’s ‘There are a thousand alternatives’.

For the sake of transparency, I’m keen to back right up to the first email I sent to Michael and Dan as we started the discussion about how we might rekindle this loomio space. So what follows is a copy of that with some thoughts about strategy and change tagged on the end. It’s a bit of a flow of consciousness, so sorry for it being so bloated and continuing to be a bit incoherent…. but it’s intended to be a sort of brain dump to spark dialogue.

Could action / praxis / pedagogy be a more valuable place to congregate around than words in a Charter? Let’s do rather than signal and talk.

Local knowledge. Local action. Local solutions. Networked nationwide. 

Food is a natural place to congregate, sit around the table and share in dialogue and abundance - conviviality.

The Zapatista scream ¡Ya Basta! - Enough!, and talk of One No, Many Yeses.

What is our One no? Opposition to enclosure & commodification? As expressed in colonisation, supremacy & domination, agriBusiness, debt / banks, local & central government entanglement with capital, consolidation of land, transnational companies, chemical & fossil fuel inputs, enclosure of seeds and knowledge, artificial scarcities, extraction from and destruction of the living world. 

And our Many yeses? The pluriverse of Agroecology? Small-scale regenerative (is the word too polluted by pale stale mansplaining?) diverse agricultural landscapes -  with more hands on the land sharing, trading and selling nutrient dense poison free food to local people at fair prices? Practiced in order to promote and contribute towards community building and empowerment, climate adaptation and resilience against our multiple intersecting crisis. To foster social justice and dignity, and local, national and international solidarity?

What would I personally aspire to see?

Explicit acknowledgment of historic and ongoing injustice - Colonisation & class. Supremacy & Domination. Exploitation & extraction. The world system.

Pluralism. Mutual Aid. Solidarity. Accomplices not allies. Social and economic democracy.

Hope as a verb. 

Fewer transactions, more relations.

Decommodification of our food system. 

Open source / Peer to Peer / Farmer to farmer (both practicing and aspiring) support and knowledge (and where possible material) sharing. -> The Cuban farmer to farmer movement says: Produce while learning, teach while producing, and learn while teaching.

Shared food, time, knowledge, ideas, space, tools, materials, seed. 

Action: Teaching / learning, growing together, and alone but connected, sharing food / time / materials, compost making, organic input production and sharing - as capacity allows. 

Agroecological practice, ways to aspire to grow: moving towards ecological processes, in-situ fertility, biodiversity, soil cover - but always in acknowledgment of social relations and power dynamics.

I would love to build towards a movement that seeks access to fair price rental of land from farmers with large holdings for market gardeners. A version of the Agrarian Commons = land access. 

Also, commoning public land. Community farms in every park.

Some Agroecological definition. I think the work that has already been done in this space is invaluable, and we need to humbly receive the wisdom of those whose analysis comes from the coal face ->

“The core principles of agroecology include recycling nutrients and energy on the farm, rather than introducing external inputs; integrating crops and livestock; diversifying species and genetic resources in agroecosystems over time and space; and focusing on interactions and productivity across the agricultural system, rather than focusing on individual species. Agroecology is highly knowledge-intensive, based on techniques that are not delivered top-down but developed on the basis of farmers’ knowledge and experimentation.”

“principles and practices that enhance the resilience and sustainability of food and farming systems while preserving social integrity… holistic and participatory approaches, and transdisciplinarity that is inclusive of different knowledge systems. As a practice, it is based on sustainable use of local renewable resources, local farmers’ knowledge and priorities, wise use of biodiversity to provide ecosystem services and resilience, and solutions that provide multiple benefits (environmental, economic, social) from local to global. As a movement, it defends smallholders and family farming, farmers and rural communities, food sovereignty, local and short food supply chains, diversity of indigenous seeds and breeds, healthy and quality food. Agroecology acknowledges that the whole is more than the sum of its parts and hence fosters interactions between actors in science, practice and movements, by facilitating knowledge sharing and action.”

Strategy and a theory of change is another important aspect in this political discussion, and where I’m likely out of step with many? There is an understandable tendency in these discussions to jump for solutions which I fear risks vaguardism. Who is going to fund us? Why isn’t the government or council doing this or that? If only we could talk to politicians. If only we could be politicians…. We’ve all watched ‘why isn’t’ and ‘if only’ get us to Cop 27 without a single ounce of progress, I’m not sure we have time to bash our head against that wall anymore?

But Murray Bookchin set forth an explicit plan for running candidates to infiltrate and reengineer local council institutions as a means of creating a democratic and ecological society. Rojava in Kurdistan, (much of its organisation inspired by Bookchin) is testament to the potential of Democratic Confederalism to enable an eco-feminist society - if only Turkey would stop attempting to eradicate it / them. So that could be a potential long term strategy: having people within local institutions who can direct resources toward new and old forms of commoning. It is however worth noting that this was a recent strategy of the ‘Sovereign Sherif’ movement and ‘Voices for freedom’, so it’s not only progressive perspectives pushing that agenda. They also mostly failed.

But if we seek to engage local government or even infiltrate it, we need to have an analysis of what councils and the state currently are, we need to have a coherent analysis of power and articulate and demand what we expect - rather than what we can’t believe they are not. We need to name the paradigm which they exist within and which they facilitate. John Holloway talks about the state’s entanglement with capital. To paraphrase: neither local or central government produce, so they must foster capital and enable perpetual growth so as to acquire the funds they need in order to exist.

I’m a firm believer - and I believe history backs me up - in the concept that politicians are followers and not leaders. They didn’t have a moral epiphany in parliament that led to women getting the vote, or the progress made in the civil rights movement, Ti Tiriti dialogue, the eight hour work day… These were broad moral transformations, slowly built and fought for, and then ratified by government. If peoples objective is to influence policy, I argue we need a cultural shift. Which is slow and hard and sometimes invisible work. “The times are urgent, we must slow down”.

It is vitally important I acknowledge here that many if not most of the people in this space are already doing amazing and inspiring work which is building and shifting culture. And it’s also understandable we reach towards those we perceive to hold power and who do hold resources, to try to enable and amplify our practice and dreams.

But I’d suggest political ratification of ‘food resilience’ or ‘food sovereignty’ is a long way off, we’re still trying to find the beginning of a path to broader cultural change, pulling chairs up to an almost empty table.

So, isn’t there a lot to be said for and celebrated in the slow work of relationship building, of just hanging out a bit and as Tyson Yunkaporta speaks about - yarning? Is there more of that to do yet before we have to define or name or categorise or act? And acting together doesn’t have to mean solving anything.

It can be, to quote John Holloway again at length from his book Crack Capitalism, “beginning to live in a world that does not exist yet, and therefore exists not-yet…

The means is the end…

the production of shared horizons of meaning through an effective process of collective deliberation… walking outwards from there rather than backwards from the goal to be achieved..

Asking we walk.”

Critically, I agree with him that, “the struggle for a different society must create that society through its forms of struggle.. if you can embody the change you struggle for, you have already won - not by fighting, but by becoming”. My friends Charles & Grace's project OpenHomes is a brilliant example of this.

And finally, “the confluence of our dignities is important, but perhaps it should be thought of as a confluence of resonance, of trying to play in the same key -> Discordant harmony.”

Hoping for more voices in a discordant yarning that brings others into that not-yet world.

Ngā mihi,

Aaron

Shee bro, haha that is a big info dump! Lots to process and talk out there but am I understanding you right that you're interested in having a kōrero around theory of change? Perhaps a good topic for the next online call :)

Some thoughts: I'm in full agreement (as - based on our calls so far – I think many others are here) that how we conduct ourselves is just as important as what we advocate for. This is the key 'decolonial' insight I think; that process is in many ways more important than outcome, the how matters as much as the what... which is why I have been so heartened by the collective decision to follow a consensus model and our efforts, however imperfect, to practice that to date. Asking we walk...

Similarly I agree (and again, think many others do) that the political dimension of growing food is under-discussed in NZ, and that the many different actions people are doing provide tangible and sought after pathways into 'living the change' in both environmental and social justice spheres... But at the same time, food is also a place for capital to re-assert its dominance, for example, as big corporates greenwash and appropriate terms like 'regenerative' to gain market advantage while leaving existing structural inequities intact etc etc.. There is also a strong and problematic trend for middle class permaculture/homesteading people 'setting themselves up' without a shred of accountability to historical privilege and the limits that places on others being able to be similarly 'liberated'... Food is (and has long been) a contested territory; a site of struggle for control of land, labour and livelihood. When @Urs Signer described the resistance at Parihaka and how you can still see the confiscation line today – cows on one side and the people on the other, tū tonu / still standing; growing and sharing kūmara, meeting monthly as they have done for hundreds of years – Franz Fanon's words rang in my head: “For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.” The war has never stopped; the stakes are what they have always been - dignity.

However, I guess my main 2c is that food, like everything under capitalism, is a highly contradictory space that contains both options for deepening our status quo and options for breaking it open, often simultaneously. There's no purity, no single solutions. For example, are community gardens a silver bullet for the systematic dismantling of our social security network, providing connection, community and kai (all important and potentially transformative encounters, showing a different way of exisiting from the alienation at supermarkets and WINZ)? Or are community gardens – as some argue – a way to 'outsource' and individualise functions previously carried by the state, further entrenching our society's suicidal direction.... we can't ever accurately say; in some senses they are both; the world is ever-moving. 'Failures' in one space open new opportunities; so too 'successes'. But however you view them the value as I see it lies in coming together, in exploring those differences and seeing where they take us, staying true to the process and values we've raised. Which is, I should add, how I feel about the relationship building happening here, and is also how I read your post... lol so lots to process but lots of fertile overlaps and points of resonance too. Look forward to that call; sounds like it's gunna be a cracker!

Haha, chur Dan, yep big dump sorry. Big subject…

Sounds like I should be clear, in pointing to the broader food discourse I’m not pointing towards any of the discussion we’ve had here to date, rather situating our little group within that context.

So, yep, 100% I’m with you on all of that. And yes, we should talk about our theory of change, but ultimately what I’m getting at is simply seeing and celebrating the value in this phase of relationship building (of which that conversation can be a part) and the growth of the group - it was great to see new faces and hear new stories at the last zoom.

Also I’m just throwing some words around that might contribute to perhaps honing in on our shared values. Situating this where you and Michael and I started for everybody else’s sake, as dialogue rather than document. Perhaps shared values is another thing for us to discuss, here or on a call?

And yes, an acknowledgement of the overlaps that are there in the discussion to date with those who have been engaging. Super heartening as you say. And, as I mentioned above, a celebration of what is already happening at the more radical end of the food space. I’m truly humbled and hold enormous admiration for the stories that have been shared and the doing being done at the grassroots. I’m keen to acknowledge the difference this is already making, and ultimately my interest in this space is how we celebrate and connect those things, and see the value in that connection - how the coming together of our experiences and knowledges and resources might help build momentum, cultural change and hopefully tangible outcomes.

It all puts me to shame to be honest, as at the moment I’m working towards being able to share similar stories, but am mostly on a solo mission as I get set up in a new place.

So here’s to the continuation of this coming together and exploration and wherever it takes us.

Kia ora Aaron,

Yes, talking is important, and yes Gustavo's wisdom is a fav because of those intersections of community, indigeneity and non-violent rebellion that recognise governments cannot be used for social change. The work with Campesina and the resulting definitions of food sovereignty and food collectivisation is worth understanding and considering always.

Most importantly though I think and want to see food sovereignty in Aotearoa led with 2 lenses - tino rangatiratanga and mana motuhake. This means constitutional change and removing the concept of land ownership as a capitalist wealth creation tool. We should not commodify mother nature is the simplest way I have of explaining this. The very idea of selling, buying or owning an ancestor of indigenous people should be offensive to us.

In short, I do not think food sovereignty is a philosophical conversation, I think it is a conversation about honouring Te Tiriti o Waitangi, changing our system of government through constitutional transformation and allyship for these outcomes - because once we shift power we will gain new insights. Food politics is about antiracism and equity.

Very much in agreement with you here.

I should clarify, I'm not proposing that we just sit around having philosophical conversations forever, rather that there might be a bit more robust yarning to do in order to strengthen relationships and find our intersections and gather more people before we rush to solutions. And that we should acknowledge that in doing that in a directly democratic and consensual way we are in the process of being in that not-yet world - we are in action.

But Action is very much the objective and allyship in honoring Ti Tiriti central to any discussion or proposed action around Food Sovereignty. Being pakeha I'm very cautious of pushing that dialogue because of our settler colonial context, so I look forward to hearing Māori perspectives on the concept and how that might look in our context. I'd be grateful to anybody who could facilitate that dialogue.

I see you and I have both named commodification as our 'One no'.....