Whether its on the ground in Cloughjordan Ecovillage where he volunteers with the community farm, in University College Cork talking to Masters students, or in the policy sphere with ARC, Oliver lives, breathes, eats and drinks the world of agri-food and rural affairs. This two pronged approach keeps the midlander going – building a better world in Ireland and fighting the good fight in Europe. “We need both – to practice food sovereignty on the ground, and to work for better agri-food and rural policies at national and EU levels. That’s why ARC is such a good way to engage, share, mobilise, strategise and make change happen.”
Feeding Ourselves 2024 – Unlocking Local Food Economies
So what’s needed, and what can be done to help embed and amplify agroecological local food provisioning by communities, for communities?
April 10, 2024
Seven things I learned at Feeding Ourselves 2024
Feeding ourselves is a lot of things – it’s a network, it’s an event, it’s movement building – and it’s growing. First with CSAs, then agroecologists, then local food proponents, then those with wider food justice concerns, then environmentalists and ruralists, and now also conventional farmers from the region – in all their way, with their own diversities.
April 4, 2024
Four Takeaways From our Rural Resilience Gathering in North West France
A recent rural resilience gathering in the Loire-Atlantique, France saw farmers, cooks, elected officials, analysts, rural activists, volunteers and others drawn from the local and European agroecology and rural resilience movements, meet to work on the future of the socio-ecological transition.
October 20, 2022
EU Institutions – Productivity Now, Environment Maybe Later
Yet again, now is supposedly not the time to do the very things that would reduce our exposure to destructive inputs. There is a fear that this terrible war in Ukraine will give European business-as-usual forces one more excuse turn the EU Green Deal into that potentially perfect but always elusive pie in the sky.
March 29, 2022
War in Ukraine – Food Fight in the EU
So now that we have the evidence of the risk of excessive reliance on feeds, fertilizers and fossil fuels – what are we going to do to adjust to this reality?
March 21, 2022
More Food less Feed – Agriculture and the War on Ukraine
We now have choices to make regarding (fossil) fuel, fertilizer, feed and food. We can maintain a downward spiral of dependency, still funding war machines and climate catastrophes, or we can, hard as it will be, build real solidarity via our own, deeper iteration of food sovereignty.
March 9, 2022