The third agrarian revolution: from production and consumption to relations
The big challenge is not to produce more food but to develop a food system built on a more humble view of the role of humans in nature.
The big challenge is not to produce more food but to develop a food system built on a more humble view of the role of humans in nature.
Agroecological processes, like the ones promoted by this exemplary project, are an essential part of the reconstruction of a local, balanced, fair and sustainable economy, which will keep young people in the region and contribute to a transformation of the countryside where the values of sustainability and food sovereignty prevail over an extractivist tradition that has wreaked havoc in the region for too long.
What roles does spirituality play in food sovereignty struggles? To what extent do spirituality and religion support or impede movement building?
As groups mobilize, organize, and demand genuine participation, this false legitimacy driven by actors like the Gates Foundation begins to crumble.
Time to talk about peasants, who I claim in Chapter 3 of my book A Small Farm Future will soon be returning to tend (or create) a small farm near you. Or may in fact include you or your descendants.
As I see it, the case for a turn to peasant farming today is about trying to meet the challenges of the present, not about trying to recross that unbridgeable and silent river of history.
More than ever, public support for healthy food production and distribution shows itself as a win-win strategy that is indispensable for combining long-standing social and economic challenges, now aggravated by the COVID-19 outbreak.
The lessons of China’s tumultuous history demand attention from those of us who advocate for more localized, land-based economies as part of the solution to global problems.
In ideological terms, these developments eventually resulted in an impressive intellectual and political culture of the high middle ages involving notions of corporate identity and religious transcendence – one that was rigidly inegalitarian, albeit admitting to various critiques of the established hierarchy.
Peasants, fisherfolk, pastoralists, indigenous people and rural workers gathered together once again in Geneva from 15 – 19 May, 2017, to claim their rights and to have them recognised in the human rights law framework through a United Nations declaration. The right to land, to seeds, to food sovereignty, to markets, to fair working conditions and to public policy participation were all at stake as the fourth session of the UN Open-ended intergovernmental working group (OEIWG) addressed the rights of peasants and other people working in rural areas.
In the beginning, there was a Miocene ape – the common ancestor of our genus Homo and our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees and gorillas. It bequeathed to us its descendants, so the primatologists suggest, a tendency towards (particularly male, but also female) status ranking. Do we need to go that far back into our evolutionary past in order to understand the nature of status competition in contemporary societies? Perhaps it’s a sociological heresy to say so, but I think the answer is quite possibly yes.
There can only be one topic for a blog post today, as a great country stands poised to make a momentous decision with potentially global repercussions… I refer, of course, to the Peasants’ Republic of Wessex…