The Solutions are Already Here by Gelderloos Peter;

Author:Gelderloos, Peter;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pluto Press

Food sovereignty is an important practice for ending white supremacy, in the Global North as well as the Global South. Leah Penniman, who participates in the Soul Fire Farm outside Albany, New York, and is the author of Farming While Black, identifies the dispossession of Black farmers and “food apartheid,” a racially distributed lack of access to healthy foods that results in a huge number of deaths due to diabetes, kidney failure, and heart disease, as ongoing features of systemic racism. Whereas “farming is inherently about the future” because of the planning, the long-term perspective involved in planting a tree that won’t bear fruit for several years, many young Black people have a sense that there is no future because “incarceration and untimely death are so ubiquitous.”

Addressing these overlapping concerns, Soul Fire Farm trains farmers of color, practices silvopasture—grazing birds and sheep among fruit trees as a way to maximize carbon sequestration—and donates lots of fresh food to neighborhoods in Albany that are victims of food apartheid. In Penniman’s words: “We use Afro-indigenous and regenerative practices—fancy words that essentially mean we’re trying to farm using the best advice of our ancestors and we’re trying to farm in a way that actually makes the environment better and not worse.”28

Inside and outside of the cities, Indigenous peoples have been at the forefront of the struggle for food sovereignty or food autonomy. In rural areas of North America, this has often centered on struggles for traditional hunting and fishing practices. Opposition to native hunting and fishing often comes from commercial fishers under the pressure of producing for the capitalist market—a practice that has destroyed marine ecosystems around the world—and from reactionary whites threatened by the implication that they live on stolen land.

Native hunting and fishing practices are very much about caring for the ecosystem as an integral part of the territory, rather than as an outside agent. Angela James, a hunter from the Bigstone Cree Nation, explains how: “the moose, the bear, the elk, the muskrat, the fish, all these animals, these beings, they’re our relatives. You’ve got to honour that protocol, honour that connection, that we are part of something bigger than all of us, we aren’t almighty human beings at the top of the food chain, ’cause we’re not.”29

Pastoralism from Barcelona to the Pyrenees, Catalunya

Edu Balsells practices traditional pastoralism in Catalunya. A participant in the autonomous movements, he began to get involved with the world of activist agriculture in 2004 and has since become a principal reference for the use of goats and sheep in forest maintenance and the prevention of catastrophic wildfires. He also participates in the transhumance, a semi-nomadic practice going back to the beginnings of pastoralism, in which the shepherds stay with their flock in the lowlands during the winter, and then migrate to mountain pastures during the summer, allowing for a healthy regeneration of vegetation in both places. The Pyrenees and their various lowlands are one of the few places in the Global North where the transhumance is still practiced.

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