Reconnecting Agroecology and the Labour Movement
A day of discussion and political education organised by the Food and Work Network, with support from the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network (EHCN) at Birkbeck, University of London was held earlier in May at Organiclea Workers’ Cooperative in Chingford.
Rowan Lubbock reports on how the tensions between industrial and agroecological food production models play out in political debates between degrowth and productivist accounts of socialism.
Workers are also food consumers. As wages stagnate and price inflation continues, people will opt for affordable food, often at the expense of human health and environmental sustainability. In other words, people often take what they can get.
During a sun-drenched Saturday afternoon, members of the Food & Work Network convened a small but lively group to discuss potential pathways for creating stronger links between agroecology and the diverse worlds of work across the contemporary food chain.
We were generously hosted by the Organiclea cooperative, a community food project based in the Lea Valley, North-East London. As our guide around the coop pointed out, Organiclea prioritises local consumers, creating short food chains geared towards sustainable production and low-carbon distribution to households and restaurants.
What coops like Organiclea embody is a desire to re-connect: human labour with the means of production and distribution, food production with natural eco-systems, and producers with consumers.
This set the scene for our day’s conversation – on how the modern food system became riddled with fissures and separations, and how agroecology may (or may not) enable ordinary people reconnect with eco-systems, and each other.
What is “Agroecology”?
Despite being at the centre of peasant and farmer movements around the world, the idea and practice of “agroecology” is difficult to pin down. What did agroecology mean to us? We found many points of convergence as we went round our table, particularly on farmer-to-farmer knowledge exchange, small-scale production, and environmentally sustainable farming. But agroecology can also be thought of as a political force in its own right, with peasant movements galvanised through shared values of sustainable production, cooperative forms of ownership and organisation, as well as collective struggles against agribusiness and the state.
Reconnecting Labour and Ecology
The case of India formed a large part of our conversation, offering a condensed example of all these aspects of agroecology. The agricultural politics of India is inseparable from the legacies of the “Green Revolution”, built on new seed varieties created by Western scientific networks. In the 1960s, India was a key site of disseminating Mexican wheat varieties that favoured large-scale landowners making use of extensive irrigation networks and chemical fertilizers. While national food production soared (albeit within a small range of foods), small farms struggled to survive, resulting in further concentration in land ownership and the further industrialisation of the countryside.
Civil society organisations across India have actively pushed for social policy aimed at redressing India’s food insecurity. These collective mobilisations coalesced into the Right to Food Campaign in 2001, largely focused on legal and constitutional reforms that more fully reflect peoples’ rights to regular access to adequate food, culminating in the passing of the National Food Security Act (NFSA) in 2013.
Yet new legislation has been steadily diluted from its original intention, particularly the limited reach of food security networks, covering only 40% of the country and targeted to groups at very low ‘poverty levels’. The government has also replaced public distribution with cash transfer programmes, making average consumers more dependent on the market, and potentially less food secure. Underlying all of this is the increasing commercialisation of agriculture that diverts precious land to export crops (soya, cotton, fruits, vegetables and flowers) and animal feed, while locking peasants out of their traditional access to seeds – all in the service of agribusiness profits.
The agroecological “zero-budget natural farming” (ZBNF) practice in Andhra Pradesh India has gained international attention for its response to both climate-induced ecological change as well as reducing input costs. By substituting organic inputs for synthetic fertilisers, ZBNF offers economic and ecologically sustainable alternatives without sacrificing yields. However, a recent study draws attention to the gender and caste dynamics and how agroecology movements, and in particular the ZBF project, can deepen dispossession and inequality.
In a recent blog the Food Sovereignty Alliance, one part of a much larger network of social movements seeking to resist the predations of neoliberal food systems, offer a critical political perspective around the food system, food sovereignty, and agroecology. As one activist puts it, “Food is key to our existence. When we talk about food, it is not just about what we buy, but it is about sovereign control over our land, resources, forest and water.
The terrain of Indian agriculture paints a rich portrait of separation, resistance, and reconnection. But lingering questions remain: how to scale up (and roll out) agroecology? How do we examine agroecology processes, such as zero-budget natural farming, from a critical political perspective that is cognisant of gender and caste oppression? What are the gendered implications of agroecology, particularly around women’s access to land rights and other forms of recognition, especially within the ZBF model? And how can peasants/indigenous groups forge united movements in the face of various divisions around class, caste and gender?
As our conversation continued, we found a fresh perspective on these question from another example of agrarian reform in the Global South, though one that offers some surprising lessons for countries like the UK.
Reconnecting People with Land
Perhaps the one thing the everyone knows about Venezuela is its oil wealth. The country has some of the largest proven reserves in the world, and during the early 21st century, when the world economy witnessed a huge spike in oil prices, Venezuela’s subterranean riches helped the left-wing government of Hugo Chávez come through on his promise to help the poor by expanding infrastructures, public goods, and other social policies.
Yet the legacy of oil in Venezuela over the past century led directly to the decline of its agriculture. Like all Latin American states, Venezuela built itself on the back of a number of select crops, primarily coffee. But as soon as the country struck oil, both people and capital left the countryside in droves. Over the course of the century, Venezuela became one of the most urbanised countries in Latin America, with few people remaining on the land. Much like England during the industrial revolution, Venezuela had to import most of its food.
As a means of trying to undo the last century of uneven development, particularly the problem of hyper-urbanisation and the underproduction of food, Chávez embarked on an ambitious policy of bringing people back to the land, as well as promoting the principles of agroecology and indigenous/traditional practices known as el konuco. Yet despite the many benefits of agroecology – for both farmers and eco-systems – its low-input techniques require very high inputs of labour. In the absence chemicals and machines, hands and tools take centre stage.
In order to come through on this policy of increased food production, cooperative farming, and agroecology, the Venezuelan government made us of generous incentives to urbanites as a means of bringing workers back to the land. Through the use of low-interest credit, access to newly recuperated land, and a host of farming equipment, the government’s vuelta al campo (back to the countryside) policy aimed to redress the substantial disconnect between people and land.
But the policy ran into serious difficulties, not least due to the fact that farming is not just a hobby that one can pick up; it’s an entire way of life – a technique, a culture, and a science. The few notable successes of the policy were only possible because there was sufficient instruction from already established farmers, passing on their knowledge of ecosystems and soil fertility to newcomers.
Even if new farming cooperatives had sufficient guidance, it was still a difficult adjustment to make. In the end, many of the new farms were simply stripped of their assets, with people moving back to the cities with virtual cash in hand. For many, it made more sense to make a quick buck than it did to turn themselves into successful farmers, which took considerably longer periods of time and patience. In combination with a series of other contradictions, including inflation, economic mismanagement and a devastating US sanctions regime, Venezuela has witnessed the worst food crisis in its history.
Yet out of this crisis arose a number of grassroots initiatives that aim to reconnect producers with consumers. One example is the grass-roots managed Alpargata Solidaria Market in Caracas, and the Pueblo a Pueblo initiative, both of which create autonomous consumer markets that work more on the level of barter exchange rather than market prices. Those who can afford higher prices are usually happy to do so; those who can’t afford higher prices simply pay what they can.
These initiatives not only provide healthy affordable food for urbanites, but also organises day trips for city-folk to visit the farms from which they buy their food. As these types of autonomous networks from below slowly begin to re-educate people about life on the land, they instil greater appreciation and knowledge about how farmers live and work.
Reconnecting Farmers with Workers
The struggle for an alternative food system in Venezuela was not limited to peasant struggles on the land. Many if not all of the peasants I spoke to during my time there – radical activists who variably sung the praises of agroecology – were equally enthusiastic about the role of industrial processing centres for raw materials like sugar, corn, and rice, for two reasons.
Firstly, industrial processing represents an essential outlet for peasant production. Very few people will buy raw maize, let alone rice. But industrial processors will. Secondly, in Venezuela these spaces of production became battle grounds for the emergence of a new form of participatory economics, in which workers themselves became reconnected to the means of production, through the process of autogestión, or self-management. Peasant activists were therefore positive about these spaces of industrial processing, because of what they represented both economically and politically.
Agroecology and the Labour Movement: A Shared Future?
As we closed out the day, our conversation turned not to the wonders of organic farming, but the current challenges faced by those working across the capitalist food economy. What do workers food want? How do they attempt to achieve it?
Organisations like the Bakers Food and Allied Workers Union (BFAWU), for instance, work towards similar goals to other trade unions in the UK and beyond: better wages, better working conditions, and wider trade union organisation among food workers across the country. Yet the bread and butter (if you’ll excuse the pun) of trade unions often hinges on the health of the company itself. For food producers, like bakeries, this might mean securing cheaper inputs (wheat), at least at a cost-efficient price that may lean towards large-scale wheat producers rather than small-scale organic farmers, given the economies of scale reached with industrial farming.
Yet workers are also food consumers. As wages stagnate and price inflation continues, people will opt for affordable food, often at the expense of human health and environmental sustainability. In other words, people often take what they can get.
As another of our group pointed out, the free school meals initiative in the UK is riven with catering companies making the most out of private finance initiatives, truly the ‘rip-off that keeps on taking’, as some health campaigners put it. A head teacher in Southampton recently called out the UK firm Chartwells for dismal food quality and steadily diminishing portion sizes, likely due to the race for profits rather than adequate food provision.
While this may signify the true cost of cheap food, this may not concern people struggling to make ends meet, or food companies and their employees attempting to stay afloat. How might ordinary people be incentivised to pay more to farmers producing through small-scale agroecological farming? These questions inevitably raise tensions over how we organise diverse forms of work across the food chain – small-scale organic farmers seeking adequate prices, and ordinary people seeking affordable food. As Alex Colás and Jason Edwards put it, meeting this challenge requires ‘union density from farm to fork, as well as generating national institutions like producer and consumer cooperatives that can shadow or even challenge the tight oligopolistic grip of agribusiness and supermarket power.’
The far-removed examples of agroecology and agrarian struggle in India and Venezuela (and their contradictions) offer important lessons for those in the UK seeking food justice and sustainable futures. To meet the challenge of industrial agriculture, we need to scale up agroecology, which ultimately means more people on the land. Making such a transition sustainable over the long run is tricky, but arguably essential. We need adequate social and political infrastructures that connect established farmers and organisations with newcomers seeking to make a living on the land.
To make small-scale farming economically sustainable, we need higher prices for food – full stop. But this doesn’t have to punish ordinary consumers. With higher real wages comes higher purchasing power, some of which will find its way back into farmers’ pockets. The problem is not rural producers versus urban consumers, it’s capital versus workers.
Challenging the power of employers, as well as pushing legislation in the right direction, will require folks across town and country to form new strategic alliances. Agroecology and the traditional labour movement have had little dialogue in the past. But their shared future begins with new conversations on how we reconnect.
