The seeds of agroecology

The increasingly globalised industrial food system that transnational agribusiness promotes is not feeding the world  and is responsible for some of the planet’s most pressing political, social and environmental crises. Localised, traditional methods of food production have given way to globalised supply chains dominated by transnational companies policies and actions which have resulted in the destruction of habitat and livelihoods and the imposition of corporate-controlled, chemical-intensive (monocrop) agriculture that weds farmers and regions          to a wholly exploitative system of neoliberal globalisation.

Whether it involves the        undermining or destruction   of what were once largely self-sufficient agrarian economies in Africa or the devastating impacts of soy cultivation in       Argentina       or palm oil production          in Indonesia, transnational agribusiness and global capitalism cannot be greenwashed.

In their rush to readily promote neoliberal dogma and corporate PR, many take as given that profit-driven transnational corporations have a legitimate claim to be custodians of natural assets.  There is the premise that water, seeds, land, food, soil and agriculture should be handed over to powerful,       corrupt          transnational corporations to milk for profit, under          the pretence  these entities are somehow serving the needs of humanity.

These natural assets (‘the commons’) belong to everyone and any stewardship should be carried out in the common interest by local people assisted by public institutions and governments acting on their behalf, not by private transnational corporations driven by self-interest and the maximization of profit by any means possible.

The Guardian columnist       George Monbiot notes         the vast wealth the economic elite has accumulated at our expense through its seizure of the commons. A commons is managed not for the accumulation of capital or profit but for the steady production of prosperity or wellbeing of a particular group, who might live in or beside it or who created and sustain it.

Unlike state spending, according to Monbiot, a commons obliges people to work together, to sustain their resources and decide how the income should be used. It gives community life a clear focus and depends on democracy in its truest form. However, the commons have been attacked by both state power and capitalism for centuries. In effect, resources that no one invented or created, or that a large number of people created together, are stolen by those who see an opportunity for profit.

We need only look at how    Cargill captured        the edible oils processing sector in India and in the process put many thousands of village-based workers out of work.                 

As Monbiot says, the outcome is a rentier economy: those who capture essential resources seek to commodify them and force everyone else to pay for access.

For thousands of years farmers experimented with different plant and animal specimens acquired through migration, trading networks, gift exchanges or accidental diffusion. By learning and doing, trial and error, new knowledge was blended with older, traditional knowledge systems. The farmer possesses acute observation, good memory for detail and transmission through teaching and story-telling. The same farmers whose seeds and knowledge were stolen by corporations         to be bred for proprietary chemical-dependent hybrids, now to be genetically engineered.

What really irks the corporate vultures which fuel the current industrial model of agriculture is that critics are offering genuine alternatives. They advocate a shift towards more organic-based systems of agriculture, which includes providing support to small farms and an agroecology movement that is empowering to people politically, socially and economically.

This article has been excerpted from: ‘The Seeds of Agroecology and Common Ownership’.

Courtesy: Counterpunch.org