Land Justice: Re-imagining Land, Food, and the Commons

by Justine M. Williams

Most of this pollution is caused by industrial agriculture: the monocropping of corn and soybeans. The effects are far-reaching: nitrogen pollution from agricultural runoff travels downstream, where it is the primary contributor to the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Industrialized agriculture is toxic, and it is also unsustainable. The fossil fuel use of agriculture (from seed to table) results in up to one quarter of all carbon dioxide emissions, which in turn contribute to global warming.3 It is said that if we were to transition our world to an organic agricultural system, we could sequester one quarter of this carbon. And yet, the USDA wants us, as Native people, to adopt industrial-style agriculture. They want this despite the fact that it is destroying the environment, and that such practices counter what we know to be true: that you cannot treat a plant like a machine—it is a living being. You cannot create a condition where there are more antibiotics served and injected into healthy animals than given to sick humans. These practices will not work out over the long term for any of us living on this land. Indigenous agriculture—based on biodiversity and the use of multiple locally adapted crops—is the real future for agriculture. Already, indigenous food producers and farmers are adapting crops in the face of climate change, utilizing knowledge of seeds selection and cropping systems that have been passed down through the millennia. On a global scale, indigenous fa...

opposition

“You cannot talk about being sovereign if you can’t feed yourself.”

real sovereignty

The struggle over land in our nation begins and ends with recognizing our spiritual relationship with our seeds, our food, the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the earth we walk upon.

what to do

Free labor built on stolen land is what built the wealth of the so-called New World.

americas 5th jump

As protectors, we must protect the planet and all its inhabitants. We are required to stand strong against corporate oligarchy and federal imperialism. This land is contested, but not for long.

what to do

agrarian transition” privatized the rural commons, destroyed

there is a contingent of farmers that are increasingly avoiding the destructive

These injustices have given rise to a food movement promoting agroecology, food justice, food sovereignty, and land justice. Urban gardens have multiplied, as have consumer cooperatives, organic farms, food workers’ unions, organic restaurant chefs, consumer groups, and farmers markets. In the past 20 years agricultural land trusts have bought and preserved 6 million acres of farmland.

alternatives

But a revolution does not just stop pipelines or change production practices and consumer habits. A revolution also transforms power structures. A food revolution would have to reverse the corporate agrarian transition currently bearing down on us.

change power structure

Corporations are investing in “digital agriculture,” in which massive amounts of information about the environment, climate, soil, and cultivars are carefully recorded by satellite, then analyzed and sold to farmers, supposedly to reduce their exposure to climate change and apply inputs with infinitesimal precision. All major corporations in the food chain, from Monsanto, John Deere, and Cargill, to Walmart and Amazon are using these big data information systems.

digital agriculture

Vertical consolidation is also underway. Amazon, in open war with the Walmart model, is planning to sell food through huge supply centers to be delivered by food taxis and drones. Don’t doubt the seriousness of this for agriculture: Amazon today employs more agronomists that the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), the scientific flagship of the Green Revolution.

Amazon plans

All the financial and structural pressure of this multi-trillion dollar sector leads to even larger forms of production. Seeds, inputs, machinery, financing, insurance, and mass information are made to deliver larger and larger batches of uniform products to retailers—the monopolies that are even bigger and more concentrated. To participate in the new food value chains, producers will have to massively refinance. Where will they get the money? The land.

Land commodification

They would buy more if they could, but farmers are not selling. Even in the US—corporate territory par excellence—farmland is largely in the hands of family farmers who resist selling their land. In five years, however, 63 percent of agricultural land will likely be inherited or sold. The question is, “Who will take over”? Corporations or trusts? Banks or family farmers? Right now, the front line of resistance to the financialization of agricultural land in the United States is made up of aging, white family farmers, the producers of genetically modified corn and soybeans who are still stuck on the fertilizer and pesticide treadmill.

who owns the land?

Without a broad convergence between producers, consumers, and related workers—with strategic alliances with other key social movements for climate justice, indigenous rights, immigrants, and other human rights movements—there will not be enough social force to influence the current agrarian transition to corporate-owned mega-farms. Capitalism will proceed to its liking, implementing its destructive forms of production, consumption, hoarding, and speculation.

social force in danger

The original agrarian question dealt with the role of the peasantry in a class struggle in which this same class would have to disappear with the industrial revolution—be it capitalist or socialist. But, peasants, indigenous people, and small farmers refused to disappear.

agrarian question

They live. Badly, perhaps, but they live. With 25 percent of the world’s agricultural land, they produce 70 percent of the food we eat, virtually with little or no government support (GRAIN 2014). The 2.5 billion peasants and small farmers make up a third of the world’s population. If rural communities are displaced, they will be pushed to the city slums. Samir Amin (2011) points out that the global economy would have to grow at a rate of seven percent over 50 years to absorb just a third all this labor. This is impossible. The current agrarian transition—and the American path projected for the rest of the world—not only condemns a third of humanity to dispossession, unemployment, and misery, but most likely means global chaos. We must repopulate the countryside, not empty it. We have to invest to improve the quality of rural life, not just extract its wealth. We must break up and redistribute large plantations and implement agroecology on a small and medium scale in order to restore the environment, cool the planet, and ensure a decent income to rural people. We need to open up farming in the city, instead of paving over farmland. We must advance a transformative agenda of land sovereignty to block the capitalist agrarian transition. For this, we must implement social and structural changes beyond land reform, beyond farmers and beyond the countryside itself. Put simply, we have to change everything. But how can this be achieved if the majority of small farmers are strugg...

what we need to do

Although the conventional wisdom has been to favor and encourage a rural-to-urban migration pattern, the recent deterioration of the large cities of America; the realization that some 75% of our U.S. population is crowded onto less than 2% of the land; the alarming size and density of these megalopolises, the newly discovered interest in environmental factors and in simpler life styles; together with some questioning of the social desirability of permitting the unchecked acquisition of title to the national territory by the corporate giants, have combined to force some discreet questioning of whether continuation of the unchecked human abandonment of the countryside is indeed in the national interest.

rural to urban migration

The evolution of resistance as a cultural practice demands a continued dialogue, readily integrating persistent racial discrimination, intra-community disparities, and on-going political disenfranchisement against the backdrop of the economic reality of the erosion of Black wealth.

what to do? local movements

Afro-ecology: A form of art, movement, practice and process of social and ecological transformation that involves the re-evaluation of our sacred relationships with land, water, air, seeds and food; (re)recognizes humans as co-creators that are an aspect of the planet’s life support systems; values the Afro-Indigenous experience of reality and ways of knowing; cherishes ancestral and communal forms of knowledge, experience and lifeways that began in Africa and continue throughout the Diaspora; and is rooted in the agrarian traditions, legacies and struggles of the Black experience in the Americas. - Black Dirt Farm Collective, Black Dirt Farm, Maryland

Afro-ecology

The wealth of this nation was built, and continues to be constructed on, the backs of our people, and this has left us with deep, inheritable scars. Returning to the land requires that we address emotional and spiritual healing with at least as much intention as we invest in training and material resources. Yonette Fleming, a farmer, healer, and organizer with Hattie Carthan Community Garden, was raised in Guyana by a family and society that cherished sustainable agriculture. When she moved to the US, she was swept up by a corporate culture that demanded that she sacrifice her body and spirit to advance capitalism. Fleming shares, “I learned to be a ‘white male’ and put money above every other interest. I worked for 12-14 hours daily with mandatory overtime. I became grossly overweight” (Fleming 2016). On September 11, 2001 Fleming emerged from the subway on Chamber St., Manhattan and witnessed her office towers fall, and with them, everything inside of her. With dust on her pressed suit and patent leather heels, she walked all the way back to Brooklyn and began to examine how she had lost herself in the money structure and artificial constructs of success. She deconstructed her false life and built it again on integrity and ancestral wisdom. She became a “servant to this planet.” “I came to the earth with an open heart and said ‘teach me, mold me, shape me, inform me with a new intelligence.’”

case study

When I’m talking about leadership, I’m not talking about [how] I need somebody to tell me how to farm. I’m talking about, we have the land but how do we get the power—the economic force to create political change for things to become more favorable for us. So that’s the kind of leadership piece that I see is missing in the movement, or there isn’t enough of in the movement. - Matthew Raiford, Gillard Farms, Brunswick, GA

testimony

Within the agricultural tradition, the intergenerational formation of relationships and the transmission of knowledge and wisdom are critical. This is so, not just for the transmission of technical agricultural knowledge on how to commune with the planet, but also the transmission of knowledge and lessons from seasoned organizers and elders on the radical tradition of Black agrarian organizing for land and power.

what to do

Those of us within the Black agrarian dynamic are at an intergenerational crossroads, for we face both the rapid loss of traditional and ancestral knowledge of aging farmers, landowners, and rural peoples—exacerbated by the dispossession and loss of black-owned land—and the massive disconnection between the generations organizing within the Black agrarian community. For Black folk and people of color, this twofold disjuncture is compounded by institutionalized racism, exploitation, violence, and generational trauma from working the land.

what to do?

“Afro-ecology came to us through our debates and considerations on an agrarian concept and methodology that spoke to our experience as black folk who do not come from farming backgrounds, yet want to be farmers, connect with the land, and use agriculture via agroecology as a tool for social transformation.” The BDFC uses the Afro-ecology methodology to guide their itinerant training process throughout the Chesapeake Bay region.

Afroecology

We really understand our beginning to have a clear starting point back in 2010, when one of our members had the chance to become part of La Vía Campesina, and began to learn about various forms of collective organization, ecological farming, and political training. Since then, members of our collective have travelled around the country and internationally, learning from farmers and movements like the MST (Landless Workers’ Movement), MAB (Movement of Dam Affected Peoples of Brazil), the ANAP (National Association of Small Producers of Cuba), ZIMSOFF (Zimbabwe Small Holder Organic Farmers’ Forum), and SAAFON (Southeastern African American Farmers Organic Network) and its members in Georgia, South Carolina, and St. Croix. These learning exchanges have been invaluable (BDFC 2016).

Grassroot movements

The BDFC believes that through these international and local exchanges, rural peoples, farmers, and organizers can strengthen their mobilizing and farming efforts, while strategically deepening the connections amongst movements. Organized alliances and connections among movements are vitally strategic for our efforts to confront capital, colonialism and all forms of oppression.

GRoots what to do?

the most deadly form of state sanctioned violence is the intentional policy and practice of flooding our communities with processed foods that make us chronically ill, and the systemic practices driving us off the land that nourishes our bodies and our souls. Black, Latino, and Indigenous people are three times as likely as white people to suffer from food insecurity, and have disproportionately high rates of obesity and other diet related illnesses (Yen Liu 2012; Indian Health Service 2015).

Biggest threat

Dennis Derryck coordinates the Corbin Hill Food Project,

Local actions

Chris Newsome is an urban grower, activist, and popular educator in Philadelphia, PA.

Educator role quest for ethnoscape

We grow crops that connect us to African heritage and speak to our experience in the diaspora. Black-eyed peas were our common bean and sorghum was our mother grain, fit for our DNA and also appropriate for the changing climate. We grow the black peanut from South Carolina that the Gullah people cultivate and eat. Newsome has revived and innovated ancestral intercropping strategies, putting together the “three more sisters” of sorghum, sweet potato, and field pea (Bolden-Newsome 2016). Like Newsome, Fleming uplifts Afrocentric pedagogies and farming techniques on her farm. She uses drumming, call and response, storytelling, and Djare (talking stick). Their bread ovens are made of clay and the learning center is built with a thatched roof, like the indigenous people of Guyana. Fleming is also conducting trials on the impact of electromagnetic energy from Giza-style pyramids on seed germination rates and crop growth. “All of those are African centered ways of farming and being,” she says (Fleming 2016).

Alive ethnoscape

So much of the traditions of the folk whom are Indigenous to the Americas or Africa are grounded with deep, profound, and animated spirituality surrounding the relations between land, people, and the cosmos. These cosmovisions are systems of reality that carry images and values for ways of relating to people and land in radically different ways than those suggested by the dominant capitalist society. When asked about what Gullah means, Chef Bill Green of the Gullah Grub Restaurant in St. Helena Island, SC shares his cosmovision: “People that live alongside the salt water. People who drink a lot of salt water, that live with the sun. That basically live off the fat of the land. So I always say—when they ask me about Gullah—love and kindness.”

living ethnoscape

What is the role of land justice in social change? Ultimately, it may be to bring us together on that irreducible terrain of hope from which all other struggles for food, livelihoods, water, and environment emerge: the land.

Role of the land