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In a few decades, industrial food systems have destroyed the Earth’s systems, human health and livelihoods as it has directly violated ecological laws and laws of justice. Now we are seeing a global agenda to erase land-based cultures, to destroy real farms, real farmers, real food to create a dystopia of “farming without farmers” and “food without farms” as false totalitarian solutions to climate change. This anti-ecological response is to put the industrial food system on steroids.
It is time to abandon our resource intensive and profit-based economic systems that have created havoc in the world, disrupting the planet’s ecosystems and undermining society’s systems of health, justice, and democracy.
It’s time to Return to Earth. To her ecological laws to ensure food for all, health for all, work for all. Food and Nutrition are the currency of the cycles of life.
Real farmers produce real food, which nourishes the soil, plants, and animals – including humans. Real food is at the heart of the health of the planet, as well as our health and well-being. Real farming has sustained the Earth and her civilisations over millennia.
Food is the great connector in the web of life. Food is a gift from the Earth given to us from the work and labour of women, farmers, farm workers, fisherfolk, pastoralists, gardeners, and mothers.
Let us prepare for a Recovery of our Food Freedom– through Our Bread Our Freedom Campaign – where the health and wellbeing of all peoples and the planet are at the centre.
From the 2nd to the 16th of October 2022 (and beyond…),
we invite you to organize People’s Assemblies, Events, or Actions
for Our Bread, Our Freedom,
wherever you are – in parks, squares, gardens, schools and communities –
to reclaim and reshape our food system,
and take back our Seed, Food, Democracy and Freedom.
Let us celebrate the Earth’s biodiversity, our seeds, our soils, our land, our territories, and all sentient beings, and shape a new Earth Democracy based on Living Seed, Living Soil, healthy communities and living economies of care.
Let us prepare for a Recovery of our Food Freedom– through Our Bread Our Freedom Campaign – where the health and wellbeing of all peoples and the planet are at the centre.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
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Join the Call – Key Dates – Ideas for Action – Initiatives – Other resources
“Our Bread, Our Food, Our Freedom”
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Which Future of Food?
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Food for All, Health for All, Work for All or End of Food, End of Health, End of Work with control over food in the hands of the 1%.
Food and Nutrition are the flow, and currency of the cycles of life. Food is the great connector in the web of life. It connects the soil organisms with the plants, the insects, and the animals.
Food is a gift from the Earth given to us from the work and labour of women, farmers, farm workers, fisherfolk, pastoralists, gardeners, and mothers.
Real farmers produce real food, which nourishes the soil, plants, and animals – including humans. Real farming has sustained the Earth and her civilisations over millennia. The principles of real farming: agroecology, regenerative agriculture, natural, organic farming are based on diversity and care. They maximise photosynthetic biomass for multiple functions and uses by recycling organic matter and working in alignment with the law of return.
As Albert Howard, in his book The Soil and Health: A Study of Organic Agriculture reminds us: “All the great agricultural systems which have survived have made it their business never to deplete the earth of its fertility without at the same time beginning the process of restoration.”
Real food is the right of all beings. To eat is to be alive. To eat real food is to be well and healthy. Real food is at the heart of the health of the planet, as well as our health and well-being.
Industrial food systems based on fossil fuels and chemicals are less than a century old. In a few decades, industrial food systems have destroyed the Earth’s systems, human health and livelihoods as they have directly violated the ecological laws and laws of justice.
Industrial systems are based on:
- Monocultures instead of diversity
- Careless technologies of spraying poisons to kill insects, plants, fungi
- Inefficient use of the blessings of sunlight, reducing photosynthetic biomass, and creating negative productivity with external inputs
- Extracting fossil fuels and soil fertility
- Separation of plants from animals
The anti-ecological industrial food systems have contributed to:
- 50% of the greenhouse gases, by polluting the atmosphere and destabilising the climate system,
- 75% of the desertification and destruction of soil,
- 70% of freshwater use,
- 75% of plant genetic diversity loss in one century
An industrial, globalised, commodity production system with no limits is contributing to ecological destruction of the earth’s living processes and the planet’s health. It has contributed to the emergence of new infectious diseases when forest ecosystems are invaded (such as Ebola, HIV, ZIKA, Monkeypox and so on) as well as the increase of non communicable chronic diseases such as, cancer, diabetes, infertility, and neurodegenerative diseases. The ecological emergencies are the metabolic disorders of the planetary system just like the metabolic disorders that are leading to the public health emergency.
The current price crisis and incoming hunger crisis is also not a symptom of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but a symptom of a system that has gone too far. According to the FAO, the World Bank, and the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES), there is currently no risk of global food supply shortages.
Since food has been reduced to a financial asset and commodity, excess speculation due to food financialization is behind the crisis. Which means steep price increases for the consumer and bigger corporate gains for financial players and big agricultural firms. What is crucially being overlooked by most diagnoses of the current food crisis is how the problem does not lie in a lack of supply, but instead in how the food system is structured around power.
It is time to abandon our resource intensive and profit based economic systems that have created havoc in the world, disrupting the planet’s ecosystems and undermining society’s systems of health, justice, and democracy.
The shift from fossil fuel driven corporate globalisation to localization of our economies has become an ecological and social imperative.
We must put into practice the international consensus on the need to create an alternative to industrial agriculture and the large-scale distribution model. The creation of local ecological economies based on “bread labour” and co-creativity with nature is the only way to sustain the earth and human societies through the rejuvenation of real work.
The ethical, ecological response is to Return to Earth and her ecological laws to ensure food for all, health for all, work for all.
The anti ecological response is to put the industrial food system on steroids. To destroy real farms, real farmers, real food and force hyper industrial monoculture farms, run on robots and AI, to produce raw materials of carbohydrates, proteins and amino acids for lab based industrial fake food systems. This is the dystopia of “farming without farmers” and “food without farms” that the rich polluters who have contributed most to climate change are imposing undemocratically on the world as false totalitarian solutions to climate change.
Industrial food systems are based on separation and specialisation as one dimensional monocultures.
“Never does nature separate the animal and vegetable worlds. This is a mistake she cannot endure, and of all the errors which modern agriculture has committed this abandonment of mixed husbandry has been the most fatal. ” ― Albert Howard, The Soil and Health: A Study of Organic Agriculture
First they created monocultures of plants and animals, separated them from each other, and broke the cycles that create sustainability and permanence. Animals were pushed off the land and put in factory farms, and food grains were diverted from people to factory animals and CAFOs, leading to nitrogen and methane emissions. Now animals are being killed and farmers are being driven off the land.
Reclaiming Seed Freedom and Food Freedom is our ecological and ethical duty to the Earth, to our earth family and humanity.
Just as Nadia El Hage says in her “Call to Action to peasants, herders, indigenous peoples and all eaters caring about good food, Hands-Off Agro-Sylvo-Pastoral Cultures”: “The current food policy environment is led by an implicit global agenda seeking to replace land-based animal production with lab-produced proteins. This trend is backed by a global campaign against livestock production, and organically-grazed animals in particular. In Northern Ireland, an industry-commissioned study calls for a reduction of over one million sheep and cattle to reach net-zero carbon emissions. The New Zealand climate change minister has recently unveiled a plan to tax, from 2025, deer, sheep, goats, and beef burps in order to tackle the country’s sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Public money is committed to tackling climate change by forcing farmers into emission trading schemes that allow exacerbating business-as-usual with more feed additives imports into feedlots, rather than converting industrial livestock systems into regenerative operations.”
There has been a deliberate confusion created between factory farms based on exploitation, and animals on small ecological farms which are an essential part of an integrated system. As a consequence, animals are often seen as the main problem of modern food systems, with many arguing in favour of discarding them. It is crucial to understand the difference between both systems: Whereas small scale farmers integrate animals as vital diversity in a functional agro-ecosystem and do not torture and overpopulate their fields with them, factory farms feature huge numbers crammed in deplorable conditions while emitting GHG emissions and relying on huge public subsidies.
We are seeing how this global agenda to erase land-based cultures, ignores the very crises they have created. Just as is the case with Brucellosis disease spreading through buffalos in Italy, caused by CAFOs, the twisted agenda uses this as a means to push false solutions to climate change and food shortages. The culling of these animals, necessary because of industrial production, is now also destroying the livelihoods of the real small-scale producers of mozzarella. Amid this destruction of real food, and real food culture, Fake Food companies, like German start-up company Formo, received record funding to produce lab ricotta and mozzarella. Allowing them to take advantage of the destruction already caused by the industrial system.
Let us prepare for a Recovery – through Our Bread Our Freedom Campaign – where the health and wellbeing of all peoples and the planet are at the centre of all government and institutional policy, community building and civic action.
“Let us align our creative potential with the higher planetary laws and higher laws of humanity which make life and wellbeing possible for all” —Dr Vandana Shiva
CALL TO ACTION FOR SEED FREEDOM AND FOOD FREEDOM, SEED SOVEREIGNTY AND FOOD SOVEREIGNTY
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- Right to Save and Share the open pollinated seeds that provide us with nourishment and Climate Resilience. No to Patents on Life and Patents on Seed
- Right to health and safety, Food Sovereignty and Food Freedom. Right to Biosafety Regulations that regulate GMOs – old and new. Deregulation violates the democratic rights of citizens and the rights of Mother Earth and the integrity of her species.
- Farmers Rights and Rights of farmers, pastoralists, fisherfolk to livelihoods and to their right to provide society with real, healthy, nourishing food.
- Freedom of all beings from poisons and agrochemicals that are the basis of industrial agriculture. Right to practise diverse systems of farming with nature: agroecology, regenerative farming, organic and natural farming.
- Freedom from fossil fuels and negative energy systems that use 10 times more external energy inputs than they produce.
- Right to food for all and freedom from speculation and monopolies that create price rise and scarcity, stealing food from the poor and vulnerable. Food is a public good and governments have a duty to regulate financial giants and ensure no one goes hungry.
- Freedom to conserve our biodiversity of plants and animals, and participate in our diverse cultures and knowledge systems that regenerate the planet, our life, health and freedom.
- Our Bread, Our Food, is our Freedom. We are co-creators and coproducers with our fellow being who are members of one Earth Family: our animals on farms and pastures, the fish in the waters, the earthworms and mycorrhizal fungi in the soil, the insects that weave the web of life and the food web.
- Kissinger had declared “Food is a Weapon”. In today’s world of fake science and fake economics, patented “fake food” is the new weaponisation of food. It is being imposed through systems of food racism, food facism and food totalitarianism. We will not let this racism destroy the earth, our health, our freedom. We are sowing the seeds of Food Peace, making peace with the Earth and ensuring no one goes hungry, no one is unhealthy because of an unhealthy, disease-creating industrial food system. Food peace is Food Sovereignty, Food Democracy, Food Freedom. Food peace is Food for All, Health for All, Work for All.
LET US HEAR FROM YOU – Let us know of your event and/or actions, ideas and work, send us a photos of gardens or terraces, projects and actions in your community, and connect and exchange with others on action around the globe. Contact form – Email
Unleash your creativity! Hashtags #OurBreadOurFreedom #PoisonFreeFoodFarming
Calendar for Days of Action-2nd October, Gandhi’s birth anniversary to 16th October World Food Day
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2nd October, Day of Satyagraha The Force of Truth, the truth of farming and food -Non violent Civil Disobedience against patents on Seed and Patents on Food, against Food Racism and Food Totalitarianism. Non Cooperation with paradigms, laws and policies that violate the earth, farmers rights and our health.
4th October, Animal Welfare Day: The Day celebrated every year internationally, on the feast day of Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals, to educate humans about how their actions impact animals and create awareness about the protection of animals all over the world. Hands off our Animals. We care for them, we love them, they are part of our Family.
5th October, World Teachers’ Day. Facing an ecological emergency we need to make nature, plants and animals our teachers. Let’s honour farmers as teachers, indigenous people and women as teachers on how to grow food and health for all while regenerating the Earth.
7th October, World Cotton Day. Gandhi Made Cotton the Fibre of Freedom in India by teaching people that making your own cloth is freedom in times of Cotton Imperialism. Today we have the imperialism of GMO Bt Cotton which fails to control pests, uses more pesticides, has trapped farmers in debt and suicide. Let us again make cotton the Fibre of Freedom for the 100 million families who grow cotton and millions who weave cotton into the clothes we wear.
15th October, Rural Women’s Day. Most Farmers of the world are women. Women produce more using less land and resources. Women are the leaders of Seed Freedom and Food Freedom.
16th October World Food Day – Our Bread, Our Freedom
Start a Garden
Cook and Share Food in a Community meal
Save your seeds
Partner with farmers to create Real Food Communities for Food Freedom
IDEAS FOR ACTION
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- Promote and protect biodiversity richness in our forests, our farms and our food to stop the destruction of the earth and the sixth mass extinction.
- Promote local, organic, healthy food through local biodiverse food systems and cultures and economies of care (farmers markets, CSAs biodistricts).
- Practice sustainable agriculture based on integration of diversity of crops, trees and animals.
- Save, grow and reproduce traditional seed varieties to safeguard biodiversity. They need to be saved not as museum pieces in germplasm banks, but in living working seed banks as a basis of a health care system.
- Create poison free zones, communities, farms and food systems.
- Support, regenerate and strengthen communities.
- Create Gardens of Hope, Gardens of Health everywhere – in community gardens, institutions, schools, prisons, hospitals in the cities and countryside.
- Demand that your government stop subsidising industrial agriculture and unhealthy systems that create a burden of disease. Public subsidies should be redirected to systems based on agroecology and biodiversity conservation, which provide health benefits and protect common goods.
- Demand that your government halt subsidies and further investments in the fossil fuels sector, including fossil fuel based agricultural inputs, as real climate action.
- Demand that your local/national government, your municipality stop favouring industrial junk food and unhealthy food systems based on toxic and nutritionally empty commodities.
- Demand that your local/national government, your municipality put an end to monocultures, genetic manipulation of plants and factory farming of animals which are spreading pathogens and antibiotic resistance.
- Demand that your government stop deforestation, which is expanding exponentially through industrial monocultures for corporate interests. Forests are the lungs of the Earth.
- Demand that your government and international bodies introduce policies to assess the costs of damage to health and the environment caused by chemicals and enact the polluter pays principle.
- Demand that your government and international bodies put Health as priority over corporate interests with respect to chemical and pesticide use in food and agriculture. The precautionary principle must be enacted.
Initiatives
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Naples, 15th October: “Our Bread, Our Freedom‘ – From the squares of Campania and Italy for a “world of justice and peace“, with Dr Vandana Shiva in a live broadcast from India coordinated by Infinitimondi in collaboration with Navdanya International. The initiative involved more than 30 stakeholders: from schools, to producers and civil society organisations of the Campania region.
Online, 16 October: People’s Food Summit – Regeneration International, in conjunction with many partners such as the Organic Consumers Association, The Global Alliance for Organic Districts, IFOAM Asia, Navdanya, the International Network of Eco Regions, Savory Hub Africa, Via Organica, AFSA, The League of Organic Municipalities and Cities and BERAS International, held the 2nd People’s Food Summit, a major 24-hour event on World Food day on Oct 16, featuring speakers from every region of our planet. Watch the Conversation with Dr Vandana Shiva
Also read:
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Sowing Hunger, Reaping Profits – A Food Crisis by Design
Manifesto on Economies of Care and Earth Democracy
Plants, Planet & People – The Living Earth and Climate Change
Earth Democracy: Connecting Rights of Mother Earth to Human Rights and the Well-being of All
A story : How Chapati Bread became the symbol of resistance in colonised India under British rule
Chapati is a flat bread made of barley and wheat flour, traditionally baked on a griddle, and is the staple food of India.
The Chapati bread became the first symbol of resistance in 1857 against colonial rule in India some 100 years after the East India Company began to establish its rule by levying taxes in the Northern Territories. The Chapati movement quickly spread throughout India. A messenger would come with a Chapati, deliver it to the village chief, who would prepare a new flat bread and send it on to the next village. No words or written messages were transmitted, thus preventing the resistance movement from being intercepted, and it spread quickly and silently throughout rural India, with direct intent, from village to village and person to person.
Later, in the early 1900s, Gandhi started the Satyagraha movement of non-violent resistance against unjust laws that led to the liberation from colonial rule and India’s independence in 1947.
Download the Ideas for Action Poster
