'Tolerated Cultivation' on the US airbase in Okinawa

You’ll need to click on the photo to see it, but at the end of this dirt road is a barbwire fence, where the Kadena Air Base has been nudged back by farmers growing sweet potato, peppers, tomatoes and a range of plants I couldn’t recognise. Farmers like Shoko Ahagon, the Gandhi of Okinawa, kept cutting away at the fences between them and the best land on the island. And, in the end, they’ve carved out a little land – not nearly enough – on which they farm. These are Okinawa’s ‘tolerated cultivators’.

I write this having heard that the Gill Tract occupation has been called off, and the police called in. In forcing the University of California at Berkeley’s administration to begin a public conversation about the land, the occupation has already begun a long-overdue discussion over what a public university is for. In the Berkeley hills, finding a flat piece of land with great soil is hard enough. Farmland is for farming. But, being far away and unable to plant my share, I joined many activists and writers, corralled by the excellent Christopher Cook, to sign this statement:

As dedicated food writers, authors, activists, and academics, we wish to convey our strong dismay with UC Berkeley’s actions to oust Occupy the Farm at the Gill Tract–and we urge the administration to embrace the community farm that has been created there instead of policing it.

This is public land being stewarded by a land-grant institution. We urge the administration and campus police to drop all charges against the farmers and protesters, and to engage in good-faith negotiations to ensure that the Gill Tract is reserved for community-based agricultural use to be governed as a form of commons in conjunction with the farmers and local community.

The Gill Tract farmers are rooted in the Albany community, and supported by hard-working volunteers. Their vision of using the space to teach children agro-ecology, feed those in need in the community and train future farmers in organic farming is an admirable use of the land and can be realized without affecting the UC negatively. In fact, UC should welcome this stewardship as an instance of community-based education and sustainable land use.

Christopher Cook, Author of Diet for a Dead Planet

Bill McKibben, Author of Eaarth

Frances Moore Lappé, Author of Diet for a Small Planet

Raj Patel, Author of Stuffed and Starved

Miguel Altieri, Professor of Agroecology, UC Berkeley

Y. Armando Nieto, Executive Director, California Food and Justice Coalition

Anna Lappé, Author of Diet for a Hot Planet

Michele Simon, President of Eat Drink Politics, Author of Appetite for Profit

David Bacon, Author of Illegal People

Organic Consumers Association

Eric Holt-Gimenez, Executive Director of Food First, Author of Food Rebellions, Crisis and the Hunger for Justice

Gail Wadsworth, Executive Director of California Institute for Rural Studies

Dave Murphy, Founder / Executive Director, Food Democracy Now!

Pesticide Watch Education Fund

Mark Winne, Author of Closing the Food Gap

Jim & Megan Gerritsen, Owners, Wood Prairie Farm, Bridgewater, Maine

Tom Philpott, Mother Jones writer and Maverick Farms co-founder

Jan Poppendieck, Author of Free for All: Fixing School Food in America

Jason Mark, Co-manager, Alemany Farm and co-author of Building the Green Economy

The Cornucopia Institute, Cornucopia, Wisconsin

Lisa Stokke, Associate Director, Food Democracy Now!

Peter Rosset, Researcher, Center for the Study of Rural Change in Mexico (CECCAM)

Chef Jenny Huston, Founder & Executive Chef at Farm to Table Food Services

Ashley Schaeffer, Rainforest Action Network

Marilyn Borchardt, Food First, Oakland, CA

Judy Wicks, Founder, White Dog Cafe, Philadelphia

Jeff Conant, Author of A Community Guide to Environmental Health

Global Justice Ecology Project, Vermont

Melinda Hemmelgarn, Freelance writer and Food Sleuth Radio host

Tanya Kerssen, Writer and activist

Erin Middleton, California Food and Justice Coalition

Deetje Boler, Every Voice producer

UPDATE:
To take action on Okinawa, visit CloseTheBase.
To take action on Berkeley, visit TakeBackTheTract.

Last year, the US Korea Free Trade Agreement was passed. This year, making the Korea deal look piddly, the Trans Pacific Partnership is expanding. The TPP began in 2006 as a hardcore trade agreement between the most trade-dependent countries around the Pacific: Chile, New Zealand and Singapore. Brunei joined the negotiations near their conclusion, rounding out the ‘Pacific 4′. Their zeal to reduce tariffs, harmonise standards, and prevent subsidies goes far beyond the ambitions of the World Trade Organization. And now six other countries want in: the US, Australia, Japan, Malaysia, Peru, and Vietnam.

In part, the reason that news about trade agreements doesn’t hit front pages is because, er, it’s news about trade agreements. Not the stuff of which editors’ dreams are made. But just because the agreements don’t make the front pages, doesn’t mean that people haven’t heard the news. There have been protests against the TPP across the Asia-Pacific region. And at the protests, people are connecting the dots. Like here in Okinawa, Japan.

Today, I visited a rally commemorating the 40th anniversary of this small Pacific Island being transferred from the US to Japan. Although Japan runs the prefecture, there’s a rather large US base still here. And there were plenty of people ready to make the connection between an oppressive base, and an oppressive trade agreement.

Okina Gaja is a 22 year old representative from JA (Japan Agricultural Cooperatives- the national association of agricultural cooperatives). He doesn’t like the Trans Pacific Partnership because farmers will be hit to the tune of $20 billion in rice alone [ref in Japanese]. What he really wants is some autonomy in setting the agenda of the island on which he lives. The TPP will prevent that. And the US base will too. “I want the US base out of Okinawa because without that, Okinawan economic independence is impossible.”

Okina Gaja, Japan Agriculture representative and opponent of the TPP

If Gaja and the farmers he works with are to win their autonomy, they’ll have to defeat some of Japan’s most powerful interests. At the moment, Japan has signalled that it’s ready to join the negotiations currently underway in Dallas. The country’s export industry is very excited by the TPP, and it’s worth understanding precisely why their enthusiasm has nothing to do with trade tariffs.

Remember that according to the economics textbooks, free trade agreements reduce the tariffs, the border taxes, that countries charge one another, thus making everyone better off. The tax that Japanese cars pay on entering the US is 2.5%. Getting rid of the tariff will do little to address the Japanese car industry’s bigger problem: the exchange rate. The Yen has appreciated against the dollar by 50% in the past five years, which makes Japanese cars that much more expensive in the US. But what the TPP does do is make social protections, the kinds that workers like but bosses would rather snip away, less tenable. It’ll be easier under the TPP for companies to challenge environmental and health safeguards, and financial regulations, among many other protections they’ll be able to shrug. The bone of contention for the US car industry is the thicket of fiddly and difficult domestic regulations that mean most foreign cars are not allowed to be sold here. The TPP will make the economic roads in Japan safer for US companies to sell their SUVs here, thus making the actual roads in Japan more dangerous.

Hirofumi Ochiai is a 43 years old bus driver with the Odakyu company’s Bus Workers Union. He experienced first-hand the force of neoliberal economic policies under the Prime Ministership of Junichiro Koizumi in the early 2000s, when bus subsidies for rural transport networks were cut, and workers’ conditions deteriorated. The result: on the most lucrative inter-city bus routes, fares fell. But crashes went up, and services deteriorated on routes that mattered, but weren’t profitable.

So Ochiai came on the march with his fellow drivers to help join the dots.

Stop the restart of the nuclear plants! Oppose TPP! Stop the increase of consumer tax! Everyone unite!

Ochiai has incredibly articulate analysis. Deregulation, he says, is always organized by the privileged. Workers always lose, and the rich always win. It’s the same with war. Workers become soldiers while the privileged stay where they are. So, in solidarity with the workers inside the US bases on Okinawa, he’s outside asking that they be freed to fight their fights back home in the US, and so that he can fight the same fight here in Japan.

Ochiai asked to know more about the solidarity work going on in the US and elsewhere. So, for his benefit and mine, some links. First, here’s Public Citizen’s TPP action page, on which they’re asking for some of the most egregious intellectual property provisions being discussed at the moment to be shown the light of day. There’s even a petition to stop the TPP. And you can find out more about how to Close the Base, thanks to the good folk at IPS.

Watch this space over the next few days for more from Japan, including more on bases, farming, nuclear power and some of the best food on the planet.

Tom Philpott, skillfully as ever, has sliced through the study, its silences and its implications. Headline: sure, if you look at the narrowest possible metrics, conventional’s better, but the whole point of organic is that you don’t just look at the narrowest possible metric.

As I’ll be arguing in a forthcoming, loooong, article in the Journal of Peasant Studies, the problem here is one we’ve seen in other comparisons between organic and conventional. Organic-industrial isn’t terribly far from industrial conventional. What this study, and others like it ignore are cases that don’t just try to compete on industrial agriculture’s terms, but on completely different ones. Agroecological farming, for instance, is more resilient to climate change, and can outperform conventional agriculture in real-world smallholder settings. In any case, the model of massive fossil-fuel dependent farms based on inefficient, insecure and unsanitary processing and distribution sysetms is flawed from the ground up. Reducing pesticide use at one end of the grinder, while keeping everything else the same, is hardly progress. Headline: A more organic cesspool is still a cesspool.

So what would progress look like? Eric Holt-Gimenez, together with Miguel Altieri, Hans Herren and Stephen Gliessman have ideas, and I’m reposting here the fine words you’ll find at Food First.

We already grow enough food for 10 billion people… and still can’t end hunger

A new a study* from McGill University and the University of Minnesota published in the journal Nature compared organic and conventional yields from 66 studies and over 300 trials. Researchers found that on average, conventional systems out-yielded organic farms by 25%—mostly for grains, and depending on conditions.

Embracing the current conventional wisdom, the authors argue for a combination of conventional and organic farming to meet “the twin challenge of feeding a growing population, with rising demand for meat and high-calorie diets, while simultaneously minimizing its global environmental impacts.”

Unfortunately, neither the study nor the conventional wisdom addresses the real cause of hunger.

Hunger is caused by poverty and inequality, not scarcity. For the past two decades the rate of global food production has increased faster than the rate of global population growth. The world already produces more than 1 ½ times enough food to feed everyone on the planet. That’s enough to feed 10 billion people, the population peak we expect by 2050. But the people making less than $2 a day—most of whom are resource-poor farmers cultivating unviably small plots of land—can’t afford to buy this food.

In reality, the bulk of industrially produced grain crops goes to biofuels and confined animal feedlots rather than food for the 1 billion hungry. The call to double food production by 2050 only applies if we continue to prioritize the growing population of livestock and automobiles over hungry people.

But what about the contentious “yield gap” between conventional and organic farming?

Actually, what this new study does tell us is how much smaller the yield gap is between organic and conventional farming than what critics of organic agriculture have assumed. In fact, for many crops and in many instances, it is minimal. With new advances in seed breeding for organic systems, and with the transition of commercial organic farms to diversified farming systems that have been shown to “overyield”, this yield gap will close even further.

Rodale, the longest-running side-by-side study comparing conventional chemical agriculture with organic methods (now 47 years) found organic yields match conventional in good years and outperform them under drought conditions and environmental distress—a critical property as climate change increasingly serves up extreme weather conditions. Moreover, agroecological practices (basically, farming like a diversified ecosystem) render a higher resistance to extreme climate events which translate into lower vulnerability and higher long-term farm sustainability.

The Nature article examined yields in terms of tons per acre and did not address efficiency ( i.e. yields per units of water or energy) nor environmental externalities (i.e. the environmental costs of production in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, soil erosion, biodiversity loss, etc) and fails to mention that conventional agricultural research enjoyed 60 years of massive private and public sector support for crop genetic improvement, dwarfing funding for organic agriculture by 99 to 1.

The higher performance of conventional over organic methods may hold between what are essentially both mono-cultural commodity farms. This misleading comparison sets organic agriculture as a straw man to be knocked down by its conventional counterpart. While it is rarely acknowledged, half the food in the world is produced by 1.5 billion farmers working small plots for which monocultures of any kind are unsustainable. Non-commercial poly-cultures are better for balancing diets and reducing risk, and can thrive without agrochemicals. Agroecological methods that emphasize rich crop diversity in time and space conserve soils and water and have proven to produce the most rapid, recognizable and sustainable results. In areas in which soils have already been degraded by conventional agriculture’s chemical “packages”, agroecological methods can increase productivity by 100-300%.

This is why the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food released a report advocating for structural reforms and a shift to agroecology (De Schutter 2010). It is why the 400 experts commissioned for the 4-year International Assessment on Agriculture, Science and Knowledge for Development (IAASTD 2008) also concluded that agroecology and locally-based food economies (rather than the global market) where the best strategies for combating poverty and hunger.

Raising productivity for resource-poor farmers is one piece of ending hunger, but how this is done—and whether these farmers can gain access to more land—will make a big difference in combating poverty and ensuring sustainable livelihoods. The conventional methods already employed for decades by poor farmers have a poor track record in this regard.

Can conventional agriculture provide the yields we need to feed 10 billion people by 2050? Given climate change, the answer is an unsustainable “maybe.” The question is, at what social and environmental cost? To end hunger we must end poverty and inequality. For this challenge, agroecological approaches and structural reforms that ensure that resource-poor farmers have the land and resources they need for sustainable livelihoods are the best way forward.

About the authors

Eric Holt-Giménez, PhD, Executive Director, Institute for Food and Development Policy, aka Food First. Eric is the editor of the 2011 book, Food Movements Unite! Strategies to transform our food systems, the author of the 2009 book, Food Rebellions! Crisis and the Hunger for Justice.

Miguel Altieri, PhD, University of California, Berkeley, Professor in MCINS – ESPM Organisms and the Environment. He is an internationally-recognized entomologist studying biological control agro-ecology.

Hans Herren, PhD, President of the Millenium Insititute. Hans is an internationally recognized scientist, was appointed MI’s president in May 2005. Prior to joining MI, he was director-general of the International Center for Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE) in Nairobi, Kenya. He also served as director of the Africa Biological Control Center of International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), in Benin.

Stephen Gliessman, PhD, University of California, Santa Cruz, Professor in Environmental Studies, founder and director of Program in Community and Agroecology (PICA). He is an internationally-recognized Agro-ecologist.

To find out, you could thread through a fairly lengthy and dense academic definition. Or, if you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, you could just visit the newly occupied Gill Tract. Because yesterday, on Earth Day, dozens activists took over a piece of land controlled by the University of California at Berkeley, and dedicated it to food sovereignty. Right now, they’re planting 15,000 seedlings.

Photo Credit: David Id/Indy Bay

The wires are already buzzing with news about the occupation. I’m drawn to it for a number of reasons. First, it’s terrific agricultural land, of which there is a dearth in the East Bay, and activists are busy using it to grow food. Second, the protest is very pointedly a protest about the privatization of the university. The organizers are frustrated not only with the dwindling size of agricultural land, but also at a broken model of public education that requires the university to asset strip itself by selling off its best land, and then to pimp itself out to the private sector to fund public education.

The University has responded by saying that the land isn’t going to be developed, but is being used for agricultural research. Member of Occupy the Farm, Anya Kamenskaya, told me that “We’re not trying to demonize any particular kind of research, but the genomic research being done here is being done everywhere, whereas the kind of sustainable agriculture [for which the plot became famous in the 1960s] isn’t.”

“Most urban areas don’t have an area like this, and with food insecurity so high in the East Bay, this could be a valuable place for tens of thousands of people,” Anya continued. It’d be a return to the idea of a public university that Berkeley seems increasingly to have forgotten. The organizing is, unlike the university, open and radically democratic. The San Jose Mercury News quotes the irrepressible Gopal Dayaneni saying this: “Occupy the Farm is committed to farming; that’s the purpose of it,” he said. “If (police) want to tell us to leave, we’ll keep farming, and they’ll have to make a decision what to do.”

Tucked in there is an idea of freedom and choice that’s central to food sovereignty. The food system is filled with choices made by a handful of powerful people, in smoke filled rooms, over the objections of the majority. What the occupation is doing is making these decisions public.

I asked who’d be receiving the food grown on the occupied land. One organizer, who didn’t want to be identified because her job was with the university, said that who gets the food should be a community decision, answered with words that might be the bumper sticker for food sovereignty: “We thought it was wisest to leave that open”.

_________________________
ACTION ITEM:
The University has shut off the water supply. The occupiers are asking for your support: please call the University Chancellor on 510 642 7464 to ask that the water be turned back on.

Press release below. To find out more, share the news and find out how you can support the Occupation, visit www.takebackthetract.com
_________________________

For Immediate Release
April 22, 2012

Occupy the Farm Activists Reclaim Prime Urban Agricultural Land in SF Bay Area

(Albany, Calif.), April 22, 2012 – Occupy the Farm, a coalition of local residents, farmers, students, researchers, and activists, are planting over 15,000 seedlings at the Gill Tract, the last remaining 10 acres of Class I agricultural soil in the urbanized East Bay area. The Gill Tract is public land administered by the University of California, which plans to sell it to private developers.

For decades, the UC has thwarted attempts by community members to transform the site for urban sustainable agriculture and hands-on education. With deliberate disregard for public interest, University administrators plan to pave over this prime agricultural soil for commercial retail space, a Whole Foods, and a parking lot.

“For ten years people in Albany have tried to turn the Gill Tract into an Urban Farm and a more open space for the community. The people in the Bay Area deserve to use this treasure of land for an urban farm to help secure the future of our children,” explains Jackie Hermes-Fletcher, an Albany resident and public school teacher for 38 years.

Occupy the Farm seeks to address structural problems with health and inequalities in the Bay Area that stem from communities’ lack of access to food and land. Today’s action reclaims the Gill Tract to demonstrate and exercise the peoples’ right to use public space for the public good. This farm will serve as a hub for urban agriculture, a healthy and affordable food source for Bay Area residents and an educational center.

“Every piece of uncontaminated urban land needs to be farmed if we are to reclaim control over how food is grown, where it comes from, and who it goes to,” says Anya Kamenskaya, UC Berkeley alum and educator of urban agriculture. “We can farm underutilized spaces such as these to create alternatives to the corporate control of our food system.”

UC Berkeley has decided to privatize this unique public asset for commercial retail space, and, ironically, a high-end grocery store. This is only the latest in a string of privatization schemes. Over the last several decades, the university has increasingly shifted use of the Gill Tract away from sustainable agriculture and towards biotechnology with funding from corporations such as Novartis and BP.

Frustrated that traditional dialogue has fallen on deaf ears, many of these same local residents, students, and professors have united as Occupy the Farm to Take Back the Gill Tract. This group is working to empower communities to control their own resilient food systems for a stable and just future – a concept and practice known as food sovereignty.

Occupy the Farm is in solidarity with Via Campesina and the Movimiento Sin Tierra (Landless Workers Movement).

The Gill Tract is located at the Berkeley-Albany border, at the intersection of San Pablo Ave and Marin Ave.

Contacts:
Gopal Dayaneni:
510-847-3592 /
gopal.dayaneni@gmail.com

Lesley Haddock: 707-293-3253/lesley.lives@gmail.com
Anya Kamenskaya: 415-812-4793 / anya.kamenskaya@gmail.com

Twitter: @OccupyFarm
Facebook Page: Gill Tract Farm
Website: TakeBacktheTract.com
Email: GillTractFarm [at] riseup.net

http://www.TackBacktheTract.com

LETTER OF SOLIDARITY WITH THE FARMERS MOVEMENT IN HONDURAS

Jakarta, 20-04-2012

On the International Day of Peasant Struggle, April 17th, in Honduras massive land occupations have started by peasants. More than 12 000 hectares in at least six departments that were occupied by about 3000 farm families. The avalanche of criticism against the coordinator of La Via Campesina Central America Rafael Alegría were unexpected and today most media accuse our friend Rafael Alegria to invade private land, jeopardizing the domestic and foreign private investment.

La Via Campesina in solidarity with the farmers movement in Honduras, recalls that in the final declaration of the International Conference Nyeleni against land grabbing a commitment was given to “support the control by people of their natural resources through land occupations , occupations of companies and corporate investors, protests and other actions to mobilize the masses to claim their commons.”

If these families have made the decision to recuperate land with all the risks involved for them, we support them so that they do not continue to live in extreme poverty and can engage in the production of food for thier survival. According to a report of CEPAL/FAO in December , 2011, 68% of the rural population in Honduras lives in poverty.

La Via Campesina calls upon its organizations and other social movements to express their solidarity with peasant families and send letters to the Government of Honduras to approve the proposed comprehensive agrarian reform law that the peasant movement has presented to Congress in October , 2011.

La Via Campesina also requests the government of Honduras to stop promoting the use of public and paramilitary forces to repress peasant families and especially to respect the physical integrity of people who struggle for land. We reject all forms of violence and the criminalization of our struggles and mobilizations in defense of our rights,

Henry Saragih
General Coordinator La Via Campesina

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In his company’s latest report (available in their investor briefcase), he even puts a number on his gratitude for your impending wheat board privatisation.

With the elimination of the Canadian Wheat Board’s monopoly, Viterra will have the opportunity to buy and sell western Canadian wheat, barley and durum for the first time in 2012. We were the first to offer bids to western Canadian wheat, durum and barley growers, and we anticipate that the industry, growers, customers and the economy will see significant benefits as further transportation and logistical efficiencies are realized in this positive new regulatory environment. The changes to the Canadian Wheat Board will also have a positive effect on Viterra, enabling us to achieve a projected increase in annual EBITDA of $40 million – $50 million per annum in 2014 and beyond.

If you’ve concerns about these profits staying in Canada, rest assured. Viterra was bought last week by Switzerland based Glencore, the world’s largest diversified commodities trader, for $6.2 billion. Expect thanks from them soon!

And find out what to do about it from the NFU and Sustain Ontario.