How to grow our way out of economic crisis

10 per cent of Europeans are unemployed. To solve the crisis we need to grow… food. The idea of becoming a farmer may not seem very appealing. Isn’t the countryside scattered with producers struggling to eke out a living from supermarket prices that barely cover the cost of production? Driving tractors across vast monotonous landscapes or herding cows into industrial milking sheds? Don’t young people up sticks and head for the city, part of a great wave of migration around the world? 

Oil has taken their jobs. Diverse farming, which needs many skilled workers, has largely given way (in the global north) to giant monocultures powered by fossil fuel-hungry machinery and fertilisers. But with climate change almost at a tipping point and so many millions out of work, it’s clear that this is unsustainable.

Subsidising land grabs in Europe 

At a gathering of activists and food producers from across Europe yesterday, I heard about how some growers and community initiatives are realising an alternative, based on the principles of food sovereignty. But small-scale farmers said they face an uneven policy field. 80 per cent of the payments under Europe’s common agriculture policy (CAP) go to just 20 per cent of farmers. Smallholders are entitled to a maximum of just 1000 euros – little better than flowers on their grave. By rewarding large landowners, the system is encouraging land grabs here in Europe, warned one grower. The policy is now being rewritten. In the future, support should go to people actually working the land and reward farming that creates jobs, they argued.

Long maligned for subsidising European exports that end up being dumped on developing countries and undermining farmers there, promoters of the new CAP say it will be development-friendly and sustainable. But that’s cynical claptrap, according to yesterday’s participants. With policymakers still fixated on agriculture achieving international “competitiveness”, how can we work to higher social and environmental standards? Policymakers need to choose between a positive vision for our food system and a race to the bottom.

Growing resistance

We heard inspiring stories of people challenging this food system across Europe, building momentum since the European Food Sovereignty Forum in Austria last August. In France, last weekend 100 farmers descended on an Autan supermarket to dismantle its ‘My farm’-branded section that was “stealing our identity”. In Georgia, activists are promoting a youth movement to slow the exodus from the countryside and training women farmers in methods that don’t require toxic chemicals. A hazelnut farmer from Turkey discussed campaigns against the privatisation of water for hydroelectricity and seeds by GM companies. And all of these people are growing food ecologically, prioritising local markets and nourishing knowledge rooted in the place they work. 

And the banks?

No discussion of the crisis could exclude them. And yesterday, European officials and activists found common ground in one place, at least: on the need to tackle financial speculation on food prices. Jyoti Fernandes, who works on a small, organic cooperative farm in Dorset, told us how farmers there saw the cost of wheat to feed pigs and chickens double last year – pushing many farmers out of business. Banks’ injections of huge sums of money into food markets are critical in creating these sorts of drastic price spikes. “Speculation on food is a moral hazard,” said Austrian farmer Tomas. And European commission official Pierluigi Londero reported that new research produced with the World Bank found speculation could be adding up to a third to food prices. The solution, according to Italian food sovereignty activist Luca Colombo, is not only market regulation – but to “remoralise” our food system so that we value food and producers, and not as commodities or competitors.

Read more about the movement for food sovereignty around the world.