All over Europe the demands on a different future for agriculture can be heard...

...in the streets with mass mobilizations against the advances of intensification, mechanization and industrialization of farming, and inside government offices with the food and seed sovereignty lobby groups standing together in a common voice behind the Nyèlèni declaration, working to reform the Common Agricultural Policies. There is little legitimacy in using public funds to support agriculture that delivers no social or environmental welfare when they could be used to support the initiatives coming from the grassroots.

Thousands of people have improved access to fresh food grown with minimal inputs, few food miles and little adulteration as a result of the emergence in community food initiatives, self-subsistence experiments and small-scale peri-urban farming.

Essentially the success of these projects shows that another way is possible, that food democracy can be implemented at the bioregional level. We are all the beneficiaries of these systems but much like in democracy people tend to forget that they are the actors as well; that the system is vulnerable without their active participation. The irony of our broken food system is such that 1/3 of production in the North gets wasted while a 1/3 in the South is lost after harvest, and the obesity epidemic unleashed in the North by making processed food cheaper than fresh food means there are more obese people than hungry people on the planet right now. While celebrating the positive news there is a need to look at whether the root causes are being tackled, so that we celebrate incremental change whilst maintaining an overall perspective on systemic change.

Will sustainable family farming be maintained in Europe? Will farmers have fair farm prices? Will the right to food of people in the Global South be improved? Will natural resources be preserved, or increasingly depleted by over-intensive farming? These are some of the questions that the actors want to see answered. Amongst the many environmental lobby groups that are taking on responsibility to react to the onslaught of industrialized control over the food chain, there is nothing quite like the RtF constellation.

Reclaim the Fields is a young European movement for food autonomy made up of a network of self proclaimed peasant farmers working on food growing and land liberation all over Europe in a variety of situations. From self-consumers in urban micro plots to horticultural workers in co-operatives and CSA's, from autonomous collectives of land squatters to traditional farmers in eastern Europe and urban gardens in London, this diverse network is bringing together professional farmers and consumer-producers around the idea of collective re-appropriation of food production.

The term peasant is used in solidarity with agricultural workers the world over who have had their livelihoods and food systems undermined and damaged by agribusiness for decades, and who carry the heritage and knowledge of peasant life that us peasants-in-the-making are aspiring too. We understand that international solidarity creates an enduring link of strength and hope between local practical action and global political struggles and hope we can enrich it further with our strength and perspective.

It was La Via Campesina's desire to have a youth solidarity movement in Europe that sowed the seed for RtF in 2007; after a small incubation period it grew like mycelium, in all directions at once. There are local projects in 11 countries on rented, squatted, rent-free or family owned land, 5 bulletins published in 3 languages, a website and many email lists. Assemblies are held twice a year in a place where land is under threat and peasant farming in need of support; September 2011 in the Carpathian Mountains in Romania where a Canadian company plans to open a gold mine, last February in the Vale di Susa where a high speed train line is pushing through villages and farmland to make way for efficiency. We see these megalomaniac projects as wet dreams of capitalist exploration and we resist them alongside the people that have a different future in mind where constant economic growth prerogatives are obsolete.

Why the impetus to liberate land? The provision of the universal core need of food is locked in access to land that is afflicted with incredible levels of concentration, prohibitive exorbitant prices and mind bogging planning and regulation laws. Land is historically a political issue, from the British enclosures and Scottish clearances to the land grab in Africa following from the food price crisis, unequal distribution and access to land has perpetuated brutal inequality in the world. To oppose land control by the authoritarianism of a few landowners, corporations and policy makers, communities have to reclaim their right to land as common treasury. The RtF culture of determination in pushing for ways to gain access to land to manage under collective stewardship mean appropriation is legitimized as a practical solution, however the need for a political manifesto to guard the progress and advance more terrain in releasing land from speculation interests and the hands of the few is still felt.

Ariana Jordão
GAIA Portugal

Photo: www.sxc.hu