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About this eventJoin us at your local Agroecology Dialogue - part of a three-week AFSA Agroecology Roadshow up the east coast of what is now called Australia!
The Dialogues will:
Provide a place-based opportunity to share farmer-to-farmer and eater-to-eater knowledges to grow the food sovereignty and agroecology movements
Create deep relations between AFSA and local, regional and national organisations, and between those organisations
Build critical political subjects and collectives capable of transforming power relations and promoting structural changes to our food & agriculture systems
Background
Australian farmers produce 93 per cent of Australia’s food, even while exporting over 70 per cent of what is produced. You often hear that Australian agriculture is ‘feeding the world’, yet the reality is that exports are directed not to countries suffering widespread food insecurity, but rather the highest value markets in the Minority World (Global North) and to the middle classes in the Majority World (Global South). What’s more, many of our exports become intensive livestock feed, biofuels, or ingredients in ultra-processed foods, contributing to health crises from the ecosystem to individual levels.
Yet in a deeply neoliberal country where the average farm size is 4,331 hectares, there is a counter-movement underway, as the past decade has seen a rapid growth in the number of small-scale farmers selling direct to market in localised food economies, what AFSA recognises as a new peasantry in solidarity with smallholders around the world. We are witnessing a relatively recent shift from entrepreneurial farming towards peasant farming as small-scale farmers seek greater independence from banks, costly inputs, and commodity markets, marking a shift from the market dependence of the entrepreneur to the collective autonomy of the peasant.
An unwillingness or inability to collectivise too often results in cycles of dependency on so-called gurus and consultants, debt, and a failure to shift intractable policy barriers and the power structures of the status quo.
The Agroecology Roadshow will contribute to the political formation of a cadre of food sovereignty activists to rhizomatically spread the movement from the ground up. Intrinsic to the praxis of food sovereignty and agroecology is a critique of capitalist food systems and a resistance to cooptation given succour by the ‘culture medium’ of social organisation, and the agroecology dialogues are born of that culture medium.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
74 Billabirra Crescent, Nerang, QLD, Australia, Queensland
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