Alternatives to corporate power: farming and food production

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Farmer, scholar and activist Tammi Jonas talks to Critical Takes about agroecology and smallholder farming, why they're preferable to corporate-dominated industrial agriculture and what change might look like. Including:

• War, farming and corporate dominance in Australia (to 04:02)
• Agroecology versus "food from nowhere" (to 11:42)
• Moving away from Big Agriculture (to 18:31)
• What might change look like? (to 25:55).

Here is a transcript of the interview, lightly edited for length and clarity:

 

Diarmid:

Hello, this is Critical Takes on Corporate power and I'm Diarmid O'Sullivan.

Rising food prices around the world are drawing our attention to the problem that our food supplies are dominated by a small number of giant corporations running a deeply industrial and destructive model of agriculture.

So I'm delighted to be talking to farmer, scholar and activist Tammi Jonas about what the alternatives might be.

Tammi, thanks very much for making time to talk.

 

Tammi Jonas:

Thanks so much for inviting me to be here, Diarmid.

 

Diarmid:

So you are an unusual combination of being both a scholar and a practitioner. So would you like to talk a little bit about what you do?

 

Tammi Jonas:

Yeah, so I think it is unusual to be a farmer and also a scholar. Farmer-activists are more common and scholar -activists are more common, but the putting all three together, not so much.

I came to the farm 15 years ago with my husband. We farm pastured pigs and cattle and we also have a butcher’s shop on the farm. I'm a former vegetarian who's been a butcher now for 15 years.

And we came because we were so concerned about the state of the food system that we thought we should become farmers ourselves, to show that it doesn't have to be the way the industrial system is. And then in a complex cycle of events, I eventually did a PhD to study what I'd been learning for 15 years with the food sovereignty movement and what role the state plays.

So not only what role peasants play and smallholders play in transforming the food system back to something that's more attuned to nature, but also what role the state plays in enabling or inhibiting us in our efforts to grow a healthy food system. Hence, I come back to the scholar part, you know, more recently.

As a leader of the Agroecology and Food Sovereignty Alliance [AFSA} here in so-called Australia as well, I've been one of the leaders for about 14 years and have learned an enormous amount from that work nationally, locally, but also internationally.

You know, we're members of the Via Campesina and the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty, and so I spend a lot of time with peasants and smallholders and fisher folk from all around the world as well as in UN fora, advocating for a policy that might have a better impact on the world.

 

Diarmid:

And you're juggling that with running this pig and cattle farm in Australia?

 

Tammi Jonas:

Yes. That's right.

 

Diarmid:

Okay, let’s start with current events. The war in the Middle East: how is that affecting farming and food where you are?

 

Tammi Jonas:

It really depends on what kind of farmer you ask. You know, Australia's a net exporting country and something like 70 per cent of what we produce here is exported.

So the big exporters are moaning terribly about the impact of loss of fertilizers and the cost of fuel. I think we've been hit one of the hardest: apparently Australia actually imports the most diesel of any country in the world, I just recently learned.

And we're all heavily dependent on diesel, including farms like ours, although smallholders have had an opportunity to transition away from some of those things. You know, we've solarized almost everything on our farm. We run some of our vehicles on waste veggie oil. You can just filter veggie oil from the local cafes, and so reduce your dependence on diesel in those ways.

And we've designed a system actually to not have to drive very much, including we're almost finished building a micro abattoir, so we will no longer have to take animals to slaughter either. Smallholders are doing many of these kind of things to try and reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and therefore reduce its impact on us.

But then you have further down the supply chain problems, or up, I should say. Plastic is going to get more expensive because it's all petrochemicals. So the impact is going to be profound for everybody, but I would say less for those of us in the localized food economies.

But the exporters are doing everything they can to influence the government to subsidize their ability to continue doing what they're doing, which is obviously deeply problematic. The earlier fossil fuel emissions problems of these industrial systems is problematic enough. Now we have imperialist wars that are causing more emissions while they advocate to maintain emitting.

 

Diarmid:

It's an important point, isn't it? That not only is industrial farming deeply entangled with fossil fuels, but like big business generally when things get tough, they expect to be subsidized or to have their risks taken away.

So yeah, it’s quite problematic.

 

Tammi Jonas:

Privatize the profits?

 

Diarmid:

Yeah, exactly. Yes. So let's talk, and this is terrain that I think will be familiar for listeners of Critical Takes, but let's talk briefly about what the problems are with corporate-dominated industrial food systems.

 

Tammi Jonas:

Well, some of them are very obvious whether you know much about food systems or not.

We've seen the shocks in Covid more recently and then now the war and the Ukraine war as well. And the consolidation of ownership and power and control into so few hands and so few global supply chains means we have no resilience as a global food economy for these kinds of impacts, right?

So you see supermarket shelves empty quickly, or you see the price of fuel go up, and then that comes down to the price of food, even if it's still available, very quickly.

And in fact, often when you have a consolidated market like we do in Australia, where we have two retailers who control 70 per cent of food sales in this country … they pass on, the costs to the consumer well before they have actually borne any cost.

Profiteering and disaster capitalism is very big in Australia, so those are obvious to anybody.

But what's less obvious about the problem of corporate ownership of the whole system. Is the decisions that they're making and how they're making them, how they're influencing governments to support their decisions about what they will produce and who they will feed and who they won't feed.

And so you have a net exporting country like Australia that has a sharply rising increase in food insecurity. You have so much food that we send volumes and volumes and volumes overseas, and yet we have something like 25 per cent of the country reporting that they're now experiencing regular food insecurity.

So these are the problems of corporate control because if it was localized food economies, for example in the region I'm in, say it was all small farmers feeding this community the way we are, first of all we wouldn't be impacted by a distant illegal war against Iran in the same way because we wouldn't need those long global supply chains.

But the other thing is we have this accountability when we're in relations with our communities. So you wouldn't just be producing ultra-processed foods and not caring about the health crises that you're contributing to because they're your neighbours.

When corporations control everything, there's no relations, and they don't care that they're killing people from the monocultures in the field to the unhealthy food that ends up on the supermarket shelves.

 

Diarmid:

That sounds like a good moment to talk about agroecology as an alternative model.

What is agroecology? And I think crucially, and you will have heard this question probably a million times, is it an alternative which can provide enough food for the world's population?

Because the big argument of industrial systems is: the world has however many billion people, and they mostly live in cities, they can't grow their own food. We must have systems which are capable of producing enough food for all those people.

What is agroecology? What problems would it solve and can it work at enough scale to substitute for industrial farming globally?

 

Tammi Jonas:

The first part is to point out that we know it can create the world because it already does.

Seventy per cent of the world's food is already produced by smallholders in agroecology-oriented kind of food systems. That’s traditional systems with traditional knowledges. That’s obviously been changing as we see the rise of land grabbing and loss of access to the lands to produce food in these ways. And yet still most of the world's food is produced this way.

I'll give you an example in Australia. The average landholding here is 4,331 hectares. That's a very big property. In China and India, which have more than half the world's population, the  average holding is under two hectares and the majority of their food being produced and sold within those countries is being produced on those very small holdings.

So actually countries like the one that I live in, or the US or Canada or Brazil, the high exporting countries, they are the anomaly in the system. So when they try to tell us that that's who's feeding the world, the fact is it's a lie.

So much of what they produce is meat and grain, right? Well, the grain is largely being grown to feed livestock or to produce so-called biofuels, which are destroying biodiversity everywhere in the world. And the other thing they're producing is … ingredients for ultra-processed foods. They're not food.

They're not actually producing very much food at all and agro-ecology and other small scale systems literally are feeding the world.

That's the first answer. And then that sort of answered your question about what is agroecology. You often call it a science, a set of practices and a social movement, because agroecology without food sovereignty is just technology and food sovereignty without agroecology is just a policy. This is a Raj Patel line.

 

Diarmid:

You make a distinction in some of your writings between food security and food sovereignty, and that's quite an important distinction there in the way that policy makers think about how food is grown and produced and circulated.

 

Tammi Jonas:

That's right. Agroecology is inherently political and advocates for self-determination of local communities and indigenous peoples and peasants. It’s a totally different way of thinking about growing food because it's not just about growing food. It's not just about improving soil health. It's not just about being organic.

It's about people having control of the system and deciding what they want to grow, who they want to feed, and collectively, what are they going to do with the surplus? Are they going to dump it somewhere? Are they going to extract its value to distant shareholders? Agroecology doesn't even countenance those things.

I've written quite a few times that anti-colonialism, anti-patriarchy, anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, these are not like add-ons that we sometimes think about. They're deeply at the core of the agroecology movement. It is a movement of resistance and defiance of the colonial capitalist system that we're living in.

 

Diarmid:

To put a concrete example on it, let's imagine, say your meat farm and one which you run on those principles and one which is run by JBS {a global meat-processing firm]. We had a good article on the site a while back about JBS from Brazil, which has used state subsidies to join the top table of meat processing companies.

In your writings you've talked about JBS in Australia. So how would a farm run on the principles of agroecology be different from say, something that JBS would do?

 

Tammi Jonas:

Well, again, JBS being an ubermensch of capitalist systems, you know, being the largest meat packer in the world. There was a Four Corners [TV] episode on it here, that we were in, called the The Butchers from Brazil , talking about the corruption of how they even gained access to this market.

[JBS] entire logic is profit and extraction, and it's not about place or people. It’s the classic food from nowhere. And in this case, pieces of meat from nowhere. We have no idea where the livestock were raised, how they were raised, what they were fed, or what that did to any ecosystem in which they were in.

If you're eating something that's coming from JBS, you don't usually even know that it's JBS because they have so many subsidiaries and other names. They use these nice names like Primo Small Goods here in Australia that they bought years ago. And that sounds great, right? Who wouldn't wanna eat something like that?

But actually it's not great because the method and logic is extraction, unlike agroecology, a farm like ours where our logic is relations and social reproduction of the farm and the farming community. It’s about maintaining this resource base for future generations. Whereas their logic is extracting the resources until they run out, and then they'll just move somewhere else and destroy the next resource base.

 

Diarmid:

I suppose the really big question then would be how does the world in all its diversity get from here to there?

I was reading some of the things that you written and you were talking about Timor Leste, which is a country that I've been to, and obviously if you compare Timor Leste and Australia, Australia has this expanses of fertile land. It has a rich society and a capacity to transform from one system to another.

Whereas in Timor Leste a lot of people are living, or they were when I was there, just above subsistence level, but the resources to change that are very limited.

So thinking globally across all of that diversity and thinking about the enormous concentrated power of JBS and its equivalents, how would we start to move from here to there? And what does the recent history of Australia and AFSA tell you about how that evolution might happen?

 

Tammi Jonas:

That’s the overarching question you've asked, right? It's the foundation of the food sovereignty movement was back in the 1990s when the World Trade Organization got involved in agriculture and the smallholders of the world said: this is going to go very poorly: we’d better collectivize our efforts to start fighting against it.

It started with fights against free trade agreements, and it's continued to be that as well as other things. And it actually fights for national sovereignty in the face of these free trade agreements, and then has morphed into the sovereignty of communities and local places more than national sovereignty, although right now with the geopolitical turn, we're certainly seeing a return to the food sovereignty movement fighting for national sovereignty again. So things are coming full circle.

The question of how we do it. In Timor Leste it’s really different obviously to here [in Australia] as you say.

What's fascinating to me is when I'm in these meetings with peasants from the South, they have a lot more worked out than we do about how to do it because they haven't been dragged as far down the neoliberal path as we have. And so they don't have to try and recover some memory of how to advocate for their rights and grow food in these ways because they haven't quite had it beaten out of them, they're still doing it.

In Timor Leste, for example, they have one of the most successful school meal programmes emerging there in the last five years because the peasant organization Mokatil actually coordinates the school meals programme with their farmers to get those meals into the schools. They tell the government what they need from them, the government subsidizes it, and then they feed the people in the schools.

It's obviously a much smaller population than in places like Australia, and it has a much more recent history of resistance and revolution to get to where they are. But the fact that they haven't lost those memories means their ability to have the impact is much greater.

They even fight against the problems of the development paradigm and USAID and AusAID bringing in plastic to show them how to farm better with more plastic on the rows of  crops and things. They say, no, we don't want more plastic in the system because they remember you don't have to do that.

So I think the question is actually for the global North countries, these ones that are supposedly the affluent ones. And who are actually politically we’re children in this space because we've not only had decades of [no] socialist economic principles or any kind of study of Marx, you know, the kind of most important economic theorist in the world ever.

That long trajectory of, of thinking about the world differently has been lost from many of our countries, certainly in Australia and the US and Canada, the Anglophone countries for sure. We’ve lost lost decades of knowledge and people building on that knowledge. You can't even talk about socialism or you can't talk or you're a terrorist as opposed to: you want everyone to have the right to eat.

I think that's really changing. You've got some strong voices like Jason Hickel or Raj Patel who are helping us with the narratives to bring back the way of talking about looking after each other in the system. But narrative won't change it. It’s that collective effort.

So what the movement always comes back to is that we have to come together in these spaces like the Nyeleni Global Forum;  we had the third one in Sri Lanka last year. Or we were just at ICCARD, the international conference on agrarian and rural development, and we come together and we strategize together and we decide how and what we're going to advocate to - or with, in the case of some states - but mostly at the states.

Then we come back to our home countries and we continue that work. So for example, we're working on debt right now as a global movement. We're like, okay, let's de-normalize debt and it's the North that particularly thinks debt is normal. In the South they know it's not normal and people are dying for it in both.

 

Diarmid:

There was something very striking you said in one of your papers that - and this is my words – that debt is the enemy of the smallholder farmer, that once you get into debt, you lose control over your ability to choose how you farm and what you farm and so on.

 

Tammi Jonas:

Yeah, and sometimes when we say that, I have to remind myself to tell others that it’s actually happening to the big farmers too. You know, farmer suicides amongst broadacre farmers are real as well, and they're almost always linked to some kind of unpayable debt or the fact that debt gets individualized as though somehow it's a shame that you are in debt when actually it's a system.

It's a structure of oppression that is being designed to [make] profits for some people and keep others in immiseration. So it's not only smallholders; you think about all the mortgage holders across our countries as well. Debt is a crippling tool of capitalism that keeps people from being able to be their full selves, including having time to grow some food, for example.

As simple as a food sovereignty position about being able to grow your own food [might be], the amount that people have to work just to pay their debts makes this a very difficult proposition. The collectivizing effort is also made difficult because people are working too hard to service debts and other kinds of structures of capitalist society, whether it's the fossil fuels or, I mean, there's even consumer culture, but I'm not even talking about that. I'm talking about the day-to-day living expenses.

So for us it's always: collectivize. It's always: come back together, use our brains together and our experiences from across the world and think about what's our next tactic and /r strategy. What are we doing together,and how does that look different whether you're in Timor-Leste or Australia, and they won't be the same in those places, but let's do it in a coordinated fashion.

 

Diarmid:

I was thinking of an interview I did with the Canadian academic Jennifer Clapp where she was talking about digital farming, which of course is another risk.

That was talking more about growing crops but I imagine that it comes in for livestock as well: you end up relying on software which you don't control as the farmer, even up to large scale farmers, and the value from the software is being collected by a company somewhere else which potentially reduces the control that farmers have over how they run their farms.

So looking at Australia: you’ve been a campaigner for something like 10-15 years, you said? What's changed in that time in Australia that might give us an idea of what this change might look like in other Anglophone countries?

 

Tammi Jonas:

 I mean, yes, it's fifteen years, coming up on sixteen and a lot's changed for the organization, but also for the country. A lot's changed and nothing's changed.

We were founded on a platform of activists coming together and saying that this new national food plan, that the government at the time was developing, was just going to serve business-as-usual interests and the big supermarkets and the exporters, were all going to love the new national food plan, so let's get the people together and and coordinate a People's Food Plan.

Here we are sixteen years later and the People's Food Plan has never been more relevant as the government now is approaching a Feeding Australia strategy and they formed a National Food Council. And this time, instead of disguising the corporate interests, they literally just gave them spots on the board.

Instead of needing to walk in with your lobbying lanyard to say “I'm here to meet with the ministers”, they've just given you a key. You actually just get to go straight in and run the place, including, for example, Bega Cheese, which is one of the biggest dairy producers in Australia. It's a three and a half billion dollar family company and they have a spot on the National Food Council as Bega, as the company.  

They’re not even trying to say they come for some particular expertise. It's like they get a say just because they're the biggest dairy guy. It's terrible what's happening here in terms of the overtness. And we see it all around the world. The overtness of the oligarchy and the, and the handing over of power to the elites and they're not disguising it so much anymore.

The good news, on the other hand, is that with all the advocacy that we've done, and some of the NGOs - we're not an NGO, we're a social movement - but some of the others in the space alongside us have visibilised smallholders and visibilised local food economies. We have a thriving community-supported agriculture (CSA) movement in Australia that did not exist fifteen years ago.

So our farm, for example, has seventy-five household members and they ask me constantly “do you know other CSAs that we could join for our vegetables or for fruit?” People want this method of solidarity economy, of being connected to their farmers. We have a huge farmer's market and a movement in this country as well.

So all of those things are trending very positively and the smallholders are much more collectivized and visible. But the overt power kind of abuse tells me that we're still in a very tight spot.

Actually, one of the best wins I can share though is on the micro abattoir front. This has been a passion of ours, trying to get localized facilities again …

 

Diarmid:

… Just so I understand that, because not all readers may follow,  an abattoir is obviously where animals are butchered, and in this case it's that the big abattoirs are expensive or they have restrictive conditions on how many animals they will accept and and so on. Is that right?

 

Tammi Jonas:

Yes. That's exactly right, and we've been losing them steadily. I wrote a report last year that shows the history and loss of abattoirs across this country, but it's a global phenomenon. The likes of JBS are buying up more and more of them, and often they'll then just close those so that they can open up an import market for some of the meat from elsewhere because they own it in all the countries.

Or other times, it's not that they close it, it's that they just aren't interested in providing a service for smallholders. And so in this country, in 2000, they deregulated the dairy industry and didn't provide any kind of price support or controls after that. Since that time, we've lost 67 per cent of the dairy farmers in this country.

The way abattoirs are going is the exact same. If we lose access to all the processing facilities, we will lose all the small-scale livestock growers. And so AFSA has been leading the campaign to change the planning laws and minimally the food safety laws, to be able to have small-scale facilities on farms built by communities, for communities, controlled by communities.

And we've had some very significant wins in legislation in the state that I live in, and we're fighting for that to be rolled out across all the other states and territories [of Australia] so that more people like us can build abattoirs.

That's an amazing change from fifteen years ago in terms of our legitimacy with the governments. They know that we're the peak body for small holders. We come with evidence-based positions and what we want doesn't harm their interests, really. I mean, politicians obviously, they often are following the money. We're not that, but they also have constituents …

 

Diarmid:

You're the votes!

 

Tammi Jonas:

Yeah. They want to be seen to be helping small farmers. It's a much better image than a big JBS factory.

 

Diarmid:

That's a curious thing, isn't it? Of course. Because in terms of image, farming in particular – certainly in the UK - has this immensely sentimentalized image of Farmer Brown and his pigs and so on, yet the reality is this increasingly concentrated, corporatized global industry.

With Big Tech, politicians like to be photographed outside Google's new headquarters or outside a data centre or something because it's kind of modern. But nobody wants to say:  we're allowing this meat-packing company from somewhere else to come and drive all the small Farmer Browns out of business.

So there's a curious kind of tension there between the way that the public thinks about farming and the way that politicians seem to align themselves.

 

Tammi Jonas:

It’s absolutely true. And I do think that's funny: your image of them standing outside JBS going, look, we handed over more control of the food system. You're not going see that. But we're trying to highlight it for them. Even if they don't want that photo, we're trying to get it out there so people can see what's happening.

 

Diarmid:

The question I always try and end with is: do you feel optimistic, based on your own experience, about the way things are going? And if you do, what, what's the basis of your optimism that things can change for the better?

 

Tammi Jonas:

Well, I'm a huge fan of being an active optimist, obviously. I was born an optimist and even when the world has kept presenting reasons why probably it's a misplaced sentiment, I remain actively optimistic because I'm so active in my optimism.

So instead of just rolling over and saying, well, it's all just getting worse all the time, what can I do? Or believing Maggie Thatcher’s TINA, There Is No Alternative. I've never believed that there was no alternative. I've always believed that if people come together, then there are alternatives, and we've seen amazing things in history that we thought would never happen. We saw them overturn slavery. We've seen revolution across the world. So we know that what seems impossible is possible because we have loads of lived examples of it.

So I remain optimistic in spite of just how grim things actually are out there right now. As long as we keep coming together, we're gonna beat the bastards eventually.

 

Diarmid:

That's a very inspiring note on which to end a really informative and thought-provoking interview. So thank you very much for making time to talk.

 

Tammi Jonas:

Thanks so much for having me.

 

 

 

This is the end of the transcript.