Episode 2 - The global peasant movement: Morgan Ody from La Vía Campesina

'...what we say in La Vía Campesina is globalise struggles, globalise hope, because we do believe that if we struggle, we can have a better life.'

Welcome back to Agroecology Radio Hour, the podcast by the Agroecology & Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA) that brings you conversations about the food sovereignty movement.

In this episode, we interview Morgan Ody, a small scale farmer in Brittany, France, and general coordinator of La Vía Campesina (LVC), the global peasant movement. We explore the international context of the food sovereignty movement, the need for international solidarity from Europe to Palestine, to Africa to Asia, and how AFSA and so-called Australia fit into this global puzzle.

More on La Via Campesina here: https://viacampesina.org/en/

Further, we caught up with AFSA's Focal Point for Farmers, Tammi Jonas, for an update on the national abattoir campaign.

As most of AFSA's work, this podcast is run entirely by volunteers, we are grateful for any contribution to help the production continue: buymeacoffee.com/agroecologyradiohour

Follow AFSA's work and join us at www.afsa.org.au

Agroecology Radio Hour is hosted by Lucy Ridge, member of AFSA National Committee, food writer, former chef, and passionate advocate for local food systems.

Transcript

Morgan: 

…it's really about working with nature, with the animals, with everything. And the collective part of it is also very important. You can never be a peasant alone. In order to be a peasant, to produce food and the other things that you need, you always need to work with others, with your neighbours and the community, but also with your animals, with your land. So it's about collective creation, and never something individualistic. And that's the reason why most peasant rights are collective rights, and not so much individual rights, because it's about doing this together. And for this, in all peasant societies and communities, the values around helping each other and solidarity are very important.

Lucy: 

Welcome to the Australian Agroecology Radio Hour, your monthly podcast that explores the issues of food sovereignty in the Australian landscape. I'm your host, Lucy Ridge, speaking to you from the unceded lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples. Today's episode takes us on a deep dive into the global context of the food sovereignty movement, from the formation of La Vía Campesina, LVC, the need for international solidarity, and how AFSA fits into that global puzzle. Our guest today is Morgan Odi, a small-scale farmer in Brittany, France. She's a member of the Peasants Confederation, which is a French peasant organization, and the general coordinator of La Vía Campesina, the global Peasant Movement.

Welcome Morgan Odi. You've been the general coordinator for several years now at La Via Campesina. I wondered, can you give us a brief introduction to what LVC is and the factors that led to its creation and where it's heading now? 

Morgan: 

Hello. So indeed, I'm a farmer myself and I am the general coordinator for La Via Campesina at the international level. La Via Campesina is the global peasant movement. La Via Campesina gathers peasants organizations, organizations of small-scale farmers, of farm workers, of rural women, of rural youth, from all over the world. There are 180 organizations which are members of La Via Campesina. And all in all we gather around 200 million people all around the world and we are organized in 10 regions. So from Southeast Asia, to Africa, to Europe, to Northern America, and also in the Middle East and, and often Africa. We have members [in the] organization [from] all over the world. 

La Campesina was created in the early nineties, very much against economic globalisation. It was very much against the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the policies that they were imposing on rural areas — to push [the] production towards export-oriented production instead of supporting small-scale farmers who were producing the food.

And so there was this idea in the 90s that in order to achieve food security, you needed to produce food as cheap[ly] as possible. And for that, you needed to get the comparative advantages to produce the food where it was the cheapest and to push the agricultural prices really, really down.

But what we said in the 90s is that it would never work, because actually hunger is a question of poverty. 

It's because we are poor that we are hungry. And already in the 90s, and still today, the poorest people in the world are the rural workers. They are the farm workers. They are the peasants. And for these reasons, if you push the peasants to be even more poor by pushing down the actual prices, you don't solve the issue. You make it worse. And this is what happened. Actually, the level of hunger in the world is not decreasing, it's increasing again. And it's because of poverty, because of the wars, and because of the climate crisis. So economic globalization makes this worse, it doesn't make it any better. And these are the beginnings of La Via Campesina.

Lucy:

I wondered if you could share how you came to this movement and what your background is? 

Morgan: 

I grew up on a small dairy farm in the west of France, and my father was already in the peasant union in France. So it's really part of my personality and history.

Then I went to study. I had a first job, but I was always interested in internationalism. I travelled to Indonesia, I spent a year there, and I met people who were part of the Indonesian peasant movement, which is a really very interesting movement. And so after a while, I thought, okay, this is what I should do. So I decided to become a small-scale farmer myself. I produce vegetables; I have a farm of 1.3 hectares. I sell to a local market and to an association of consumers.

For me, it was very natural to be part of the peasant union, because I see [being] a small-scale farmer, producing food, as a way to change the world that is accessible to me. But at the same time, I know that it's not enough. I mean, I know that just by producing organic vegetables, I will not change the world. So I need to do that. 

But at the same time, I need to be part of a global movement that has the capacity to make a difference, in terms of challenging the World Trade Organization, in terms of pushing for agrarian reforms all over the world, in terms of pushing for ecology, in terms of getting a UN declaration for peasant rights. These kinds of things we can achieve only if we have big movements all over the world. So that's the reason why I'm trying to do both. And I think that's also the reason why so many young people are joining the peasant organisations, because it's very concrete, you know, daily life. We are doing good things that make sense. But also we are part of a big movement that can make big changes happen. Yeah. 

Lucy: 

And it's so interesting that you've spoken about people all over the world, and young people, and the importance of women in rural areas and the work that they do. So La Via Campesina is a really diverse movement. Why is diversity so important in movement building, do you think? 

Morgan: 

Yeah, we say it's a unity in diversity. Well, first, because the world is diverse. Between peasants in France, pastoralist people in Mali, indigenous people in Peru, and small-scale farmers in India, we are very diverse. But at the same time, there are so many things unifying us. Everybody needs to eat. The principles for how we grow food all over the world are the same, we need water, we need air, we need land. So I think it really gives a very nice image of the fact that, as humans all over the world, we are all equals. But at the same time, this can encompass a huge diversity, of cultures, of ways of singing, of ways of cooking food, and that is beautiful. And we want to keep that great diversity which makes the world beautiful. 

Lucy: 

Absolutely. We wanted to ask you a little bit about the use of the word peasant. Because in the international space, the word peasant is used quite widely. As you know, indeed, La Vie Campesina is ‘the Way of the Peasant’, and you spoke earlier about the Peasants Union in France. But there's been a little bit of pushback, we found, in Australia with people being a bit hesitant to call themselves peasants or not really understanding why it was important to do that. So Morgan, I wondered if you could give us a definition of peasant, please. 

Morgan: 

A peasant is someone who takes care of the land and works with the land, with the water, with the animals, to produce what the family and community needs to make a living. So this is food, but also very often some material for accommodation or for other needs that we have. So it's about working with nature to produce what we need for [our] livelihood.

And it's really about small scale, rather than, you know, broad-acre commodity farming. But it's very diverse. If you are in a very arid area, it can be about pastoralism, where people travel through huge areas to feed their animals. And in places with a quarter of a hectare of rice fields, for example, you can already produce a lot. 

So with peasants, you cannot just say it's [anyone farming] below 10 hectares. No, that's not possible. But it's really about working with nature, with the animals, with everything. And the collective part of it is also very important. You can never be a peasant alone. In order to be a peasant, to produce food and the other things that you need, you always need to work with others, with your neighbours and the community, but also with your animals, with your land. So it's about collective creation, and never something individualistic. And that's the reason why most peasant rights are collective rights, and not so much individual rights, because it's about doing this together. And for this, in all peasant societies and communities, the values around helping each other and solidarity are very important.

Lucy:

I wondered if you had some thoughts about why it's important for farmers to self identify as peasants and why that specific language is important. 

Morgan: 

Well, it's political to call ourselves peasants, and I can talk about my own organisation. My organisation is called the Peasant Confederation. So we use the term peasant, and it was a political decision to do so. 

In the 80s, when they created the organisation, the normal term was also "farmer," or in French, "agriculteur." And even the administration was pushing for another terminology, around "agricultural exploitation," which is, like, extractivism. And what we said at that moment is that we are not an extractivist industry. We are something else, which has to do with taking care of the land, taking care of the territories, taking care of our neighbours, of the animals, and that is what peasants are about. So for us, it was a political move to call ourselves peasants and a peasant union.

In the beginning, it was not so easy. But with the years, now even the Minister of Agriculture will say, "Oh, yeah, the peasants think this or think that." So finally it comes into the general language, and language is always political. And I think that we should fight for language. We should fight for our words.

Because there is a will to turn everything into technicality, into something very cold, that does not take into account the relation of care, the love that we have for each other, and that makes it as if this does not exist. But this is the key. The fertility of the land, it's not only about physics. It's also about the kind of relation which is about energy, and which we understand very little about. And I think that as peasants, just as indigenous people, we do understand that it's not only about physics, that there is life, and life is about something more than physics.

So for us, it was important. And we know that in English-speaking countries, in the UK or in Ireland, they have the same kinds of questions, also because it relates to old-time peasantry.

But this is also something which we believe is beautiful. This year in Europe, we are commemorating 500 years since the German Peasant War, which took place in 1525. That was one of the main people's uprisings in Europe, at the moment when capitalism was being created, at the moment when Europe had just started to colonise the Americas. And in the face of that, European peasants staged a huge uprising.

This is very little known, but it's part of our history. And if you look at their demands at that moment, because it was also the beginning of the printing industry, some peasants were starting to be able to write and read. So we have their demands written down, and this is a kind of first human rights declaration. And what they were calling for, they were calling for freedom, they were calling for equality.

So I think that as La Via Campesina, we are still rooted in these movements, demanding equality, demanding freedom, demanding access to the commons. All those values are still the same, and we are still fighting for the same things. For this reason as well, I find it very inspiring to call ourselves peasants, just as peasants were calling themselves peasants 500 years ago.

Lucy: 

Wow, that's so interesting. I think that's a part of European history that, yeah, you're right, isn't very well known. So it's so important to be able to root ourselves in that history and take inspiration from them.

You mentioned earlier the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas, which we call UNDROP. And this was a really important declaration that La Via Campesina had a lot to do with. So I wondered if you could talk us through a little bit about how you made that happen as an organisation.

Morgan:

So it really started with the Indonesian peasant organisation, because they were facing huge human rights violations, very much linked to agrarian conflicts. So big companies would arrive on the territories, they would push away the peasants to take the land, killing people or burning [their] houses. And so after the dictatorship of Suharto, the peasant movement really had a blooming time, and peasants could go back on their land [and] claim their land again. But there were still many conflicts. And so for the organisation in Indonesia, it was really important to say that as peasants, we are human beings, we have human rights. And so they said that it's just like [with] women's rights. We are part of humanity. 

So it's part of human rights, but because we face specific discriminations, we do need a UN declaration to recognise our rights. And this is the same for peasants. Actually, all the rights which are in the Peasants Rights Declaration are human rights. They are also recognised in the Universal [Declaration of] Human Rights. But we need a specific declaration to make it clear that [for] us peasants, the right to land, the right to water, the right to political participation, the right to move from one place to another, the right to live in a safe territory, or in a territory which is not contaminated with toxic products, all of these are human rights and should be implemented.

And so they convinced the La Via Campesina movement to go for it, and then we started a very long process of work in Geneva, in the UN Human Rights Council, to find countries that would support [it]. And Bolivia played a key role, Bolivia really supported that process towards the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas.

And then we found all the allied countries along the way, most of them being countries from the global South, who understand very well what [it means to face] specific discriminations against peasants. And so, after a very long process of 18 years, there was a vote in the UN General Assembly, and it was positive. Most of the countries agreed to have this [declaration], a few hundred. and something that is important to be said is that even in countries like Australia, which did not vote in favor. 

Lucy:

Yeah, I was going to say actually [that AUstralia did not vote in favour of the UNDROP]

Morgan: 

Yeah. It's not because Australia did not vote in favor of UNDROP,  [that] the UNDROP cannot be implemented in Australia. On the contrary, the UNDROP has been voted by the majority of the UN General Assembly. So it's for everywhere. In countries that voted in favor, but also in countries that voted against. And we see some moves for example, in Europe, most of the countries but in 2023, we had a new vote to create a new working group to work on the implementation of peasants rights all over the world. And then we saw some countries like Spain or Germany or Belgium, which had abstained in 2008, sorry, 2018, and five years later, they voted in, in favor. 

So we also see that it's like the UN Declaration for the Rights of Indigenous People. It takes some time for countries to accept that it's there and that they should work with it. So let's hope that it's going to be the same with Australia as well. 

Lucy: 

Yes. Yes. We very much hope so. Absolutely. So I wondered what, what are some of the biggest learnings that you've had from working with Livia Campesina and, and, and from your work and how do you think that we might be able to apply that in an Australian context? 

Morgan:

For me, the biggest learning is about this very simple, basic principle that every human being is equal. And I think we all know this, but I mean, it's not so clear and it's not so much [present] in our everyday life.

I had the privilege to go to Haiti two years ago. And in Haiti, really, every day, everybody says this sentence: "Tout moun se moun", every person is a person. And really, you hear that several times a day. And I found that fantastic, that for children, for everybody, for all of us, every person is a person. That is the basic [knowledge] that we should all have.

And I think that this is what we are defending as La Via Campesina now. You know, it's not only about food sovereignty [or] agroecology, it's about, every person is a person. And even if we are poor, marginalised, if we are a woman, if we are gay, if we are Black, we are all [just] the same.

We can be—we are all—we are all as stupid as each other. I would say as smart and as stupid. And that is an important lesson because that [is what] has been the claim for social movements in [the] whole [of] history. The claim for equality, the claim to refuse that some people—just because they are white, or because they are rich, or because they are men—[should] pretend to have the right to dominate and to oppress other people. No, we refuse that.

And so I think that it's very strong that a movement of peasants—and we are, most of the time, among the poorest people in the population—we unite all over the world for this value [that] every person is a person and we do have human rights, and we do not want to be oppressed. We want to be considered as equal in societies, and it's not only a big principle.

I mean, in everyday life, we are fighting for peasant feminism, for example, to stop the oppression of men against women. So it [is] materialized in very concrete struggles in the fields. You know, we have created an articulation of diversities to ensure that people who are LGBTQI, in the rural area[s] in particular, stop facing massive violence just because they are gay or trans, because we consider that every human person is a human being and that everybody should be respected. So I think that this principle, linked with very concrete actions, is very powerful.

Lucy:

Yeah, absolutely. And so necessary at the moment in a world where, um, so often every person is not treated like a person. 

Morgan: 

Exactly. I mean, this is what the far right is about, but also the right wing, this is all what it's about for a very long time, actually. And that's what we learn when we learn about the peasants, the history of peasant struggle in the world, [and] of indigenous people's struggles in the world. It's always about equality, always about refusing that some people, just because they come from Europe, or because they are white, or because they are men, or because they are rich, feel the right to oppress other people.

And we are right now in a moment where I think over the last 50 years there was some progress. I mean, the fact that in [19]48 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was voted in the UN, it's important. And we should not deny the importance of such things. Because, I mean, before that, with colonialism and all those things, it would never have been possible. So suddenly in [19]48, the countries, they accept this statement.

But it's never been implemented. I mean, we are still in a situation where colonialism, neocolonialism, white supremacism, [and] the fact that if you are rich you have access to medical services and if you are poor you don't have access to medical services, all these things. It's a daily struggle, and I think that in the last decades there was a lot of hypocrisy, and of pretendingly we were all the same, but the reality was still that if the U.S. was deciding something and Senegal would not agree, well, the U.S. would continue. And pretendingly to kill civilians was not okay, but when the U.S. put bombs in Iraq and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, well, nobody said nothing. And so I think that now we are at a moment of truth, in a sense, because of [the] environmental crisis, because we now all know we have only one earth and that the resources are limited.

And so the rich people cannot pretend anymore that if they become richer, the poor people will get some of this wealth. We all know that there is only one cake and we need to share it. So now the only way for the privileged to maintain their privileges or to increase their privileges is to take resources and wealth out of the poorest people. And this is what we are facing right now. It's very clear now that in order to continue to get richer, the billionaires, the rich people in this world, are ready to do genocide. I mean, what they are doing right now in Palestine, it's about genocide. And it's about what they are ready to do to anyone of us who is not accepting to give up some of our rights for them to continue to be still richer and richer and richer. That is about that.

And I think in Via Campesina, because we are a peasant movement, because we've been experiencing oppression [and] domination for centuries and millenniums, we know what it is about. And we know that in order to struggle against this far right, against these people that believe that they are the kings and we are nothing, in front of that, we need to unify and we need internationalism. And that is what [it] is about, internationalism from the people from below. So, together with trade unions, with fisher folk, [and] with indigenous people, we try to unify to propose a vision of hope. And what we say in La Via Campesina is globalise struggles, globalise hope, because we do believe that if we struggle, we can have a better life. We can have food for everybody, we can have housing for everybody, [and] we can have medical care for everybody. But if we don't struggle, it's very clear now, the powerful people, the rich people, they will take it all for them and we will have never, nothing left for us.

Lucy:

Yeah absolutely, and I think that idea of globalizing hope is so powerful. In Australia, there's been some statistics about depression and suicide rates in people living in rural areas and people in farming communities. And I think partly it's isolation, and partly it's because if you're not part of a movement, and if you're not part of a community that is doing actively hopeful actions, then it's very easy to feel hopeless. So I think what La Via Campesina does to globalize that hope is so powerful, and something that often gets missed when we talk about the mental health of farmers in Australia.

Morgan: 

And I think it's true also in our daily life. I mean, the daily life of peasants or small-scale farmers, it can be tough when we are under the rain [and] it's cold. Right now in Europe, it's cold and it's raining, but at the same time, I mean, to see the birth of a baby cow or to see the small plants growing, it's beautiful. So, it's tough, but it's beautiful. But it's also plenty of sense, plenty of beauty, and we know that [our] work is useful. I mean, producing food is what we need the most.

And I do think that in this moment where we are kind of lost all over the world, in particular, I would say in Western countries, people are lost. And we do need to have these basic things. Okay, I need to do something that makes sense, that is good for the others. And we need this kind of basic principles: 

Lucy: 

Every person is a person. 

Morgan: 

Every person is a person.I think that it's better than big speeches, very intellectual speeches. Just what the Haitian people say: every person is a person. And let's take this as a way to guide our lives. And I feel that in the movements, the people who are in the movements, even if we face repression, there is happiness. There is joy in the fact that we are making good friends, because it's nice to know that your friends are good people that are struggling for the better, and that are courageous. I mean, when I travel very often, I consider that the peasant leaders that I have the privilege to meet, that they are heroes, really heroes. They struggle for the good things, [as] very modest heroes. They are not in [the] newspapers, they are not in the TV shows, but still they are heroes.

Lucy: 

So I wondered if you had any advice for farmers, for peasants in Australia, how can they participate in the global food sovereignty movement? 

Morgan: 

Well, first, I think it's very important. I'm very happy that AFSA is now a member of La [Vía] Campesina, because I think that this connection with all the peasants' movement[s] in the world, it makes a difference. 

I mean, sometimes we are in our societies, we listen to the media, and it can make us see the world in a sense that it's propaganda. So the fact that we can have direct connections with other people in other parts of the world, we can just ask them, "Okay, I heard that on the TV this morning, but what do you think about it? Because you are in this country, so tell me, how is it really for you?" And I think that this is important because information is currently a weapon for the powerful people, a weapon of propaganda. And in front of that, the fact to keep direct connections among workers, among peasants, [with] ourselves, and to ask, "Okay, how is it?" and to understand that there is complexity, that very often it's not what we hear in the media.  

I'm saying this also [because], you know, France is still a very colonial country, so what we hear about Western Africa is very much connected to this neocolonialism. And the fact to be able to discuss directly with small-scale farmers in Western Africa, I get a completely different sense of what is going on there, and it's very helpful. And I think that so that would be advice, to make webinars to ensure that you have some peasants traveling to other countries, [and] that you also invite a peasants' delegation to come to Australia so that we know about your reality as well, which is important. That's a first thing. 

Then I think that it's very important to keep the connection with people who face economic difficulties, even if they don't share all your values, because what we see all over the world, and in particular in western countries, is that the far right has been extremely smart into capturing the popular vote. 

And it's important that we don't let this happen, so that we ensure that we keep the connection with our neighbors who are facing big economic difficulties, who are indebted, who are isolated, and that we maintain this very concrete solidarity. They might be voting for the far right, but why? And I think that very often in the social movements, we are tending to think, "Oh, if they are voting once for the far right, they are bad," and so we have abandoned them. And I think that it's really important that we say, "Okay, actually, there is a sense that the far right is so smart in using the feeling of humiliation of people," but we need to ensure that we give recognition to these people who are workers, who are working very hard and do not get recognized by this capitalist society for the work that they do. 

And I think that if we abandon them, it's too easy for the far right to capture their votes and their support. So I think it's our task to not keep being [only] with the people from the middle class, from the cities, [and] with the scholars, but to ensure that we keep a strong connection with all our neighbors who are facing this economic oppression. That's not easy. It's not easy because it's so much easier to keep among ourselves than to have difficult conversation[s] with our neighbors who might be racist, who might be homophobic, and all those things, but at the same time, I think that if we are not doing so, we are not giving us the chance to really build strong popular social movements that can make a difference in our societies. 

Lucy: 

Yeah, you can really, you can really empower people through those relationships. Wow, that's very... oh, that's excellent stuff. And already I've got so many thoughts pinging out of my mind, and I'm sure that other people do as well. Before we wrap up, I thought I would just ask you if there's anything else that La Vía Campesina is doing right now that you'd like to share with us.

Morgan:

Oh, wow. There are so many things. Well, I think in this moment, exactly, we are very much concerned with the situation in Palestine. Well, we have been over the last months, obviously, with the situation in Gaza, but that was a statement that Trump is doing against the Palestinian people, it's making us very much concerned. And we think that it's not only about Palestine. What's going on in Palestine, it's about the project that these oligarchies, these billionaires, have for the people in the world, actually, in particular in the global South, but also for the working class in the northern countries. So we think that it's a matter of struggling for humanity, for dignity, to support the Palestinian people and to say very clearly, there is no way that you erase Palestine. There is no way. 

Lucy: 

Yeah. 

Morgan: 

So I think it's difficult because when saying this in Western Europe and probably in Australia, you face a lot of repression, but we should keep saying this. It's the best thing. They are human rights, the Palestinian people. They have been living there, they have been farming there, taking care of these territories for centuries. There is no way that they are pushed away from their country to install a touristic area for the rich people. No, we will not let it go like this and we will mobilize all over the world to support them because their struggle, the struggle of [the] Palestinian people, this is a struggle for humanity, this is a struggle for equality and for human dignity.  

Lucy:

Yeah, exactly, because all people are people, and all Palestinian people are people. So their struggle is our struggle. Well, thank you so much for your time, Morgan. It's been an absolute delight having you with us today.

Morgan:

Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Bye-bye. 

Lucy:

We've invited AFSA's focal point for farmers, Tammi Jonas, onto the pod for a quick update on AFSA's current abattoir campaign. Welcome, Tammi. 

Tammi:

Thanks, Lucy. Good to be here.

Lucy:

So what's going on with abattoirs in Australia right now?

Tammi:

Well, there's the bigger picture that multinationals are taking over most of them, and small and medium-scale livestock farmers are losing access to them at an increasingly rapid rate. It's been going on for more than a decade; this last year we've seen probably a dozen abattoirs close access to smallholders. 

Lucy:

So what's AFSA doing to help in this climate? 

Tammi:

We've been advocating for reforms to allow it to be, to make it easier to build micro-abattoirs, and to protect kind of smallholder access to the bigger abattoirs for several years. I think in Victoria specifically, where we've been the most active, we've put in proposed reforms for about seven years, repeatedly to Minister after Minister for Agriculture. And we were delighted in December, early December, to see the report on the inquiry into securing the Victorian Food Supply pro[pose] a recommendation that had our proposed reforms about micro-abattoirs: so, defining them in the Meat Industry Act and then making them easier to get a planning permit, essentially. 

And like the next day, Hardwick, which is owned by Kilcoy, a big multinational meatpacking firm, told all the smallholders in my region that we are no longer going to be welcome there. As of, at the time they said, the 1st of January; we managed to get them to make it the first of Feb. So now we don't have any access. 

That came off the back of, in October of last year, DBC, which is an abattoir in Southwestern [WA], had a similar story where they had told smallholders there that they were no longer going to take small lots for service kills. We managed to, in that case, advocate to both the WA government and to DBC, the board themselves. It's not a multinational, it's an Australian-owned, vertically integrated company, now majority owned by West Pork, which is vertically integrated pork production. We had written to all of them and convinced them to stay, give access until mid-Feb. And so that was more successful than we had with Hardwicks, actually. But because of that, and then actually in January, Tamin abattoir, another one in WA, closed access, and three more in New South Wales in that same period of time have done the same. 

Lucy:

Yeah. So it's been a problem for a long time, but it's really kind of rapidly accelerating now.

Tammi:

Absolutely. With the acceleration, we went, "Okay, it's time to do more than just submit quiet reform ideas every now and again to the ministers." So we launched a campaign.

Lucy:

Mm-hmm.

Tammi:

We wrote a campaign strategy, we contacted all of our allies across the movement, and we said, "Let's go." We wrote a petition for Victoria. Our comrades in Sprout Tasmania, the growers' group in Tassie, already had a petition on the go about abattoirs. 

Lucy:

Mm-hmm.

Tammi:

So those things really helped us get more attention in like the ABC and some of the other local media. We submitted our petition to Victoria yesterday with nearly, nearly 3000 signatures on it. 

Lucy:

Yeah. Wow.

Tammi:

The MP who supported it, Martha Haylett, was really pleased with the response that we'd had to those signatures. Being in parliament was pretty interesting because we were definitely not pariahs, you know, they were like ministers and MPs were coming up to talk to us to say, "How's it all going?" 

Lucy:

Wow.

Tammi:

So, you know, you have to, you have to resist saying, "Well, we're hanging in there, but you could really help make it better.” Actually well, no, we didn’t resist saying that at all, we said exactly that. 

And then we've got meetings, we sent letters to ministers in every single state, actually. Now we’ve had meetings with some of the states and some of the shadow ministers. Some other MPs in those states have also shown interest in talking with us, so it's still amping up. 

Oh, and WA, I should say WA, not only did DBC give them till mid-Feb, they recently backflipped entirely and have said they're going to continue doing small lots of service kill and it’s kind of a mystery why, but it may have to do with the live export ban that's coming up over there for sheep. And we think they made a deal for some grant money from the government for the transition if they would remain open to smallholders. And we'll take it if that's what it is for now. 

Lucy: 

Yeah, definitely. So there's a lot going on all over, all over the country. Yeah, so how can farmers and eaters and anyone else in the food system get involved with this campaign? 

Tammi:

One of the main things is to keep raising awareness about it, particularly to MPs, because we have stated demands that are all on the AFSA website. So the reforms, which are pretty technical if you're not a planning nerd like farm activists tend to be, so those things are there, and there are templates for writing to your local members. So, making sure everybody's local members know that this is an issue for everybody who eats. You know, the focus on export has come to its logical conclusion where soon we will not be able to process any livestock that is produced here in Australia for Australians. That's the direction it's going if they don't, if they don't get into gear. So, local members' letters, sharing these things on social media, joining AFSA obviously, because I like to say - I don't like to say, but I do say - if they have the money, we have the numbers, but we don't have the numbers unless they're ‘signed-up numbers’. You know, governments don't listen to us when we say, "Oh, but we have like 16,000 people who like us on Facebook." You know, what they wanna know is how many members do you have? And the more members we have, the more powerful our voice is.

Lucy: 

Absolutely. Well, thank you very much, Tammi, for coming in and giving us an update.

Tammi:

My pleasure.

Lucy:

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Agroecology Radio Hour. If you'd like to support AFSA['s] work, please head to our website afsa.org.au, where you can become a member or follow the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance on social media. You can also sign up as a subscriber to this podcast on buymeacoffee.com and contact us via our email address coordinator@gmail.com. Thanks to our producer Ivan Blackett and our guests Morgan Ody and Tammi Jonas. We'll put relevant links in the show notes if you'd like to know more about Morgan's work with La Via Campesina and the Abattoir campaign with AFSA. And of course, please share this podcast with your networks to help grow the food sovereignty movement in Australia and beyond. Viva!