This is the second installment in a series about degrowth in theory and practice by Syris Valentine. Read more about the series below. Jump to the first installment here:
PART 1: ‘Degrowth’ Principles Have Charged the U.S. Climate Movement—the Name Not So Much
PART 2: 'Peasant-Led Movements Hold the Model for Restoring the Land'
Rosalinda Guillen didn’t want to go to the inaugural World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2001. At the time she was in the middle of legislative work in the California State Capital on behalf of the United Farm Workers. The United States Department of Labor had to order her to attend the forum as part of the U.S. labor delegation. It would shape the rest of her decades-long career as an organizer and labor leader.
“I was there for seven days, and it was amazing,” Guillen told Deceleration. “What I saw when I met with the labor movement in Brazil was the just transition after 20 years of organizing.”
The World Social Forum came after Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement had pushed for decades against the destruction, displacement, and disenfranchisement inflicted upon them and the nation by a corporate-controlled global food system, said Guillen. The movement’s leaders presented to forum attendees their successes and the work they’d undertaken to create a food network, and an economy around it, that was more human and more humane.
They organized themselves to effect civic change as much as they sought economic change. They developed a model of participatory governance and budgeting that allowed them to elevate the solutions they knew would best improve their lives, she said. And to ensure that they had their own true power and autonomy “many of them had organized themselves into worker-owned cooperatives,” said Guillen. At the forum, she saw how the cooperatives engaged with each other buying, selling, and trading among themselves, offering food, clothing, leatherwork, and even healthcare services.
“They were all worker-owned cooperatives serving other work-owned cooperatives. That’s what they called the solidarity economy.”
When Guillen returned from the forum, she carried that model back with her. The way she approached her work evolved. And in 2014, she co-founded Community to Community Development, a women-led nonprofit organization built around food sovereignty and farmworker rights.
“We're looking at this from the farmworker perspective,” Guillen said, “because we're on the land. And we're observing the way that our food is being grown.”
What Guillen, other farmworkers, and outside scholars have observed is a food system that is fundamentally unjust and violent.
Fixing a 'Violent' Food System
Stian Rice, a food systems geographer at University of Maryland, Baltimore County, has studied the many manifestations of this violence across the food system—from hunger to labor abuses, corporate consolidation of farm ownership, animal violence, and environmental damage. In his upcoming book Elsewhere, he unpacks many of his learnings and provides a tour of its abuses.
“The food system is a thing that is supposed to support life; it is supposed to nurture life,” Rice told Deceleration. Instead, “it is often antagonistic to life.”
“At the core of any capitalist system,” he added, “you are taking more than you are returning.”
Industrial agriculture today, for instance, depletes nutrients from the soil, and farmers must replenish them with synthetic fertilizers manufactured from fossil fuels. The value of farm labor exceeds what is repaid in wages. Grocery prices are set higher than the nutritional value of the food itself. All this exists to maintain the profits that keep the engines of the corporate food system moving.
As Rice grappled with the implications of this analysis, he began to recognize “just about everything we talk about in terms of changing the food system does not fundamentally change [this imbalance]. It’s all dressing on top of it.” We’re confronted with issues a new farm bill can’t fix, he said.
To him, this realization provides an odd sort of optimism: because once people acknowledge and accept these foundational flaws in the food system, it affords the opportunity to envision workable alternatives. “You can start to talk about things like mutual aid networks,” he added, “and the kind of loose federations of producers and consumers that are constantly adapting how they relate to each other for changing circumstances.”
Federations of that kind are exactly what Guillen witnessed emerging from the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil and making themselves globally known during the World Social Forum.
The Indonesian Peasants Union
Those emergences aren’t isolated to Brazil. Where Brazil has the Landless Workers Movement (or MST, in its Portuguese initials), Indonesia is home to the Indonesian Peasants Union (or SPI in its Indonesian initials), both of which lend their support to La Via Campesina, a coalition of similar peasant-led movements from around the world.
Political ecologist David Gilbert, who studies how people practice degrowth in the present food system, saw how SPI was fighting to change centuries of plantation practices in Indonesia to return the land to the agro-ecological principles that people indigenous to Indonesia had long practiced.
“Starting in 1900, going all the way up to today there are ongoing land conflicts with industrial agriculture,” said Gilbert. In the part of Sumatra where he spent most of his time, he saw what this movement has let people accomplish.
“They went from primarily a tobacco and ginger plantation with long rows of crops with pesticides to a few hundred families living on this land in a food forest,” Gilbert told Deceleration. “They crop almost 40 highly valuable food crops. The canopy has returned. The health of the watershed has returned.”
This ecological change and success was motivated, above all, by a desire for land, for autonomy, and for self-determination. And while they never would have described their work as being “degrowth,” Gilbert still sees it as being fundamentally aligned. “I think there's degrowth across the world in different ways,” he said, and the movement in Sumatra is one of them.
To him, the agroecology and food sovereignty practiced in West Sumatra is central to the overarching degrowth project because it allows people “to determine and control their own foodways.” And the way these are practiced in Indonesia also reflects something that Gilbert and his colleagues have referred to as “everyday degrowth,” the simple habits that reflect how the principles of the seemingly radical idea of degrowth show up again and again in our daily lives.
“There is actually a tendency to treat the world well, to not waste resources, to not overconsume, to support each other,” Gilbert said. “This is a fundamental human tendency that we can see across history. It's capitalism that's quite the deviation.”
Despite the shift in baseline that has led many Americans to see capitalism and its industries as the norm, many activist-scholars like Antonio Roman-Alcalá seek through their work to remind people that the opposite is true, not just historically, but even still today. “The majority of the food that humans actually eat comes from what we call the peasant food web,” Roman-Alcalá told Deceleration, “meaning non-industrial, non-capitalist forms of food production.”
“What we call conventional agriculture, which is industrial agriculture, that's literally about 100 years old. That is not conventional by the measures of human history,” he said.
“Yes, there are alternatives, but they're actually more like we're restoring more reasonable ways that humans have interacted with non-human nature to get their food needs met, to try to create an actual viable future for the planet and for people.”
Still, when organizers seek to make those changes, to restore ecologically sound agricultural practices, it’s important to recognize that just because a certain strategy has worked in Indonesia or Brazil doesn’t mean it can succeed in Texas or Catalonia. “It's a fallacy to think that you have a panacea,” said Rice. Every place has its own context and history that shape what is workable and what people can accomplish, and the solutions communities pursue, as Gilbert describes in one of his papers, need to be expressed in and through their local geography, in all its forms.
So even as Guillen and her compatriots have taken inspiration from the World Social Forum and started their own co-op, Cooperativa Tierra y Libertad, they still have to grapple with the nuances of what it means to operate a worker-owned, women-led, organic, and regenerative farm that is financially sustainable while paying workers fair wages and keeping prices accessible to members of their community.
This is something as well that organizations like Cooperation Texas have to grapple with as they try to build a network of cooperatives across Texas among farmers, ranchers, bakers, grocers, and even jewelers and housing developers.
Fundamentally though, in the United States, a new movement needs to grow that can explore and experiment with these possibilities. Gilbert sees California’s Central Valley as “one of the most unequal places in the world.” Yet, no farmworker-led movement yet exists on the scale of the Brazilian Landless People’s Movement or the Indonesian Peasants Union. The United Farm Workers have certainly been an important presence in the Central Valley and beyond, but the focus on collective bargaining has so far limited their potential, according to Guillen.
“When you make that the only solution,” she said, “then you lock yourself into negotiations in a system where you are out maneuvered, outpowered.”
Building beyond that, however, is difficult when so many farmworkers in the United States are immigrants and the government is targeting and assaulting immigrant communities at an unprecedented scale. Ultimately, though, Guillen feels that unions and organizers in the U.S. need to take serious inspiration from the Landless Peoples Movement because “[i]t's a movement towards a just transition, which again combines all of the elements, food sovereignty, solidarity economy, and environmental justice.”
And this vision must be made manifest so that it can be enacted, experimented with, improved upon, and expanded over time.
“It's great to have this intellectual thought and beautiful, inspiring vision, but nobody believes it until they see it,” said Guillen. “We can't just talk about it. We have to try to create it so people can feel it and see it — especially for farmworkers, so they can work under the production system that we want to create.”
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ABOUT THIS SERIES: For decades, governments across the globe have assumed that constantly increasing their GDP promised to solve all the social and economic problems that confronted their citizens, from poverty to education and beyond. But as economic growth has become an the all-consuming obsession of nations, it has instead spurred overlapping and interconnected crises to deepen year after year. Poverty has worsened. Wealth inequality has grown. Climate change has accelerated. Homelessness has increased. All while the economies of the richest countries in the world continued to grow without any of that accumulated wealth reaching those who need it the most. In response to this, activists, academics, and everyday people have begun to call for new ways of assessing how we measure well being in our societies. One of these emerging models is known as degrowth. This series examines what degrowth is, how is has evolved, and where its principles are being put into practice.
