Occupying farmland for organic food and fairness exposes university elitism

On Earth Day—April 22, 2012—about 200 people, accompanied by children in strollers, dogs, rabbits, chickens, and carrying hundreds of pounds of compost and at least 10,000 seedlings entered a 14-acre piece of land containing the last Class I agricultural soil in the East Bay. Located on the Albany-Berkeley border in the Bay Area, the plot is owned by the University of California Berkeley. By the end of the day, they had weeded, tilled, and successfully cultivated about an acre of the land. By May 14, when 100 University of California riot police surrounded the tract and began arresting the farmers, Occupy the Farm had cultivated around five acres of the plot known as the Gill Tract.

The Occupy farmers have laid out footpaths around cultivated plots, created wildlife corridors, riparian zones, and protected areas for native grasses and a wild turkey nest, and set up a library and a kitchen. They have planted thousands of seedlings of corn, tomatoes, squash, beans, broccoli, herbs, and strawberries, including heirloom varieties from a local seed bank. Other plots have been reserved for agro-ecological research. There’s also a permaculture garden for kids on the other side of a gazebo of woven branches where wind chimes tinkle in the breeze.

Gopal Dayaneni of Movement Generation, says that the vision for the farm is the “practice and promotion of sustainable urban agriculture with a commitment to food justice and food sovereignty.” He is a father, activist, and member of what he calls the “new urban peasantry.” Food grown on the farm will be distributed—for free—through existing food justice networks in the San Francisco Bay Area.

On April 24, the University shut off the water supply and threatened the farmers with eviction. University administration has gone on a media offensive, attempting to pit researchers against the Occupy farmers and according to some reports, preventing them from negotiating with the farmers. Some faculty members have published statements in support of the farmers, arguing that the goals of the farm are aligned with the public policy goals of the state and the U.C. mission. If transforming a student’s life is part of that mission, U.C. Berkeley student Lesley Haddock has certainly experienced it working on the farm. “Before our project began, I had never planted a seed,” she admits. “But in the past two weeks, I have become a farmer!”

One of the Occupy farmers, Ashoka Finley is a program assistant with Urban Tilth and runs an organic farm in collaboration with students at Richmond High School, in Richmond, California. A political economy graduate of U.C. Berkeley, Finley believes that the farm is redefining and reclaiming the role of the public university, just as the Occupy movement is redefining and reclaiming public space.

“The history of the Gill Tract is [about] public subsidization of private research that [profits] the corporate industrial complex; not research for the public good,” he says.

It was not always this way. The 104-acre plot was sold to the University in 1928 by the Gill family with the condition that it be used as an agricultural research station. Under the Smith-Lever Act of 1914, part of the University’s mission as a land grant institution is to promote community involvement and initiatives in agriculture.

From the 1940s through the 1990s, research conducted at the Gill Tract laid the groundwork for successful, non-chemical and non-petroleum-based methods for controlling numerous major insect pests on several California crops, and for the integration of biological, chemical, and cultural methods of pest control.5 The innovative methods developed, shared, and refined at the International Center for Biological Control included intercropping6 and using bugs to control pests in addition to or in place of pesticides, and means to reduce overall chemical dependency and prevent the development of superbugs in industrial and community agriculture worldwide.

The turning point came in 1998, when Novartis gave $25 million to the Plant and Microbial Biology department to conduct genetic research on the land. “They kicked off the local organic pest management project to do gene research,” says Ulan McKnight of the Albany Farm Alliance. “What was here before directly benefitted the people of California; now what they do here directly benefits biotechnology companies. Instead of doing things that can help people, they are doing things that benefit the one percent.”

Among the projects closed down at the time was a seed bank of rare heirloom varieties of many important food crops, and a state-of-the-art drip irrigation system from a student-run urban sustainable agriculture demonstration plot. Until the water was cut off at the Tract, the Occupy farmers were planning to start using those irrigation tubes again.

The trend of privatizing the research and knowledge produced at public institutions is systemic, according to Julie Sze, associate professor of American Cultures at U.C. Davis. A long-time supporter of social justice and student movements, Sze attributes her activism to her student days at U.C. Berkeley, where she took courses with the likes of RP&E founder Carl Anthony. She credits the university with being the “social justice innovation lab” that produced so many of the environmental justice leaders of today and argues that corporatization is an impoverishment of the U.C. system and a betrayal of the system’s legacy for California.

It is worth noting that the number of people graduating from UCLA annually exceeds the total number of people graduating from all private colleges in the state. It is no exaggeration, therefore, to say that whatever happens with the U.C. system affects the future of California.

Universities have a special role to encourage ways of thinking that go beyond the corporate workplace, says Sze. People who have fought to work with communities on the side of racial and economic justice are an important legacy of the university. People like Paul Taylor, who in the 1930s, promoted the idea of the agricultural job ladder (where farm workers could eventually become family farmers) over the agribusiness model, which depended on seasonal workers. The university is a place to explore and imagine different possibilities and different futures, which is why student activism is a global force and so deeply threatening to the existing order.

Sze believes that the move towards corporate funding of research, coupled with increasing student debt, has curtailed the ability and desire of students to participate in the creative and innovative social justice thinking and activity that is so important to the common good.

David Naguib Pellow, another movement scholar-activist and a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, observes, “Every [public] university I’ve worked at, professors are encouraged to secure external funding for their research to alleviate state budget constraints. This often involves seeking resources from corporations and foundations that have little or no accountability to the public, which amounts to the privatization of ideas, knowledge, and the commons, and is a dangerous trend if we desire to live in a democratic society.”

The tuition hikes and the cuts in programs that do not have a corporate/profit bent are a direct result of the bias towards education in the service of corporations, according to Finley, and needs to be countered by the training of people in the service of people.

In an email sent out in early May, Adbusters urges recipients to “occupy the future;” that is, “to describe, build and sustain the post-capitalist future we want to live in.”

Dayaneni concurs with that sentiment. “People ask me what they can do to support. I say, take more land. Occupy a library, a clinic, whatever, plan it right and [re-launch] it appropriately and at scale. We need to prove that we have the ability to self govern. This is the new moment of occupy, not tit for tat, not cat-and-mouse games with cops, but full-scale intervention. Occupy the Farm is one of the first to-scale interventions.”

Projects like Occupy the Farm also create a sort of sovereignty and allow a space for larger political expression where people can articulate their demand for a more egalitarian, just society through work done with their own hands, argues Finley.

“In the first world, we have been fed a false sense of security that is imploding,” says Michelle Mascarenhas-Swan, recounting her family’s experience with the militant experiment in collective governance and self-sufficiency. “On Earth Day, our families were a part of manifesting a collective vision for a better way forward—that the land be a community educational center. We have planted strawberries in the children’s garden and feed the chickens with snails that we collect from our own garden. My partner, a cook, brings us food regularly. We are making that vision real.”

Not everybody, however, sees Occupy the Farm in the same light and on the same terms, Finley points out. For many communities of color, farmwork is both a practice of material and cultural survival and self-sufficiency, and, at the same time, deeply tied to racialized exploitation in the United States. For African Americans, farming is related to slavery and sharecropping. For recent immigrants from Latin America, farming is about the bankruptcy brought on by the dumping of subsidized monoculture products in their countries. And for Southeast Asian immigrants, farming is associated with a bloody countryside strewn with unexploded ordnance and other detritus from U.S. wars. At the same time, like other forced immigrants before them, these people have also brought with them a knowledge and identity that is wrapped up in the cultivation and ceremony of working the land.

Subsistence through the production of one’s own food is one of the most effective forms of resistance. But the action at Gill Tract also points toward the broader challenges at the University.

The arena of struggle revealed by Occupy the Farm is not just organic farming, food justice, and food sovereignty. The classrooms, the libraries, and the research agenda of the university are being shaped to meet the needs of corporate sponsors. Groundbreaking areas in scholarship that were pioneered in the University of California, such as Ethnic Studies, Women and Gender Studies, Peace and Conflict Studies, were won by student-led protest and strikes (and occupations) in the early 1970s. They now face devastating cuts against which students are mobilizing. Battles against tuition hikes, student debt, and democratizing University governance will be key to shifting the overall direction of the university and the society.

Amilcar Cabral, the African revolutionary and agricultural engineer once said: “Culture contains the seed of resistance, which blossoms into the flower of liberation.” At the Gill Tract we can see seeds of resistance that have been planted—but it is clear that in order to blossom, they will need watering.

Corruption is still Tunisia's challenge

In the year since the Arab Spring, attention has been riveted on one issue above all others: the place of religious practice in public life. In Tunisia, where the movement began, full-face and body veils, now often worn complete with gloves, are increasingly visible on the streets — an exotic sight for locals and foreigners alike. And the secular opposition seems increasingly strident in its conviction that the Islamist government is driving the country the way of Iran.

But it wasn't religion that set off the Jasmine Revolution; it was acute economic injustice and the pervasive and structured corruption that helped produce it. The fate of Tunisia, and its neighbors, may depend most on whether that lingering problem is addressed.

You can usually tell which buildings in this sparkling, white-and-sky-blue country the family of former dictator Zine el Abidine ben Ali had a stake in; they're eyesores. Last month, a small group of protesters gathered in front of one of them, a squat, mustard-colored hotel complex on a beach in the town of Kilibia.

Kilibia, home to extensive Roman and Punic archaeological sites, also boasts beaches of silky, ash-white sand, which audibly sings underfoot as you walk across it. The seafront is exactly the kind of resource members of the Ben Ali family liked to commandeer for their personal gain.

They had shares in several sprawling hotels here, including the yellow one, built with an Italian investor. Typically for the Tunisian tourism industry, it functioned and still functions as a closed system: Tunisians are not allowed on the beach; the hotel employs no Tunisians except for a few guards, purchases no Tunisian supplies or food — not even any luscious local olive oil. Everything is shipped in from Italy.

Now the hotel is dumping coarse yellow sand across the top half of the beach to cushion tourists' feet from a rock formation.

This may sound like a trivial transgression. But it typifies the arrogation of public resources and financial opportunities for the personal enrichment of regime insiders that sparked last year's uprising.

Under the Ben Ali dictatorship, physical repression, torture and disappearances were fairly uncommon. The regime perpetrated its oppression by means of a diabolically intrusive system of state corruption.

This particularity has prompted Tunisian activists to blaze new paths in human rights doctrine. They are seeking to expand the definition of "gross violations of human rights" to include systematic economic crimes. They want perpetrators to answer for these crimes in a public reckoning, as part of a transitional justice process, like the ones in South Africa or Rwanda that focused on physical abuses.

Tunisia's new Cabinet includes a minister for "governance and anti-corruption." This is an innovation, certainly, but activists worry that his appointment was more show than substance.

A commission established in the weeks after Ben Ali's overthrow, and including public accountants and specialists in the intricacies of administrative or real estate law, examined some 5,000 complaints. The report it released in November exposed a vast system of structured corruption by which the Ben Ali in-laws and their cronies helped themselves to the best of everything: stakes in the most lucrative businesses, exemption from customs dues, choice public land. Government institutions such as tax authorities and the judiciary, even private banks, became instruments of coercion. Recalcitrant chief executives would get slapped with an audit or see their loans dry up or their authorizations revoked.

The commission developed evidence on 400 cases, which it transferred to courts. But according to member Amine Ghali, only a handful have been taken up by a judiciary still largely staffed by Ben Ali-era personnel.

"We're no one's first priority," says Ghali, detailing examples of neglect by the current government. "We have no office equipment or vehicles, no power to subpoena witnesses or to protect them. Members who are government employees don't even get relieved of their regular duties but have to do this work on the side. You get the feeling the government doesn't care if we succeed."

Many fear that the current political elite, including the leadership of the ruling Islamist party, intends to quietly appropriate the old structures and practices for their own benefit. Recently passed provisions of this year's budget include Ben Ali-style shelters for potentially ill-gotten gains, in return for a financial contribution. Taoufik Chamari, of the National Anti-Corruption Network, warns of the "real risk that the same system of corruption will be maintained, legitimized by new beneficiaries."

Corruption is a less photogenic issue than heavily veiled women. Yet when it grows so pervasive as to amount to capture of the state by a structured criminal network, as it did in Tunisia and in Egypt, public outrage can get explosive. Many here predict that if Tunisia does not use this remarkable post-revolutionary moment to impose accountability, then a frustrated people may truly radicalize, turning to militant, puritanical readings of Islam to afford a recourse the post-revolutionary democracy did not.

As the example of the yellow hotel suggests, actions of Westerners — conscious or unconscious — matter. Our support for Arab nations in transition, our behavior as investors and visitors, should break with past habits of contributing to corruption.

Land reforms: Food sovereignty should trump food security, say speakers

Participants in a land ownership forum on Monday underlined the need for equal distribution of land rather than land reforms and ensuring food sovereignty rather than food security in the country.

They pointed out that due to the corporatisation of farming and gifts of land to foreigners, not only food security, but also food sovereignty is at stake.

The national consultation on land reforms was organised by Pakistan Mazdoor Tehrik (PKMT) and Roots for Equity.

The participants expressed concern that the masses of the country are facing issues like food insecurity and malnutrition while the government continues to give irrigated lands away to foreigners.

Speakers pinpointed that the strong nexus of the military-bureaucracy-feudal troika is the key impediment in the way of land reforms. It was underlined that without breaking the influence of this troika, not only land reforms, but even real democracy could not come as the feudal overlords have always remained instrumental to the survival of the established government. It was also highlighted that lands are given freely to generals, bureaucrats, cricketers and actors, instead of to farmers and peasants, who are the real owners.

PKMT National Coordinator Ali Akber felt food sovereignty instead of food security should be a basic pillar of the agriculture development framework.

The PKMT member pointed out that 2013 is an election year and it is important that political parties ensure that land reforms be made a key part of their manifestoes.

Speaking on the occasion, Roots for Equity Executive Director Dr Azra Talat said that 50 per cent of the total irrigated land is owned by only four per cent of landlords, which causes frustration and underuse of the land.

She said there is a need for a new line of action to launch an effective peasant movement to stop the corporate land grab strategy and push for equal distribution of land.

She felt that a consensus approach has led to the equal distribution of land becoming a more important issue than land reforms.

She pointed out that the Sindh Agriculture minister has himself given 3,200 acres of land to foreigners for corporate farming and the entire population of the area has been displaced. “Our lands are given to foreigners, leaving our own people homeless and jobless,” she added.

Ali Hassan Chandio, a nationalist from Sindh, said land reforms are not possible in Pakistan while the troika endures. He said that there is a need for a strong movement against this troika to force land reforms and land redistribution.

He added that the new trend of corporation farming has displaced many peasants and crops were sent abroad, which is endangering the nation's food security. “Land should be redistributed among farmers and peasants… corporate farming is the new face of feudalism”, he maintained.

Pakistan Business Review Chief Editor Dr Shahida Wazarat also advocated land reforms. “There will be adverse affects on food security if corporate farming continues in future,” she opined.

OAS states divided over food sovereignty

Representatives attending the 42nd General Assembly of the Organisation of American States (OAS) squabbled here on Tuesday over the inclusion of "food sovereignty" in a declaration on food security.

Bolivia proposed the inclusion of the term, which was coined in 1996 to describe rights of people to "define their own agricultural, livestock and fisheries systems in contrast to having food largely subject to international market forces."

However, Chile, among the countries that have registered the highest growth rates in food exports in recent years, opposed the idea, saying such a concept might harm the free flow of food stuff.

The majority of foreign ministers attending the meeting supported the proposal put forward by Bolivia, said Diego Pari, Bolivia's ambassador to the OAS.

He added that Chile, backed by the United States in its opposition to the inclusion of "food sovereignty," succeeded in including a footnote in the declaration questioning the use of the term.

"Chile opposed the issue of food sovereignty and has established a footnote," said the Bolivian diplomat.

"We think it's a somewhat covert opposition, but we managed to gain the support of several countries which had previously perceived the term as a threat rather than a right of the people," he said.

Despite the disagreement, the OAS's general committee decided to approve the 42-paragraph declaration so that the issue becomes a matter for discussion in the OAS and other frameworks over the next few years.

Tonga's 150 years of freedom

As we remember Emancipation Day with a public holiday, today 4 June 2013, we marvel the foresight of Tonga's King Siaosi Tupou I who initiated the Emancipation Edict, 150 years ago on 4 June 1862.

Today is a day to be celebrated by Tonga's people and to appreciate that great step forward in the quality of our lives. But it is also a day to reflect that in losing their connections with the precious land that was given to them by Tupou I, too many Tongans have lost the prosperity that they once held in their own strong and capable hands, as producers on that land.

So where has that freedom of 150 years ago left Tongans today?

The land is underdeveloped and the findings of last weeks' Royal Land Commission show that after the model for land distribution was set that the mapping and the actual settings of boundaries for distribution has not been completed.

The intent of the Emancipation of the Tongan people is clear.

In the time of Tupou I, the 1860 Code of Law was a response by the king to an urgent need to secure Tongan lands, and to structure an economic system for Tonga so that Tongans could develop and earn cash from the fruits of their labour.

The historian Noel Rutherford, editor of The Friendly Islands: A History of Tonga, stated that the edict was one of the most revolutionary clauses in the law. It reads:

"All chiefs and people are set … at liberty from serfdom and all vassalage … and it shall not be lawful for any chief or person to seize or take by force or beg authoritatively in Tonga fashion anything from anyone. Everyone has the entire control over everything that is his."

The Emancipation Edict abolished the obligations of those lower in the Tongan kinship ranking system to provide food and labour freely to those higher in the system. So instead of people relying on the kinship system for their daily livelihood, high-ranking Tongans, including the King and his government, would have to pay cash to get things done. It was an attempt to replace kinship with cash as the basis of the Tongan social system.

To make such a system work, government introduced the poll tax, and Tongans over sixteen years of age were to pay a tax of twelve shillings per annum, providing the king with a revenue to pay the salaries of officials, and pensions to chiefs to compensate them for the loss of the compulsory service of their people.

A land reform was also introduced and each chief was to make available to every adult male in his clan a piece of farming land over which the tenant, in return for a rent payment of two shillings per annum, would enjoy complete security of tenure. Sale of land to foreigners was forbidden.

The reforms were considered to be revolutionary. The independent authority of the chiefs began to break down and instead of them remaining independent war-lords, they became pensioners of the king and no threat to peace of an orderly government.

More interesting at this point of time was the formation of the base of the Tongan economy.

The combination of the need for cash to pay taxes, guaranteed tenure of farms and relief from the extortions of traditional obligation, gave a new impetus to Tongan agriculture. Tongans began to plant coconut groves on a scale unknown before that, and within a decade Tonga became one of the major Pacific producers of copra.

Prosperity in turn led to a rapid development in public works and church building and to an influx of foreign traders to take advantage of the new opportunities.

Rutherford points out that the 1862 reforms set the pattern and general direction of subsequent social, economic and political developments in Tonga during the reign of King George Tupou I, and for much of its subsequent history.

On the one hand, the processes of modernization were set firmly in motion, but on the other hand the land remained firmly under Tongans control, and was shared out among Tongans in a more equitable manner than probably anywhere else in the world at the time.

The onus to develop the land and the economy remain squarely in the hands of Tongans.

The irony of what happened 150 years ago, was that only three days ago, on 1 June 2012, the Royal Land Commission of Tupou V, presented its three volumes report. It contained 120 recommendations toward providing more effective and efficient land practices.

It stated an urgent need for Tonga's Ministry of Land to confirm estate boundaries, identify all registered allotments and update its land registry, and other things.

This morning the Tonga Defence Services raised the flag at the Nuku'alofa waterfront and played the national anthem, and they will do the same tonight to lower the flag.

Taking into consideration the significance of a day that the Tongans call "'Aho Tau'ataina" Freedom Day, there is no enthusiasm evident on this quiet public holiday, which upon reflection is an extraordinary day.