Rundale

By Patrick Bresnihan, Sophia Doyle, Olivia Oldham and Clara Oloriz

On April 27th, the Root and Branch Collective (RBC) organised a one-day event at Maynooth University to contribute to the ongoing work of the food sovereignty movement on the island of Ireland – in particular, the work of Talamh Beo, Feeding Ourselves and the Landworkers Alliance NI. The RBC is a group of researchers, activists and farmers dedicated to developing a radical agrarian studies approach to Europe.

The context for the event was the eruption of farmer protests across Europe in February 2024 and the rise of reactionary farmer-rural movements and political organisations, including in Ireland. As discussed in a previous article on this site, organisations like the Farmer’s Alliance, as well as a number of Irish rural Independents, have sought to articulate farmer grievances with anti-migrant, anti-environmental and other reactionary positions. Recent successes in local and European elections – particularly in France and Germany – have demonstrated the potency of this reactionary, rural populism.

Within this context, the event in Maynooth posed the questions: what does a progressive food, land and farming politics in Ireland look like? How can it distance itself from right-wing populism, while remaining accessible to a broad range of people whose lives and livelihoods are affected by the capitalist agri-food system? Where can it build alliances, particularly with urban-based movements?

The event sought to bring together individuals and organisations from within and beyond food politics – not just small-scale farmers but everyone involved in efforts to resist unequal access to food and land: migrants, climate and environmental justice campaigners, labour and housing organisers, and community workers. Despite our efforts to broaden the composition of the group, the participants were predominantly white, small-scale growers and researchers working in the areas of food, land, and the environment.

The reflections below build on ongoing analysis within RBC, which critically engages with the politics of food sovereignty and farming movements in Europe. As active participants in these movements, our aim is to better understand the present conditions and how they both limit and enable our capacity to shape the future.

What do we achieve by asking nicely?

The day started with a discussion of Talamh Beo’s Local Food Policy Framework, which outlines a series of measures designed to improve access to locally produced, healthy food for everyone in Ireland, and provide a fair living for agroecological farmers through short supply chains, food hubs and easier access to land.

The Framework reflects a broader tendency that has seen progressive movements and organisations propose food policy initiatives as part of their efforts to advance just agrarian transitions and post-capitalist imaginaries. Together, these different food policy initiatives offer positive visions that connect rural livelihoods, health, equitable access to food and wider environmental and climate goals. But how do we get from here to there? How do these alternate futures become reality?

For some participants at the event, the best way to advance such initiatives in Ireland was through a conciliatory approach: building consensus by appealing to a broad church, including alternative and conventional farmers, activists and policy-makers, rural farmers and urban consumers. Emphasis was placed on ‘getting politicians onside’; working with researchers to produce a scientific evidence base for policy-makers; and winning over public support through positive messaging and mobilisations. This strategy was explicitly contrasted with the divisive, angry and disruptive farmer protests. 

Other participants questioned this conciliatory approach. They pointed out that what prevented the realisation of alternative food systems was not just individual politicians, a lack of scientific evidence, or even popular appeal, but a system of powerful interests that massively constrains what can and cannot happen within the agri-food sector.

From this perspective, bridges still need to be built, but lines also need to be drawn. Specifically, this means identifying and confronting those (class) interests and institutional forces that prevent alternative food systems from flourishing. Without disagreement, alternatives can either be ignored or co-opted without unsettling the status quo. 

It was also pointed out that the farmer protests were in large part effective because they were ‘angry and disruptive’. Though mixed in their composition and political articulation, the protests built on an effective populist rhetoric of ‘us’ against ‘them’ that has in recent years been monopolised by right-wing and reactionary narratives – channelling grievances against EU technocrats, environmentalists and migrants.

Who and what is the food sovereignty movement against? Is there such a thing as ‘left farmer populism’, and if so, what does it look like? Whose (class) interests are a barrier to the agricultural transition we want? Answering these questions requires a better knowledge and analysis of the highly stratified and unequal agri-food sector – getting us past the simplistic binary of small-farmer vs corporation.   

Who is the ‘farmer’?

A recurring theme in discussions on the day was the expression of empathy with ‘farmers’, including those involved in the protests. There was a clear understanding of the material conditions that modern farmers are forced to operate under (alienation, isolation, mental health issues, debt) caused by the corporate agri-food system. It was understood that the deeply entrenched unequal land system in Ireland today was the result of colonial underdevelopment, market consolidation and neoliberal abandonment. 

Others also cautioned against a pervasive nostalgia for a rural/pastoral farming life, highlighting instead the precarity and the highly technologized and stratified nature of modern farming today.

What became clear through these discussions was that the category of the ‘farmer’ was by no means self-explanatory. More often than not, it obscured, rather than explained, the different (class) interests and allegiances that are at play in the agricultural sector. Again and again, we returned to the question: who exactly is the “farmer”? Is it the capital-intensive ‘dairy enterprise’ or the part-time beef farmer surviving off CAP payments and off-farm income? Is it the migrant worker in mushroom sheds and strawberry fields, or the manager of investor-owned land generating carbon credits? Is it the biochemist devising new applications for milk derivatives, or the children working for free on the family farm during the holidays?

It was striking, for example, that the designation ‘farmer’ is rarely (if ever) extended to the migrant worker, even though migrant workers are involved in the harvesting, processing and selling of much of the foodstuffs produced in Europe today. Not only is super-exploited migrant labour fundamental to the food supply chain, these workers bring with them knowledge of food and land, as well as of movement organising in the places they are forced from – a point made strongly by Clark McAllister, who has carried out a workers inquiry into seasonal labour in the horticultural sector in the UK. 

In Ireland, there is a dearth of similar research despite well-reported issues of  low wages, poor working conditions, and lack of suitable accommodation in the sector. A 2018 Teagasc survey finding that 77% of the workforce in horticulture is made up of foreign nationals, predominantly from Eastern European countries, including the Baltic States, Bulgaria and Romania.

Consequently, we asked ourselves how useful it is to centre our movements for a more just and equitable food and land system around the exclusive and rather ambiguous term ‘farmer’? What alternative framings are there to develop a more materialist approach, one that takes into account differential access to land, including the ‘people of no property’ who have historically been central to land politics in this country and elsewhere?

The question of land

The second half of the day focussed on the question of land – a key area where we felt it might be possible for diverse elements of the food sovereignty movement, broadly conceived, to find common cause. And yet, when we divided ourselves up into groups to discuss different facets of this issue – like research and data on land ownership, policy and legal reforms, and direct action – land was actually not at the heart of any of these discussions. Private land ownership is such a taken-for-granted assumption in contemporary society that it prevents us talking meaningfully about alternatives.

In many countries of the ‘minority world’– countries of the imperial core and many settler colonial states – the proliferation of the neoliberal logic of privatisation has pushed property in land off the political table for decades. While it’s true that a radical political economy of land has, in recent years, seen a surge of renewed interest in some intellectual and activist spaces, we can’t assume that all members of the movements we are a part of are ready to engage with the land question on those terms. 

Private ownership is often perceived to be more secure, more conducive to investment in long-term agroecological practices, and more able to provide the kind of autonomy understood to be necessary for peasant agriculture, agroecology and food sovereignty. In contrast, RBC is interested in understanding how we can make visible the barriers that private landownership poses to the success of agroecological and food sovereignty movements, and how alternative land relations can help to re-imagine agricultural policies supportive of these socio-ecological movements.

Land has transformative potential as a way of bringing together a wide variety of interests and concerns, a connective thread through urban and rural struggles and across borders. By centring the land dimension, we can broaden the agencies involved in food sovereignty movements and thereby decentre the problematic figure of the farmer. But, as we learnt from the Maynooth event, raising the question of land is not enough. 

An obvious task is the need to build radical political consciousness within the movements we are a part of. Developing a critical identification with landlessness across diverse constituencies, engaging in radical pedagogical strategies, and drawing on prefigurative examples of alternative land relations are all useful strategies. For example, projects such as the People’s Land Policy, Shared Assets, LION and Abundance all intervene in the current status quo of land as alienated private property or object of speculation/finance capital, through ideas of communal stewardship, ancestral relations and reparations. 

When the land question is formulated in abstract terms, it can flatten the particularities of different contexts. It is important, then, to relate abstract questions of land and property to concrete struggles, both contemporary and historical, and to draw out and centre the land dimension of these struggles.

In the Irish context, this could mean reviving radical histories of land agitations and struggles, and the “unfinished revolution,” mentioned by some participants. The history of land politics in Ireland is often centred on the late 19th century, but struggles over land ownership, distribution, labour and rural development have never gone away (see the excellent Peelers and Sheep podcast).

For example, the land annuities campaign led by Peadar O’Donnell in the 1930s, or the National Land League set up in the 1960s to protect small farmers against farm consolidation and speculation by foreign investors. The National Land League is part of a longer history of radical farmer-rural populism that was left-oriented, calling for a radical program of state-led land re-distribution and progressive agrarian reform. We need this kind of historical inspiration today.

Conclusion

There is no easy solution to the questions raised above. What is clear is that the differences revealed during the event are not just abstract quibbles. They get to the heart of food sovereignty politics – and not just in Ireland. Taken for granted ideas about social change and agency in our movements constrain our ability to bring about the alternative food systems we desire.

These debates need more critical knowledge and analysis based on robust research. For example, we need to know more about the (class) interests and allegiances that structure the agri-food system in this country, including the various forms of exploitation and resistance that operate across the food supply chain. This knowledge won’t come from universities or research agencies (though resources from these institutions can be useful). Beyond one-off events and encounters, we need to design our own infrastructures to produce and disseminate movement-centred knowledge. 

We can look elsewhere for inspiration in this regard. For example, the Observatory of Food Sovereignty and Environment OSAE is a civic research organisation based in Tunisia, linking food sovereignty to knowledge sovereignty. Closer to home, we see activists working with often hard to access data to make visible shifting land ownership in Scotland, Wales, England, and the nascent Land Observatory Campaign in Ireland (inspired in part by SAFER in France). Critically building popular knowledge and political consciousness through such projects sets the grounds for new perspectives within food sovereignty movements.