Levenvale Farm Agroecology Dialogue (Bellingen, NSW)

Name: Levenvale Farm Agroecology Dialogue (Bellingen, NSW)
Start: 2024-10-08T09:00:00+1100
End: 2024-10-10T15:00:00+1100
Location: Levenvale Farm

Tue, 8 Oct, 9am - 10 Oct, 3pm AEDT

Levenvale Farm

hydes creek, australia

Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance

17 followers · Contact host

Event description

Join AFSA president Tammi Jonas of Jonai Farms and Meatsmiths for the Agroecology Roadshow!

What to Expect:

1. Share experiences of grassroots strategies for growing and accessing ecologically-sound, socially-just, nutritious and delicious food.
2. Work together to take back control of our food and agriculture systems from corporations.
3. Build connections between local, regional, and national organisations.

Building a movement:
Australia’s farmers produce 93% of the country’s food, but over 70% is exported, mostly to wealthy countries or used in livestock feed, biofuels, and ultra-processed foods. Despite this, small-scale farmers are on the rise, selling directly to local markets and embracing ecologically-sound and socially-just practices, and collectivising to deal with the problem of the state in regulating corporate industrial agriculture. In a global context, we call this movement agroecology, a lesser-known term in Australia.

To grow agroecology in Australia, we need to built strong networks at a grassroots level, and connect them to the national and international movements for food sovereignty. The Agroecology Roadshow aims to empower small-scale farmers and activists to push for change from the ground up to radically transform our food and agriculture systems.

Before the Event:

We’ll be sending out a short survey to ticket holders 2 before the event to help us understand the key challenges and opportunities in your area. This will allow us to focus the discussions on what matters most to your community. The email will also include important info like directions and event logistics.

Catering:

Lunch will be a potluck feast, so please bring a dish to share! If you have specific dietary needs, we encourage you to bring something that suits your requirements. Also, please bring your own cups, mugs, and cutlery to help reduce waste.

Got Questions?

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions at: admin@afsa.org.au.

Support AFSA's Agroecology Roadshow and Pay the Rent

Ticket prices for the Agroecology Roadshow are kept as low as possible to enable as many people as possible to participate in the discussion.

If you have capacity to contribute to the Roadshow with a donation in addition to your ticket price, this will help to cover the full costs of the event, and support AFSA's work advocating for food sovereignty in Australia. Your support is greatly appreciated, and enables the Roadshow to be an inclusive and democratic space for the food sovereignty movement in Australia.

In addition to supporting AFSA’s work, we have also included an option to Pay the Rent to local First Peoples in your region. This is an optional contribution for attendees wishing to offer a gesture of reparation and acknowledge that sovereignty was never ceded.

Tickets for good, not greed Humanitix dedicates 100% of profits from booking fees to charity

Hostinformation

Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance

17 followers

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The Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA) is a farmer-led civil society organisation of people working together towards socially-just and ecologically-sound food and agriculture systems that foster the democratic participation of Indigenous Peoples, smallholders, and local communities in decision making processes.

AFSA Values & Theory of Change

We uphold the 7 Pillars of Food Sovereignty:

Food for people
Builds knowledge and skills
Works with nature
Values food providers
Localises food systems
Puts control locally
Food is sacred

We value our relationships with Land, water, and sky, and strive to care for Country and promote First Peoples’ sovereignty in everything we do. We value biodiversity, and support agroecological food production that protects Land, people, and the more-than-human world.

We listen to First Peoples at every opportunity and promote their rights to voice, treaty, and truth as expressed in the Uluru Statement from the Heart. We are embracing custodial ethics, locating our practices, and expressing solidarities with Traditional Custodians on all food sovereignty issues.

We support the movement away from the corporate-controlled, exploitative capitalist food system, which is shaped by unequal systems of power and oppression, and produces commodities for profit instead of food for people. Our solutions must dismantle systemic food injustices rooted in colonialism.

We value all parts of nature over profits. We acknowledge and respect everyone’s work in the food system, including unpaid, underpaid, and devalued labour. We work to honour culture and conviviality, and to protect and restore food literacy and traditional, non-industrial ways of growing, preparing, sharing, and eating food as a community.

We prioritise community, collaboration, mutual aid, horizontal knowledge exchanges, and equality, seeing them as necessary for and complimentary to individual autonomy. We reject any ideology that promotes individual rights over human rights.

We are concerned about the way the state tries to simplify things that are inherently complex such as agro-ecosystems, food economies, public health, water rights and food security through narrow policy and legislation, but we are not ‘anti-government’.

We seek to localise decision making, replacing the state where possible with smaller-scale, democratic collectives that organically emerge, such as citizens’ assemblies that allow direct democratic participation in decision making in local communities, and farmers’ and workers’ cooperatives to regain control of the means of production, distribution, and communication.

We are an anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, pro-collectivist organisation working to build solidarity across movements working for food sovereignty, food security, climate action, workers’ rights, and against extractive industries. We embrace degrowth as a politics and a practice. Our members embrace a broad spectrum of political ideologies, but as an Alliance, we do not identify with singular labels – we are a pluralist movement.

We are reformists AND radicals, focusing on practical alternatives (e.g. community-supported agriculture, agroecology, community food initiatives, food hubs) as a way to create ecologically-sound and socially-just food and agriculture systems. We connect these actions with a social movement approach, integrating the goal of destroying the power structures of capitalism. Without this radical transformation, practical actions are at risk of co-optation by neoliberalism.

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