A-Infos (en) Sicilia Libertaria: Agri-food and Food Sovereignty - the bluff of made in Italy (Part two) (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

The 2023 "State of the World" report by FAO and "Power shift" by the 
"Global alliance for the future" reveal the hidden costs of industrial 
food systems: 12,700 billion dollars, equal to a third of global GDP, 
for 70% caused by health effects: it is the cost of living. 
Agroindustrial food is the commodity that devours us. ----   Not only. 
The study published in June 2023 in the authoritative journal 
"Environmental research letter" analyzes 58 years of data on the 
climate, production and income of 109 crops in 127 countries and 
concludes that "a greater diversity of crops reduces the negative 
impacts of droughts and high temperatures on crops, increases resilience 
to weather and soil conditions". 41 thousand animal and plant species 
are at risk of extinction. (Source: Crop diversity buffers the impact of 
droughts and high temperatures on food production; iucn.org)

   Nonetheless, the EU supports high-yield agriculture per hectare 
(intensive monoculture) with the fake that it will free up land for 
biodiversity at the same time as solving the problem of world hunger 
(which is instead inequality in access to food): "in Europe, we will be 
able to return 75% of our agricultural surface to nature without this 
leading to cold winters, food and economic scarcity", said the Dutch MEP 
Nilufer Gundogan: it is the techno-optimism which, with the theory of 
soil saving, states that increasing productivity favors the protection 
of biodiversity, according to the principle of sustainable 
intensification in agriculture. On the contrary, land sharing 
presupposes a widespread, non-intensive agricultural model that promotes 
biodiversity within the cultivated areas; biodiversity depends on 
complex interactions between the different types of land use, the use of 
which cannot be delimited within fences: an insect, a pollinator, knows 
no artificial boundaries and its ability to survive is determined by the 
biodiversity conditions of the land cultivated and non-cultivated. The 
high use of pesticides and herbicides, in increasing quantities every 
year to ensure high productivity, causes the local and permanent 
extinction of living things in cultivated areas and through the 
contamination of air and water the extinction spreads everywhere. In 
European protected areas there is a 75% reduction in the biomass of 
flying insects and proportionally of insectivorous birds due to 
contamination from toxic cultivated environments. The story telling of 
high-yield agriculture is the narrative of the endless hunt for profit.

    On the contrary, a non-extractive, organic agriculture, based on 
the ecology of not only plant populations and agrobiodiversity, is not a 
cultivation method but a community of the territory resulting from a 
radical social transformation that abolishes the agrarian individualism 
of private land ownership and returns Agriculture to the community as a 
common good, whose activity is a cognitive-productive work shared by the 
whole society which thus exercises the right to knowledge and generates 
food sovereignty, or the ability to be the guardian of biodiversity and 
environmental heritage, of an agroecology based on complexity, on the 
right to food security and access to food, on energy control exercised 
with delegation to farmers. The rejection of monoculture in the field in 
favor of agricultural diversity mirrors the overcoming of the capitalist 
dogma of one-dimensional progress of not only agricultural models, of 
technical, cultural, economic and social uniformity and uniqueness.

   Food sovereignty has as its incipit the cognitive, reproductive and 
collective ownership re-appropriation of seeds, their free exchange and 
genetic adaptation to environmental conditions; collective ownership and 
free trade are now prohibited by law, peasant seeds confined to the 
registers of conservation varieties and genome banks. By seeds we do not 
mean those of the multinational seed companies as they are created and 
produced specifically for industrial agriculture, but we mean the seeds 
of traditional varieties, the result of centuries-old adaptations, 
resilient and adaptive to the changing conditions of the territory: "due 
to cross-breeding and selection natural, the genetic composition of the 
traditional organic seed harvested at the end of the season is never the 
same as that sown, so the population evolves by progressively adapting 
to the environment in which it grows." (Salvatore Ceccarelli - Stefania 
Grando, geneticists, Sowing the future, Giunti Ed. 2019). Seeds are the 
basis of the food supply chain since food comes from seeds and our 
health is derived from the quality of food. Whoever owns them controls life.

Food sovereignty implies another social way of understanding the 
Territory, which is no longer the geographical space defined by 
political-administrative borders where a public body exercises its 
authority, the place where the inhabitants carry out activities, profits 
and profits, from which they extract materials and products. The 
Territory is a natural subject part of an ineliminable world of life 
relationships of the local community. It is an eco-systemic unit within 
which environmental resources and their users are integrated so that the 
forms of a balanced and inseparable totality are created. The territory 
is the subject of Rights through communities, another way of possessing 
where properties are inalienable, indivisible, non-inheritable. The 
Rights pertain to the object (water, forest, land, etc.) and not to the 
subject (natural or legal person), therefore ownership or hierarchical 
dominion of the subject over the object is not exercised; the subjects 
are only usufructuaries and must guarantee the integrity of the 
territory and its resources for future generations. The territory is a 
common good, a collective heritage whose governance and management are 
based on consensual decisions and the delegation of authority with 
direct democracy.

Roberto Brioschi

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
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