The Landworkers’ Alliance is a union of farmers, growers, foresters and land-based workers.

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If you have any comments, critiques, considerations, compliments, complaints, about anything the Landworkers Alliance is or isn’t up to, do let us know your thought. We love feedback, it keeps a system healthy. Please fill in this quick form.

Membership / Supporter / Donation Queries

Please contact Lauren.Simpson@landworkersalliance.org.uk

Requests for work, volunteering or internships

We are currently not recruiting for any roles but please read our newsletters for any announcements. We currently do not offer any volunteer or internship placements directly with the LWA, but keep an eye out in the newsletter or on the forum for any members looking for volunteers or workers.

Academic/Research Enquiries

Please look at the Agroecology Research Collaboration to see if it fits your area of research/work.

Membership Support / Advice

Currently the LWA does not have capacity or resources to help individual members or potential members on their specific projects, farms or programmes. We get a lot of requests for individual support and would love to have the time to respond to each request in full. We are fundraising for a new role for somebody to focus on membership support and services as we have identified it is a gap in our offering so please watch this space. Having said that, if your query is critical and urgent please email info@landworkersalliance.org.uk including the word URGENT in the subject header and it will get picked up and we can try our best to help.

Contacting Individual Staff

Please take the time to explore our staff page here to see who the most relevant contact for your enquiry is.

Our addresses format is firstname.lastname@landworkersalliance.org.uk

Please bear in mind we all work part time and have limited capacity to respond to enquiries outside our core areas of work.

You can also find information under the About Us header about branch and regional organising, and identity groups within the LWA membership.

Press/Media Enquiries:

For any queries relating to press please email press@landworkersalliance.org.uk

Merchandise/calendar Enquiries

For any enquiries to do with shop sales including the calendar please email merchandise@landworkersalliance.org.uk

To Include an Item in Our Newsletter:

You can fill in this quick form to submit it to be included in the next bulletin/newsletter. The deadline to submit is the end of Friday each week for the following week’s member bulletin. With the same form you can also submit to the monthly non-member newsletter which goes out in the first week of the month.

All Other Enquiries:

For any other enquiries that are URGENT please email info@landworkersalliance.org.uk with the word ‘urgent’ in the subject header and we will do our best to help.

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Why now, more than ever, we need a food system based on food sovereignty

Why now, more than ever, we need a food system based on food sovereignty
14/04/2020 Abel Pearson
In Blog, News

The Covid-19 pandemic is causing extreme suffering and disruption across society.  The pandemic is disproportionately impacting the most vulnerable and poorest people in our society – including those on low incomes, those with limited access to food and outdoor space, those in precarious employment, homeless people, and people with underlying health problems. Our social systems to help these people are  being pushed to the edge of what is possible, and we have seen incredible acts of solidarity and humanity from people and communities working hard to help.

It’s unclear how long Covid-19 will continue to spread, and when restrictions might ease.  But, what we do know is that we will not, and cannot, return back to ‘normal’. This crisis has highlighted that ‘normal’ is not a society that is resilient, fair, and just.  Now more than ever we need to look to build a society that puts people’s health first, builds solidarity and community, tackles inequality and addresses the biodiversity and climate crisis.

Covid-19 has highlighted the weakness in our food and land-use system. Global supply chains have been instantly affected, and our heavy reliance on imports [60% of our total supply], particularly from southern Europe is revealing how precarious our situation is. The last few weeks have seen a huge increase in demand from food banks just as they run out of food donations from supermarkets due to increased sales. We are facing a 60-80,000 person gap in the agricultural workforce due to travel restrictions, as we rely on migrant labour to harvest our crops. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation clearly warns that this crisis is likely to impact smaller scale farmers disproportionately, and as the average age of farmers in the UK is over 60, many farmers will have to take extra measures to self-isolate. In the long term we need to see thousands of new entrants into agroecology and eco-forestry to help re build our landuse systems.

What is clear now, more than ever, is the need to restructure our food system within the principles of food sovereignty.  We need stronger action at all levels of society and government to lead a just transition towards a food system that: ensures everyone has access to healthy and affordable food; values workers and producers; localises supply chains; and uses agroecological farming principles to ensure that our farming methods contribute positively to the climate and biodiversity crises that we face.  Our members are showing that this is possible, and we ask for your support to help build the food system that we all urgently need.

Over the coming weeks and months we will be campaigning on many of these individual issues, based around the key issues of food sovereignty. We’ll keep you updated as this progresses so watch out for newsletters, social media and blogs for more information.

In the meantime, here’s some actions you can take to support our work:

  • Sign our petition calling for an emergency package of support for landworkers
  • Join the LWA as a aelod sy’n weithiwr tir or aelod-gefnogwr, and help build a future where everybody can access local, healthy, affordable food, fuel and fibre from producers they can trust.
  • Donate to our POT CYFLEUSTER to help support landworkers through challenging times

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