Voices from flame

Written by James Lunt, FLAME member

We often think that concepts central to the LWA such as “food justice” and “food sovereignty”, are modern ones, borne from heightened awareness of food politics. And while La Via Campesina was one of the first to coin these terms, they were certainly not the first to fight for them. Indigenous people from across the world died for these concepts, and colonial authorities weaponised them in their search for land, resources and wealth. Food became political in a way that allowed western nations to spread the power and influence throughout the globe, and its effects are very much still with us today with green revolutions and food technology part of a long line of “improvements” that have allowed Europeans and the global north to take advantage of agriculture. It has its roots in the British introducing alien crops, to place not suitable for growing them, while simultaneously taking away indigenous forms of agriculture that had provided for centuries. The ensuing human caused famines and starvation offered the perfect chance to force native people to rely on western imports, or else take up the more “civilised” form of European farming, highly productive but mono cropped plantations. The three sisters became the one, and agro-forestry removed the hyphen and added a full stop. Complicated and unique patterns of growing and raising became simplified and controlled. These tactics can be first seen in the colonisers’ own back garden, and the first to be colonised was often their own people. The repossession of previously communal territory into private hands first started with the enclosures of the 16th to 19th Century. The draining of the fens was the precursor of the weaponising of India’s water resources by British engineers.

But where there is colonialism, there is resistance. Food became a weapon in the arsenal of the coloniser, but also one for the resistance. Growing and raising became resistance in itself, and people were killed for it. The buffalo were destroyed by the European immigrants, but these huge animals became a way the Comanche became successful enough to stop the imperial machine in its tracks. And where we see the parallels in dispossession and colonisation, we also see defiance by the English working class against dispossession. However, it should be noted that the insidious racism and ethnic cleansing seen in the colonialism of The Americas, Africa and Asia Pacific added another element to food warfare, and was not seen in the treatment of England’s own population.

One of these groups of people fighting against specifically enclosure, were the Diggers. This group of people were active close to where I live in South East England, and while the roundheads and cavaliers clashed in the English civil war, they fought their own battles in the commons and fields of Surrey. This common land was the victim of enclosure, turning from somewhere belonging to and farmed by the community to one directly owned by those able to purchase it. It had transformed the English countryside, and now most people think of commons as glorified parks, rather than somewhere to plant cabbage, graze sheep or harvest broom. But this is exactly what the Diggers did, repossessing land stolen from them by the lord of manor.