Cymraeg 
It’s almost that time of year again – the Oxford Real Farming Conference ORFC) is upon us! So just before we all head off for our Christmas breaks, we thought we’d share some of what the LWA will be bringing to this year’s conference, running on 4th and 5th January 2024, to help those of you attending to get your session plan well prepared ahead of time! You don’t want to miss out on your favourite speakers!
At ORFC 2024, there are over a hundred incredible sessions planned across eight venues. These will bring speakers from around the world together with the larger ORFC community to discuss issues around food and farming policy, land justice, the financialisation of nature, community wellbeing, and the critical role farming plays in solving our ecological crises. Delegates will be able to choose from panels, keynotes and workshops that engage with the crucial challenges affecting our food and farming system right now.
There will be plenty of opportunities to learn about new (and old) agroecological practices and connect with others who share your vision of a fairer and more diverse food and farming system. As always, ORFC will create a space for in-depth knowledge and skill-sharing, giving experienced (and not-so-experienced) speakers the opportunity to step forward and be heard.
We are delighted to once again be holding a Landworkers’ Alliance room as part of the programme, in the Old Library in Oxford Town Hall inviting panels and speakers from our staff team, coordinating group and our membership to share inspiration, information and to encourage radical, challenging conversations for the future of agroecology and food sovereignty in the UK and around the world.
In this article, we’re going to share with you what we’ve got planned across the two days in our space, and the moments you won’t want to miss in what is a fully-packed programme! Hopefully this will help you distill which sessions you’d really like to get to from what we have on offer.
In the LWA Room – The Old Library, Oxford Town Hall
1. Agrobiodiversity for the Survival of our Food System
Thursday 4th January 2023, 11am-12.30pm
Chair: Jyoti Fernandes. Speakers: Richie Walsh, Hannah Thorogood, Henrietta Inman, Tom Adams
After almost a century of industrialised agriculture, we’ve found ourselves in a precarious position. We’ve ended up with a food and farming system based on just a few varieties of specialised crops and animals; but with this specialisation comes great risk. Now, in the face of intersecting environmental crises – from global warming to soil degradation and biodiversity loss – we need to (re) build diversity to build resilience. This session will hear from landworkers, food-makers and seed savers who are working to revive agrobiodiversity from the grassroots – in our fields and orchards, on our plates and in our guts, and in the soils, ecosystems and communities that sustain us.
Jyoti Fernandes will be chairing a discussion on Agrobiodiversity
2. ORGANISING FOR MIGRANT WORKERS’ JUSTICE IN THE UK
Thursday 4th January 2024, 1pm-1.45pm
Speakers: Catherine McAndrew
Last year, in collaboration with other labour rights and farming organisations, the Landworkers’ Alliance produced a report looking into the structural drivers of labour exploitation in the UK’s industrial horticulture sector, and how supermarkets are reaping the rewards of this exploitation. The report revealed how the new UK seasonal worker immigration scheme is facilitating worker exploitation, and provided workers with a platform to recount their experiences of both abuse and resistance. In this session, Landworkers’ Alliance’s Catherine McAndrew will present the findings of this report and put forward a course of action for improving working conditions in British farming.
3. SHIFTING THE NARRATIVE FROM A COST-OF-LIVING CRISIS TO A COST- OF-PROFIT CRISIS
Thursday 4th January 2023, 2pm-3.30pm
Chair: Dee Woods. Speakers: Sofía Monsalve Suárez, Yali Banton-Heath, Daniel Stanley, Courtney Scott
2023 saw food prices in the UK skyrocket. Combined with a spike
in energy prices, the cost of living for families across the UK rose dramatically, pushing countless families deeper into poverty. Meanwhile, supermarkets continued to generate enormous profits. Hiding behind a cost-of-living smokescreen, they hiked up their prices and handed out billions in shareholder profits, all the while attempting to persuade us that price increases are an inevitable result of factors outside of their control. Are we living in a cost-of-living crisis? Or a more entrenched corporate greed crisis? Join our panellists to explore the ways in which we can inform public understanding about the entrenched corporate control of our food systems, what can be done to change the narrative around food inequality, and how we can begin to place the blame firmly at the door of those at the top of the supply chain.
Dee Woods (Credit: Joya Berrow)
4. A MARKET GARDEN RENAISSANCE ACROSS THE FOUR NATIONS
Thursday 4th January 2023, 4pm-5.30pm
Rebecca Laughton will chair this session (Credit: Fern Leigh Albert)
Chair: Rebecca Laughton. Speakers: Barry Ferguson, Julie Brown, Jo Hunt, Jono Hughes
The UK imports 85% of its fruit and 43% of its vegetables. Countries we import from are already experiencing the impacts of climate change, while financial pressures are causing UK growers to leave the sector. Yet, across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, market gardens are attracting new entrants, supplying local communities, integrating productive systems with biodiversity, sequestering carbon and engaging with the public.
This session will launch the LWA’s new report ‘Horticulture across Four Nations’, which explores the contribution that agroecological horticulture could make to reducing our reliance on imports and building a more resilient, fresh produce sector. Growers featured in the illustrative case studies in the report will speak about how they are contributing to making this vision a reality, and what their respective governments could do to help.
5. The Search for Common Ground: Reconciling Farming and Academic Research (ARC session)
Friday 5th January, 9am-10.30am
Chair: Tara Wight. Speakers: Holly Silvester, Julia Cooper, Jessica Stokes, Ben Adams
Our Scotland Policy and Campaigns Coordinator and Research Coordinator, Tara Wight, will lead a discussion between academic researchers, funders and pioneering farmers to discuss how we can work better together.
While in the field, farmers pioneer and share innovative regenerative practices, research councils continue to pour millions of pounds a year into tech-heavy, top-down solutions to the challenges faced by agriculture. Through their own experiences of successful participatory research, panellists will explore differences in expectations, timescales and language which pose challenges to collaboration, and discuss what can be done to overcome these. They will then discuss what action is needed for the wider research agenda to recognise and support farmer-led innovation.
Jyoti Fernandes will be chairing a discussion on Agrobiodiversity
6. BUILDING A GLOBAL PEASANTS MOVEMENT: 10 YEARS OF LWA AND 30 YEARS OF LVC
Friday 5th January 2023, 11am-12.30pm
10 Years of LWA & 30 Years of LVC (Credit: Steph Wetherell)
Speakers: Jyoti Fernandes, Morgan Ody, Anders Behrend, Chukki Nanjundaswamy
As food and agriculture became globalised, peasant organisations from the Global North and South came together and founded the global peasants’ movement, La Via Campesina (LVC), in 1993. La Via Campesina is now over 30 years old, unifies over 200 million peasants around the globe and comprises of over 180 member organisations. It continues amplifying the voices of peasants worldwide, fostering solidarity among diverse communities, inspiring hope and advocating for just and inclusive food systems. Ten years ago a new member organisation of LVC has been founded in the UK: the Landworkers’ Alliance, a union of farmers, growers, foresters and land-based workers. Panellists in this session will explain how the peasants movement works and manages to build unity within such a big diversity.
7. ‘SEA SOVEREIGNTY’ IN ACTION, WITH CÂR Y MÔR
Friday 5th January 2025, 1pm-1.45pm
Chair: Sofie Quist Speaker: Ella Sturley
Landworkers’ Alliance members Câr y Môr are Wales’s first community- owned regenerative ocean farm. Off the coast of Pembrokeshire in South Wales they farm shellfish and seaweed, and use regenerative farming techniques to build biodiversity in their marine farming system. Their community-ownership model means they are deeply integrated with the local community, and provide dignified jobs and opportunities for local people. In this session, we will hear from Câr y Môr about their important and pioneering work, and discuss what food sovereignty and agroecology look like in a coastal food and farming system.
Câr y Môr (Credit: Câr y Môr)
8. Developing a New International Trade Framework and Protecting Peasants’ Rights
Friday 5th January 2023, 2pm-3.30pm
Chair: Paula Gioia Speakers: Morgan Ody, Dee Woods, Anders Behrend
In 2018, the UN general assembly voted in favour of the UN Declaration on the rights of peasants and other people working in rural areas (UNDROP). This was a major achievement for La Via Campesina, as the movement had been working for 17 years to get there. The adoption process of UNDROP proved the capacity of the global peasant movement to negotiate within UN spaces and with governments towards a new legal tool. Strengthened by this experience, and seeing the urgent need to get away from the neoliberal trade order and, in particular, away from WTO, La Via Campesina is now launching an initiative towards a new trade framework based on food sovereignty.
This session will look at LVC’s concrete proposal for a fair trade system centred on people’s needs and on how to achieve such a major shift at the global level.
What else are the LWA up to?!
As well as our sessions in the LWA room at ORFC, there’s strong LWA representation across the conference, with members and staff team contributing to sessions on support for new entrants, international trade frameworks, food sovereignty and land speed-dating! There’ll also be a Youth Convergence on Land Justice with FLAME, and a screening of a Landworkers’ Alliance Short Film on Women and Non-Binary Farming.
In-person tickets for this year’s ORFC are all SOLD OUT, but several of the sessions are being streamed ONLINE. Check out the online programme here.
For those of you with tickets, we look forward to seeing you there! Do come and see us at the LWA stall to pick up some merchandise or copies of our publications and meet the team. Please do tag us in your social media posts @landworkersalliance, especially if you’re posting about these sessions in the Old Library!
ORFC is a unique opportunity to meet , connect and build our movement, and a rare moment when leaders in the field of agroecology, regenerative agriculture, community food and farming and food sovereignty are in one place sharing their knowledge and experiences.
Let’s make this one the best yet!
