“For some farmers, it’s been the first time they have ever met a vegan. It really goes to show there is more that unites us than divides us and the only way forward is together.”
This coming together is vital to push back against Big Ag (industrial-scale agriculture) and profiteering supermarkets. In India, farmer suicide rates have escalated owing to the extortionate costs of pesticides like Roundup.
The farmers who use Roundup are obliged to fork out every year for the ‘terminator’ seeds that go with it, unlike those using heritage seeds, which can be sown year on year through seed saving. But the agricultural corporations of this world lord it over the majority of growers (and us) with their policy of profits over people.
In reality, both farmers and vegans find themselves isolated and equally demonised. But it is having this in common that has created cooperation and opened up a discussion about the just transition to plant-based diets.
Grassroots
Another grassroots-up initiative is Assemble, the national network of people’s assemblies taking place in cities as far afield as Hull and Bristol.
Roger Hallam, the co-founder of XR told Resurgence & Ecologist: “This is the next big thing; we have £100,000 in funding and 70 Assemblies. Independent candidates [during the 2024 parliamentary election in the UK were] a way of building a new social movement across the eco and social crises.”
Speaking from prison following the imposition of a five-year sentence for helping organise the M25 gantries action in 2022, he added, “Along the way, the ruling class will have the police knock on your door and have you put away for half a decade. What needs to be done? It’s time to unite the non-Labour left and the climate resistance space, to fuse.
“We have a lot to learn from each other, and millions of people are crying out for initiative and leadership. A programme for decency, compassion and survival. A massive reduction in inequality to fund the reduction in emissions and Earth system repair. Anything less and we will have nothing but fascism and mass death.”
It is this ripple effect and a joining together that will prove key, as solid, disciplined grassroots organisation pays dividends, but this time with people over profit.
Destructive
Also in the spring, another youth-led campaign, Everybody Eats, grabbed the headlines. Directly eating into supermarket profits by refusing to pay for products or taking them from the supermarket food bins, and distributing them to nearby food banks, they were described as “angels” by one food bank manager.
Currently around 15 million people in the UK are in food and fuel poverty – this in the sixth-largest economy in the world. Everybody Eats have targeted supermarkets from Manchester to Hastings, sparking debate about their Robin Hood tactics.
Yet over a year ago the governor of the Bank of England warned that we had reached ‘apocalyptic’-level food price rises, while at the same time UK farming productivity is forecast to decline as our climate heats and ecological systems buckle.
All this is on top of fragile trade links and the shocking reliance on imported foods. In the UK only 60 per cent of all foods are home grown and of that only 23 per cent of fruit and vegetables is from this country.
The National Food Strategy recommendations made under the previous Tory government detailed how broken our food system is and the destructive effect agricultural policy has on our natural environment.
Flourish
We need a resilient farming sector that can respond to the climate crisis. Instead, farmers have been pushed over the edge with decades of governments interested only in cheap imports and a food industry in a race to the bottom of cheap prices.
It is a secure and sustainable plant-based food system glo-bally that will deliver and stave off the worst-case scenarios of climate breakdown and in so doing support farmers to transition to a realistic, sustainable food future.
It is estimated that more than 70 per cent of farmland can be taken out of production and rewilded to allow depleted soils to recover, while still providing enough wholefoods for the growing British population.
Rivers and seas will become cleaner, as will our atmosphere. Wild animals and insects will return and flourish as the industrial scale of animal farming and super-trawler fishing die off like fossil fuels – stranded assets.
This Author
Jan Goodey is an activist with Just Stop Oil. He works as an allotment gardener for New Roots co-op and a community orchard worker for Brighton Permaculture Trust. Join Assemble weekly national briefings online at 7pm every Thursday.
