Slow Food Heroes: #SOScampesinado – Slow Food International

The crisis triggered by COVID-19 has led to the reinforcement of traditional and hegemonic powers and ways of carrying out things, but a range of spontaneous processes of self-group, mutual support, and articulation concerning social movements and citizens have also emerged to reply to a important socio-economic reality. In the circumstance of agroecological actions, a single of these responses has been the #SOSCampesinado marketing campaign, from which we share reflections and classes acquired many thanks to the words and phrases of Patricia Dopazo Gallego, journalist of Soberania Alimentaria. 

Spain was just one of the nations most difficult hit by the Covid-19 disaster. Its lockdown started on 14 March 2020 and was one particular of the most stringent in Europe. In this framework, the pandemic has highlighted the urgency of reclaiming the relevance of all those functions that have turn out to be more vital than at any time, irrespective of their standard invisibility in a industry-centered modern society. 

The creation, distribution, and advertising of food was soon declared an essential exercise, but which one particular responds to which design? 

When in Spain the whole Horeca channel (accommodations, dining establishments, and caterings) and direct income areas (client teams, producers’ marketplaces, milk vending devices, and many others.) ended up being shut down, and when little-scale output was looking for ways to survive, the visible face of the sector was a minister declaring that there was no provide issue since the substantial distribution chains had been still functioning. What solutions ended up offered to ensure the functioning of shorter advertising circuits and the survival of small-scale creation? None. This is the paradoxical and dichotomous reality of discourse and steps that consider massive-scale distribution – which plunders the peasantry – as the only indicates of obtain to food items.

Confronted with this panorama, many of us rebel from the need to have to defend what is definitely essential: the routines that warranty the sustenance of life beyond enterprise.

So, we made a decision to denounce the predicament for them and produce conscience in the political sphere and also amid the citizens. The campaign compelled politicians in some regions to glance for remedies and some weeks immediately after it the road marketplaces had been opened again in some regions like Barcelona and Euskadi. 

A spontaneous motion from an informal space

The #SOScampesinado initiative stems from an informal community of close to 40 females from unique sections of Spain who have been united for numerous yrs by the require to deal with agroecology and meals sovereignty from a feminist point of view. Among us there are livestock farmers, shepherdesses, communicators, trade unionists, agroecological activists, scientists, and environmental activists, when the confinement arrived, we shared how we had been and how we supported ourselves, and a perception of urgency was activated in the group. 

From the company conviction that agroecology is essential to assurance the suitable to adequate foods and nutrition, we felt that the decisions of community establishments had been not oriented toward guaranteeing these rights. We firmly imagine that in these cases, processes of collective corporation, resistance, mutual assistance, and vindication are central.

Based mostly on an agile trade of experiences and techniques (by way of emails, calls, and messages), we made a decision to organize ourselves and start out a point out-large mobilization fed by the a variety of territorial initiatives with which we were being connected. Our needs have been produced community on 30 March in a letter to the Ministry of Agriculture signed by far more than 100 businesses. In it, we requested, amongst other things, for the reopening of regional marketplaces and the lifting of the ban on the use of self-intake industry gardens, as properly as financial and fiscal measures to mitigate the huge financial impression that this disaster is obtaining on rural economies. We also stressed the need to have for inter-administrative coordination (inter-ministerial, inter-regional and area) to avoid disturbances, dispersion, and inefficiencies in the adoption of measures. In quick, we were being asking public administrations to assistance and identify the important worth of nearby manufacturing and self-sufficiency places as meals suppliers for our communities.

In just a couple of days, thanks to the press and digital, interpersonal, and inter-organizational social networks, the letter was signed by 600 additional businesses, and, most importantly, it succeeded in increasing awareness of the truth of smaller-scale agri-food stuff creation and processing and its shorter advertising circuits. What’s more, this motion experienced its replicas and alliances with other strategies in the territories, reflecting the likely and synergies of the struggles for peasant and social rights.

One more connected motion that was viral in digital social networks and supported by our marketing campaign was #Yocomodelahuerta (something like “I eat from my vegetable garden”), developed by individuals who have a vegetable backyard garden for their own self-sufficiency and were afflicted by the restrictions mainly because it was not permitted to go out to treatment for this type of gardens. 

https://www.youtube.com/view?v=gjQC5-dUXUY

A structure to use for totally free

All the motion, in a second moment, was tailored and replicated on a local or regional scale, led by unique persons (not only women of all ages). It was one thing like a inventive commons action and we are happy that any one can change and use it for no cost.  Anyway, it was able to inspire indirectly the spreading of significantly additional initiatives in a smaller sized scale (metropolitan areas, areas), and some of them did provided direct action with the producers, like this 1 in Catalonia: a directory map about each agroecological small producer, which was a excellent strategy to promote them and maximize direct call with customers. https://einatecagroecologica.pamapam.org/directori-dabastiment-agroecologic/

What does a feminist approach search like?

A single learning that we take into account central to this campaign lies in the method by itself. With the urgency of this motion incredibly substantially in brain, we have been capable to adapt it to our availability, and not the other way all over. We have found this in the distribution and relaying of responsibilities and in the unique rhythms that the marketing campaign has had in its two months of duration for the reason that there have been times of enthusiasm and enthusiasm but, of study course, also moments of tiredness and doubts. We have included distinctive languages, well balanced views, and blurred leadership, sharing methods, encounters, and relationships in the collective design. The adherence to the constitution was primarily based on solidarity recognition and regard for territorial, cultural, and identity differences. For all these explanations, we feel that it has been a radically feminist course of action: horizontal, various, and in dialogue, which recognizes the debates, theoretical get the job done, and political follow that has been built up over lots of decades by the hand of peasant women and feminist and agroecological collectives.

In point, those of us who make up this network has been battling for agroecology in our territories for many years, and soon after this expertise, we have as soon as yet again understood that it is the get the job done of the territories that nourishes the written content of initiatives and condition mobilization when it results in being important and urgent. Our articulation, based mostly on belief and mutual guidance, has been a conference place wherever community mobilizations can be shared and strengthened with no the require for a official framework or a vintage organizational design. Therefore, confronted with the everlasting concern of no matter if we need to have a lot more sophisticated or formal organizational buildings, our experience has evidently revealed that if the territories are very well connected with alliances and cooperation involving them, there is no require for a structured state corporation with dynamics that frequently close up becoming ineffective and sporting.

The wrestle is in the streets

A further learning that ought to be highlighted is the massive enhance and visibility that virtual social networks can give to product struggles in the territories. We are not gurus in these tools in truth, we have essential the aid of communication administrators from businesses, collective experts in demand of digital media, and creators of visual resources this kind of as infographics. 

Virtual social networks are unable to and should not change our struggles, but they are a basic complement to mobilizations in neighborhoods and villages, where by we can see and touch every other, and embrace the battle and hope. Having said that, in this hyper-technological culture and in the certain context we are residing in, with our restricted mobility, they represent an indeniable space for generating and defending discourse, disseminating techniques, and articulating social force. 

Feminist agroecology in practice

If we had to undertaking an analysis of this whole procedure, we would say nowadays that it has not had all the good final results that we would have preferred. At the institutional stage, we managed to satisfy with the Ministry of Client Affairs, which listened to our messages and undertook to go them on to other ministries, albeit with extremely constrained benefits. Producers’ markets have been opened in some regions, and also self-use gardens, but there was no prevalent adjust at the point out degree right up until the de-escalation period formally began. A lot of keep on being shut and have to have community stress to drive their reestablishment and compliance with safety rules. We know that our concept and our demands arrived at the institutions, but we have also found that most of them have prioritized other pursuits.

This marketing campaign has managed to make visible and deliver jointly in a collective information numerous agroecological experiences that right up until then had not located spaces exactly where they could really feel determined, regarded, or accompanied in their requires. We believe that that getting constructed the marketing campaign collectively, horizontally, with mutual care, with out logos or letterheads, for everyone in the plural and from no one particular, in distinct, has facilitated this appropriation.

In limited, past this instant of crisis, we are now on the way, owning integrated a ton of recognition and, earlier mentioned all, feminist practice for the development of agroecology as a result of an unparalleled campaign that strengthens our conviction that agroecology will be feminist, or it will not be.

Parts of the story are taken from the posting posted in this article

 

Gradual Food items Heroes is a job financed by the European Cultural Basis, with the contribution of the CRC Foundation.