Agriculture and a global plague: How to find unity amidst turmoil?

Will this summer be a ripe time to practice a dual-power strategy?

The original English text can be found here . For details, please contact Liu Umbrella’s volunteer translation team.

Since the beginning of the ongoing global pandemic and mandatory confinements (non-jail-like "lockdowns") in various countries, I have been listing articles and references related to global agriculture and the coronavirus in an online document to share with my friends, family Shared with a reading group I recently joined online. The current unstable state of the world reminds me of the words of anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing: "The uncertainty of the world and the unplanned nature of time are always scary. But by thinking in turmoil , we clearly know that uncertainty also makes life full of new possibilities.” ¹

After visiting six cooperatives in the Basque Country in France, I am now staying at home near the Alps. I want to share some of what I’ve been reading recently and think with you about some agricultural and transnational possibilities—and hopefully end with a few words about the land struggles in my homeland of Hong Kong.

My exploration of these ideas began in 2010, when I met some farmers in the urban/rural/mountainous New Territories in the north of Hong Kong. The "non-place" name "New Territories" alludes to its colonial past and the British Empire's clumsy pattern of renaming landing sites and conquering the "New" World - such as New Zealand, New Britain and Newfoundland (meaning "New Territories"). A newly found place"). ²

In 1898, mainland China leased the New Territories and 200 outlying islands to the British colonial government for a period of 99 years, resulting in the arbitrary classification of "original residents" and "non-indigenous residents" villagers. The current hegemonic and patriarchal land policy in the New Territories is a legacy from the colonial period, causing villagers to continue to lose their homes and farmland, while allowing men in “original” families to own land and build houses. Many times these indigenous villagers will profit from their land rights by illegally converting farmland into brownfields - filling the fertile soil with concrete and building parking lots, waste recycling sites and containers above. Field paving the way.

In Hong Kong, indigeneity created a resonance with songs that were streamed during the 2016 North Dakota pipeline protests. Hong Kong's indigenous villagers bear no resemblance to indigenous communities in the Amazon, where the first coronavirus deaths were reported in early April.

The New Territories farmers I met in Ma Shi Po Estate, Ping Che and Tin Heung Garden were or are victims of the hegemony of developers, especially Henderson Land, which, like other developers in Hong Kong and China, has His empire extended into the art world . ³

In 2016, this type of land struggle led me later to visit other parts of the world asserting food sovereignty and land tenure rights, such as ZAD ( Zone à Défendre in French, Zone to Defend in English) in western France. The ZAD is an ongoing occupation of 1,650 hectares of land in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, where many cooperatives now live, fighting against the government's proposed new airport for fifty years ( The plan was later canceled in January 2018).

Four years later I returned to Europe and continued to visit agricultural cooperatives until the start of the lockdown on March 16, 2020, hoping to continue traveling and visit ZAD in Our Lady of the Badlands again. I believe this global pandemic has fundamentally changed our relationship with agriculture, the right to food, and our reliance on essential service workers such as farmers, delivery drivers and supermarket cashiers. An example I saw yesterday in Grenoble was of unmasked bicycle delivery couriers - mostly people of color - waiting on empty streets for delivery. Meanwhile during lockdown, there were white families leisurely cycling around the neighborhood. ⁴

Food-related issues naturally have varying complexities, some, if not all, of which are biopolitical and sit at the intersection of systemic global inequalities. Soul Fire Farm, a BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color)-centered community farm in the United States, teaches us how to flexibly grow food in a system of racism and injustice. The following characters and co-ops also share ways to survive.

(Im)mobility of essential service workers

The vegetables and rice from outside were delivered, and the team leader called people out in the group: The vegetable seller was from the next village. The variety was not as good as in the supermarket, and the price was about the same as before; I heard that some communities in the city bought vegetables in groups. , the supermarket gives them ABCDE set meals, each set comes with a lot of unnecessary vegetables; and the price of vegetables in Hankou is even more exaggerated, with pork as high as 60 yuan per pound. (approximately 6.80 pounds)

—Anonymous, Wuhan Diary, Black Book Assembly More-Than-Half-A-Year-in-Review

This excerpt is from February 2020 and is the fifth diary entry of someone in Wuhan during the lockdown. The diary foreshadowed what was about to happen around the world: organizing through social media to get food, buying in bulk at supermarkets and creating food shortages and limited choices (especially "panic buying"), forming support groups with neighbors, gouging prices, and fluctuations in the livestock industry. Later, a three-channel documentary with English subtitles produced by Tsinghua University’s Qingying Studio shared footage from Wuhan social media: a terrace gardener growing enough vegetables to last a month, including lettuce, Wuhan-produced cabbage and seaweed hearts; Bees harvesting nectar from yellow flowers; empty supermarket shelves; electric delivery bicycles loaded with vegetables; and free vegetables delivered, a cartload of daikon - " two plants per person ."

In Yunnan, mobile beekeeper Liu Decheng cannot make a living due to travel restrictions. China is the world's largest honey producer, and more than 300,000 beekeepers carry truckloads of bees across state and province each year, chasing the seasons and blooming flowers, spreading pollen for crops in the process. On February 13, 2020, with about a hundred bee colonies (some of which were poisoned by pesticides), insufficient sources of flowers, and lack of money to buy bee feed, Liu Decheng committed suicide, leaving behind a family of six. His death was announced on the website of the Chinese Beekeeping Society . Two days later, government officials announced that only essential service workers, such as those working in livestock, feed and beekeeping, could move freely . But it was too late.

Non, un paysan n'est pas un militaire.
J'ai un peu de mal avec ces propos guerriers.
It's a solid experience.

No, farmers are not soldiers.
These bellicose remarks bother me a little.
I understand the intention, but I prefer to talk about "unity".

— Nicolas Girod, Confédération paysanne, a French agricultural union

In mid-March, the World Health Organization stated that Europe had become the " global epicenter " of the COVID-19 pandemic. In France, I saw President Macron likening the situation to a war on March 16, 2020, and imposing lockdowns and restrictive measures. In the same telecast, he said six times: "We are in a war ." If this was a war, then a Forensic Architecture investigation revealed that the Israeli military was sending troops to Palestine (colonized by the Israeli government since 1967). ) What about the Gaza weeding campaign (2014 to present) that sprayed crops-killing chemicals and weaponized wind?

Macron's military and macho speeches seemed to have inspired the Ministry of Agriculture to launch projects such as "la grande armée de l'agriculture française" (la grande armée de l'agriculture française), which successfully recruited 200,000 citizens to work on farms. Border closures caused by the global pandemic have restricted the mobility of seasonal migrant workers from Eastern Europe, most of whom are reported to be underpaid and exploited . The next day, amid uncertainties such as border closures and Brexit, the British government announced a similar " Land Army " plan to try to fill the positions of 60,000 seasonal workers, 90% of whom are EU citizens. Due to the length of the contract, the remote location of the farm, and the lack of care guaranteed by full-time employment, the Land Army program took unprecedented steps. As more than six charter flights fly Romanian farm workers to the UK, the anti-immigration Brexit poster of 2016 "BREAKING POINT" is quickly becoming a distant memory. For those who voted for Brexit, the global pandemic revealed the UK’s material dependence on migrant labour, juxtaposed with the spectacle of the UK unfolding its exit from the EU.

The global pandemic has highlighted a paradox in so-called " America ": as undocumented immigrants, farm workers are constantly at risk of deportation , but because of the pandemic, they are given official letters allowing them to stay indefinitely. Agricultural migrant workers are another example of how “no borders, no countries” exist, but truly eradicating border violence is impossible under current conditions of underwage and exploitative working conditions; workers still put their own health at risk, To feed those who have had the state's disregard and incompetence imposed on them and who have the privilege of staying home.

As the lockdown enters its second week, supply chains are broken and medicines and essential goods are in short supply. Thousands of truck drivers remain stranded on highways with little food or water. Crops ready for harvest are slowly rotting.

—Arundhati Roy , The pandemic is a portal, April 3, 2020

Overproduction and displacement

Images of police in Ahmedabad using batons to disperse street vendors circulated online after India announced a sudden lockdown. Overturned wooden carts and crumbled fruits and vegetables on the road are a microcosm of the collapse of food systems in the global pandemic. In the United States, a farmer in Idaho posted a photo of a pile of potatoes on social media and gave them away for free, while pointing out that "the potato supply chain must have been completely turned upside down ." Journalist JK. Sidwaya published an article online, Describes in detail the response to the global pandemic in Ugdougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, West Africa. Similar to France, outdoor markets in Burkina Faso have also been closed due to social distancing measures. In Ugdugu, vegetable vendors set up makeshift alley stalls outside their homes, selling not only vegetables, white rice, flour, oil, sugar, wood and charcoal, but also cooked foods such as donuts and fried yams. The doors will be closed as usual ahead of the nationwide curfew from 7pm to 5am.

During the second week of April, I participated in a reading group organized by curator Jennifer Teets and artist Fernando García-Dory. Among the books on the list is "Big Farms Make Big Flu" written by evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace. Judging from the book reviews, it seems that it is not difficult to read. It is different from " Sopa de Wuhan " with a cover design and editing by Pablo Amadeo. The latter design has shockingly racist undertones and comes with a series of illustrations of bats, taken from zoologist Ernst Haeckel (who coined the term "World War I"). man and an early proponent of scientific racism). The book's cover equates horseshoe bats with the "source of the coronavirus" and casually juxtaposes ten other bat species with the book's fifteen academic authors and contributors.

Our reading group is timely because the impact of Wallace's work has spanned international borders—in Social Contagion: Microbiological Class War in China ,Coronavirus: Agribusiness Would Risk Millions Of Deaths (Coronavirus: Agribusiness puts millions at risk of death), and was quoted on two Chinese-language left-wing platforms in Hong Kong. Then we connected with people in the United States and Colombia through small groups scattered across Europe, quoting Wallace again and again. Sharing these articles during a global pandemic has repeatedly raised awareness of deadly viruses: "The factory-like operation of industrial livestock will provide a suitable environment for various virulent viral influenzas." ⁵

I also learned earlier that private equity investment firm Goldman Sachs purchased ten poultry farms in China in 2008 for US$300 million. The Chinese government’s neoliberal capitalist land reforms have led to the privatization of small farms and their integration into industrial agricultural networks through “accumulation by dispossession.” ⁶

As I read the group summary, I also kept thinking of endangered wetlands, such as the recent eviction of ZAD de la Dune in Brétignolles-Sur-Mer, France, and the ongoing eviction of the Aarey Colony in Mumbai, India, for the development of a new metro line. deforestation , as well as the relationship between land struggles, the instability of farmers’ livelihoods, and the ongoing anti-extradition movement in Hong Kong.

Is anyone else affected by a plot about villagers cursed by the infamous "I moved" technical glitch?
If this update resolves this issue for you, please let us know!

—Animal Crossing, @ACWorldBlog tweet, April 23, 2020

It seems that the now politicized and banned Nintendo Switch game Animal Crossing: New Horizons shows that art can brutally imitate life , and vice versa. A technical glitch in the game caused online friends visiting each other's islands and homes to find "I moved─ (friend's name) " on their doorsteps. During the four years of continuous struggle, the Hong Kong government issued a final eviction notice of July 15 to the Wang Chau villagers living in the New Territories green belt on April 15, 2020. Today, I put a selfie stick on the dining table, pointed it at my face, and talked to villagers and members of the Wang Chau Green Belt Development Concern Group, discussing the village resettlement that occurred in the New Territories ten years ago andtwo other incidents in Hong Kong.land struggles , and what can be done in the face of violent repression under the cover of COVID-19 .

Suddenly, we had so many people attending our farmers’ markets that our supply couldn’t keep up with the demand.

—Ou Ximin, Coronavirus sparks boom for local farmers in import-dependent Hong Kong (Coronavirus brings prosperity to local farmers in import-dependent Hong Kong)

Food sovereignty and the possibility of dual power

Ma Baobao Community Farm is located in Ma Shi Po Village, New Territories. Before the global pandemic and social distancing measures, Friends of Ma Baobao could be seen on the streets displaying and distributing cooked meals made from their own organic produce to demonstrators and journalists who actively participated in the anti-extradition movement.

As mentioned in "Wuhan Diary", vegetable prices surged during the global plague. More than 90% of vegetables in Hong Kong come from China, but the trend of increasing costs, coupled with food sovereignty issues related to land grabs by the government or developers, has resulted in the current prosperity of local agricultural products in Hong Kong. But this may be too late, because a development plan formulated in 2007 and approved by the government will swallow up large tracts of land in Ma Shi Pu Village. In July this year, the Hong Kong government will chronologically acquire more farmland from Ma Shi Po Village as part of three New Territories village relocation plans planned for this summer: Tai Po Kau Kan Hang (June 30); Chau San Village (July 15); Ma Shi Po Village/Kwu Tung (July 28).

"Dual power is a strategy that addresses real needs and involves a broad base of society to build indigenous self-governing institutions, democratic institutions and alternative economies."

—Katie H, From Mutual Aid to Dual Power: How Do We Build a New World in the Shell of the Old?

Despite already being extended once, Hong Kong's social distancing measures have been extended again, this time until August 31. Learn lessons from Ma Baobao’s mutual aid activities, recognize the incompetence and minority of democratic parties, consider the eviction situation in three rural areas as an example, and pay special attention to the continued demand for "double universal suffrage": Will it happen this summer? Is the time ripe for a dual power strategy – resisting the destruction of nature, biodiversity and habitats, and advocating for an agriculture that no longer normalizes pandemics, patriarchy and hegemony?

Solidarity with all essential service workers, marginalized farmers and homeless villagers around the world.

—Leung Chi-gang, April 30, 2020, France

Footnote

^[1] Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015): 20.

^[2] John Mark Carroll, A Concise History of Hong Kong (America: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007): 70.

^[3] Hong Kong Artist Union, Art, Violent Money and Autonomy (Hong Kong: Display Distribute, 2019): 119-132.

^[4] This reminds me of lunch time in British secondary schools. There are three cashiers in the cafeteria, one of which is reserved only for free school lunch students, most of whom are students of color.

^[5] Rob Wallace, Big Farms Make Big Flu (New York: NYU Press, 2016): 59.

^[6] Ibid., 70-71.