Ana Felicien works at Venezuelan Institute of Scientific Research and is a founding member of the Semillas del Pueblo (People’s Seeds) movement. She researches in the areas of agroecology and food sovereignty. In this interview with Venezuelanalysis, we asked her about grassroots attempts to achieve food sovereignty during Venezuela’s crisis years, and the need to change both consumption patterns and food-agriculture systems in the transition to socialism.

Campesino holds bean seeds. (Archive)

In the course of Venezuela’s economic crisis, we have seen changes in people’s consumption patterns. People are eating more plantain, cassava and whole-grain corn, among other things, and fewer processed carbohydrates. Do you think this is just a temporary change (a return to the “traditional Venezuela,” which the romantically-minded might delight in because of its picturesque qualities), or is it a real step toward greater food sovereignty? How can we work to assure that these changes in consumption and production patterns become lasting ones and thus steps toward sovereignty and socialism?

The changes in consumption patterns during these difficult times are due, firstly, to the crisis of the whole agroindustrial system, which connects production, processing and highly concentrated, homogeneous and commodified consumption.

In Venezuela’s case, that system is also highly dependent on imports of raw materials and technology, which makes the system highly vulnerable and unable to meet the food needs of the population (as we have seen in recent years).

On the other hand, the new consumption pattern is possible thanks to the availability of food harvested in campesino production systems. With far fewer resources, these systems have proven capable of sustaining production, even in the face of all the problems of infrastructure (for both production and distribution) that peasant agriculture confronts.

These changes occurred as a spontaneous and almost immediate response in the majority of the population. Although they point to a possible revival of foodstuffs that form part of our identity, there is an even greater challenge: to overcome the colonization of our consumption that makes us in Venezuela some of the biggest consumers of wheat and with one of the most homogeneous diets in the tropics, despite being a megadiverse country in biological and cultural terms. This diet results from a historical process of differentiation that has separated off indigenous, afro, and campesino agricultural systems, while favoring imported food from the metropoli: Spain during the colony and the United States after oil came on the scene.

It is not for nothing that Venezuela signed a reciprocal trade agreement with the United States in 1939 that lasted until 1972, making possible and encouraging duty-free imports of processed foods. A wide variety of products (Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and All Bran, Kraft cheese, Klim milk, Lipton Tea, Quaker oats, canned and frozen meats, Coca-Cola, Campbells soup, among other items) began to arrive, which tended to create an American-style pattern of consumption in the country. These products were distributed in oil field commissaries and in supermarkets created by Rockefeller in the main cities. It profoundly changed the way food was distributed and consumed in the country because, although the target was the middle class linked to the oil industry, the supermarket (soon) became normal throughout the country as the main space of food distribution.

To progress in transforming our consumption habits, it’s necessary to understand these colonization processes and develop responses that, beyond being merely immediate or local efforts, could allow us to consolidate a more sustainable food model. However, despite efforts ranging from the agroecological movements to state institutions such as the Venezuelan School for Food and Nutrition, we have seen how the logic of dependence on food imports is reproduced even in the CLAP food distribution system, which is a project with an enormous potential for promoting consumption patterns that would reflect greater sovereignty. The key then is to promote these transformative initiatives and connect them to the principal food policy operating in this crisis situation, with a view to making a this into a process of change that comes from below…

You were part of the group that started the movement Semillas del Pueblo (People’s Seeds). Can you tell us about the movement’s aims and what it has achieved? What obstacles and problems have you encountered? Also, what is the importance of the seed law that was passed in 2015?

Semillas del Pueblo grew out of a process of collective construction and popular debate concerning the new Venezuelan seed law. This process began in 2013, with those of us in the Venezuela Free from Transgenics campaign working with other organizations to promote a popular debate in favor of the new law and systematize it. The aim was to get the law to protect seed varieties pertaining to peasant, indigenous and afro-descendant groups in a differentiated system that includes – besides the certified seed produced by public research institutes and companies – the seeds, knowledge and organizational forms of the farmers, who, as we said before, are putting food on our table. The result of this collective work was a law that, on the one hand, opposed patenting and transgenics seeds and, on the other, promoted ecological agriculture.

It was an unprecedented law for the [Latin American] region, since recent years have seen more and more concentration in the business of industrial seed production, supported by changes in national seed laws that favor this monopolistic tendency. Because South America is where there has been the greatest expansion of transgenic crops, this new law has received a great deal of international recognition. By contrast, inside the country, seed importers have attacked it. Moreover, the defunct [opposition-controlled] National Assembly recently approved a new seed law, which of course favored industrial seed producers.

After the 2015 law’s approval, we organized a network of agroecological farmers and movements that had participated in the popular debate process. This network is comprised of urban farming groups, organizations of small rural producers (from the western and eastern region of the country), food distribution organizations that connect rural and urban areas, and researchers focused on agroecology and food sovereignty. Last year, we were somewhat weakened by a series of difficulties, and we are now reconfiguring our efforts to focus on connecting with the work being done in communes and in producers’ networks, with the idea of advancing seed production.

There are a number of grassroots organizational projects doing very important work in this area. They are democratizing access to seeds, (which, just like food, has been heavily monopolized and frequently smuggled). Of these efforts, the project Pueblo a Pueblo (People to People) stands out. That project, involving community organizations in the rural and urban areas, brings together seed production, food production and food distribution at fair prices. The project gives political content to the seed issue, by connecting it to key efforts in guaranteeing the right to food during the current crisis.

We continue to work hard on getting the law implemented, concentrating mostly on teaching, promoting and activating seed production spaces, but we have also made efforts in the areas of communication and awareness‐raising. No doubt there should be a greater effort in defending the new legislation and it must be done fundamentally by spreading awareness of law. The current situation urges us to do so.

Imported seeds (especially of garden vegetables) have practically disappeared, entering into the illegal economy. Meanwhile, seeds for more traditional crops, which have always been under popular control, have become more important in campesino production. This is key for any project aiming to change food and agriculture. Such a project needs to prioritize the genetic resources that small farmers have maintained and will maintain, not by the seed industry. In that sense, the law is more than a law: it is a plan for action to gain seed sovereignty.

However, despite the many grassroots efforts to produce seeds by the farmers, the rapprochement with state institutions has been practically nil, even with those institutions created by our own law. Bringing the two together is a pending problem.

A sign calling for the passing of the 2015 Seed Law reads “Free seeds for a free people.” (Alba TV)

Constructing socialism is not only a matter of inheriting capitalism’s productive forces. It is also necessary to transform them. That is because, under capitalism, productive forces are subordinated to a quantity-based system and one that promotes false or fabricated needs and planned obsolescence. Can you connect this requirement of altering productive forces in the transition to socialism with the Venezuelan context and its food system?

As we discussed initially, the current food crisis offers powerful and clear evidence that monopolistic agroindustry is unable to provide food for the majority. There is no choice but to change, and what we consume daily shows it! Today workers are securing food through distribution circuits that are connected to campesino production, whether through intermediaries or through various forms of consumer organization. It’s virtually impossible to buy the goods sold in supermarkets at speculative prices, meaning that that model has failed.

But to take steps toward a real transformation, it’s necessary to make our food sovereignty projects more coherent. Here we have to face some challenges, such as:

1) Identifying the political subject of food sovereignty in Venezuela. This means recognizing the project of food sovereignty as a demand both of the working population (which was produced through processes of proletarization and migration towards the cities), and of the farming communities (made up of indigenous peoples, peasants and afrodescendentes) who have continued to produce. Especially important is the practice of cultivating small family plots (called conucos in Venezuela) as a form of resistance to the processes of appropriation, subordination and displacement that the growth of agro-industrial production leads to.

2) Reconnecting agro-food systems to their biocultural base; overcoming dependence on imported technologies and inputs, including seeds; and struggling for the diet to become more diverse and suited to local conditions. Crops that do not require large amounts of inputs or depend on imported seed are key in this effort as are the various agroecological methods used by campesinos to maintain them. Of course, this has consequences for urban consumers, who are called upon to reconnect our consumption habits with those processes that can lead to greater autonomy.

3) Influencing public policy so that it favors food sovereignty and not agribusiness, which tends to be involved in hoarding and smuggling. We must occupy the spaces where public policy is made and recover those spaces of decision-making that we once had. Agricultural policy, during the recent years of crisis, has been totally disconnected from campesino production. We have seen a large number of subsidies and agreements that favor the private sector and do not benefit the common people at all. The struggle over policy-making is very important for obtaining food justice.

Agroecological plot in Mérida state, Venezuela. (Otras Voces en Educación)

This work is licensed under a Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives Creative Commons license

Photo by Wilfredorrh

The post Reconnecting Agriculture to our Cultural Base: An Interview with Ana Felicien appeared first on P2P Foundation.

At the Sustainable Economies Law Center, we support creativity and innovation in many ways, one of which is to uplift homemade food enterprises. So, it wasn’t easy to come to our decision to not support AB 626. AB 626 is a bill that was drafted at the behest of tech company executives and lobbyists to prioritize their interests above the interests of home cooks and consumers. After being stalled for several months, the bill passed a vote of the full Assembly in January and will soon be up for a vote in the Senate Health Committee.

The media has been reporting a lot lately on “the dark side of the tech revolution” (KQED) as you may have noticed. The New York Times Magazine described typical strategy among tech start-ups as striving to “metastasize from transaction enablers to, with sufficient success, participation gatekeepers.” An example of this is food-delivery apps like Seamless which tout convenient ways for customers to get food delivered from local restaurants, but in some cities the app has become so pervasive that “its customer base becomes too big to ignore, even for restaurants that struggle to afford its steep commissions” so a consumer-friendly app becomes just another means for consolidated corporate control of the food system.

We recognize that the fundamental paradigm of Big Tech is a problem: this paradigm which revolves around extremely rapid growth, monopolization, exploitation of workers and user data, disregard for important public safety and worker protection laws, and inhumane and unsustainable profit maximization.

So what’s the solution?

Our friends and allies have repeatedly called for a new revolution in tech that would make tech platforms democratically owned and controlled by users, proposing to make Facebook a regulated utility or a platform cooperative and proposals to buy Twitter to make it a cooperative. People have wondered: what if Uber were owned by the Uber drivers? Spoiler alert: venture capitalists, business executives, and absentee shareholders who own and control these tech giants tend to disapprove of such proposals so while they are exciting visionary ideas that stimulate important conversations, they are not likely to be realized in the near future.

But while an established tech giant becoming a user-owned cooperative seems far fetched, we’ve been engaged in another opportunity to change the paradigm of Big Tech and support the creation of more community-owned tech platforms. That brings us back to AB 626, the California bill that proposes to dramatically change the regulation of homemade food sales to be much more permissive; a bill that would represent a major shift in food safety regulations and likely set new precedent around the country.

The bill is backed by tech companies, including Airbnb and executives of the soon-to-be retired tech start-up Josephine, among other venture capital backed tech companies. There are numerous reasons to support the general concept of the bill: legalizing an industry that’s already active, creating more opportunities for small business ownership, supporting local food systems, and more. One reason we’ve historically supported legalizing homemade food enterprises is that this provides opportunities to challenge concentrated corporate control of the food system.

However, tech company executives and lobbyists have been making the decisions on the direction of this bill. The bill has been amended several times and more amendments could be on the way, but each version of the bill has failed to place serious responsibilities on the tech companies involved in transacting sales of homemade food and each version has failed to ensure adequate worker protections. We fear the imminent Uberization of homemade food if nothing is done to change course.

We have proposed a policy that would allow more sales of fresh homemade foods made in home kitchens with reasonable food safety requirements (such as safe food handling training, kitchen inspections, sanitary standards) and with the important condition that only certain types of legal entities could operate a web application or web platform that promotes sales of homemade food and takes a cut of each transaction. This is very similar to how California law has restricted certified farmers’ markets for decades: only certified farmers, nonprofits, and local governments may manage farmers’ markets (for-profit non-farm enterprises such as Walmart and Whole Foods cannot operate a farmers’ market) which helps protect the integrity of the farmers’ market as supporting farmers by providing a venue for direct producer to consumer sales of fresh agricultural products.

This is an opportunity to change the paradigm of tech: if this alternative vision were incorporated into California’s next expansion of homemade food legislation it could set a huge precedent in tech across sectors and around the globe.

We need your help! Forms of support needed range from simple letter writing to more active participation in a working group, community outreach, and more.

Read our much more detailed policy paper here.

Read more about the evolving political landscape of homemade food in California here.

Photo by siwiaszczyk

The post Supporting new cooperative tech paradigms to protect the homemade food economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The complex issues arising out of Silicon Valley are numerous, from sexual harassment in the workplace to exclusion of women and people of color from career opportunities to dismissing impacts of the tech industry on gentrification.

And these issues are not isolated, they are deeply connected by a pervasive and insular start-up culture and an economic paradigm over-reliant on venture capital. The false promises of the “gig economy” that these companies celebrate must be faced head on, including in the food system.

That’s why we cannot support AB 626, the homemade food bill that has been pending in the California Legislature for the past year. After being stalled for several months, the bill passed a vote of the full Assembly last week. At the Sustainable Economies Law Center, we work to support creativity and innovation in many ways, including by supporting homemade food enterprises. So, it wasn’t easy to come to our decision to not support AB 626.

Here’s the thing about legislation: it reflects the people who write it, and this bill was written by a tech start-up. . The most recent changes to the bill make it so that home cooks carry all of the liability while the tech platforms that promote the transaction and take a cut of cooks’ incomes cannot be held liable if anything goes wrong. Tech platforms wanting to take profits but avoid all liability is essentially the same story we’ve seen play out with Uber and Lyft denying any responsibility for liability when their passengers have been injured or even killed by negligent drivers. But AB 626 proposes unprecedented protections against liability for gig economy apps: it expressly shields web platforms from liability for any illness or injury associated with food purchased through its platform. As a point of comparison, since 2013, California law requires ride apps such as Uber and Lyft to carry $1 million per incident liability insurance to cover their drivers (separate from any insurance individual drivers may carry). Some cities, such as San Francisco, require Airbnb hosts to carry liability insurance.

Food system workers are already among the lowest paid and the most vulnerable workers in our economy and we need to rethink what the future of work looks like in a healthy, resilient community, especially in our food and farming systems. We don’t need a technological quick fix, we need a new paradigm that values all workers, regardless of their status as employees or contractors. We need a new paradigm for workers that protects their rights in balance with consumer preference for fast and convenient service. We need a new paradigm in our economy that provides real economic opportunities for everyone, not just the elite. And we need a new paradigm in policymaking, where grassroots food justice and workers’ rights organizations are at the table, not on the menu.

So we are urging the California Legislature to set a new course for homemade food sales through tech platforms, starting with rejecting AB 626 and bringing home cooks and community based organizations to the table to craft a bill that truly empowers workers of the next economy. We’ve put forth a proposal for an equitable homemade food economy that includes a new type of “gig economy” platform that is owned and controlled by the very users and workers that give the company its value: a platform cooperative.

Incidentally, last week on the heels of the pro-tech platform amendments, the start-up behind AB 626, Josephine, announced it will be closing down in the next few months. This opens the door to an even higher likelihood that some other entity, with far less of an interest as Josephine in supporting home cooks, will dominate the homemade food economy. There is no guarantee that the preferred platform for homemade food will prioritize workers’ rights, food safety, and economic justice. Unless we act soon.

Take action today!

• If you have not yet written to your legislator, find a template letter here. This is an easy and helpful way to get involved.
• Please sign up here if you have time to volunteer during the next few months.
• Read our detailed policy proposal here.

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Photo by nicubunu.photo

The post The Future of Homemade Food is at Risk appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This site is about foraging in the city. It promotes the idea that cities can become edible. That edible cities are a commons that all urban actors should strive to produce together.

Adrien Labaeye is taking the lead on this great new initiative dedicated to foraging and the urban food commons. The following texts are extracted from the Edible Cities website. which, among other things, features best practices, maps and resources.

Edible Cities Manifesto

We citizens of the cities claim the right to feed ourselves and find medicine from the urban landscape;

We call the city our garden;

We are aware that while foraging people reconnect with their food, its origins, its seasonality, and shape in nature;

We dream of growing edibles everywhere in the city;

We plant and disperse seeds without waiting for a public administration to tell us so;

We care for the edibles we feed from;

We pay attention to local regulations that protect sensitive areas and endangered species;

We are generally against commercial urban foraging (picking to sell) unless its for the common good;

We demand cities free of soil and air contamination, and free from any fertilizers and pesticides;

We share the knowledge of plants with everyone who is genuinely interested;

We find peace and comfort among nature, we honour and show gratitude to the plants and trees;

We respect the claims of all living creatures, human and non-human, to feed from plants and trees, but see the claim for life of any plant and tree superior;

We are part of nature, we are nature.

Edible Cities Resources

Resources. It lists various resources that are useful to learn about foraging: links, books, etc.

Maps. It provides an introduction to all the maps that can be used for foraging.

Manifesto. This is a manifesto of a group of committed foragers outlining what urban foraging can do to cities and the people who live there.

Good practice. This is a collection of principles on how to be a conscious forager.

The Edible Cities Indicator. It introduces the concept that the edibility of a city can be a good indicator of how sustainable a city is. Contact us to know more.

The post Urban foraging: Commoning the edible city appeared first on P2P Foundation.

From the notes to the video:

There’s something amazing growing in the city of Detroit: healthy, accessible, delicious, fresh food. In a spirited talk, fearless farmer Devita Davison explains how features of Detroit’s decay actually make it an ideal spot for urban agriculture. Join Davison for a walk through neighborhoods in transformation as she shares stories of opportunity and hope. “These aren’t plots of land where we’re just growing tomatoes and carrots,” Davison says. “We’re building social cohesion as well as providing healthy, fresh food.”

The post How urban agriculture is transforming Detroit appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“How did we get to accept that food, one of the three essentials for life, along with air and water, can be produced, distributed, appropriated and even destroyed on the basis of pure economic considerations?”

Download Commons and ‘Commoning’: A ‘New’ Old Narrative to Enrich the Food Sovereignty and Right to Food Claims

From the Introduction

Tomaso Ferrando and Jose Luis Vivero-Pol: Over the last ten years, Watch readers have become familiar with the consequences of the capitalist economic model: from the depletion of natural resources to climate change, and from the concentration of wealth to the corporate capture of our food system. Despite a decade of mobilizations and struggles, we continue to witness the effects of capitalism’s appropriation and transformation of nature: the enclosure of land, the rapid disappearance of small-scale farming, the privatization of customary fishing rights, the misappropriation of seeds, deforestation to cultivate cash crops for industrial long food chains, the gradual extinction of biodiversity, human-induced pollution, meal impoverishment, nutrient-poor ultraprocessed foods, and widespread famines, to name but a few.

Policy makers, social movements, grassroots groups and engaged scholars have discussed legal initiatives, policy options and examples of how bottom-up organizations and new forms of governance can facilitate, redress and prevent some of the malfunctions and harmful effects of global capitalism. However, they
often stop at the symptoms; or their attempts to introduce a new vision of what a new food system could look like are thwarted. In this respect, we invite readers to re-interpret the relationships between humans, animals, nature and food, and present a value-based paradigm shift that goes to the root of a failed economic system. Rather than perceiving natural resources and food as commodities, this article shows that a paradigm shift towards valuing, governing and stewarding nature, labor and food as commons can enrich the claims for food sovereignty and the human right to adequate food and nutrition.

This paradigm change is neither a proposal for a quick fix, nor a short-term solution to the converging crises, but rather a long-term, ecological and bottom-up
alternative to the dominant economic model. Our notion of the commons goes beyond an economic understanding of commons as rival but hardly excludable natural resources shared by a community. We advocate for an understanding of the commons that reflects a combination of material and immaterial common resources (e.g. fish stocks and cooking recipes). The commons also encompasses the shared social practices that have been institutionalized by societies to govern resources (referred to as ‘commoning’), and collective management with a sense of common purpose (i.e. to guarantee access to food to all members of the community). Thus, commons are not only resources but also practices where each member of the collectivity is thinking, learning and acting as a ‘commoner’. It is through commoning’ that resources become part of the commons, and not the other way around.

The commons-based approach to humans and the planet informs a transition from nature as a resource that serves human needs, to nature as a co-constructed
and co-inhabited web—a life enabler that also sets limits to human activities. This paradigm shift is rooted in historical and customary practices (e.g. indigenous groups producing food in rural areas, transhumant pastoralists in grassland steppes) as well as in innovative contemporary urban actions (e.g.
young dwellers consuming organic food produced in urban gardens or sharing meal initiatives via Internet apps). Therefore, it is both a new and an old paradigm that clearly confronts the dominant neoliberal narrative that is marked by profit oriented market hegemony and individualism. We begin with a critique of the idea of the ‘tragedy of the commons’ and we then discuss the role that commons and ‘commoning’ can have in decommodifying nature. In the last section, we introduce the idea of food as ‘new’ old commons in opposition to food as a pure commodity, and discuss how this narrative and praxis may enrich other transformational civil society claims.

Download the full report here.

The post Commons and ‘Commoning’: A ‘New’ Old Narrative to Enrich the Food Sovereignty and Right to Food Claims appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Executive summary by Michel Bauwens (P2P Foundation, research) and Yurek Onzia (project coordination)

This study ^[1] was commissioned and financed by the City of Ghent, a city in northern Flanders with nearly 300,000 inhabitants, with the support of its mayor Daniel Termont, the head of the mayor’s staff, the head of the strategy department, and the political coalition of the city which consists of the Flemish Socialist Party SPA, the Flemish Greens (Groen) and the Flemish Liberal Party (Open VLD).

The request was to document the emergence and growth of the commons in the city, to offer some explanations of why this was occurring, and to determine what kind of public policies should support commons-based initiatives, based on consultation with the active citizens in Ghent.

The authors of the report are Michel Bauwens as investigator and Yurek Onzia as coordinator of the effort.

Timelab, an artistic makerspace under the leadership of Evi Swinnen, and the Greek scholar of the P2P Lab Vasilis Niaros, played important supportive roles in the realization of this project. Wim Reygaert and partners provided the graphics used in the original report. Annelore Raman coordinated the connections within the city council.

The consultation, which took place during the spring of 2017, took the form of:

1. A mapping of 500 or so commons-oriented projects per sector of activity (food, shelter, transportation, etc), through a wiki, which is available at http://wiki.commons.gent
2. 80+ one to one interviews and conversations with leading commoners and project leaders
3. A written questionnaire that was responded to by over 70 participants
4. A series of 9 workshops in which participants were invited per theme, ‘Food as a Commons’, ‘Energy as a Commons’, ‘Transportation as a Commons’, etc ..
5. A Commons Finance Canvas workshop, based on the methodology developed by Stephen Hinton, which looked into the economic opportunities, difficulties and models used by the commons projects

The report consists of four parts.

The first part provides the context on the emergence of urban commons, which has seen a tenfold increase in the Flanders in the last ten years. It focuses on the challenge it represents for the city and the public authorities, for market players, and for traditional civil society organisations, and how the new contributive logic of the commons challenges (but also enriches) the logic of representation of the European democratic polities, in this specific case, at the level of a city. It also looks at the opportunities inherent in the new models such as more active participation of inhabitants in co-constructing their cities, in solving ecological and climate change challenges, and in creating new forms of meaningful work at the local level.

The second part is an overview of urban commons developments globally, but especially in European cities, and takes a closer look at the experiences in Bologna (with the Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of the Urban Commons, now adopted by many other Italian cities), Barcelona (the pro-commons policies of the new political coalition of En Comu), Frome, UK (for its civic coalition that replaced the political parties in the running of the city), and Lille, for its experience with a Assembly of the Commons as a voice and expression of the local commons.

The third part is the analysis of the urban commons in Ghent itself, highlighting some of its strengths and weaknesses.

And finally, in the fourth part, based on our analysis in the three first parts, we offer our recommendations to the City, in terms of an institutional adaptation of the city to the new commons-centric demands that emerge through the commons activities. It’s a set of 23 integrated proposals for the creation of public-commons processes for citywide co-creation. In some way, it represents the shift from urban commons to a more ambitious vision of the ‘city as a commons’.

The P2P Foundation’s Michel Bauwens and Vasilis (Billy) Niaros

The context for the Emergence of the Urban Commons

We define the commons as a shared resource, which is co-owned or co-governed by a community of users and stakeholders, under the rules and norms of that community. There is no commons without active co-production (commoning), and without an important measure of self-governance. Thus, it differs from both public and state- or city-owned goods, and from private property managed by its owners. Both a Dutch study by Tine De Moor (Homo Cooperans), and a study for the Flanders by the Oikos think thank have confirmed a steep rise in the number of commons-oriented civic initiatives (commons-oriented means that important aspects of the initiatives have commons’ aspects). This rise is related to a growing awareness amongst a layer of citizens that a social and ecological transition is necessary given the relative state and market failures, but also by the effects of the great economic and systemic crisis of 2008, which has seen an austerity-driven retreat from public authorities in terms of common infrastructures.

These new urban commons however do not exist ‘on their own’ as fully autonomous projects and entities but by necessity interact with both public and market forces, for access to resources and support.

Thus the commons is a challenge for the other institutions as well:

• It is a challenge for the city, as commons are a claim to both public and private resources that were governed by the city, or which may have been private properties currently in disuse . Self-governance in the commons most often takes a contributory logic, i.e. the contributors and participants manage the projects, but this doesn’t necessarily involve all the citizenry. This also poses a challenge for representative democracy. Conversely, commoners may want support, but may resent control and limitations to their autonomy.
• It is a challenge for market forces, which may feel challenged by commons projects as alternatives to privatized provision, or may profit from them in ways that are considered extractive by the commoners, or their actions may ‘enclose’ and destroy the commons, creating conflictual relations.
• But is is also a challenge to established civil society organisations, which were based on memberships, a professional cadre, and bureaucratic forms of organisation and management; elements which are often rejected in the commons initiatives.

The commons requires a ‘partner’ city, which enables and empowers commons-oriented civic initiatives. It also requires generative market forms which sustain the commons and create livelihoods for the core contributors as well as facilitative types of support from civil society organisations.

An important discovery in our analysis of the 500+ urban commons projects in Ghent, is that their structure strongly resembles that of the commons-driven digital economy. This means that at the heart of urban commons we find:

• Productive communities based on open contributions.
• That these urban commons and their platforms may generate (and are obliged to if they are to be resilient and self-sustaining over time) generative market forms — i.e. entrepreneurial coalitions that have a positive relationship with the commons and the commoners.
• The communities, platforms and possible market forms require, and receive, facilitative support from the various agencies and functionaries of the city, and the Civil Society Organisations, which have adapted to the needs of the new citizen-commoners.

This relationship is shown by the following graph:

Graphic 6: Polygovernance model.

This graph shows the five entry points of the commons economy in which the city is actively intervening (bottom), the 3 elements of the commons economy, and the public-commons processes and institutions which could be set up as a meta-structure to frame the cooperation between the city, the commoners and the generative economic entities.

It is also clear that the commons initiatives and their emerging economy, hold great potential for the social and economic life of the city.

The three main potentials are in our opinion the following:

1. The commons are an essential part of the ecological transition: shared and mutualized infrastructures have a dramatically lower footprint than systems based on ‘possessive individualism’, but on the condition that ‘it is done in the right’ and systemic way. A good counter-example is how the competition between drivers in the Uber model negates the environmental advantages of ride-hailing. Huge reductions in the material footprint (and carbon footprint) are possible with the commons-centric models.
2. The commons are a means for the re-industrialization of the city following the cosmo-local model which combines global technical cooperation in knowledge commons with smart re-localization of production; an example is how city procurement could be used to reintroduce healthy local meals for children in public schools (5 million a year, not counting other anchor institutions which could join); a combination between procurement from the urban/rural short-circuit farmers in the organic sector, carbon-free transportation (Ghent is flat, which allows for bike-cargo transport), and local cooking, would create hundreds of jobs for the local economy. Socially, this means jobs not just for the technically-savvy but for the desperate blue collar workers who have been hit hard by the ecologically unsustainable neoliberal globalization model
3. Representative democracy is, for a number of interlocking reasons, in deep crisis and facing a crisis of trust. And the world of production is still nearly entirely un-democratic. The commons however are based on the self-governance of the value producing systems and are therefore one of the few schools of true democracy and participation. Inclusive and diverse commons could be at the very least an adjunct to representative democracy, creating a system of Democracy+, augmented with participation , deliberation and multi-stakeholder governance models in cooperation with the commons initiatives.

The analysis of the situation in Ghent

The city of Ghent is a dynamic city of nearly 300k inhabitants including a huge number of young people and students. It’s a city in which the commons already have a distinct presence, with support from an active and engaged city administration.

• A tradition of center-left coalitions have created a distinct political and administrative culture with many engaged city officials. The city is actively engaged in carbon reduction, traffic reduction, and has neighborhood and social facilitators, connectors in schools, street workers and other types of staff that is actively engaged in enabling roles at the local level. This includes different kinds of support for commons-initiatives.
• The city has an important policy to support the temporary use by community groups of vacant land and buildings.
• The city counts around 500 commons-oriented initiatives in all sectors of human provisioning, such as food, shelter, mobility, etc. Many of these are active around the necessity of socio-ecological transitions in their respective domains and neighborhoods.

These positive aspects should be tempered by the following issues:

• Both the efforts of the city and the commoner’s initiatives are highly fragmented;
• There are many regulatory and administrative hurdles to hinder the expansion of commons initiatives, for example in the field of mutualized housing; (for example, we received a 7 page memo of such obstacles from housing activists).
• Though there are a number of fablabs/coworking spaces and some craft-related initiatives, there is at present a lack of activity around open design linked to real production;
• Though blessed with a large university, which is active around sustainability issues, there is very little evidence of relations between the university and the commons projects, and some of its spinoffs and players are sometimes distinctly hostile to open source and design projects;
• Though many of the leading commons activists are facing precarious lifestyles and incomes, they usually have good social and knowledge capital and mostly consist of long established inhabitants. There are many commons project in the post-migration communities, but they are mostly limited to ethnic and religious memberships, and there is as yet relatively little cross-over. They are however successful counter-examples such as the initiatives in the neighborhood Rabot.
• Old and newer Civil Society Organisations play a significant infrastructural and support role for maintaining urban commons projects, but perhaps perceive them to be mainly directed towards vulnerable population groups and not as key and highly productive resources.
• Despite the city support, the major potential commons are largely enclosed and vulnerable to private extraction; the current models do not challenge the mainstream consensus but find a way to co-exist with the major imbalances.
• Despite its long history of self-organization with the guilds in the middle ages and a very strong labor movement in the 19th century, the cooperative sector and its support mechanisms are quite weak; there is a weak if not inexistent support infrastructure for a specifically generative and cooperative economy that could work with commons infrastructures.

The proposals for the city administration

The general logic of our proposals is to put forward realistic but important institutional innovations that can lead to further progress and expansion of the urban commons in Ghent in order to successfully achieve its ecological and social goals. We propose public-social or public-partnership based processes and protocols to streamline cooperation between the city and the commoners in every field of human provisioning.

We are not summarizing all proposals here, merely the underlying logic.

Graphic 7 (“proposed transition infrastructure for the city of Ghent’”) shows the general underlying logic.

Graphic 7 (“proposed transition infrastructure for the city of Ghent’”) shows the general underlying logic.

Commons initiatives can forward their proposals and need for support to a City Lab, which prepares a ‘Commons Accord’ between the city and the commons initiative, modeled after the Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of the Urban Commons. Based on this contract, the city sets-up specific support alliances which combine the commoners and civil society organisations, the city itself, and the generative private sector, in order to organize support flows.

Graphic 9 describes a cross-sector institutional infrastructure for commons policy-making and support, divided in ‘transition arenas’.

Graphic 9 describes a cross-sector institutional infrastructure for commons policy-making and support, divided in ‘transition arenas’.

The model comes from the existing practice around the food transition, which is far from perfect and has its problems, but nevertheless has in our opinion the core institutional logic that can lead to more successful outcomes.

The city has indeed created an initiative, Gent en Garde, which accepts the five aims of civil society organisations active in the food transition (local organic food, fairly produced), which works as follows. The city has initiated a Food Council, which meets regularly and could contribute to food policy proposals. The Food Council is representative of the current forces at play, and has both the strength and weaknesses of representative organisations. The Food Council contain a contributive ‘food working group’ which mobilizes those effectively working at the grassroots level on the food transition by following a contributive logic, where every contributor has a voice. In our opinion, this combination of representative and contributory logic is what can create a super-competent Democracy+ institution that goes beyond the limitations of representation and integrates the contributive logic of the commoners. But how can the commoners exert significant political weight?. This requires voice and self-organisation. We therefore propose the creation of an Assembly of the Commoners, for all citizens active in the co-construction of commons, and a Chamber of the Commons, for all those who are creating livelihoods around these commons, in order to create more social power for the commons.

This essential process of participation can be replicated across the transition domains, obtaining city and institutional support for a process leading to Energy as a Commons, Mobility as a Commons, Housing, Food, etc.

We also propose the following: (not exhaustive)

• The creation of a juridical assistance service consisting of at least one representative of the city and one of the commoners, in order to systematically unblock the potential for commons expansion, by finding solutions for regulatory hurdles.
• The creation of an incubator for a commons-based collaborative economy, which specifically deals with the challenges of generative start-ups.
• The creation of an investment vehicle, the bank of the commons, which could be a city bank based on public-social governance models.
• Augmenting the capacity of temporary land and buildings, towards more permanent solutions to solve the land and housing crisis affecting commoners and citizens.
• Support of platform cooperatives as an alternative to the more extractive forms of the sharing economy.
• Assisting the development of mutualized commons infrastructures (‘protocol cooperativism’), through inter-city cooperation (avoiding the development of 40 Uber alternative in as many cities).
• Make Ghent ‘the place to be’ for commoners by using ‘Ghent, City of the Commons’ as an open brand, to support the coming of visitors for commons-conferences etc.
• As pioneered by the NEST project of temporary use of the old library, use more ‘calls for commons’, instead of competitive contests between individual institutions. Calls for the commons would reward the coalition that creates the best complementary solution between multiple partners and open sources its knowledge commons to support the widest possible participation.

We also propose

• A specific project to test the capacity of ‘cosmo-local production’ to create meaningful local jobs (organic food for school lunches) and to test the potential role of anchor institutions and social procurement.
• The organisation of a CommonsFest on the 28th of October, with a first Assembly of the Commons.
• A pilot project around ‘circular finance’ in which ‘saved negative externalities’ which lead to savings in the city budget can directly be invested in the commons projects that have achieved such efficiencies (say re-investing the saved cost of water purification to support the acquisition of land commons for organic farmers).
• The setting up of an experimental production unit based on distributed manufacturing and open design.
• Projects that integrate knowledge institutions such as the university, with the grassroots commons projects.

^[1] A slightly graphically improved version of the official Dutch language version of the report can be found here. Suggested citation: Commons Transitie Plan voor de Stad Gent. Michel Bauwens en Yurek Onzia. Ghent, Belgium: City of Ghent and P2P Foundation, 2017
Header photo by estefaniabarchietto

The post A Commons Transition Plan for the City of Ghent appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Originally posted on Degrowth.de

Activists of the Nyéléni movement protest against food speculation on the occasion of the meeting of the finance ministers of the G20. (Photo: Anna Korzenszky)

About the authors and their positions

We see ourselves as part of the movement for food sovereignty and are writing from the perspective of the Österreichische Berg- und Kleinbäuer_innenvereinigung ÖBV – Via Campesina Austria¹(Irmi Salzer) and the agro-political group AgrarAttac (Julianna Fehlinger).

We are mainly active in Austrian networks and participate in the Nyéléni movement for food sovereignty. We are also involved in the European Nyéléni process and are thus connected to partners throughout Europe. Irmi Salzer is an organic farmer in Burgenland and Julianna Fehlinger is sometimes a community farmer and sometimes an alpine farmer.

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1. What is food sovereignty?

The right of all people to democratically decide how food is produced, distributed and consumed

Food sovereignty as a concept was first presented in 1996 at the World Food Summit of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) by La Via Campesina² , a global organisation of small farmers, rural workers, fishing communities, and landless and indigenous peoples. Since then, food sovereignty has evolved into the political leitmotif of a growing number of social actors from the widest possible range of societal groups fighting for the transformation of a global food and agricultural system dominated by industrial interests and focused solely on profit.

At the beginning of the 1990s, small farmers’ movements (at first mainly in Latin America and Europe, then in the rest of the world) realised that, in light of the globalisation of agricultural markets and the increasing political power of institutions such as the WTO in the agriculture sector, it was necessary to form a globally active alliance of farmers. By founding La Via Campesina they sought to oppose through a strong transnational movement the neoliberal tendencies that were restricting the lives and survival chances of millions of small farmers and worsening the situation of hungry people all over the globe. As an answer to the technical term ‘food security’ that was coined by the FAO and that fails to address a number of questions, the young movement developed the concept of ‘food sovereignty’. Food sovereignty addresses the power structures in which our food system is embedded; it addresses the conditions of food production and distribution; it asks about the consequences of our production methods for future generations; and it places the people who produce and consume food products at centre stage.

The principles of food sovereignty

Food sovereignty can be understood as a framework that must continuously be ‘filled up’ through concrete, local measures. Food sovereignty cannot be defined from the top down and for all time, but can only be shaped through a collective process of dialogue. Throughout the Nyéléni process (Nyéléni is the name used by the global food sovereignty movement to refer to itself; see below), the attempt has been made to define the main principles of food sovereignty based on the wide range of realities of both the farmers and the ‘eaters’. Such principles include valuing food producers, the primary importance of feeding the population (instead of producing for export), the establishment of local production systems and the strengthening of local control over food, the development of knowledge and skills, and, last but not least, working with nature instead of against it.

60 – 80% of all food in the Global South is produced by women. (Photo: Tina Goethe)

Food sovereignty encompasses the rights of individuals, communities and institutions (including states), as well as a responsible relationship with nature, animals and other human beings. In the prevailing agricultural and food system, a majority of producers are denied their right to democratically participate in all political areas contingent to the production, processing and distribution of food products. International trade agreements, agricultural subsidies, GMO legislation, hygiene regulations, directives regarding access to markets, production regulations, etc. are on the whole adopted without the people directly affected having any right to participate in the process. The right to democratically choose and monitor agricultural, food, fishing, social, trade or energy policies is a necessary first step in order to enforce other rights such as the right to food, education and access to resources.

Only when these rights are enforced is it possible for producers to fulfil their responsibility regarding natural resources such as the soil, and biodiversity and the climate, so that future generations are also able to produce high-quality foods.

Food sovereignty means we must act in solidarity. Transnational solidarity, networking and mutual support are necessary to fight against exploitation and domination mechanisms. Local resistance and local alternatives must be completed through a global perspective.
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2. Who is part of the food sovereignty movement and what do they do?

Food sovereignty has been developed since the 1990s as an alternative for the Global North and South. At the beginning, the debate around food sovereignty was mainly led by La Via Campesina. However, La Via Campesina recognised early on that a profound change and democratisation of agriculture and food systems can only be achieved if the movement sought to form alliances beyond those with producers, and to forge ties with other movements. Thus, the first International Forum for Food Sovereignty, the Nyéléni Forum, took place in Mali in 2007. Together with initiatives and organisations connected with environmental, human rights,consumer protection,women’s, and also urban movements, the principles of food sovereignty were developed, and common goals, opponents and demands were identified. Since then, both regional forums (for example the Europe Forum for Food Sovereignty in Krems, Austria in 2011) and national forums have been held. Based on the common principles of democratisation, solidarity, local control, and greater care for the environment, movements for food sovereignty are continuously seeking to both create and advance alternative practices.

Activists from Nyéléni Austria, the Austrian movement for food sovereignty. (Photo: Christopher Glanzl)

With regard to production models, adaptable (resilient) agro-ecological production methods are tested that, for example, use open-pollinated, non-GMO seeds, reduce agricultural dependence on oil and are based on natural cycles.

In the area of food supply, producer-consumer networks are constructed, e.g. by replacing traditional markets with relationships based on solidarity (Community Supported Agriculture – CSA), or by ensuring that producers earn a living wage through collective buying. Participatory Guarantee Systems (PGS) are trust-based certification systems that replace state control and supervision, and alternative education networks enable knowledge sharing on an equal footing, creating a collective space for all those involved in the agricultural and food system.

Food sovereignty in theory and practice – shared meal composed of locally produced food at the Nyéléni Austria Forum 2014. (Photo: Christopher Glanzl)

In order to stop the competition for land and soil and allow access to land for everybody who wants to farm it, models are being developed that remove land from the capitalist cycle of exploitation and promote the use of land as a commons.

The food sovereignty movement demands global social rights and dignified work conditions for all people—irrespective of their social origins or gender— throughout the agriculture and food system.

‘Food sovereignty’ (in Portugese) is written on the ground using soil colors at the 5th International Conference of La Via Campesina in Maputo, Mosambique. (Photo: La Via Campesina)

Through emancipatory processes, citizens should be empowered to participate actively and equally in shaping the political framework of the agriculture and food system. In this respect, the actors in the Global South and North face both similar and dissimilar political and social problems. The diversity of the groups coming together under the ‘big tent’ (Patel 2009) of food sovereignty is a strength, but also a challenge for the global food sovereignty movement.

Democratisation and the right to have rights

In order to enforce the right to democratic participation in the agriculture and food system, it is necessary to create conditions that do not arise of their own accord in our societies marked by exclusion and domination. Low-income people, migrants and women are often particularly shut out from participation. The food sovereignty movement is therefore fighting for conditions that enable all people to demand and enforce their social, economic and cultural rights and their right to participate in decision-making processes.

3. How do you see the relationship between food sovereignty and degrowth?

Working together against false alternatives and for social-ecological transformation

In the German-speaking world, degrowth and food sovereignty are closely related, being often supported by the same activists and similar initiatives (such as Community Supported Agriculture, urban gardening, ecological agriculture, food co-ops, the occupation of fields) or are based on the same approaches for alternative paths (e.g. subsistence, unconditional basic income, commons, environmental and climate justice). All these approaches and initiatives are areas of experimentation for both food sovereignty and degrowth. In both movements, the combination —mainly non-institutional— of science, social movements and practical (collective) experience plays an important role.

Both food sovereignty and degrowth envision a new type of prosperity and well-being, one that includes social-ecological forms of production on the one hand, and a comprehensive democratisation of society (and the economy) on the other. In both cases the aim is to create new values that enable a good life for all based on solidarity and ecological living. Both movements should only be thought of in global terms and not just from a national perspective. One recent example of a coming together of both perspectives and movements is the 2016 campaign started by Attac Germany and Aktion Agrar with the title Kühe und Bauern nicht verpulvern! (roughly ‘Don’t throw farmers and cows down the drain!’), in which discourses about post-growth are combined with those surrounding food sovereignty.

The concept of food sovereignty has a history of more than 20 years and is constantly being reformulated through concrete struggles in both the Global South and the Global North. The degrowth discourse (as a widely debated concept) is younger and more clearly shaped by academic currents from the Global North. It has been taken up by many activist groups and grassroots initiatives and has developed a huge mobilisation potential in recent times.

In the following section we would like to establish certain criteria for analysing the possibility of bringing together degrowth and food sovereignty³ .

Analysing power and domination structures

We consider that the fruitful currents of the degrowth movement are those that clearly label the profiteers of the capitalist model of accumulation and study the growth imperative of capitalist market economics. The concept of food sovereignty only has a limited capacity to expose the forces behind this growth imperative and to understand the social consequences that would result from overcoming it. Food sovereignty’s main focus of fundamental criticism is the profit mentality that fails to take human needs into account or that creates needs in order to increase demand and consumption. The market is thus revealed as being a poor mechanism of allocation and distribution (the most current example being the crisis in the milk market). In order to advance the food sovereignty movement, the degrowth debate should be capable of showing why the economy has to grow under capitalism, which type of growth must be reduced and which domination structures are directly embedded in the growth imperative. It is therefore important to understand power not only in terms of possession but also as a social force, as a relationship of power.

A joint study of social and ecological crises

In the degrowth movement there is both a social and an ecological current of growth criticism. Only when it is possible to bring together the questions and points of criticism of both currents and to translate these into common perspectives and demands, i.e. when degrowth seeks to achieve a social and ecological —a social-ecological— transformation, will degrowth be able to enrich the food sovereignty movement. The food sovereignty movement itself is constantly seeking to maintain a balance between these two points.

The world is not a commodity – positioning ourselves against capitalist enclosure

Current capitalist dynamics seek to turn increasing areas of society into marketable commodities. In addition to labour, which became a commodity at the beginning of capitalism, and certain aspects of processed nature (such as food products), other aspects of nature (such as greenhouse gases) and of society (especially care work) are increasingly being turned into commodities. Positioning ourselves clearly against these processes and seeking to achieve the organisation of such areas as commons is an important step for a joint path of degrowth and food sovereignty.

Together against false alternatives

The main arguments of both degrowth and food sovereignty are already firmly anchored in the general world views of many critical citizens —and both movements can take advantage of this situation. Most of these individuals would agree with both the sentence: ‘We live on a finite planet on which there cannot be infinite growth’ and with criticism of industrial agriculture and factory farming systems. The essence of both degrowth and food sovereignty, however, is that they seek to politicise people and to show clearly that supermarkets selling organic products contribute as little to saving the world as so-called ‘green growth’. To this purpose, it is necessary to escalate the economic and sociopolitical perspectives of progressive sectors of society towards questions of wealth distribution and not let them stagnate in moralising anti-consumerism. This is the only way to leave behind false alternatives (such as the ‘green economy’, critical consumption and organic certifications) and approaches too deeply rooted in pragmatic politics, and to work on utopias, such as degrowth and food sovereignty.

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4. Which proposals do they have for each other?

Focusing the criticism of growth on production and addressing dominance relations in the use of resources

Weder Wachsen noch Weichen! (roughly ‘We won’t grow and won’t yield either!’) is one of the main slogans of the European farmers’ movement. It is a criticism of the change in agricultural structures that exerts massive pressure on small farms and has been causing farm abandonment for decades. This structural change is intrinsically tied up with the liberalisation of agricultural markets and the industrialisation of agriculture. The slogan refers to the farms themselves, which —in order to continue enabling a farm-based agricultural system— should neither grow (in terms of area farmed) nor cease to exist. In this sense, growth does not refer directly to the concept of gross domestic product (GDP) growth, criticised by the degrowth movement when placed at the heart of economics and politics. However, both types of growth are closely related. For its part, the type of growth alluded to in the slogan,opposed by the farmers’ movement, refers to increasing efficiency per man hour —not per surface area— on the farms. According to the agro-industry, the whole of agricultural production must and will grow and become more efficient thanks to the structural change in the agricultural industry, supposedly in order to ‘feed the world’s hungry’. However, the World Agriculture Report has clearly shown that in terms of surface area and units of energy invested, smaller, agro-ecological farming systems are much more efficient than industrial-economic agriculture based on monocultures and factory farming. In addition, small farms are more capable of adapting to the needs of people and thus ensuring a sufficient food supply for all.

Currently, due to the elimination of the milk quota in April 2015 and the crisis in prices for agricultural products (especially milk, but also pork), the above-mentioned slogan is once again being increasingly heard. We see this as an opportunity to carry out a debate that is critical of growth and that addresses the production side of the problem and not, as is usually the case, only consumption. Food sovereignty has a wealth of experience in the area of direct involvement with agricultural and food politics, and this can be of value for the degrowth movement.

Within the food sovereignty movement, there is often insufficient systematic thought given to the concept of growth. The movement mainly addresses the negative consequences of these policies for agriculture and food in general, but questions such as why economic growth is absolutely necessary in capitalism and its importance as a tool for keeping society content (a growing pie makes it easier to solve problems of distribution…) are barely touched upon. Yet such a debate would significantly increase the movement’s capacity for action.

Subsistence, social romanticism and resource quotas

Subsistence or self-sufficiency is recognised by segments of the food sovereignty movement as a positive concept when it refers to the regionalisation of food production. However, it is not seen as an end in itself. Especially in the Global South, subsistence and semi-subsistence agriculture are often insufficient to provide food producers with a good life. Thus, the main focus of the movement for food sovereignty is on the creation and strengthening of local and regional production and distribution systems and on recuperating community control over such systems —and individualistically abandoning society is seen as a form of depoliticisation. The movement is based on collective action and solidarity, and no demands are made for (individual) self-restraint and frugality. In addition, the movement does not content itself with the creation of anti-civilisational parallel societies-slash-alternative projects. At the Europe Forum in Krems in 2011, the Nyéléni movement set forth the following strategy of action: Resist – Transform – Build alternatives. Significantly, these three strategies are applied simultaneously and with the same degree of priority. In our opinion, degrowth’s sufficiency-oriented current and focus (at least in certain segments) on individual changes in behaviour could especially benefit from such a politicisation.

Traditional peasant production of cheese. (Photo: Gunther Naynar)

A return to former ways of living, often preached about in moralistic undertones by segments of the degrowth movement, is not a vision shared by the movement for food sovereignty. Ambitions of this nature filter out historical dominance relations and reduce the question of ecologically and socially just economics to measurable indicators (such as the ecological footprint) or otherwise tend to be unrealistically romantic. Although the small-farm agriculture of the past centuries in most of Europe generally followed the principles of a circular economy, it was also highly hierarchical and patriarchal in its organisation. In addition, advances in communications technology have opened up historical opportunities for transnational solidarity movements. A fruitful connection between the innovations of modernity, on the one hand, and traditional cultural technologies as well as social forms of organisation (e.g. commons), on the other, must be the goal of any emancipatory movement.

The demand for a system of quotas for resource use, often heard in the context of post-growth movements, is considered especially problematic in the food sovereignty movement. Anybody studying the finite nature and protection of resources such as water and land must always take into account the associated power relations, mechanisms of exclusion, and questions of distribution. For example, what does the obligation to reduce CO2 emissions mean for the one billion people on this planet who don’t have access to electricity? Individual —and in the worst case marketable— resource quotas are authoritarian and technocratic pseudo-solutions that fail to address relations of power and do not help us achieve a social-ecological transformation. They are based on a monetary view of nature and life, and only further their commodification.

5. Outlook: Space for visions, suggestions or wishes

‘A good life for all!’ –through solidarity and mutual learning among social and ecological movements

The starting point for common emancipatory movements must be solidarity between the individual struggles involved and the realisation that future successes will be founded on a complementary relationship between the movements. We must therefore be open to learning from each other and sharing experiences. In addition, this requires a continuing debate on the dominant nature of capitalist growth (Brand 2015).Production and consumption must be analysed in regard to their ‘nature as capitalist, patriarchal, racified or post-colonial social relations’ (Brand 2015: 34) in order to create the foundations for a social-ecological transformation based on solidarity.

The goal of fighting for a good life for all seems to us to be the most important common message of the emancipatory movements. The definition of a good life is developed on a daily basis in the complementary social movements and their struggles.

Activists of the Nyéléni Austria movement call for resistance. (Photo: Christopher Glanzl)

Once again, the so-called ‘liberation from excess’ cannot be the goal of emancipatory movements. To date, this has only been possible through the postcolonial exploitation of the countries in the Global South and especially of the lower social classes of the Global North and South. The most important social struggle in our capitalist society is the one between poor and rich; and the homogenising question of how all our societies can free themselves from excess is in our eyes a cynical one. Now that so many people are waiting at the gates of Europe to participate in some of the excess, it is made especially and brutally clear that hardly anybody in Europe is prepared to give anything up, or is able to do so: On the one hand, most people are benefiting less and less from excess due to the reductions in real wages; on the other hand we see a clear case of grandfather policies. So as not to admit this openly, those fleeing from other countries are simply treated as criminals. The fact that this strategy is even possible is in our opinion due to the enormous social inequality advanced by global neoliberal politics. For their part, those who we believe should really be collectively liberating themselves from their excess simply fade into the background.

In addition to a relationship based on solidarity between different social and ecological movements, we would also like to speak out in favour of the simultaneous application of diverse political strategies. As mentioned above, the movement for food sovereignty seeks to enable a transformation through three different but complementary and reciprocal strategies: Resist – Transform – Build alternatives.

Although, in light of neoliberal-capitalist land grabbing, the destruction of the foundations of life, and the violent exclusion of more and more people, it is urgently necessary to develop common strategies and build up common alternatives, it is probably unrealistic and from our point of view not even desirable to join energies into a single, unified movement. Social movements need to take each other into account and complement each other in a context of solidarity. But each movement must fight its own battles.

Links

> Österreichisches Forum für Ernährungssouveränität
> Meine Landwirtschaft – Kampagnenseite
> Solidarische Landwirtschaft
> Uniterre – Schweizer Bauerngewerkschaft
> Nyéléni Europe – Bewegung für Ernährungssouveränität
> FIAN International – Menschenrechtsorganisation mit dem Fokus Recht auf Nahrung
> La Via Campesina International
> afrique-europe-interact – transnationale Initiative zu Migration, Flucht und Landwirtschaft
> Hands on the Land for Food Sovereignty – Kampagne gegen Landgrabbing

Lead photo: Tina Goethe

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Degrowth is not only a label for an ongoing discussion on alternatives, and not just an academic debate, but also an emerging social movement. Regardless of many similarities, there is quite some lack of knowledge as well as scepticism, prejudice and misunderstanding about the different perspectives, assumptions, traditions, strategies and protagonists both within degrowth circles as well as within other social movements. Here, space for learning emerges – also to avoid the danger of repeating mistakes and pitfalls of other social movements.

At the same time, degrowth is a perspective or a proposal which is or can become an integral part of other perspectives and social movements. The integration of alternatives, which are discussed under the discursive roof of degrowth, into other perspectives often fails because of the above mentioned scepticisms, prejudices and misunderstandings.

The multi-media project “Degrowth in movement(s)” shows which initiatives and movements develop and practice social, ecological and democratic alternatives. Representatives from 32 different fields describe their work and history, their similarities & differences to others and possible alliances. From the Solidarity Economy to the Refugee-Movement, from Unconditional Basic Income to the Anti-Coal-Movement, from Care Revolution to the Trade Unions – they discuss their relationship to degrowth in texts, videos, photos and podcasts.

The project was run by the “Konzeptwerk Neue Ökonomie” (Laboratory for New Economic Ideas) in Germany, so most of the authors are from there. However, there are a couple of clearly international perspectives and most of the movements work far beyond the national level.

The post Degrowth in Movements: Food Sovereignty appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Outline

• What are the commons?
• Is there an example of a commons business model?
• In what areas are commons active?
• Is commons a new idea or are there examples from the past?
• How do privatization and enclosure affect the commons?
• What is the importance of digital commons?
• What role can commons play in the actual economic and institutional crisis?
• What are briefly the differences between commons and markets?
• Further reading

What are the commons?

Commons should be understood as a dynamic, living social system — any resource that can be used by many could inspire people to organize as a commons. The key questions are whether a particular community is motivated to manage a resource as a commons, and if it can come up with the rules, norms, and sanctions to make the system work.

Photo by 4nitsirk

The post A Shareable Explainer: What are the Commons? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Food, a life enabler and a cultural cornerstone with multiple meanings, is governed as a mere commodity by the neoliberal food policies that prevail in Europe. These meanings so relevant to human are reduced to the one of tradeable good and the value of food is mixed with its price in the market.

RE-VALUING MULTIDIMENSIONAL FOOD AS A COMMONS: A WORK IN PROGRESS

The Food Commons in Europe

A  proposal by Jose Luis Vivero-Pol for the European Commons Assembly. Read the full proposal here.

Considering any good as a commons is a political arrangement to govern a particular resource in a situated place and time. Along those lines, the consideration of food as a commons rests upon its essentialness to human life and the revalorisation of the different food dimensions (see figure 1) that are relevant to people (value-in use) and thus reducing the tradable dimension (value-in exchange) that has rendered it a mere commodity. A regime based on food commons would inform an essentially democratic food system (food democracy) based on sustainable agricultural practices (agro-ecology) and open-source knowledge (creative commons licenses) using non-material (cuisine recipes, agrarian practices, public research) and material items (seeds, fish stocks, land, forests, water) as commons to reach a global commons (food and nutrition security for all).

Fig 1: The six food dimensions relevant to humans: multi-dimensional food as commons VS mono-dimensional food as commodity

Source: Vivero-Pol (in press). http://www.preprints.org/manuscript/201701.0073/v1

CUSTOMARY AND CONTEMPORARY FOOD COMMONS IN EUROPE

Food shall be re-constructed as a commons based on its essentialness and the commoning practices that different peoples are maintaining (customary) or inventing (contemporary) to produce food for all, based on a rationale and ethos different from the for-profit capitalistic one.

Customary Food-producing Commons (territorial[1], many of them being ICCAs) are located in rural Europe, associated to cultural heritage, landscape preservation and biodiversity stewardship, being mostly owned in collective proprietary regimes, and still resisting the privatisation and enclosing waves triggered by capitalism. Despite centuries of encroachments, misappropriations and legal privatizations, more than 12 Million hectares of customary common lands have survived up to now in Europe (9% of France, 10% in Switzerland, 4.2% in Spain or 8.4% in Wales, UK). Their utility to human societies and efficiency in terms of resource management enabled them to survive up to present day. Despite this abundance, its relevance is hardly noticed by general media and neglected by the EU and national authorities and the mainstream scientific research.

Anyone can forage wild mushrooms and berries in the Scandinavian countries, thousands of surviving community-owned forests and pasturelands in Europe where livestock are raised in free-range, namely Baldios in Portugal, Crofts in Scotland or Montes Vecinales en Mano Comun in Spain. Additional examples can be provided by the irrigation system in the Huertas of Valencia, the emphiteusis proprietary regimes in Italy, the management of oyster beds in the Arcachon bay, the pastoral traditions of Sami people in the Scandinavian countries, the hunting licences in Switzerland and so on, so forth. In Spain, more than 6600 farming households depend entirely on them for earning their living, are grounded on legal principles that ensure the preservation of the communal condition of such property, as they cannot be sold (unalienable), split into smaller units (indivisible), donated or seized (non-impoundable) and cannot be converted into private property just because of their continued occupation (non-expiring legal consideration). In Galicia (Spain), common lands represents 22.7% of total surface and they are owned and managed by resident neighbours inhabiting visigothic-based parishes, a legal figure recognized in the 1968, 1989 and 2012 laws. Finally, in the medieval village of Sacrofano (Roma province, Italy), a particular and ancient University still functions for the local residents: the Università Agraria di Sacrofano holds 330 ha of fields, pastures, forests and abandoned lands where the citizens residing in the municipality can exercise the so-called rights of civic use (customary rights to use the common lands).

Contemporary Food-producing Commons (community-based, mostly urban, innovating practices). These social innovations re-invent traditional methods of governing commons (sharing home-made meals, community gardens) or design new commons that did not exist before, using internet, communication technologies and hyper-connectivity. European examples are mushrooming, such as Ecovillages (human-scale settlements consciously designed through participatory processes to secure long-term sustainability), Transition Towns (a placed-based movement to live with less reliance on fossil fuels and capitalistic markets) or Community Supported Agriculture (initiatives to re-connect small producers and consumers in local, organic, fair networks). They can be complemented with food buying groups, solidarity purchasing groups or food policy councils enrooted in alternative narratives of transition such as food sovereignty and agroecology such as Xarxa de Economia Solidária de Catalunya (Spain), Genuino Clandestino (Italy) or Cork Food Policy Council (Ireland).

Harvesting clams in Galicia. Photo by Jose Luis Vivero-Pol under CC-BY-NC-SA license

RELEVANCE TO EUROPE AND EU AUTHORITIES

Food is treated as a mere commodity in European policies, legal frameworks and normative views. Actually, food is not even considered as a human right in EU charters, constitutions and legal frameworks, nor a public good subject to public policies and universal access (such as health, education or water) and least to say a commons, although many commons and community-owned resources are producing food for Europeans.

The impacts of EU policies on agriculture, fisheries, natural resources, biodiversity (including seeds) and traditional knowledge are generally detrimental to the common lands, the material and immaterial commons and the commoning practices of governance. The European industrial food system with its many externalities (climate change, disappearance of small-farming, unhealthy ultra-processed food, food waste, unfair prices to producers, the absence of the right to food, subsidies diverted to corporations and bigger farmers, water and soil pollution, biodiversity reduction, etc) is driven by the valuation of food as a commodity and the ethos of profit maximisation. As a token, a recent foresight report on the global food security by 2030 considers food as “an opportunity for trade, innovation, health, wealth & geopolitics” (p.34) with no single mention to food as vital need, a human right or a cultural determinant for Europeans. The Common Agriculture Policy (CAP), what represents 40% of EU budget (52 billion Euro in 2014), deals with food as a for-profit commodity, subsidising the industrial food system and denying the food-producing commons. None of the five relevant regulations that conform the legal/political corpus of the reformed CAP include any mention to “commons”, “common resources” or the “right to food”.

The commodification of food ended up in the dominant industrial system that fully controls international food trade and, although it does not even feed half of the European population, has given rise to the corporate control of life-supporting industries, from land and water-grabbing to agricultural fuel-based inputs. This industrial food system did not even achieve the goal of feeding adequately, in quantity and quality, the European eaters. Food Insecurity (understood as the inability to eat meat every second day) is rising in Europe, already affecting 13.5 M people (10.9%) with a 2.7% increase since austerity measures were implemented; there are 50 M people with severe material deprivation including food and water and 30-40% children in 6 EU countries are below poverty line.

At present, there is a consultation on the European Pillar of Social Rights (EPSR). Out of the ten topics that are considered relevant to the domain “Adequate and sustainable social protection”, none refer to the basic protection of two vital human rights, the right to food and the right to water, because they are considered as commodities (to be provided through markets and accessed through purchasing power) instead of public goods, rights or commons (to be provided through a polycentric governing system formed by public provision, market access and collective actions). Needless to say, the right to land or the right to have breathable air are also absent from this debate.

The next Common Agricultural Policy has to include food commons and the right to food. Perhaps also to be renamed as “Commons Food Policy”?

THE TRICENTRIC TRANSITION PATHWAY

A myriad of local transitions towards local, sustainable, agro-ecological food production and consumption are taking place today across Europe. Drawing from Elinor Ostrom’s polycentric governance, food is being produced, consumed and distributed by agreements and initiatives formed by state institutions, private producers and self-organised groups under self-negotiated rules. Those food commons tend to have a commoning function through a multiplicity of open structures and peer-to-peer practices aimed at sharing and co-producing food-related knowledge and items. The combined failure of state fundamentalism (in 1989) and so-called ‘free market’ ideology (in 2008), coupled with the emergence of these practices of the commons, has put this tricentric mode of governance (see Figure 2) back on the agenda.

Fig 2: Scheme of a tri-centric governance and transition pathway for food systems in EU

Vivero-Pol (forthcoming, 2017).
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2548928

Over the last 20 years there have been two streams of civic collective actions for food growing in parallel but disconnected ways, divided by geographical and social boundaries: (a) the challenging innovations taking place in rural areas, led by small-scale, close-to-nature food producers, increasingly brought together under the food sovereignty umbrella, and (b) the Alternative Food Networks (AFNs) exploding in urban and peri-urban areas, led by concerned food consumers who want to reduce their food footprint, improve the quality of their diets and produce part of their own food. Their maturity, however, have paved the way for a convergence of interests, goals and struggles. Large-scale societal change requires broad, cross-sector coordination. It is to be expected that the food sovereignty movement and the AFNs will continue (and need) to grow together, beyond individual organisations, to knit a new (more finely meshed and wider) food commons capable of confronting the industrial food system for the common good.

The transition towards a food commons regime will need a different kind of state (national states and EU authorities), with different duties and skills to steer that transition. The desirable functions of this Partner State are shaped by partnering and innovation rather than the Leviathan paradigm of top-down enforcement (command-and-control via policies, subsidies or regulations. This enabling state would be in line with Karl Polanyi’s theory of its role as shaper and creator of markets and facilitator for civic collective actions to flourish. Amongst the duties of the partner state are the prevention of enclosures, triggering new commons, co-management of complex resource systems, oversight of rules and charts, care for the commons (as mediator or judge) and provider of incentives and enabling legal frameworks for commoners governing their commons.

The private sector presents a wide array of entrepreneurial institutions, encompassing family farming with just a few employees, for-profit social enterprises engaged in commercial activities for the common good with limited dividend distribution and transnational, ‘too-big-to-fail’ corporations that exert near-monopolistic hegemony on large segments of the global food supply chain (van der Ploeg, 2010). The challenge for the private sector is to be driven by a different ethos while making profit, focusing also much more on social aims and satisfying needs. Thus, this food commons transition does not rule out markets as one of several mechanisms for food distribution, but does it reject market hegemony over our food supplies. In plain words, governments will support private initiatives whose driving force is not shareholder value maximization (e.g. family farming, food co-operatives, producer-consumer associations), while citizen/consumers will exert their consumer sovereignty by prioritising food with a meaning (local, organic, fair, healthy) beyond the purely financial (not just the cheapest). The private may also rent commonly-owned natural resources to produce food for the market.

The transition period for this paradigm shift should be expected to last for several decades, a period where we will witness a range of evolving hybrid management systems for food similar to those already working for universal health/education systems. The Big Food corporations will not allow their power to be quietly diminished, and they will fight back by keep on doing what has enabled them to reach such a dominant position today: legally (and illegally) lobbying governments to lower corporate tax rates and raise business subsidies or mitigate restrictive legal frameworks (related to GMO labelling, TV food advertising, local seed landraces, etc.) among other things.

HOW THE “FOOD COMMONS” COULD BE SUPPORTED BY EU AUTHORITIES? 15 MEASURES

If food is valued and governed as a commons in Europe, the following food policy options could be considered, to be then materialised in concrete political, legal and financial measures.

1.- A Declaration of the European Parliament to consider food no longer as a commodity but a commons, public good and human right to be included in national legal frames & public policies.

2.- Set EU targets for food provisioning in 2030: 60% private sector, 25% self-production (collective actions), 15% state-provisioning through Universal Food Coverage (see point 12).

3.- European Citizen Initiative to consider food as a human right, a public good and a commons in European policy and legal frameworks. Policy priorities should be geared towards safeguarding farmer’s livelihood and eater’s rights to adequate and healthy food.

4.- Food commons and right to food in the CAP reform with specific references and a recognition of the importance of the food-producing commons in Europe.

5.- Local, organic, freshly-made Schools Meals as universal entitlements, governed by parents and school staff

6.- Promote Food Policy Councils at all levels through participatory democracies, financial seed capital and enabling laws. Once enough numbers are achieved, an EU Food Policy Council could be established to monitor the reform yet-to-be Commons Food Policy.

7.- Farmers and fishermen as public servants. Food producers to be employed by the State to provide food regularly to satisfy the State needs (i.e. for hospitals, schools, army, ministries, etc).

8.- Guaranteed daily bread for all. Establishing public bakeries where every citizen can get access to a bread loaf every day (if needed or willing to).

9.- Universal Food Coverage to guarantee a minimum amount of food to every EU citizen, similar to universal health coverage and universal primary education.

10.- Patenting living organisms should be banned as an ethical minimum standard.

11.- Food speculation should be banned, because it does not contribute to improving the food system.

12.- Stricter and innovative rules to avoid food waste (binding regulations)

13.- All agricultural research funded with public funds to be in the public domain.

14.- Food-related subsidies to support innovative civic actions for food such as Territories of Commons, community-supported agriculture, food buying groups, open agricultural knowledge, etc.

15.- European Parliament to elaborate a communication to call for an EU food bank network that is universal, accountable, compulsory and not voluntary, random and targeted, shifting from charitable food to food as a right.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• De Moor, M., L. Shaw-Taylor and P. Warde, eds. (2002). The Management of Common Land in North West Europe, c. 1500–1850. Turnhout: Brepols Publishers.
• EUROSTAT (2015). Eurostat statistics explained. Material deprivation  http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Glossary:Severe_material_deprivation_rate
• Kostakis, V. and M. Bauwens (2014). Network society and future scenarios for a collaborative economy. London: Palgrave MacMillan.
• Lana-Berasain, JM. & I. Iriarte-Goni (2015). Commons and the legacy of the past. Regulation and uses of common lands in twentieth-century Spain. International Journal of the Commons 9(2): 510–532. DOI: http://doi.org/10.18352/ijc.488
• Maggio, A., T. Van Criekinge and J.P. Malingreau (2015). Global Food Security 2030. Assessing Trends in View of Guiding Future EU Policies. Joint Research Centre Science and Policy Reports. Foresight Series. https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/publication/eur-scientific-and-technical-research-reports/global-food-security-2030-assessing-trends-view-guiding-future-eu-policies
• Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the commons: the evolution of institutions for collective action. New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Ostrom, E. (2009). A polycentric approach to climate change. Policy Research working paper WPS 5095. Washington, DC: World Bank.
• Polanyi, K. (1944). The great transformation: the political and economic origins of our time. Reprinted in 2001. Boston: Beacon Press.
• UNICEF (2014). Children of the Recession: The impact of the economic crisis on child well-being in rich countries. Innocenti Report Card 12, UNICEF. www.unicef-irc.org/publications/pdf/rc12-eng-web.pdf
• Vivero-Pol, J.L. (accepted, in press). Food as Commons or Commodity? Exploring the Links between Normative Valuations and Agency in Food Transition. http://www.preprints.org/manuscript/201701.0073/v1
• Vivero-Pol, J.L. (forthcoming, 2017). The food commons transition: collective actions for food and nutrition security. In: Ruivenkamp, G. & A. Hilton (eds.). Autonomism and Perspectives on Commoning. Zed Books. Pp. 185-221.
• Vivero Pol, J.L. & C. Schuftan (2016). No right to food and nutrition in the SDGs: mistake or success? BMJ Global Health 1(1) e000040; http://gh.bmj.com/content/1/1/e000040

SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALS

1.- SCIENTIFIC PEER-REVIEWED TEXTS

Handbook of Food as a Commons. Routledge, London. Edited by Vivero-Pol, J.L., T. Ferrando, O. De Schutter & U. Mattei (due in 2017, 28 chapters and 38 authors).

Transition towards a food commons regime: re-commoning food to crowd-feed the world. In: Ruivenkamp, G. & A. Hilton (eds.). Perspectives on Commoning: Autonomist Principles and Practices. Zed Books. Pp. 185-221. (forthcoming, 2017). https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2548928

Food as Commons or Commodity? Exploring the Links between Normative Valuations and Agency in Food Transition (accepted in Sustainability) http://www.preprints.org/manuscript/201701.0073/v1

The Value-Based Narrative of Food as a Commons. A Content Analysis of Academic Papers with Historical Insights (under review in Journal of Rural Studies). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2865837

No right to food and nutrition in the SDGs: mistake or success? BMJ Global Health 1(1) e000040; DOI: 10.1136/bmjgh-2016-000040 (2016). http://gh.bmj.com/content/1/1/e000040

2.- PRESENTATIONS WITH POLICY PROPOSALS

How to reclaim our food commons? Meaningful food to crowd-feed Europe http://www.slideshare.net/joseluisviveropol/how-to-reclaim-our-food-commons

Food is not a right in the SDGs: the EU position analysed http://www.slideshare.net/joseluisviveropol/food-is-not-a-right-in-the-sdgs-the-us-and-eu-positions-analysed

3.- OUTREACH SHORT TEXTS

Staying alive shouldn’t depend on your purchasing power. The Conversation (2013).

https://theconversation.com/staying-alive-shouldnt-depend-on-your-purchasing-power-20807

Why isn’t food a public good? Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs (2014)

http://www.policyinnovations.org/ideas/commentary/data/00289

Food as a commons: A shift we need to disrupt the neoliberal food paradigm. Heathwood Institute (2015)

http://www.heathwoodpress.com/food-as-a-commons-a-shift-we-need-to-disrupt-the-neoliberal-food-paradigm-jose-luis-vivero-pol/

SPANISH

Soberanía alimentaria y alimentos como un bien común. En: Seguridad Alimentaria: derecho y necesidad. Dossier 10 (Julio): pp 11-15. Economistas Sin Fronteras, Spain. (2013)

http://www.ecosfron.org/portfolio/seguridad-alimentaria-derecho-y-necesidad/#.Uh3BAfW3vbk

FRENCH

Peut-on éradiquer la faim à l’horizon post-2015 en continuant à traiter l’alimentation comme une marchandise ? CTA Knowledge for Development Blog.  February 2016. http://knowledge.cta.int/fr/Dossiers/S-T-et-defis-agricoles/Securite-alimentaire/Articles-de-fond/Peut-on-eradiquer-la-faim-a-l-horizon-post-2015-en-continuant-a-traiter-l-alimentation-comme-une-marchandise

[1] During the European Assembly of Commons, there was a policy proposal presented at the European Parliament session on “Territories of the Commons”. See here for text: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309859387_Territories_of_Commons_proposal_JL_Vivero_hackpad_V_1  And here for presentation:  http://www.slideshare.net/joseluisviveropol/territories-of-commons-food-heritage-nature-climate-mitigation-democracy

[2] Indigenous peoples’ and Conserved Community territories and Areas: natural areas, resources, species and habitats conserved in a voluntary, common and self-directed way by local communities and indigenous peoples throughout the world http://www.iccaconsortium.org/

[3] This figure is downsized since it includes only 13 countries and only refers to Utilised Agriculture Area, so forested or coastal areas are not included. http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Common_land_statistics_-_background

[4] Legislation in Finland (www.ym.fi/publications )

[5] Those who have “an open house and a burning fireplace” what means they regularly inhabit that house, either owned or rented. Therefore, commonality is not inherited but granted by living in the community.

[6]There are 2800 Montes Vecinales de Mano Comun (Collectively-Owned Community Forests) legally protected, representing a third of total forest area. They produce wood, food, pasturelands, income by selling wood or renting land for wind-power turbines. They are an example of direct assembly democracy that can be replicated on other settings applying the EU’s principle of subsidiarity in decision-making. More info at: http://montenoso.net/wiki/index.php/MVMC/es

[7] Law 13/1989 (10 October) de Montes Vecinales en Man Común (DOG nº 202, 20-10-1989) and Law 7/2012 (28 June) de montes de Galicia.

[8] The term “Università” derives from the ancient roman term “Universitas Rerum” (Plurality of goods) while the term “Agraria” refers to the rural area. http://www.agrariasacrofano.it/Storia.aspx

[9] ECOLISE http://gen-europe.org/partners/ecolise/index.htm and Global Eco-village Network Europe http://gen-europe.org/home/home/index.htm

[10] Transition Network https://transitionnetwork.org/

[11] http://urgenci.net/the-network/

[12] http://www.xes.cat/pages/xs100.php

[13] http://genuinoclandestino.it/

[14] http://corkfoodpolicycouncil.com/

[15] Country studies have been done for England, Italy, Croatia and Spain https://www.cbd.int/protected/ts64-country-case-studies/

[16] http://ec.europa.eu/priorities/deeper-and-fairer-economic-and-monetary-union/towards-european-pillar-social-rights_en

[17] http://ec.europa.eu/priorities/adequate-and-sustainable-social-protection_en

• Jose Luis Vivero Pol is an engaged scholar, food commoner. Click here to read more of Jose Luis’ writing on this blog. Universite catholique of Louvain, Belgium Email: [email protected]
• The P2P Foundation is serializing videos from the European Commons Assembly. See all videos here.
• Lead image: Conviviality in Central Africa Flickr CC Luca Gargano

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