Editor’s note: Large scale agriculture, especially the industrial form with its dependence on heavy machinery, highly toxic chemicals and genetically modified crops is incredibly destructive. It’s also remarkably undemocratic since it is pushed by large multinational cooperations and their exclusive institutions like the World Economic Forum and the UN. If we as humans want to have a future on this planet (it looks like we don’t), we need to shift radically to more community based, small scale, democratic food systems and locally applicable techniques for ecological restoration, since large scale agriculture will inevitably fail and leave toxic, deserted landscapes behind.
A battle for the future of food is already underway. There’s still time to change the outcome.
Later this year, the United Nations is set to hold a historic Food Systems Summit, recognizing the need for urgent action to disrupt business-as-usual practices in the food system. But far from serving as a meaningful avenue for much-needed change, the summit is shaping up to facilitate increased corporate capture of the food system. So much so, that peasant and indigenous-led organizations and civil society groups are organizing an independent counter-summit in order to have their voices heard.
At the heart of the opposition is the fact that the conference has been co-opted by corporate interests who are pushing towards a highly industrialized style of agriculture promoted by supporters of the Green Revolution, an approach that is meant to eradicate hunger by increasing production through hybrid seeds and other agrochemical inputs. It has been widely discredited for failing to achieve its goals and damaging the environment. The Summit’s concept paper perpetuates the same Green Revolution narrative — it is dominated by topics like AI-controlled farming systems, gene editing, and other high-tech solutions geared towards large-scale agriculture, as well as finance and market mechanisms to address food insecurity, with methods like agroecology notably absent or minimally discussed.
A Crisis of Participation
But the problem is not only the subject matter that the conference has put on the agenda. It’s also the remarkably undemocratic way of choosing who gets to participate, and in what ways. The agenda was set behind closed doors at Davos, the World Economic Forum’s exclusive conference. As Sofia Monsalve, Secretary General of FIAN International puts it, “They have cherry picked representatives of civil society. We don’t know why, or which procedure they used.”
The multi-stakeholder model of governance is problematic because it sounds very inclusive,” Monsalve continues. “But in fact we are worried about the concealing of power asymmetries, without having a clear rule in terms of accountability. What is the rule here — who decides? And if you don’t decide according to a rule, where can we go to claim you are doing wrong?”
The conference organizers have claimed that they have given peasant-led and civil society groups ample opportunity to participate in the conference, but this is a facade. The UN’s definition of ‘participation’ differs significantly from that of the hundreds of civil society groups that have spoken out against the Summit. The Summit claims that allowing groups to attend virtual sessions and give suggestions amounts to participation. But true participation means being consulted about crucial agenda items that have a massive impact on the communities they represent. This was not done.
“We didn’t have the opportunity to shape the agenda, Monsalve explains. “The agenda was set. Full stop. And therefore we are asking ‘why is it that we are not discussing how to dismantle corporate power? This is a very urgent issue on the ground for the people. How is it that we are not discussing about COVID and the food crisis related to COVID?’”
Organizations like the People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty (PCFS), which represents 148 grassroots groups from 28 countries, feel similarly. “It’s just like having a table set,” explains Sylvia Mallari, Global Co-Chairperson of PCFS. “So you have a dinner table set, then the questions would be who set the table, who is invited to the table, who sits beside whom during dinner? And what is the menu? For whom and for what is the food summit? And right now, the way it has been, the agenda they’ve set leaves out crucial peoples and even their own UN nation agencies being left behind.”
Elizabeth Mpofu of La Vía Campesina, the largest peasant-led organization representing over 2 million people worldwide, explains how “The United Nation food systems summit, from the beginning, was really not inclusive of the peasants’ voices. And if they’re going to talk about the food systems, on behalf of whom? Because the people who are on the ground, who are really working on producing the food should be involved in the planning. Before they even organized this summit, they should have made some consultations and this was not done.”
The concerns are not only coming from outside the UN. Two former UN Special Rapporteurs to the Right to Food — Olivier De Schutter and Hilal Elver — as well as Michael Fakhri, who currently holds the position, wrote a statement to the summit organizers early on in the process. “Having all served as UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food,” they write, “we have witnessed first-hand the importance of improving accountability and democracy in food systems, and the value of people’s local and traditional knowledge.
It is deeply concerning that we had to spend a year persuading the convenors that human rights matter for this UN Secretary General’s Food Systems Summit. It is also highly problematic that issues of power, participation, and accountability (i.e. how and by whom will the outcomes be delivered) remain unresolved.”
Michael Fakhri has also expressed concern about the sidelining of the Committee on Food Security (CFS), a unique civil society organization that allows “people to directly dialogue and debate with governments, holding them to account.” As Fakhri explains, if the CFS is sidelined in this summit (as they have been thus far), there is a real danger that “there will no longer be a place for human rights in food policy, diminishing anyone’s ability to hold powerful actors accountable.”
Gertrude Kenyangi, executive director of Support for Women in Agriculture and Environment (SWAGEN) and PCFS member, stated during a Hunger for Justice Broadcast on April 30th that the problem comes down to one of fundamentally conflicting values: “Multinational corporations and small-holder farmers have different values,” said Kenyangi. “While the former value profit, the latter value the integrity of ecosystems. Meaningful input of small-holder farmers, respect for Indigenous knowledge, consideration for biodiversity… will not be taken into account [at the Summit]. They will not tell the truth: that hunger is political; that food insecurity in Africa is not only as a result of law and agriculture production, but it’s a question of justice, democracy and political will. That’s our concern.”
The Presence of AGRA
The problems with the Summit were compounded further by UN Secretary General António Guterres choosing to appoint Agnes Kalibata, president of the Alliance for a Green Revolution for Africa (AGRA), as Special Envoy to the conference. AGRA is an organization, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates and Rockefeller Foundations (as well as our governments), that promotes a high-tech, high-cost approach to agriculture, heavily reliant on agrochemical inputs and fertilizers. They have been at the forefront of predatory seed laws and policies that marginalize and disenfranchise peasant farmers on a massive scale.
AGRA has devastated small-scale farmers under the mission of “doubling productivity and incomes by 2020 for 30 million small-scale farming households while reducing food insecurity by half in 20 countries.” Their approach has been proven to be markedly unsuccessful. Timothy Wise, a senior adviser at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, began to research AGRA’s efficacy in the last fourteen years of work. Unlike many nonprofits who are held to strict transparency standards, AGRA refuses to share any information about their performance metrics with researchers. It took a U.S. Freedom of Information Act request to find out what AGRA has to show for their US$1 billion budget. Researchers found that AGRA ‘apparently’ had not been collecting this data until 2017 (eleven years after their founding in 2006).
Food security has not decreased in their target countries. In fact, for the countries in which AGRA operates as a whole, food insecurity has increased by 30% during their years of operation; crop production has fared no better. Yet this narrative continues to be pervasive around the world. It is the backbone of the UN Food Systems Summit and most development agendas. And AGRA’s president is leading the conference.
Attempts to build bridges with civil society organizations have failed. In sessions with civil society groups, Ms. Kalibata has demonstrated a lack of awareness of the growing peasant-led movements that reclaim traditional agricultural methods as promising avenues to a more sustainable food system. Wise explains, “During the session she held with peasant groups, she basically indicated that she didn’t know about the peasant rights declaration that the UN had passed just two years ago. And she told them, why do you keep calling yourselves peasants? She said that she calls them business people because she thinks they’re needing to learn how to farm as a business.”
“It’s also a pretty significant conflict of interest, which people don’t quite realise,” Wise continues. “AGRA is a nonprofit organisation that’s funded by the Gates foundation and a couple other foundations — and our governments. They are about to enter a period where they desperately need to replenish their financing. And so they are going to be undertaking a major fund drive exactly when this conference is happening. And the summit is being positioned to help with that fund drive.”
Since Ms. Kalibata was named special envoy, there has been a public outcry over this clear conflict of interest. 176 civil society organizations from 83 countries sent a letter to the UN Secretary General António Guterres voicing their concerns over Ms. Kalibata’s corporate ties. They never received a response. 500 civil society organizations, academics, and other actors sent the UN an additional statement laying out the growing list of concerns about the Summit. Again, they received no reply.
While 676 total civil society organizations and individuals expressed clear concern over Ms. Kalibata’s appointment, only twelve people signed a letter supporting the nomination. The Community Alliance for Global Justice’s AGRA Watch team found that all but one of these individuals have received funds from the Gates Foundation.
Competing Pathways for Food Systems Change
This summit isn’t just a case of poor planning and a lack of genuine participation for peasant-led organizations. It represents a deeper and more insidious trend in food systems governance: the erosion of democratic decision-making and the rise of powerful, unaccountable, private-sector actors who continue to consolidate power over the food system.
The absence of practices like agroecology from the agenda shows how deeply the private sector has consolidated power — these methods are highly promising, low-input and low-cost solutions for farmers to increase their yields while farming more sustainably. But they are mentioned only in passing. “If you ever look at a situation and see something that looks like the most obvious, sensible solution and it’s not happening, ask who’s making money from it not happening,” explains Timothy Wise. The answer here is clear: high-input agriculture makes many people extraordinarily wealthy. This power allows them to set the agenda for food systems change, at the expense of farmers, and at the expense of the environment.
That’s why this conference is so important: it will set the stage for the approach to food systems change in the coming decades. We the people need to decide who should set the agenda for a food future that affects us all — one that preserves biodiversity and prioritizes human rights and well-being. Are we willing to let the corporations who pursue profits at all cost continue to claim that they know what’s in our best interest? Do we want a future governed by the likes of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, in partnership with the largest agrochemical and seed companies in the world? Or are we ready to demand that those who actually grow our food — peasants, farmers, and Indigenous peoples around the world — be the ones to determine our direction?
This is what’s at stake. Right now, the most powerful players in the food system are poised to set an agenda that will allow them to continue amassing profits at staggering rates, at the expense of farmers, consumers, and the environment.
But there is still time to fight back. Where the conference holds most of its power is in its legitimacy. As groups mobilize, organize, and demand genuine participation, this false legitimacy driven by actors like the Gates Foundation begins to crumble. We must stand in solidarity with the grassroots communities who are telling the truth about this conference and what it represents. We must get to work.
A Growing Culture would like to ask all readers to help raise the dialogue about this upcoming summit. Re-share this article, re-post, tweet and amplify this issue. You can learn more about A Growing Culture here: https://www.agrowingculture.org, on Twitter: @agcconnect or Instagram: @agrowingculture.
Editor’s note: Gender ideology is another form of postmodern insanity becoming a norm in this insane culture. Disguised as Human Rights, this sect-like ideology is even being embedded into the legal system of many countries. It’s also another example of how this culture, and neoliberalism specifically, destroys any form of identification (as a sex-based class in this case), replacing it with superficial, abstract ideas that have no relation to physical or biological reality whatsoever.
Women in Canada are joining together in increasing numbers to oppose the ever-growing impacts of gender identity legislation, as gender ideology takes root in our country. There are now numerous feminist groups across Canada, advocating for women’s sex-based rights. On May 2, 2021, four of those groups — WHRC Alberta, Alberta Radical Feminists (ABRF), Alberta Women’s Advocacy Association (AWAA), and Canadian Women’s Sex-Based Rights (caWsbar) — gathered in Edmonton, on the steps of the Alberta legislature, to take a public stand in support of our sex-based rights and in protest of the wholesale dismissal of women as distinct group and the insistence that we should redefine “woman” to include men.
The attack on women’s rights is nothing new. Several bills have been passed or are in the process of passing which impede women’s rights and, more broadly, limit the ability of Canadians to question or challenge gender identity ideology and protect kids from dangerous, irreversible medical procedures.
Bill C-16, Canada’s gender identity legislation, passed in 2017, adding gender identity and gender expression to the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination in the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code. The effect has been that males who identify as women now have unrestricted access to women’s spaces like rape shelters, change rooms, and prisons.
In 2020, David Lametti, the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, proposed amendments to the criminal code, which would criminalize “conversation therapy.” Bill C-6 is currently going into its third reading, and would prevent therapists, for example, from taking a moderate, exploratory approach to so-called “trans kids,” rather than immediately affirming a child’s self-declared gender and putting them on the path to medical transition.
More recently, the Liberal government proposed a removal of Section 4.1 of the Broadcasting Act, the clause excluding “user-generated content” from regulation by the CRTC, Canada’s public authority in charge of regulating and supervising broadcasting and telecommunications. The reforms, should Bill C-10 pass, will curtail free speech online, ensuring individuals who challenge government-sanctioned ideology cannot speak out about their criticisms and concerns on social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube, a form of censorship feminists are already experiencing in our attempts to remind the public, media, and politicians that human biological sex is important, real, dimorphic, and immutable. If Bill C-10 passes, the platforms women use to connect with each other and advocate for women’s sex-based rights will be forced to censor our words and content, under threat of fines from the CRTC.
Women who speak out about gender identity ideology are threatened with sexual assault, murder, beatings, job loss, social alienation, and silencing, and because trans activists have labelled us “TERFs,” and therefore “hateful,” “bigoted,” and even “Nazis,” this response is passed off as righteous and even progressive. Today in the West, this form of misogyny is accepted and supported. In the 20th century, suffragists faced similar attacks — slander, propaganda, violence. If you look at anti-suffragist imagery, you can see the parallels.
Criticism of trans activism and gender ideology has been labelled “hate speech,” but defences of women’s rights are not an attack on people who believe they are transgender. This response is revealing, though, in terms of the foundation and goals of trans rights activism. Women fought for decades to be considered persons under the law, for our right to sport, access to public toilets, the right to vote, and have autonomy over our own reproductive choices. Many of these efforts are being undone by the work of trans activists who want women to set aside our safety and comfort in favour of the desires, fetishises, and demands of men.
The May 2 rally in Edmonton was not advertised, and for good reason: we were concerned about interference or assault from groups who oppose women’s rights advocacy. We wanted a safe place to peacefully meet up (in compliance with Covid restrictions), talk, and share. So we limited knowledge of the event to our own circles, opting to livestream it to the ABRF and AWAA Facebook pages, later uploading the video to the WHRC Alberta YouTube page. An hour before it started, we shared an event poster across social media.
We were really happy with the turnout, with women coming from Calgary, Cochrane, Lethbridge, and Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Some were afraid to attend in person, but watched online and sent us supportive messages. Some passersby stopped to listen to us speak. Just the opportunity to meet with one another in person was inspiring and galvanizing, as many of us had only known each other from social media and zoom meetings. There is power and energy in women gathering — especially for the purposes of feminist movement building or activism — that is hard to come by in mixed-sex groups. It may sound cliché or contrived, but it is invigorating — women can support and lift each other up in a space where we all know that womanhood is a shared experience of growing up female, not an identity one adopts.
I emceed the event and emphasized that this fight is not a partisan issue, saying:
“This isn’t about being a Liberal or a Conservative, it’s about being adult human females who have experienced oppression on the basis of our biological sex. This isn’t something we can just identify out of. This isn’t a magic trick that will cure the real issues we are faced with. Do not misunderstand: we are explicitly and exclusively pro-woman. Any insistence that we are hateful or bigots or fascist is a deliberate misrepresentation of what we are saying and our goals.”
Thousands of Canadian women have begun calling themselves “politically homeless,” because we are not represented by any party. We seem to be faced with voting against our own interests no matter who we choose.
I then introduced Charlotte Garrett, a teacher who spoke about children’s rights to a complete, accurate education. She said, “If a child is taught that five plus five equals whatever you feel it to be, you are destabilizing material reality; the very ground the child occupies.”
She also spoke about the female experience as an inherited birthright that goes “back and back and back.”
We then played a recording from Kathleen Lowrey, a University of Alberta anthropology professor who was punished for speaking out in defence of women’s rights, who encouraged us all to persevere, saying:
“Resistance to one mode of male aggression leads inexorably to other resistances. That’s why we face so much ferocious opposition for asserting common sense on gender identity ideology. But it’s also why we’re finding so many women swelling the ranks of feminist political action these days. They see what we see. They’re making the connections we’re making.”
Alline Cormier, WHRC Alberta coordinator, followed with a message in French, reiterating the message advocated in The Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights: that women and girls’ sex-based rights exist, are important, and the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women and girls that result from replacing the category of “sex” with that of “gender identity” must be prevented.
The last speaker was Coach Linda Blade, who invoked the Famous Five in her call to courage:
“Like the Famous Five of old, we gather today in this new century to serve notice that we will not stop asking ‘why?’ until we reclaim our sex-based rights. Female persons of today, as well as future generations of Canadian women and girls, have the right to live in dignity and security.”
It is pivotal that we speak out loud about these issues, not just online, where powerful men can shut down our accounts, censor our content, or monitor what we’re saying in secret groups and private messages. We have to be able to talk about these things in public.
The feminist movement began because women talked to each other in person, and realized banding together and getting out in public to speak and fight could make a difference, and it will continue to grow the same way. We have to protect our free speech rights and our spaces. On June 13, we will be holding another rally — this time in Calgary, presented by organizations from across Canada, including Canadian Gender Report, LGB Alliance Canada, We The Females, Alberta Women’s Advocacy Association, Canadian Women’s Sex-Based Rights, Alberta Radical Feminists, and WHRC Alberta. The location and final list of speakers will be announced at a later date. I hope you can take the time to watch, be it online when it is live streamed to the ABRF and AWAA Facebook pages, or in person.
On May 2, I said:
“Today we stand in the footprints of the Canadian feminists who came before us, who demanded that we be acknowledged and protected on the basis of our sex, who fought tooth and nail for the rights that we have today, the same rights being undermined by a new cult-like religion that requires obedience and acceptance of medical experimentation without question and without complaint, under threat of social and professional alienation and blacklisting. We have to stop staying quiet, we have to stand up.”
Any woman who does is not alone. If you reach out, you will find someone. We’re here and there are so many of us. We aren’t the first women to do this and we won’t be the last.
Transcripts of all of the May 2 speeches are available on the AWAA website.
Raine McLeod is a project coordinator and editor based in Calgary and is president of Alberta Women’s Advocacy Association and the founder of Alberta Radical Feminists.
The Brazilian government is planning to open up the land of uncontacted tribes to deadly exploitation, by scrapping the emergency orders that currently protect their territories.
Experts say the plan could drive several uncontacted tribes to extinction, and destroy around 1 million hectares of rainforest – an area twice the size of Delaware.
These tribes are especially vulnerable as their territories are not officially mapped out and protected. Currently the only thing standing between them and well-funded and heavily-armed loggers, ranchers and land-grabbers are the orders (known in Brazil as “Restrições de uso” injunctions).
Seven territories are currently protected by these orders, most of which have to be renewed every few years. Three of them are due to expire between September and December 2021, and are particularly vulnerable.
One of these protects the forest home of the last of the Piripkura tribe – after a series of massacres only three members of this tribe are known to exist, though some studies indicate others may still survive in the depths of the forest. A recent study by Brazilian NGO ISA showed that 962 hectares of forest in the Piripkura territory were razed last year, the equivalent of more than 1,000 football pitches.
President Bolsonaro and allies are targeting these tribes’ territories, which remain vulnerable until they are fully demarcated as indigenous lands. A Senator close to Bolsonaro, for example, is demanding that the Ituna Itatá territory be dramatically reduced in size, while state and federal politicians allied to powerful logging, ranching and agribusiness interests target other territories. President Bolsonaro is highly sympathetic to these deadly land-grabbing efforts, and has explicitly said he wants to open up all indigenous territories for exploitation.
COIAB (the Coordinating Body of Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon), OPI (Human Rights Watch of Isolated and Initial Contact Indigenous Peoples) and Survival – today launched a new video to expose Bolsonaro’s plan. They’re calling for the Brazilian government to renew the Land Protection Orders; evict all invaders; fully protect the territories; and #StopBrazilsGenocide.
Angela Kaxuyana, one of COIAB’s Coordinators, said today: “No more massacres! We won’t allow any more invasions! It’s vital that indigenous peoples and the organizations of the Amazon, and all civil society, mobilize to prevent the territories where the isolated indigenous peoples live from being handed over to loggers, land grabbers, gold miners and other forest predators to destroy. If the Bolsonaro government ends the Land Protection Orders, it will be yet another disaster and attack against the lives of these peoples, which is part of the grand plan to dismantle the indigenous policy in our country.
“We need to prevent more lives from being lost in this (un)government, we’ll carry on defending our rights to life, and those of our relatives who live autonomously in their territories.”
Fabrício Amorim of OPI said: “Land Protection Orders are a cutting-edge tool of public policy in Brazil, which can be deployed quickly to safeguard the lives and land rights of uncontacted indigenous peoples. They’re the highest expression of the precautionary principle, provided for in national and international laws. Doing away with them will mean the extermination of indigenous peoples, or some groups of them, without there even being time to recognize their existence in order to guarantee their rights. It will silence little-known lives and impoverish humanity. Therefore, it’s vital to strengthen these instruments, start demarcating these areas and remove all invaders.”
Elias Bígio, former head of the Uncontacted Tribes unit at Brazil’s Indigenous Affairs Agency FUNAI, said today: “The Piripkura’s land has been occupied by aggressive and violent people who are destroying the environment and threatening everyone.
“The uncontacted Piripkura have shown that they don’t want contact. They don’t have the security of contact with ‘our’ society, given the traumatic relationship they’ve had with the invaders. They’re there in the forest, and they’ve devised strategies to protect themselves and survive. They’ve managed to survive and are there, hidden, restricted to a small territory, and claiming this territory for themselves.”
Sarah Shenker, Coordinator of Survival’s Uncontacted Tribes campaign, said today: “The future of several uncontacted tribes living in territories shielded by emergency Land Protection Orders will be decided this year. They have already experienced land theft and appalling violence and killings at the hands of outsiders. The orders are currently the only thing standing between them and certain death.
“The ranchers’ and politicians’ plot to rip up the orders, steal these lands, and wipe out the uncontacted tribes who live there, is one branch of many in the Bolsonaro government’s genocidal attack on Brazil’s indigenous peoples, and it must be blocked. Over the coming months, uncontacted tribes’ allies in Brazil and around the world will be campaigning non-stop for the orders to be renewed, all invaders evicted, and the forests to be fully protected. Only then can the uncontacted tribes survive and thrive.”
Notes to Editors
– Representatives from COIAB, OPAN, OPI and Survival are available for interview.
– The uncontacted tribal territories currently shielded by the Land Protection Orders are:
Territory | Expiration date | Area in Hectares
Piripkura (Mato Grosso) | 18 Sep 2021 | 243,000
Jacareúba/Katawixi (Amazonas) | 08 Dec 2021 | 647,000
Pirititi (Roraima) | 05 Dec 2021 | 43,000
Ituna Itatá (Pará) | 09 Jan 2022 | 142,000
Tanaru (Rondonia) | 26 Oct 2025 | 8,000
Igarapé Taboca do Alto Tarauacá (Acre) | Until the demarcation process is complete | 287
Kawahiva do Rio Pardo (Mato Grosso) | Until the demarcation process is complete | 412,000
The protection camp at Thacker Pass, Peehee mu’huh, has been in place for more than four months.
This episode is an update starting with a new recording from May 18th, as well as audio from recent video updates recorded on-site by Max Wilbert over the past month or so.
WEST YELLOWSTONE, MONTANA— Following a challenge by multiple conservation groups, the U.S. Forest Service announced Thursday that it was halting a plan to clearcut more than 4,600 acres of native forests, log across an additional 9,000 acres and bulldoze up to 56 miles of road on lands just outside Yellowstone National Park in the Custer Gallatin National Forest.
In April, the Center for Biological Diversity, WildEarth Guardians, Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Native Ecosystems Council challenged the South Plateau project, saying it would destroy habitat for grizzly bears, lynx, pine martens and wolverines. The logging project would have destroyed the scenery and solitude for hikers using the Continental Divide National Scenic Trail, which crosses the proposed timber-sale area.
“This was another one of the Forest Service’s ‘leap first, look later’ projects where the agency asks for a blank check to figure out later where they’ll do all the clearcutting and bulldozing,” said Adam Rissien, a rewilding advocate at WildEarth Guardians. “Logging forests under the guise of reducing wildfires is not protecting homes or improving wildlife habitat, it’s just a timber sale. If the Forest Service tries to revive this scheme to clearcut native forests and bulldoze new roads in critical wildlife habitat just outside of Yellowstone, we’ll continue standing against it.”
In response to the group’s challenge, the Forest Service said it was withdrawing the South Plateau project until after it issues a new management plan for the Custer-Gallatin National Forest this summer. Then it plans to prepare a new environmental analysis of the project with “additional public involvement” to ensure the project complies with the new forest plan.
“This is a good day for the greater Yellowstone ecosystem and for the grizzlies, lynx and other wildlife that call it home,” said Ted Zukoski, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The Forest Service may revive this destructive project in a few months, but for now this beautiful landscape is safe from chainsaws and bulldozers.”
The project violated the National Environmental Policy Act by failing to disclose precisely where and when it would bulldoze roads and clearcut the forest, which made it impossible for the public to understand the project’s impacts, the groups said in their April objection. The project allowed removal of trees more than a century old, which provide wildlife habitat and store significant amounts of carbon dioxide, an essential component of addressing the climate emergency.
“The South Plateau project was in violation of the forest plan protections for old growth,” said Sara Johnson, director of Native Ecosystems Council and a former wildlife biologist for the Custer Gallatin National Forest. “The new forest plan has much weaker old-growth protections standards. That is likely why they pulled the decision — so they can resign it after the new forest plan goes into effect.”
“The Forest Service needs to drop the South Plateau project and quit clearcutting old-growth forests,” said Mike Garrity, executive director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies. “Especially clearcutting and bulldozing new logging roads in grizzly habitat on the border of Yellowstone National Park.”
This is part 4 of a series that originally appeared on ClimateandCapitalism. You can read part 1,part 2 and part 3.
Featured image: Processing cod in a 16th Century Newfoundland ‘Fishing Room’
THE FISHING REVOLUTION
Centuries before the industrial revolution, the first factories transformed seafood production
Marxist historians have been debating the origin of capitalism since the 1940s. It is true, as Eric Hobsbawm once commented, that “nobody has seriously maintained that capitalism prevailed before the 16th century, or that feudalism prevailed after the late 18th,”[1] but despite years of vigorous discussion in many excellent books and articles, there is still no consensus on when, where and how the new system formed and became dominant.[2]
This article does not try to resolve the debate or propose a new grand narrative. My goal, rather, is to draw attention to an important aspect of early capitalism that has been almost entirely ignored by all of the participants: the development and growth of intensive fishing in the North Sea and northwestern Atlantic Ocean in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
‘An immense fishing enterprise’
As we will see, transatlantic fishing in the 1500s was one of the world’s first capitalist industries. But even if that were not true, recent research into its size and scope demonstrates its extraordinary importance to the economic history of that period.
Part Two of this article discussed the work of Selma Barkham, whose archival research documented the previously unknown large-scale Basque whaling operations in the Strait of Belle Isle.
Similarly, Laurier Turgeon of Laval University has shown that the transatlantic cod fishing industry was much larger than previously thought. His work, based on archival records in French port cities, documents “an immense fishing enterprise that has been largely overlooked in the maritime history of the North Atlantic.” In the second half of the sixteenth century, “the French Newfoundland vessels represented one of the largest fleets in the Atlantic. These 500 or so ships had a combined loading capacity of some 40,000 tons burden [56,000 cubic meters], and they mobilized 12,000 fishermen-sailors each year.”
To those must be added annual crossings by some 200 Spanish, Portuguese and English ships.
“The Newfoundland fleet surpassed by far the prestigious Spanish fleet that trafficked with the Americas, which had only half the loading capacity and half as many crew members…. The Gulf of the Saint Lawrence represented a site of European activity fully comparable to the Gulf of Mexico or the Caribbean. Far from being a marginal space visited by a few isolated fishermen, Newfoundland was one of the first great Atlantic routes and one of the first territories colonized in North America.”[3]
Historian Peter E. Pope reaches a similar conclusion in his award-winning study of early English settlements in Newfoundland:
“By the later sixteenth century, European commercial activity in Atlantic Canada exceeded, in volume and value, European trade with the Gulf of Mexico, which is usually treated as the American center of gravity of early transatlantic commerce … The early modern fishery at Newfoundland was an enormous industry for its time, and even for our own.[4]
In the same period, close to 1,000 ships sailed annually to the North Sea from Holland, Zeeland and Flanders. The Netherlands-based fishing industry was so important that Philip II used part of his American gold and silver to finance warships that protected the Dutch herring fleet from attacks by French and Scottish privateers.
In the 1400s, the Dutch fleet in the North Sea caught and processed huge volumes of fish, making herring the most-widely consumed fish in northern Europe. In the 1500s, the North Sea herring catch remained stable while the Newfoundland fishery transformed the market — in 1580, Newfoundland fishers brought back 200,000 tonnes of cod, more than double the North Sea herring catch in its best year. By the end of the century, cod had replaced herring as the most important commodity fish in Europe, by a large margin. This graph shows the growth of herring and cod sold in continental Europe from 1400 to 1750.
Old and New World supplies (tonnes) of herring and cod to European market. (Source: Holm et al, “The North Atlantic Fish Revolution ca. AD 1500” Quaternary Research, 2018)
It is clear that in the 1500s intensive fishing became a major industry, an important component of the revolutionary social and economic changes then underway across Europe.
The first capitalist factories
In 1776, in the first chapter of The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith famously attributed the “greatest improvements in the productive powers of labor” to “the effects of the division of labor,” in what he called manufactories. In some pin-making establishments, for example, “about eighteen distinct operations … are all performed by distinct hands,” By dividing up the tasks, pin factories produced many times more pins than would have been possible if each worker made them individually.[5]
Less famous, perhaps, is the particular emphasis that Karl Marx placed on the importance of division of labor in manufacture, his term for “combining together different handicrafts under the command of a single capitalist” [6] before the introduction of machinery in the industrial revolution. “The division of labor in the workshop, as practiced by manufacture, is an entirely specific creation of the capitalist mode of production.”[7]
A recent book claims that production by division of labor was invented in the 1470s, on Portuguese sugar plantations on the island of Madeira. The assignment of different activities to different groups of slaves shows, the authors say, that “the plantation was the original factory.”[8]
While that was an important development, it was not the first case of factory food production. Over half a century earlier, as we saw in Part One, Dutch merchants, shipbuilders, and fishworkers introduced a sophisticated division of labor to produce food in much greater volume — not a luxury product like sugar, but a mass commodity, seafood. The large, broad-bottomed herring busses, in which teams of workers captured, processed and preserved fish in the North Sea, have a strong claim to being the first capitalist factories.
French fishers used similar vessels, called bankers or bank ships, on Newfoundland’s Grand Banks in the 1500s. Laurier Turgeon describes a typical division of labor in “the precursor of our factory ships,” as the cod were hooked and hauled up:
“All eviscerating or dressing operations were carried out on deck where activity had turned well and truly into assembly-line production. The ship’s boys grabbed the fish [from one of the fishers] and threw it onto the splitting-table. The ‘header’ severed the head, gutted it, and in the very same movement, pushed it towards the ‘splitter’ at the opposite end of the table. Two or three deft strokes of the knife sufficed to remove the backbone, after which the ‘dressed’ filet dropped down the hatch into the ship’s hold. There, the salter laid it out between two thick layers of salt.”
Work continued apace from dawn to dark, even overnight when the catch was particularly good. Every bank ship was “a workshop for the preparation and curing of fish” and the workers’ activity “resembled 19th-century factory labor in many respects.”[9]
The inland cod fishery also involved an assembly-line division of labor, in facilities built each year on Newfoundland’s stony beaches. A journal kept by ship’s surgeon James Yonge in the 1600s, summarized here by historian Peter Pope, describes the factory-like operation of Newfoundland fishing stations, called fishing rooms by English fishworkers.
“If fishing was good, the crews would head for their fishing rooms in late afternoon, each boat with as many as one thousand or twelve hundred fish, weighing altogether several tonnes. … The shore crews began the task of making fish right on the stage head, the combination wharf and processing plant where the fish was unloaded. A boy would lay the fish on a table for the header, who gutted and then decapitated the fish…. The cod livers were set aside and dumped into a train vat, where the oil rendered in the sun. The header pushed the gutted fish across the table to the splitter, who opened the fish and removed the spine…. Untrained boys moved the split fish in handbarrows and piled it up for an initial wet-salting. This salting required experience and judgment, as Yonge stressed: ‘A salter is a skillful officer, for too much salt burns the fish and makes it break, and wet, too little makes it redshanks, that is, look red when dried, and so is not merchantable.’ …
“After a few days in salt, the shore crews would rinse the fish in seawater and pile it on a platform of beach stones, called a horse, for a day or two before spreading it out to dry on a cobble beach or on flakes, rough wooden platforms covered with fir boughs or birch bark….. At night and in wet weather, the fish being processed had to be turned skin side up or collected in protected heaps. After four or five days of good weather, it was ready to be stored in carefully layered larger piles containing about fifteen hundred fish.”[10]
On long beaches, there could be multiple fishing rooms with workers from many ships in close proximity. As Pope writes, “This sophisticated division of labor, the large size of the production unit, together with the time discipline imposed by a limited fishing season gave the dry fishery some of the qualities of later manufacturing industries.”[11]
The sixteenth century fishing rooms and bank ships were factories, long before the industrial revolution.
‘A distinctly capitalist institution’
In Capital, Marx argues that merchant activity as such — buying cheap in one place and selling dear in another — did not undermine the feudal mode of production, nor did craftsmen who made and sold their own products. It was the integration of manufacture and trade that laid the basis for a new social order: “the production and circulation of commodities are the general prerequisites of the capitalist mode of production.”[12] The actual transition to capitalism, he wrote, occurred in three ways: some merchants shifted into manufacturing; some merchants contracted with multiple independent craftsmen; and some craftsmen expanded their operations to produce for the market themselves.[13]
But, as Maurice Dobb comments in Studies in the Development of Capitalism, the problem with schematic transition schemas, including Marx’s, is that the actual process was “a complex of various strands, and the pace and nature of the development differ widely in different countries.”[14]
For example, Selma Barkham found that Basque whaling expeditions to Labrador were organized and financed by what she calls money-men: “men with a solid financial background, and a good deal of experience, both in money-raising and in the insurance industry.”[15]
In England, on the other hand, as Gillian Cell shows, the Newfoundland fishery was “run by men of limited capital … [It] was primarily the preserve of the west-countrymen,” not London’s merchant grandees, and certainly not money-men. The largest capital expense, the ship itself, was typically shared among several investors. “Most commonly a ship would be divided into thirty-two parts, any number of which might be owned by the same merchant, but on occasion there might be as many as sixty-four.” In other cases, investors reduced their cost and risk by leasing ships, with no payment due until they returned.[16]
The investors hired a captain who hired the sailors and fishers, and contracted with a victualler who provided fishing gear, boats, barrels, salt, and other essentials, including food and drink for a long voyage. One person might play multiple roles — the captain and victualler might also be investors, for example.
A capitalist enterprise requires capital; it also requires workers. The very existence of intensive fishing in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries shows that there were thousands of men and boys in England and western Europe whose livelihood depended on working in the distant fishing factories.
It was arduous and dangerous work that took them away from home for most of the year. Just travelling to and from the fishing grounds took a month or more each way, in crowded wooden ships that might sink at any time. Maritime historian Samuel Elliot Morrison described the sixteenth century Newfoundland fishery as “a graveyard of ships” — more merchant ships were lost at sea in the years 1530-1600 than in all of World War II.[17]
And yet captains apparently had no difficulty in recruiting full crews of skilled and unskilled workers every year.
Little research has been done on the social origins of these workers, but it is surely significant that the rapid expansion of long-distance fishing in England in the 1500s coincided with a wave of rural enclosures and consolidation, in which “the traditional peasant community was undermined as layers of better-off peasants became wealthy yeoman farmers, some entering the ranks of the gentry, while others were pauperized and proletarianized — and on a massive scale.”[18] In the long sixteenth century (roughly 1450 to 1640), “great masses of men [were] suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled onto the labor-market as free, unprotected and rightless proletarians.”[19]
In the Netherlands in the mid-1500s, about five percent of the male population worked in the herring industry.[20] There, and in England, France and Spain, a growing number of men who had formerly supplemented their diet and income with occasional fishing now had to work for others — having lost their land, they turned to the sea full time. Some may still have owned small plots of land and others probably worked as agricultural laborers between voyages, but all were part of a new maritime working class whose labor enriched a rising class of merchant-industrialists.
As we saw in Part One, workers on Dutch herring busses were often paid fixed wages. That was rare on English and French ships: usually, the gross proceeds from selling the catch were divided in three — one-third for the investors, one-third for the victualler, and one-third for the captain and crew. The captain took the largest part of the crew’s share, while workers received different amounts depending on their skill and experience, with laborers and boys receiving the least. Share payment reduced the investors’ losses when the catch was small or lost. It was also a form of labor discipline: as an English merchant wrote, because the fisherworkers’ income depended on the size of the catch, there was “lesse feare of negligence on their part.”[21]
From a purely legal standpoint, the merchants, shipowners, victuallers and fishworkers on each expedition were part of a joint venture, but as Daniel Vickers writes, that formality did not change the fundamental class relationship.
“Relations between merchants and their men remained in substance those of capital and labor. Merchants still garnered the lion’s share of the profits (and bore most of the losses); they retained complete ownership of the vessel, provisions, and gear throughout the voyage; and they could do with their capital what they wished once the fish had been sold. By early modern standards of economic organization, this transatlantic fishery was a distinctively capitalist institution.”[22]
Ecological Impact
Beginning in the early 1600s, a few English mariners sailed an additional 900 miles or so from Newfoundland to the area now known as New England. All were astonished by the abundance of fish — and especially by their size.
John Brereton, 1602: “Fish, namely Cods, which as we encline more unto the South, are more large and vendible for England and France than the Newland fish.”
James Rosier, 1605: Compared to Newfoundland cod, New England cod were “so much greater, better fed, and abundant with traine [oil]” and “all were generally very great, some they measured to be five foot long, and three foot about.”
Robert Davies, 1607: “Hear wee fysht three howers & tooke near to hundred of Codes very great & large fyshe bigger & larger fyshe then that which coms from the bancke of the new Foundland.”[23]
Newfoundland and New England cod are separated by geography, but they are the same species. The difference in size and abundance wasn’t caused by genetics, but by a century of intensive fishing. Marine biologist Callum Roberts explains:
“By the time of these voyages, Newfoundland cod had been intensively exploited for a hundred years, and fishing there had evidently already had an impact on fish numbers and size. Catching fish reduces their average life span. Since fish like cod continue growing throughout their life span, fishing therefore reduces the average size of individuals in a population. The Newfoundland fishery had driven down the average size of cod, and the relatively unexploited stocks in New England became a reminder of the past.”[24]
A recent study estimates that until the late 1800s the annual catch was less than 10% of the total cod population[25], far below the level deemed sustainable in the twentieth century. That, together with the fact that the catch increased, year after year, seems to imply that in the early modern fishing had little or no impact, but that is misleading, because the total cod population was composed of distinct local populations. Since fishing operations tended to stay in areas where fish congregated, local cod populations could be, and were, diminished by intensive fishing.
By 1600, for example, in the area known as the English shore, “fishers made, on average, only about 60 percent of the catch per boat that they had come to expect.”[26] The total catch remained high because some fishers worked harder, using more boats or staying at sea longer, while others shifted geographically, targeting less depleted populations as far away as the aptly named Cape Cod in Massachusetts.
“As human fishing removed larger, more mature fish from each substock, the chances of abrupt swings in the reproductive rate increased. In short, even at the seemingly ‘moderate’ levels of the 1600s and 1700s, fishing altered the age (and perhaps gender) structures, size, weight, and spawning and feeding habits, and the overall size of codfish stocks in the North Atlantic.”[27]
Cod are among the most prolific vertebrates on earth. Mature females release 3 to 9 million eggs a year: someone once calculated that if they all grew to maturity, in three years it would be possible to walk across the ocean in their backs. In reality, only a few hatch and few of those avoided being eaten as larvae, but under normal conditions (i.e. before intensive fishing) enough survived to maintain a stable population in the trillions. Intensive fishing disrupted that metabolic and reproductive cycle, but the total number of cod was so great that it took nearly five centuries for the world’s largest fishery to collapse.
A Fishing Revolution
In 2018, a team of environmental historians led by Poul Holm proposed that the birth and rapid growth of intensive fishing in Newfoundland should be called the Fish Revolution. A careful study of the fishery’s size, its impact on European markets and diets, and its environmental effects led them to conclude that historians “have grossly underestimated the historical economic significance of the fish trade, which may have been equal to the much more famed rush to exploit the silver mines of the Incas.” The Fish Revolution was “a major event in the history of resource extraction and consumption. … [that] permanently changed human and animal life in the North Atlantic region.”
“The wider seafood market was transformed in the process, and the marine expansion of humans across the North Atlantic was conditioned by significant climatic and environmental parameters. The Fish Revolution is one of the clearest early examples of how humans can affect marine life on our planet and of how marine life can in return influence and become, in essence, a part of a globalizing human world.”[28]
That conclusion synthesizes a large body of recent research. It is, I think, absolutely correct as far as it goes, but it needs to be supported a deeper understanding of the social and economic drivers of change. In brief, the Fish Revolution was caused by a Fishing Revolution.
The success of the North Sea and Newfoundland fisheries depended on merchants who had capital to invest in ships and other means of production, fishworkers who had to sell their labor power in order to live, and a production system based on a planned division of labor. It would not have been possible in the Middle Ages, because none of those elements existed. The long-distance fishing operations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were among the first examples, and very likely the largest examples, of what Marx called manufacture — “a specifically capitalist form of the process of social production.”[29]
In the Fishing Revolution, capital in pursuit of profit organized human labor to turn living creatures into an immense accumulation of commodities. From 1600 on, up to 250,000 metric tonnes of cod a year were caught, processed, and preserved in Newfoundland and transported across the ocean for sale. That increased production supported a qualitative increase in the volume of fish consumed in Europe — and it began the long-term depletion of ocean life that in our time has pushed cod and many other ocean species to the brink of extinction.
+ + + + + +
Many questions remain. How did the huge increase in fish from Newfoundland affect coastal and regional fisheries in Europe? Who were the workers who joined long distance fishing fleets? Did the same men return year after year, or was it a temporary expedient for some? How did the merchants who financed the expeditions invest their profits? We know that merchants who invested in American colonies tended to support Parliament when Civil War broke out in England the 1640s, but what about the West Country capitalists who organized transatlantic fishing? How were North Atlantic ecosystems affected by the large-scale removal of top predators?
More research is needed, but the existence of a large fishing industry during what Marx called the age of manufacture is beyond doubt. Despite that, historians debating the origin of capitalism have rarely mentioned the industry that employed more working people than any field other than farming. I hope this article contributes to a more rounded picture, and shows that no account of capitalism’s origins is complete if it omits the development and growth of intensive fishing in the centuries when capitalism was born.
This four-part article on intensive fishing and the birth of capitalism is part of my continuing project on metabolic rifts. Your constructive comments, suggestions, and corrections will help me get it right. -IA
Notes
[1] Eric Hobsbawm, “From Feudalism to Capitalism,” in The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, ed. Rodney Hilton (Verso, 1978), 162.
[2] Since the 1980s, the two leading schools of thought have been Political Marxism, associated with Robert Brenner, and World-systems Analysis, associated with Immanuel Wallerstein. For recent work from those currents, see: Xavier Lafrance and Charles Post, eds., Case Studies in the Origins of Capitalism (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019); and Christopher K. Chase-Dunn and Salvatore J. Babones, eds., Routledge Handbook of World-systems Analysis (Routledge, 2012).
Important books that critique and move beyond both approaches include: Henry Heller, The Birth of Capitalism (Pluto, 2011); Neil Davidson, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? (Haymarket, 2012); and Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancıoğlu, How the West Came to Rule (Pluto 2015).
[3] Laurier Turgeon, “Codfish, Consumption, and Colonization: The Creation of the French Atlantic World During the Sixteenth Century,” in Bridging the Early Modern Atlantic World, ed. Caroline A. Williams (Routledge, Taylor & Francis, 2016) 37-38.
[4] Peter E. Pope, Fish into Wine: The Newfoundland Plantation in the Seventeenth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2004) 13, 22.
[5] Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (Modern Library, 2000) 3-5.
[6] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, vol. 1, (Penguin Books, 1976), 456-7.
[20] James D. Tracy, “Herring Wars: The Habsburg Netherlands and the Struggle for Control of the North Sea, ca. 1520-1560,” Sixteenth Century Journal 24, no. 2 (Summer 1993) 254
[21] Sir David Kirke in 1639, quoted in Pope, Fish Into Wine, 161.
[22] Daniel Vickers, Farmers & Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630-1850 (University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 89-90.
[23] Brereton, Rosier, and Davies quoted in Callum Roberts, The Unnatural History of the Sea (Island Press, 2007) 37-38.
[24] Callum Roberts, The Unnatural History of the Sea (Island Press, 2007), 38.
[25] G. A. Rose, “Reconciling Overfishing and Climate Change with Stock Dynamics of Atlantic Cod (Gadus morhua) over 500 Years,” Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences (September 2004), 1553-1557.
[26] Peter Pope, “Early estimates: Assessment of catches in the Newfoundland cod fishery, 1660-1690,” quoted in John F. Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (University of California Press, 2005), 567.
[27] John F. Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (University of California Press, 2005), 569.
[28] Poul Holm et al., “The North Atlantic Fish Revolution (ca. AD 1500),” Quaternary Research, 2019, 1-15.
