 So you're all very welcome to food sovereignty, climate action and local resilience. This is a Green European Foundation event and it's part of a project that is producing a pamphlet on the topic later this year and is building on our question of scale paper, the project we did last year with GEF and looking at shortening supply chains and local economies. Today we're going to just, I'll give you a quick overview of the session. So I'm going to just give a context, then we'll have a welcome from GF and GFI. We'll do an overview of the paper we're working on, Ferrigal will be given an overview. And then we have some reflections from a European perspective and then we have three local stories sort of framing of food sovereignty in three different aspects here in Ireland. Now we're going to have a breakout looking at the blockers and enablers in small groups. In four areas, we're really going into trying to harvest some insights from those conversations before we close. So today we're engaging in conversations with advocates of regenerative agriculture with rural regeneration and sustainable communities and we're exploring how we might strengthen the resilience and well-being of our local places through the framing of food sovereignty. So we're going to just have a couple of welcomes. So my name is Seen. I'm a project coordinator at the Green European Foundation. So we're organizing today's event with the support of Green Foundation Ireland and Cultivate. For those of you who might not know us, the Green European Foundation is a European-level political foundation. So we're funded by the European Parliament and affiliated to but independent of the European Greens. And our mission is really to contribute to kind of the development of a European public sphere, get citizens more involved in EU-level politics, build a stronger, more participative democracy. As you know agriculture is something that on the European level is quite an important topic, especially these days. And so we also really like having these events more at the local level where we can really harvest local and national actors and bridge that gap to Brussels. Yeah, so one of our projects this year is a so-called transnational project, which is really where we bring together foundations from across Europe. So this one's called Climate Emergency Economy. And we have partners from Ireland but also from the UK, Bulgaria and the Netherlands. And particularly on agriculture, we're really hoping to connect some of the perspectives from Ireland and Bulgaria, so two very different parts of Europe. And yeah, the project itself looks into the challenges of building a so-called Climate Emergency Economy, focusing on certain hard-to-reach sectors of which agriculture is one. So we're really excited to share this first draft of the paper and some of the enablers and blockers that have been identified and yeah, to build on this discussion. And if you want to stay in touch with the project, also the future events that will be happening with our Bulgarian partners, I will drop a link in the chat that you can subscribe to our newsletter. And yeah, hopefully we stay in touch. Okay. Thank you, Leshian. And just from GFI, the Green Foundation of Ireland, who are a partner in this project. Tommy Simpson, just to say a few words of welcome. Thank you very much. This is one of the series, as Seen has just mentioned, the lead partner. And this is Greenhouse in the UK. And thanks to Peter Sims and Jonathan Essex. But again, it's a follow-on also from last year, what Davey mentioned, a question of scale. We've been running projects now in collaboration with Cultivate for some years on and off. And I have to say Cultivate have been an excellent partner. And I would ask origin individuals to take a look at the publication from last year, a question of scale, which is available on the Green Foundation Ireland website. We've also run a number of other seminars prior to COVID, going back right to 1914. And my main emphasis has been on the whole area of sustainable jobs. We ran the one called Rebuilding Communities through Sustainable Jobs, the 14 Sustainable Communities Sustainable Jobs. That was the DCU in Dublin City University. Also, one in Clark Jordan, which Davey again collaborated on, was the full circle, it was called a Community Approach to Sustainable Work. And then we had one on food as well, which Oliver Moore also spoke at, was in UCC in Cork, University of Cork, restoring food to the heart of the community. And so on. And then in 2018 jobs in a changing climate, that was with the trade union SIPTU and climate jobs and the just transition that was in Queen's University in Belfast. And as I mentioned last year, a question of scale. So we continue to collaborate with Cultivate and it's been an excellent experience. And I would urge people to look up the publications and other information on the Green Foundation Ireland website. Thank you. So thanks for that, Tommy. And thanks to Green Foundation Ireland support along with Green European Foundation for this webinar and for this wider project. So this webinar builds upon a context article that we have been developing with Fergal Anderson called Food Sovereignty, Climate Action and Local Resilience. This will be published later this year. Fergal is a small farmer with Tulliv B.O. He, the Irish Land Workers Alliance, and is formerly with Fia Campesina. So over to you Fergal. Yeah, my name is Fergal. So we have a farm here in the west of Ireland. It's about, I suppose, 10 hectares in total. We've got two hectares of mixed vegetables and hard culture orchards. And we manage about eight hectares of mixed woodland. We market everything direct into local markets. We've done different things over the years, selling in the local market on the street, running communities for agriculture and project. And at the moment, we're mostly working with a couple of restaurants. We have very good relationship with those restaurants. So Dave, you asked me to write up this document. And you've all received it, I think. So I'm not going to go through it point to point, because that would just be painful, I think. But maybe I can sort of think about, we can talk a little bit about some of the concepts, which have informed the thinking around it. And then we go into a little bit more possible things that we can reflect on as we enter the discussion. So I mean, firstly, I suppose, Food Sovereignty, that's a global framework for thinking about food and agriculture, which we can use to better understand the kind of issues that we're facing. And I think it's based on these principles of solidarity and social justice and agroecology. And I'm putting farmers and citizens at the center of discussions about rather than agribusiness corporations. And the second element that's in the paper is obviously climate change. And I think we need to remember, as we have these discussions, that the real cause of climate change is an economic model based on that endless growth on speculative financial markets and an attitude towards our natural world, which is more or less based on extraction, or in the case of agriculture, on an almost, you could call it an antagonistic relationship to the natural world rather than a cooperative one. And it's that neoliberal market-led approach of capitalism, which continues to try and convince us that there is no alternative possible. And it expands a huge amount of energy in attempting to eliminate or discredit, or actually particularly, I think, absorb any alternatives which emerge to that model. So I think there's a danger, in general, of approaching climate change with the same mentality as that which created it, which wants to only develop more markets, more extractive industries, and more opportunities to continue a kind of accumulation and an application of industrial and technological solutions and systems to all walks of life. And as we know, I mean, agriculture and land use is a huge player in climate change, not just in terms of emissions, but more where in the main player in the kind of catastrophic biodiversity loss that we're seeing almost everywhere, and in the broken carbon and water cycles, which are inhibiting the capacity of the planet to regulate its own natural processes. So when we're confronted with those global problems, it's often very difficult to find common solutions. And that's why I think the concept of food sovereignty is so key here. And it gives us a framework for thinking about how we interact with our land, within our communities, and with each other, which is debated at a, you know, from a local to a global level. And it's discussed and debated with the same understanding from one end of the earth to the other. And from Bacconk to Brazil, or Mozambique to Madrid, or whatever it might be. And we're very lucky to have a concept like that, which tackles global issues in a common way. And it's thanks to La Via Campesina for that concept. It's thanks to the peasants of the world for bringing that idea into the kind of discussion more than 25 years ago now. And it kind of brings us to where we are today, where food sovereignty remains this unfinished and constantly evolving concept, which has been used by social movements, debated by social movements for more than 25 years. And as such, it can't really be eliminated, it can't be discredited, and it can't be absorbed by that neoliberal model. And I think that is why it offers us such a, you know, such a useful possibility to confront the neoliberal model from the places where we're strongest, which is our fields and our farms in our case, and where we still have some degree of autonomy from that system. And that said, that autonomy has been eroded on many farms, farmers who are selling the global markets find themselves in the situation where they're dependent on agribusiness corporations for the purchase of inputs, they're dependent on them for the industrial machines that they use, and they're constantly being sold new technologies and new systems. And we're seeing that system of production receive the lion's share of subsidies, where public money is essentially being used to ensure markets for agribusiness corporations to provide those inputs, and bus and supply of inputs, and also in terms of the to ensure cheap outputs that they can then process and sell and trade on global markets. And I mean, as if that's not enough, the those farming systems also have hugely negative impacts on our natural world on biodiversity and water quality on an ecosystem. So I mean, in Ireland, this applies in particular to something like our dairy industry, where we export more than 90% of our production at a huge environmental cost, but also at a social cost, because I think I mean, the industrialization of farming, and conversion to agribusiness operations, I don't even call them farms, some of those places, it disconnects these farms from their regions, from their localities, and it creates a kind of monoculture production rather than a polyculture, and also creates a monoculture of farm type. So it threatens the existence of the very kind of small scale diversified farming that we need now more than ever to confront the challenges with which we're faced. And I think citizens are beginning to ask those questions, they're asking beginning to ask how public money has been spent, why it has been used to create damage, to create harm, and to benefit a minority of agribusiness shareholders. And farmers are organizing as well. And I think it's moving through that kind of collective social movements of farmers and citizens that will see the capacity building to confront the vested interest of agribusinesses, because there's no doubt that they're kind of powerful opponents. So the paper is broken into these four sections, which we have production, distribution, livelihoods and labour, and the global trade and solidarity. And I think in the first two areas we've got like a very rich lived experience in Europe of examples of agroecological production, which is working on the ground, and examples of very well-organized sort of community-led distribution systems, and what those systems lack and what those productions lack very often policies and supports which would go towards in sort of making it easier, unless inhibited for them to grow and to be replicated. I suppose that would be a removal of the supports for the industrial model would automatically make more, I suppose, funding and capacity there for production to be focused on providing food for people and on regenerating those ecosystems which have been so badly eroded by the industrial production model. The second area is perhaps more complex because it requires us to look, I mean, the labour and livelihoods and the global trade and solidarity, that makes us look beyond our own local areas, beyond our local borders, and to begin to think about how we can change structures and decisions which exist outside our locality and our direct area. And I think it's there where international solidarity and organizing can become important and take a primary role. I mean, I think social movements have become more atomized, more focused on particular campaigns, and I think we've maybe lost that kind of shared European international spaces where there used to be an articulation of kind of of citizens movements. And I think we need to build in those more than ever. So perhaps that's something we can think about how we can build international, regional solidarity, inter-regional solidarity, and cooperation. And I think in some ways I was thinking about it, the great slogan of the ultra-globalization movement was, you know, to think global and act local. But I mean, maybe we need to invert it a little bit. I mean, if we are thinking local, we now, there are times where we need to act globally, sorry, to kind of confront the power of those, I suppose, transnational agribusiness corporations who are working with technology companies and other big vested interests. So that's just something else. I suppose there's a few other things I thought about that aren't really in the paper, which might be worth considering. I think they're important elements, but I don't know if there's room for them to be reflected on. One thing I think is important is that idea of generational thinking. I mean, sort of something that goes beyond the sort of short-term thinking, short-term mentality, that prevents us from making significant changes to our culture over time, and which I suppose is robbing a future generation. And that's something certainly can be said of the problems we're faced with climate change. And it's particularly useful to think about that when we're talking about land use and farming systems, because they can be slow to change and we sometimes need long-term plans that go beyond our own sort of timeframe to make those changes. I think reclaiming that kind of intergenerational approach might help us to regenerate parts of our culture to be lost or have been removed and replaced with kind of consumerism. So perhaps we're thinking about that. The second one is just on governance level in terms of getting local governments and municipalities to take effective measures on the ground. And I think there's a lot of capacity there. And it's perhaps a fault of the actual structure of governance itself, of the top-down decision-making of representative, you know, electoral systems. And I think the idea of that democratic and federalism is an interesting one for us to think about here, where you have a kind of popular assemblies. And in Ireland, we're a very successful example of the citizens assemblies, which led to referenda. And I mean, essentially they would be there to define policy and dictate direction, and you'd directly elect officials to enact those policies. And it's just, it's another idea way of thinking about local governance, which I think is something as well, and it goes into the kind of systemic changes that we need to see in order to kind of develop the kind of changes that we want. So I mean, it's just something that's worth considering. I suppose connected to that is that idea of community wealth building. And that would be, people might be familiar, but where the same authorities and municipalities look at local anchor institutions, and which have large public procurement budgets, and seeing how they can develop procurement policies. I mean, I can leave it there, Davie, if that's all right, anyway. We'll have five minutes or so to capture any reflections or questions that people have. It's more useful insights. And if you write them in the chat, we can actually harvest them into our documents and work with them. If you want to be your hand up, you can do that in reactions. But I suppose what we're really trying to do here is practice food sovereignty, enable the practice of food sovereignty, how we produce our food in a regenerative way, think about our soils, think about restoring ecosystems, thinking about the livelihood potential of diversification, and the potential for stronger local economies. And also then to do that, to look at the last pillar, as I see in food sovereignty, the actually taking autonomy over the distribution networks, so that we can grow, transform and distribute in our regions and local economies in a way that builds that resilience, as well as reducing our carbon footprint. We focus less on our carbon footprint here, but we can see that this idea or this lens of food sovereignty gives us a way to take climate action, but also at the same time to build that capacity to cope with the challenges that we're going to face over the next number of years. So, does anyone want to come in or add anything? Mario Hagen says in the chat, super local to global planning. So, what Faragal was saying there, like think and act globally, but really embed and root ourselves locally, engaging in that process that we're describing in this section. We are going to move now into a reflection from Europe, a response from Morgan Audie. Morgan is a farmer and a member of the coordinating committee of the European Via Campesina. And so you're very welcome, Morgan. We'll start with the blockers. So, what is the things that are stopping us make these changes or what are you seeing as preventing the changes we need to see? Well, at TCBC, we say very clearly that what we want is more farmers in Europe. And the main obstacle for a relocalization of food prediction and a transition towards agroecology is the constant push towards lower agricultural prices. And lower agricultural prices force farmers to grow bigger in order to produce more and thus compensate lower prices by larger volumes. It also makes it impossible for farmers to move towards more agroecology because most of the destructive agricultural practices aim at lowering production costs. This is the case for pesticides, for example. We all know that it is possible to produce without pesticides, as all organic farmers do. Yet, it is impossible to be competitive without pesticides on global markets. And so you will tell me, yes, but some farmers do succeed in going more agroecological, even in this context. Yes, this is true, but only some because we develop a strategy of market niche. This is my case as an organic farmer selling on short supply chain. I can sell my products to a much higher price than if I had to sell conventional vegetables to supermarkets. Yet, as the organic production grows and gets more integrated within both big corporation framework, the prices of even of organic food are pushed down. In the same way with COVID, big organic producers have started to sell vegetables, organic vegetables on local markets, taking all prices down. What I want to say is that we, the small farmers, we are looking for strategies to try to survive. And so we move to organic farming. I am also involved in a CSA scheme, and it is important to secure my revenue. But all these are market niche, which also, little by little, are taken by big corporations, which are starting to move to big boxes on organic production. So we should be very clear when we speak to each other that all local alternatives, they are very much a necessity for us to survive. Yet, it is not equal with our project for the world society. Because if all my neighbors were moving to organic production and to a short supply chain, the prices would go down and we would all die. So we need to go further in our thinking. There are two important factors that drive decrease in agricultural prices and take the value away from the farmers and redirect the value towards big corporations. The first one is technology. Bigger tractors, drones, digitalization. The main goal of the vast majority of technologies is to reach more productivity. So farmers get indebted to buy high-tech tools, and then they need to grow much bigger, to produce more, and to produce also more specialized product. Because if I buy a machine to plant salad, I will need to plant only salad, and it will not be possible for me to grow carrots anymore. I will need to be more specialized. So it is a very important incentive that we don't take enough into account very, very often. And the other important factor that drives prices down is free trade. Competition with corporations from all over the world with different standards of social and environmental level is a major threat for small-scale farmers all over the world. And this is what food sovereignty is tackling. The lower standards a corporation has to deal with, the more competitive it will be on global markets. So free trade is really an important incentive to lower both social and environmental standards. And this is true both at international level, but also within the EU. And it is an important factor, the intra-EU trade, because we see a very strong specialization also within the EU, with some countries with high capitalization. Lots of machines, for example, specializing in dairy production, with huge productivity through machines. And for example, Spain has lost many dairy producers. But for fruits and vegetables, where you need lots of labor, in France we've lost 50% of the production over the last 30 years. It all moved to Spain, Italy, and then also to Morocco, where they have lower social standards. So it's a war of all of us against all of us. And this is really what we need to stop. And this is really what food sovereignty is about. I will speak about the more what we can do. Let's come to the positives, but let's capture what we just said there. So it's the high cost of low price. The prices have been driven down with the globalization and the commodification of food. But we do see with the need for carbon reduction and a different approach to agriculture as we introduce the circular economy, as we learn to live within the Earth's carrying capacity, that this way of agriculture and our food economy is completely unsustainable. So we know that we're moving towards transformation, which I think we're capturing with looking at regenerative agriculture and community-supported agriculture and that sort of embedded food system interlocalities. But what are you seeing that might accelerate change? What are you seeing, Morgan, that's happening on the ground that might be the green shoots of something and new of a new agricultural food system? Well, so this is more on the alternative. Of course, all the local alternatives, they are very much needed on welcome. But we really need to tackle the issue of low price. And here we have something which is complicated, because on one end, we see a really great part of the people in our societies who have economical difficulties, who face growing precarity. And so there is a kind of opposition between the farmers who need higher agricultural prices. And let's say the people, the poor people in our society, who need to get food at lower prices. And we believe that we need really to tackle this contradiction, because for us it's not a real contradiction. The problem is that food has become a commodity, while we do believe that we could go for a more collective approach towards access to healthy and good food and local food. So paint a picture of that, Morgan. Tell us a story of what you're seeing from that perspective. So one idea concerning that is the food social security. It's to do the same as what we do for health, where of course, all the people will contribute to the health social system. But then you will receive according to what you need. If you are healthy, you won't receive, but if you are sick or ill, you will receive health treatment, not depending on what you spent as contributions. And we believe that this is a very interesting solution if we want to tackle the issue of access to healthy food is pay social contribution, depending on each person's revenue, but receive the food on an equal basis. The project that we try to develop at the French level is to have around 150 euro per month per person. And then the third pillar of this proposal is local collective decision making. This is to have farmers who are part of this framework, who have to reach some of the of the requirements decided at the local level, but really make the food not a commodity, not a commodity anymore, but really something which is based on the local decision, what we decide to together and make it really democratic in a sense that it's not only the wealthiest people in the society who can afford the local healthy organic food, but that really we are on equal footing. Because this is a criticize that is often made that only the rich people can buy organic local food. And we need to tackle this issue. We need to say, okay, how do we make sure that really the less wealthy people in the society can reach the food that we produce at the local level. And for this, we need a more collective contribution to reach better revenue for the farmers and access to a healthy food for even the poor people in the society. So that is one of the one of the proposals that really, I think it's very far from being completed and from from being able to reach it. But I think that it helps us to think really forward on what we really want for more equal society, more of a fairer society and more ecological society. Yeah, it's a new culture. I mean, it's an emerging culture that we're seeing, but really value food, value seasonal eating value and supporting your local food producers and being part of that local food economy or those local food webs that will bring resilience and allow us to take action to address the climate ecological emergency. So I think there's a number of things coming together now around this framing of food sovereignty. Morgan, thanks so much for joining us and sharing your reflections. That was very useful. And stay with us. Thank you. So we are going to now look at what citizens and communities can do. So we're going to have three short stories. First, from Suzy Khan, who I have worked with over the last 15 years on different aspects of sustainability, transition times, permaculture. But Suzy's recently just joined the Climate Justice Centre at TASC. So she's now really involved in this people's transition, which I'm going, we're going to have a conversation around. But Suzy has her own permaculture training project called Caradura. And she's a member of Equalize.eu, which is a meta network of community supported or community engaged initiatives for sustainability and climate action. Suzy, you're very welcome. Thanks, Davie. Very nice to be here. And yeah, I think to give you a little bridging from where I, what I'm going to bring in this story about the people's transition work, that as you say, I'm only recently engaged with, with tasks, also quite new climate justice centre, is that one of the things of being, you know, at very like empathetic and very relating to Fergal and to Morgan, Morgan talking about that producer level, having run, you know, both courses, but also being a producer, trying to run CSAs, trying to do work at community level. I think that one of the things I was always looking for, as many of the things that we involve ourselves in at community level are voluntary and we're doing community development. And it's, it were brokers that would be somewhere that we could impact and and make changes in policy and how kind of that could, how that could arise. So that's kind of a little bit of a bridge as to why when I saw Sean's work on the People's Transition Report that was published last November, I kind of was keeping an eye on this work because it looked like it was a potential exciting leverage point. Sean went around, he spoke to lots of initiatives on the ground, he spoke, I'm sure, to several people that might be on this call. He spent I think about six weeks in the camper van, but he also really reached out and spoke to, I think he just rocked up in people's farm yards and spoke to what we might call conventional farmers. And that out of that, out of research and it was through another European Foundation work that created the People's Transition Report was this idea that at the base of it is that at the core of the work, I guess, is the recognition that if communities have all this valuable local knowledge, part of that that I've been listening to and part of for probably 20 or more years, that although people want to, if you talk to someone you could go to the value place where people do want to protect things for future generations, but they also want to address their very real and immediate concerns in their lives. And that, I mean, I think you kind of touched on it just now, like the dairy farmer that's in debt for his machinery, like whatever it is. And so I've got some people on mute. One second, let's find this. For some reason, there's some people I can't mute. So if you are on your sweetie, you're not muted. So I'm muting you now. Now your fault. But if everyone could just mind themselves with the mute, sorry, Suzy, and back to the People's Transition. So the idea was to take this report and say, okay, here's all these learnings about how, you know, how that participatory model, how that idea of local collective decision making, that deeper participation and collaboration, how could that work in a pilot forum in Ireland with communities? And the idea really is those that if it is something that climate actions can meet and address the needs and can be part of a dialogue can be co-owned, all that community wealth building, then the outcome of that would be the communities are actually demanding climate action because it's solving their real and current issues. Maybe there's something to capture there, Suzy. You mentioned it briefly, their community wealth building. And I think it's something that the task paper People's Transition really brings in as part of the response that we can make. Maybe just if you can quickly, what is that local wealth building, community wealth building? Sure. I mean, I guess, you know, like sometimes it's like when you're trying to talk about something like climate justice or just transition, it's quite useful to talk about the opposites. And I think people have already. So I mean, the opposite of community wealth building, and then I'll talk about what it is, is if governments privatize climate action, use those public monies that are coming, we're about to see the biggest stimulus package that Ireland has seen probably since its foundation as a state, coming in for climate action through EU, through all of our usual mechanisms through the Green Deal. And if governments privatize that investment, take that public money, then that's not community wealth building, right? That's the old model of extractive wealth into private hands, into multinationals. And when those multinationals pull out of communities because they do, and we know that that post industrialization, then everybody gets left in those precarious, maybe service jobs in often in caring. I've just spent one of the pilots that we're piloting this approaches is in Ardara, as it really is a community that has all of the issues that you would find in any western steed board broil community with issues in terms of the farming community, the fishing community, and the Port Nemona, Pete Boggs that closed 10 years ago and so on. So what community wealth building is about is a number of different things, but Virgil mentioned one of them, which is participatory budgeting, saying, here comes this money. Can we have our own development plan for our, and can we have the local institutions be part of that wanting to support us? Can we have the money that comes in through in Ireland, the leader programs, the money that comes in through smaller amounts through the county councils, but can we have a say in that? So that's part of it is participating in the actual spending. But another way to think about community wealth building is, and there's a fantastic example, took them five years in the community of Fintry in Scotland, where you have a development company coming in, wanting to bring in an energy company like Windmills, which we know cause huge resistance across Ireland's landscape, because none, it's all of the burdens and none of the benefits of a new investment, a climate action, a transition action, an action to a new kind of energy form. But all of that is just the burden comes to the local community and none of the benefits. And Fintry as a community pushed back with the developer and, you know, they ended up the very small village and they ended up, oh, it took them five years to get a profit sharing model to get a mortgage on an extra windmill to end up, there's great, it's called the winds of change if you want to see how that community engaged. But eventually that's meaning that they're getting a 15% return on that directly into the community. Currently that is about, I think it's 30 to 50,000 sterling budget that the community has to dress other needs in the community, food poverty, fuel poverty, whatever other needs are there for those that aren't enabled because the money is extracted to do things and you can see all the stuff they're doing with it in their community. That figure is going to go up when they pay off the mortgage on the windmill they put in, it's actually going to be 400,000 per annum into a small community and, you know, they have complete community wealth ownership. Now that's just a profit sharing, but what if we, you know, the community's supply and distribution of food, whatever else it is that is a viable climate action that can be fully and, you know, cooperatively owned, then you know that wealth circulates within the community. You're keeping the wealth in the region, in the locality. Yeah, funny enough, that leaky bucket was a metaphor that you used a long time ago, Davie, in the paradigm and I find myself using it again recently a lot. Yeah, there's work that the Master and New Economics Foundation did around local economies and the need for local exchange mechanisms or local currencies, but just to finish Suzie, in the two pilots you're doing in Donegal and Dublin with the people's transition, is there a focus, is there a way you're bringing in agricultural food? So one of the things that we're doing is rather than arriving with solutions, we are doing that like really deep community consultation and listening phase because it's very easy to come in with a repetition of a top-down solution, you know, and say, here we are, we've got this one, and it hasn't responded to or addressed, you know, the needs and I think that's a critical factor because it's part of what pits, you know, so-called environmentalists against farmers or anyone in the community would say like, we have these burdens, are you, you know, you hear that response of like, are you going to pay off my machinery? Are you going to put my thing, you know, like that? So we're starting from a listening and consultation space and also the other part of that is that communities may not have within them the expertise, there's lots, I have a huge belief in the community as what the community does have because that's where I've chosen to make my life's work is at the community level, but you know, we are dealing with, like, if you wanted to set up a new cooperative, I've seen some amazing examples around the world that I've been exploring and looking at, you know, urban A's, big database and knowledge commons, but you need at some point to bring experts that say, well, this climate solution is viable in your locale because of these reasons and it does address those two key priorities that you identified in your consultation and then you still go into co-creation and participation about like one of the tracks that we have is a decision makers or politicians track where we're engaging, you know, very much with the local development companies and the local politicians at local and national level because we want them to be the drivers, but it helps if your community has told you all of their needs and priorities and it's not that the climate action that gets proposed is going to address all of those, but if people can see, you know, the dots joined back to that conversation that we had about, you know, essentially why people are not living the quality of life, they could achieve why they're living the life, you know, it's a capabilities approach to development that says like, what is it that are the opportunities, why are people not living the life and could we expand those capabilities at a local level because then, you know, I mean, I got to speak to people whose lives got derailed because of changes in industries, changes in, you know, things that happened and where, you know, where they couldn't find that new capability. So I guess that's the important thing is to actually start, if we mean participation, we say those words that we want it to be participatory, you can't start with, you know, what the action is going to be at the beginning. So your approach is in your prototype and in the People's Transition Model is to listen deeply to that community, to look for what's strong, not what's wrong and then build on that to the actions and the initiatives. It's both and, I would say, it's both and, you know, so yes, it's opportunities and strength and we, you know, in Donegal, we've been talking about, you know, the older industries and, you know, what derailed them and the wool industries and, you know, how, where the sheep's wool used to go, where it goes now, where it doesn't go now. So, you know, we are talking about those complex pieces, but also people's needs and priorities now, like why people cannot get housing, not just in Fribsborough, where you would expect people have issues with housing, but why people cannot get housing in order at, you know, why the young people were not going to come back until their 30s and if they do come back, they still think it's going to be a challenge, you know, so we're talking about outmigration, we're talking about and these are somewhat obvious if you've spent time looking at rural Ireland and looking at these challenges, but we're really drilling down and speaking to key, you know, consultations, key reporters to get the real stories behind that to say, yeah, I'm a woman who spent my life doing this and then this happened and then that happened. And now we're, in Ardara, we're just completing the listening phase with a survey of kind of saying, so do you, you know, this is what you said, do you agree? And we're moving on to doing the same phase in Fribsborough. So it is, but where we hope to get to. So lastly, just that last bit is that if this works, and this is, you know, discovery phase, if you like, if this as approach works, if you get, you know, those two communities and then we go and look, we're already getting inquiries from other communities that want this brokering, want us to help talk to, you know, the experts in UCD or in somewhere else. If we get that working and these solutions are actionable and they are funded and so on, we start that wealth capture happening, then hopefully you get another 20 and hopefully you keep going. And then as I say, the out the end is that communities are demanding climate action because it is a driver. And the opposite of that is communities resisting it. And we know that that in populist movements, in protest movements, you know, we know where that could go. And that's, I suppose, where it's bridged me out of maybe my comfort bubble communities that I already get. And that's it. So that was ideal. And I think the people's transition is a model of engagement. If we don't listen and engage our communities, we're not going to have an inclusive transition. There'll just be no transition, never mind a just transition. So thanks, Susie. Good luck with the work with tasks there. So we're going to keep moving with another local story. We've got my colleague Oliver Muir. Oliver is a lecturer in UCC at the Cooperative Centre for Cooperative Studies and the Chief Communicator at ARC 2020, which is looking at organics and rural regeneration across Europe. And he's also the chair of Clark Jordan Community Farm. So welcome, Oli. Hi, David. So Oli, maybe just from this idea of practicing food sovereignty, which you probably can see quite actively in Clark Jordan, maybe, maybe we'll start there. What what can we see? How do we, how does this transition to low carbon and resilient society? And how is it seen and where you are? Yeah, so basically Clark Jordan Community Farm is in, it's on the land of Clark Jordan Eco Village, which is 67 acres in the middle of Clark Jordan Town, really. Clark Jordan Town is in the midlands in Ireland. So there's lots of elements here locally that we engage with as a firm as well, which I can tell you about first, which do involve elements of the food sovereignty and local resilience. So we have a bakery, we have an egg club, we have a mushroom club. We have allotments. We have, you know, an eco village that has elements of living and working and recreating and livelihoods kind of all together. But then also on the main, on the main town itself of Clark Jordan, there is a community cafe as well, which takes lots of our produce as well, takes extra produce from the farm. So there's sort of an ecosystem of sort of innovations that are related to food sovereignty because these initiatives, like from the bakery to the egg club to the buyer's club actually as well for whole foods, they involve people coming together to make arrangements with each other, to make collective decisions together, to make longer term arrangements, to commit to, you know, paying each other for various aspects of, of, you know, food that's produced in an agroecological way. So for example, so the farm itself then is tree hectares, just a huge amount, but it's tree hectares of vegetable, of mixed vegetable production done agroecologically. So that's very much sort of food sovereignty and food resilience approach because, you know, we're producing it right beside where we're consuming it. We've a wide variety of things that we're producing. We're also using rotations and cover crops and we're using sort of non-industrial interventions basically. So it's not industrial processes and it's not industrial inputs. It's natural and human inputs. So we have two farmers employed on kind of one and a half labour units equivalent. We have up to 10 people that we train each year then as well through the ESC, the European Solidarity Corps, which also ties into that kind of longer distance solidarity that General will be talking about later as well, that, you know, we connect up with young people around Europe and help them live and learn in an eco village for a year on a farm where they learn how to be agroecological producers. So, you know, the membership is very engaged as well. So, you know, there's 80 families being fed a large proportion of their vegetables and some of their fruits for the year from the farm. But we have, as soon as you talk about participating, participatory budgeting. So that is how we operate as well. So it's a member owned and operated CSA. Not every community supports agriculture initiative is the same. Some are farmer driven, some are consumer driven. Ours is member owned and operated. So we can hire the farmers who then become part of the community. So, you know, the members, you know, give input constantly on what should be done. We have quarterly meetings. We do have participatory budgeting. You know, we set the amount we charge ourselves for the foods. And then we have kind of a long term approach to how we manage the soil. So one third of the land is in green manures or cover crops at any one time. So we're not like, you know, trashing the land to produce food where we're thinking longer term about land management and space management, putting in more and more agro-ecological elements as well, like sort of micro pods for growing in, you know, extra, you know, fruiting bushes. And a huge variety of vegetable production. So it's not so monocultural as well. It could be up to 50 different types of veg in a given year. So there's a lot of elements. Oli, maybe you could just say a little bit more about the solidarity elements beyond the CSA. So the community supported agriculture is about 85 subscribers, but there's probably a number of other clubs that you directly link with, right? Yeah. So as an eater in this town, I can get raw organic milk from a micro dairy up the road. I can also access the bread once a month, sorry, once a week or twice a week even, from a bakery on site in Deakin Village using a sourdough techniques and trialling as much as possible to grow the cereals locally. That's a lot of work in Ireland, but still it's being done. So there's also a mushroom club, an egg club. There's a buyer's club for a whole set, collective wholesale purchases. There's the local cafe then as well, and then, which is a co-op. There's allotments, and there's some larger sort of the largest growers in the allotments also do meals sometimes and have extra surplus to sell. And we're also then setting up a distribution, an online farmer's market here as well, which will be useful for extra distribution from the farm where we have those extra needs. We can also grow to service that open food network market. But likewise, all of those people I mentioned, all those producers, also there's an apple club or sort of the apple juice producers as well, they'll also be able to sell through this open food network. So like every major food group can be covered regionally, very locally, within sort of five miles, and they'll be able to sell now hopefully through this open food network as well. So I think what's really important there is that this isn't just shortening supply chains, which is doing, which reduces our ecological impacts or the ethics of where our food is produced and the relationship with the food producers, but it's actually doing a lot more than that, is building a route to market, a potential ability to diversify that everyone becomes producers and consumers, prosumers in food webs rather than just short supply chains. So yeah, and you can see lots of little sort of micro niches emerging as well from people who do grow their own veg, start to become plant sellers, people then doing tinctures, doing herbalism courses, all of these things to build up from just increasing the capacity of people to grow and to operate in a resilient manner. Brilliant, Ollie. So that's Ollie talking about what's happening in Clark Jordan. ClarkJordanCommunityFarm.ie is the website of the community farm, the largest CSA, which is a network of about 10 different community supported agriculture projects. Thanks, Ollie. And we're going to have one little short story from the locality. Jen O'Connor, Jen O'Connor, McConnell, sorry, Jen, is a food sovereignty researcher. She was the former CEO or manager, general manager of Irish Seed Savers, and is someone that has worked with us on and off over the years. So Jen, you're very welcome. Thank you very much, David, David, Richard. Philip, David, thanks for joining us, Jen. So really, it's a simple question, in the sort of framing of practicing food sovereignty, why is seed sovereignty important? So, well, first off, thanks very much for the opportunity to be here and nice to meet you all and hear all of your stories. Really without seed, there is no food. So if you actually consider all of the sources of your food, whether it's local, whether it's imported, most of that food with regard to plant material is actually required seed for it to grow. So when we actually look at seeds, a lot of the times, if you actually look, you'll see a lot of the seed is actually imported. So over 95% of the seeds to grow food in this country is actually imported. There isn't really a strong focus by the government to ensure that we have local seed production. And the thinking really is, is because of the weather and the climate here in Ireland, that we don't really have a viable market to grow our own seeds. However, with the likes of Irish Seed Savers that I was involved with, brown envelope seeds, true harvest seeds up in the north with eco seeds and the herb garden, like there's only five seed producers in Ireland, but yet there's a huge need given of our, I suppose, our reliance on agriculture. And also the same then goes for feed for animals as well, that a lot of the seed for that is actually imported. So seed sovereignty really is about protecting our ability to control from where our seed comes, which then ensures that we have a control on where our food comes from, but also the autonomy and the power to understand our seed. So while there's great opportunities for plant breeding, for seed breeding as well, that it's to really understand that throughout a whole food cycle, none of it can really start unless we actually have full control over our own seed. With regard to seed sovereignty, seed itself is one of the most heavily regulated items in the world. You have obviously with the likes of Monsanto buyer, a lot of work on GMO, there's real control over seed. And so it actually brings huge hardship on farmers throughout the world, where especially in hardship countries, developing countries where there is an element of force that's actually been put on to the farmers to actually grow seed from industrial organizations so that they can actually bring in money. However, it means that they cannot save their own seed. It also ensures that the seed itself is patented and it therefore means that the seed is owned. Now, seed shouldn't actually be owned. There is a lot of work that's done with regard to plant genetic resources, which is our plant and seed material. So there's a lot of work in terms of conservation. And most countries in the world would sign up to what's called the International Plant Treaty. So if you're interested in learning more about this, you can go to the FAO, which is the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. You can go to FAO.org and you'll see a lot of work, especially this year. This is the International Year of Fruit and Vegetables. So there's a lot of focus now in terms of conservation, what we're actually doing to research and protect seed, but also to ensure that we're protecting farmers, to be able to grow their own food, grow their own seed, and then save seed. However, with EU legislation, there is a restriction on sharing seed. So it's concerned. It's actually discussed about marketing seed, which is about the selling of seed itself. In the likes of Irish Seed Savers, we fall under the element of heritage seeds. So a lot of our seed is either native to Ireland or heritage in that it's come from other places, but it's adapted to our environment over the years. So it's been grown year on year and protected. Those seeds are allowed to be shared because we're trying to actually protect and conserve these collections. So by other people getting these seeds and growing them in their own gardens, communities, and farms, it is actually protecting the collections themselves. There's also another element within EU regulation that allows for very small packets, so amateur packets for hobby gardeners to actually be sold. However, we're not allowed actually within Ireland and within Europe. You're not actually allowed to sell on a bulk scale to commercial growers. So therefore, it means that you're also always getting your seed from kind of bigger corporations. However, one of the things that should be focused on with regard to seed as well is that there are different types of seeds. So why do commercial growers grow certain types of seeds compared to hobby gardeners? So you have the likes of, you have the genetically modified seed. And you know, there's, if you look back on the years with regard to Walter Borlock, who had started work on the dwarf wheat, and that in a sense was originally to look at addressing famine and actually food poverty. However, that is now then developed, and it's become a better control about food, control about seed. You also then have hybridized seed. Now there's nothing wrong with that seed, but it's basically bred so that it is distinct uniform and stable. So that when commercial growers are growing the seed, that they know that all of their crop is going to be uniform. And that's because that's what the demand is on the market. People don't shy away from the ugly veg or, you know, if something looks a little bit different to what they expect it to look like, then you have open pollinated seed. And the open pollinated seed is true to the parent type. It means that you can actually grow from that seed, you can save from that seed. However, there's another bit of science behind that, which unfortunately you'll have a lot of people might say, oh, I'm saving my seed, but you need to grow you know, a vast number of plants to actually ensure that you're protecting the genetic diversity of the seed. So there's a lot of focus that really needs to be given an education on seed. So you have the likes of the Gaia Foundation's UK and Ireland seed sovereignty program. You've also got the Let's Liberate Diversity, which is a European seed network. I was involved with them for the last couple of years. And there's various organizations around, especially La Via Campesina as well, in terms of protecting farmers rights, but people's right to access seed. So seed sovereignty is vital because without that, we don't have food sovereignty itself. You're muted there, Davey. Thank you. Without seed sovereignty, then we don't have food sovereignty. And without both, we don't have resilient local food economies will be dependent on externalities and exports. And so thanks, Jen, for joining us. There's just one thing I can add on to that as well, just as sorry, Davey, and is just with regard to the fact of, if many people think back to February 2017, when there was a huge shortage of vegetables on supermarket shelves, a lot of this also comes down to supply chains. And this is where they meet with regard to trade. But when the supermarket shelves were empty of vegetables, people started to kind of say, why are we importing vegetables that we can grow ourselves? And the same goes then for seed. That was 2017. Then there was a lot of focus 2018 and 19 on climate action. What can we do and a focus on carbon footprint and food miles? But you also need to factor in seed miles. If you're looking at growing locally from where is your seed grown and is it suitable? And then also you then have COVID, which actually demand for seed was massive. And so it meant then people were starting to panic and bulk buying seed without really understanding what they were going to grow, how the seed could be stored, how long the seed survives. And then the next thing was Brexit. So now with Brexit, most of the seed that has come into Ireland either comes from or through the UK, but yet within Great Britain, a lot of the seed growers there like the seed co-op real seeds, they would actually grow a lot of seed, but they also import a lot of seed from Europe. Now that supply chain is cut off. So the supply chain into Ireland of seed is really, really low. And so again, this year was a huge panic for people to want to get seed. The main things that need to happen is supporting local seed producers, but also putting pressure on the Department of Agriculture to have a focus on seed production. They're doing a lot of work now on cereal, but they're not doing it on vegetables. And actually vegetables is the majority of what people eat. So it's been much more focused on that. So really, we need to be prepared for the vulnerability of the island of Ireland and in terms of ensuring that we actually develop seed production for seed security for the future. Okay, so as well as lobbying, we can actually save some of our own seed as well. So let's get into the practice as well as the lobbying for changes and policies. Thanks, Jen. Always a pleasure. Good luck with your PhD. Okay, so we're going into small groups. We're really trying to identify in each area, the blockers, the enablers, and what citizens and communities might do. So in production, in room number one, with Fergal, organizing process and distribution, number two with me, livelihoods with Ollie in room three, and trade and solidarity in room four. And we've only got about 15 minutes if we're going to finish on time. So let's use our time wisely, be listening as much as we're speaking, and we're trying to capture as many blockers and enablers on what we can do. So I'm sending you into the rooms now. Okay, you're all very welcome back. Thanks all for that engagement. I know it was short, but we've managed, I can see, in the harvest document to bring quite a lot in. We'll start with room one in production. Fergal, what was your room? Do you or someone else want to just feed back quickly? Yeah, okay. One of the key things we came back with was that it's hard to get information from the established system, therefore there's no way in. And the informal information network is very useful. However, this needs to be made tangible. For instance, farmers walks are great as part of the informal space and network, but that needs to be made tangible. Access to resources, training, knowledge is really, really important and support systems are currently not up to scratch. We need to continue communities of practice as best practice models and find some way of systemizing those. And I think that is the main thing that came out of ours, Fergal. In some European countries, they're doing this and doing it well, so there's good models to look to. And emphasis on education, education to younger generations came up. In Romania, the permaculture is looking at this already. Perfect, Mari. That was absolutely brilliant. I was in the livelihood room. We had quite a quick and rapid conversation. And maybe some of the key ones that came up for us in thinking about adding value and distributing locally is the sort of business as usual, extracting value to the global economy from our local economy and the bureaucracy and health and safety that were wrapped up in. Some enablers were looking at things like some appropriate scale technologies. And there was, and Pat mentioned, the super value food academy. So there is some things that might be interesting. But an interesting one was a shorter working week, giving more people time to grow food and distribute food. So that was good. Ollie, you were doing livelihoods. Are you or someone else just give us an insight into what was discussed there? Sure, yeah. We didn't assign anybody else to speak, but I'll start maybe and if somebody else wants to jump in, because I did take some notes into the dock. So we did have a bit of a farmer focus on this, not exclusively about livelihoods, but the blockers, I suppose, were institutional and funding cap-related blockers, which forced people at all ends of the spectrum into sort of a conventional reality. So the funding rules and paperwork rules kind of shackle farmers and force them into a pass dependency, where they've got buildings and borrowings to service, or they have to keep certain basic things going, such as an inappropriate stocking rate or animal range, even for upland areas and so on. So those are some of the kind of blockers, but for and succession planning as well. Enablers, though, more listening was an interesting point, more listening to farmers and food producers. EIPs have been an enabler for farmers to explore new different ways, the European Innovation Partnership, for farmers to explore new ways to diversify and broaden out what they do, but as a specific enabler, micro-dairy and enabling local markets and similar to micro-dairy is maybe a new way for farmers in that sector to look at profitability and viability, that maybe it is possible to, for at least a certain number of farmers and food producers, to generate livelihoods through diversification, through more complicated means, such as just downscaling and supplying local markets from a smaller number of cattle, both directly, from smaller number cows, but directly. Brilliant, Ollie. That was great. So one more quickly, the trade and solidarity room, that was you, Jen, a quick feedback or insight from that room? Thanks very much, Jo. We had a very interesting conversation that could have gone on for a lot longer, and some of the key things, like in terms of just understanding what the trade deals are, why we actually import, what we import, why we export, what we export, and again on the back of that, if we're agreeing to export something, what are we agreeing to import instead? And if we change that then, how does that impact other elements of things that we might be agreeing to, like technology, data, other, you know, raw materials? And some enablers would be in terms of looking at a local policy versus an international policy, so not actually having it as one and the same. Also looking at the WTO and free trade, how we could actually have a binding social treaty on food sovereignty, so not everything has to get approved by the WTO, but then also then again looking at what's currently in place, why is that in place, what can be done to improve on it, and what can be done to then really develop food sovereignty in Ireland. And then looking at certain things like blockers, like personal choice, why do we like go into a supermarket and see that something is 50p and it's five euro in the farmers market, but we'll go to the 50p because it's, we've kind of become that quite convenience culture. So how can we actually really connect more with our food, connect more with what we buy, where we buy it from, what are the supply chains, but then also to understand the corporate interest in food and the development of food, but also then the foreign aid interest in terms of why we export certain things to countries that are then effectively eradicating their own food industries and then removing food sovereignty from others. So it's that kind of personal choice, personal action and impact and outcomes then. Jen, thank you. I'm very comprehensive. Sorry for being so quick, but we have reached the end of our session and I don't want us to eat into any more of your time. So thank you everyone for attending this session. What's happening next is we're going to take everything harvested. If there's any insights or signposts put into the chat, we'll stay open for another 10-15 minutes just to capture that. I'm going to bring this session to a close. So we'll be bringing, we're doing a second webinar in September with the Green European Foundation. It'll be in partnership with our partners in Bulgaria around the climate economy actions and we will be bringing and launching this pamphlet on food sovereignty and local resilience. I just want to remind people that we have this paper we did before that we're building a law on. It mentions the local wealth building that Susie was talking about with the people transition. It sort of frames and regenerative economics, what we're talking about today. So I just want to thank all of the partners and everyone that came today. Thank you so much.