 So you're all very welcome to this second webinar, Practising Food Sovereignty in the Climate Emergency, imagining a regenerative community and cooperative-led approach to the local food economy. This is organised by the Green European Foundation, a partnership with Green Foundation Ireland, and Cultivate, the Sustainable Ireland Cooperative, is part of the Climate Emergency Programme and is made possible with the financial support of the European Parliament to the Green European Foundation. I'm Davy Phillip, and I'm a facilitator with Cultivate, based at the We Create Workspace here in Claude Jordan Eco Village. And I'm very involved in the community-supported agriculture movement here, the open food network, and I'm a new board member to Tal of Beow, who we're going to hear a bit more from today. So last year, as part of the Green European Foundation's Climate Emergency Economy project, we facilitated an exploration of cooperative and community approaches called scale, and scale meaning supply chains and local economies, which was really an exploration over two webinars, a publication, and then a final podcast, and all of those are available at the GF website. Thanks before we jump in, just thanks again to the Green European Foundation and my Irish partners, Green Foundation Ireland, who in partnership with us in Cultivate have been driving this project and the scale project last year. This does launch our pamphlet, it's a 20-page pamphlet that we're printing and taking to Glasgow, and we have a session in the site events in COP in a few weeks, and it's available now on both the GF and the Green Foundation Ireland's website. So to get us moving, I'm delighted to introduce Eva Souffin-Jakramat. She's a board member of the Green European Foundation, a director of the Green Polish Foundation, who are co-founders of the KZZ, which is the Living Earth Coalition, a Polish platform of advocacy for agroecology, food sovereignty, and more sustainable and just cap. He was a member of the KZZ, Steering Committee have been particularly involved in the topics of GMOs, pest-of-side use, and also topics related to the farm-to-fork strategy in the European Green Deal. Eva, you're very welcome, and I'd invite you to maybe just say a few words on GF and tell us a little about the Living Earth Coalition and its advocacy for food sovereignty and agroecology. Thank you, Davie. Good afternoon to everyone. My name is Eva Souffin-Jakramat, and I am really very pleased to welcome you on behalf of the board of directors of the Green European Foundation, which is organizer of this event and of the Transnational Project Climate Emergency Economy that this event is part of. I also represent, as Davie said, the Polish Green Foundation, Strefa Zeleni, which is what we call a disseminating partner in this project. The Green European Foundation, Jeff, is one of 10 European-level political foundations funded by the European Parliament. It is linked to, but independent of other European Green actors, such as the European Green Party and the Green EFA Group in the European Parliament. Jeff collaborates also very closely with the Federation of Young European Greens. The mission of Jeff is to contribute to forge a stronger, more participative democracy in Europe, stimulating public debate from a progressive green perspective, looking for the most adequate, long-term, fair, and resilient answers to the challenges of today's world. For Europe, exchanging experiences and good practices from nation-states, from our regions, cities, and local communities. Jeff aspires to reach broader audience across Europe by acting as a laboratory for new ideas through the Green European Journal, which would like to be the number one of political ecology in Europe, but also through other publications in different languages and the pamphlet, the food sovereignty, climate action, and local resilience that we are launching today is a great example of the Jeff's publishing activity. Jeff Foundation also develops capacity building and political education programs for its partners and for young European activists from the EU and non-EU countries and supports its national partners across Europe to organize conferences, seminars, webinars, and other events and exchanges, mainly through transnational projects and the Climate Emergency Economy Project is exactly one of them. Over the past few years, Jeff has been exploring with several partners the challenge of a climate emergency economy focused on how to decarbonize sectors like transport, trade, industry, or agriculture, looking for answers to the question, what would an economy that faced up to the reality of the climate emergency look like? And this year, there is a continuity of this project with three pillars, hydrogen use to decarbonize industry and transport, the second one, food sovereignty and regional resilience, and the last one, transport infrastructure, investment and trade. And today, even we are in the second pillar and our foundation, Strefa Zeleni, is a disseminated partner for the second pillar as we are strongly involved in this topic. So the pamphlet that is launched today, Strefa Zeleni and the coalition Rzevaziemia, it's the Polish name of this Living Earth Coalition, we'll definitely use, we are in Poland, one of founder organization of this coalition, it's a platform of more than 20 organizations with, among others, the big NGOs like WWF and Greenpeace, but and the Nielani network for food sovereignty. The coalition was founded in 2018 just to influence the process and political decisions around the new common agricultural policy as a part of Fund to Fork strategy of the European Green Deal. We simulate public debate and promote the change of model of agriculture of the rules of the European Union Agricultural and Food Policy, agroecology, food sovereignty, local food production and distribution, peasant and organic farming, short supply chains, agrotechnics regenerative for soils and biodiversity, fair trade agreements, affordable local and good quality food, fixing carbon and water cycles, et cetera, those measures and directions we defend. I will finish presenting with a very concrete example why all those criteria and the solutions must be applied jointly. It's a story of that happens 40 meters from the place that I live most of the year in my family house, 70 kilometers from the capital. It's a huge investment of a very, very huge greenhouse covering 22 hectares of land, partly replacing all the much smaller municipal greenhouse, partly replacing the municipal forest. It's one of several investment of this kind in Poland of the same Dutch millionaire. We know that others should follow. And the procedure for environmental decisions started when the main construction of the greenhouse was already finished. And we don't know yet how much water it will need and what will be its impact on water system in the region. We know from other places that there will be a very strong light pollution and it will contribute to the, but it will contribute to the local economy. There will be 2,250 local jobs and the heating comes from the nearby cold power plant. The heating is their byproducts. So we are using the byproduct of this power plant, but we know also that the jobs will be poorly paid and no protected and the conditions of work will be hard, especially in summer. You can imagine working in a greenhouse in summer. The production will be mostly conventional. The producer analysis, the pesticides will be used in a sustainable and responsible manner. And part of the production could be or could be organic. If the owner gets good subsidies, subsidies from the new tap ecosystems. The regional shops and supermarkets will offer cheap tomatoes from this new Giga supplier. What will force the numerous small local producers to give up tomato cultivation? Was there any public discussion and consultation before the investment, before the investment starts? No, it is what we understand by food sovereignty. I am sure that you will know the answer at the end of this webinar. Have a very good debate. Thank you for your attention. Thanks Eva and that gets us off to a great start. If you're just arriving, you're very welcome to this GEF webinar with GEFI, the Green Foundation of Ireland and Cultivate. Please add any reflections, questions, insights and most importantly, signposts to the initiatives you're working on in the chat. If you haven't done so, you're welcome to introduce yourself in the chat to build a sense of community in this sort of limited webinar format. So let's dive in our main contribution to get us going. Our next contribution is from Judith Hitchman, Judith is an Irish woman based in France. She's a food sovereignty activist and the current president of urgency, a network of citizens, small scale food producers, consumers activists and researchers representing local solidarity-based partnerships for agroecology, networks and initiatives in over 40 countries. She also represents urgency as a board member and joint coordinator of the Intercontinental Social and Solidarity Economy Network, REPRES. So Judith, you are very welcome and we've just got a question for you. We'd like to ask you, how may a locally based economic model of agriculture and food distribution help us respond to the climate emergency and why is the solidarity economy important? Judith, over to you and thank you. Thank you very much indeed, Davie and hello everybody. And thank you all for inviting me to participate today. So the question of the climate crisis and food sovereignty are very closely interlinked. You can see on this first slide a photo taken during Hurricane Ophelia that hit Ireland four years ago and this picture is taken in for more and you can see the kind of impact that it is having on everything there. We have the climate crisis and change and we also have COVID-19 at the moment. So the key question for all of us is how to build resilience. Now, community-supported agriculture contributes to the realization of solidarity economy in many different ways. First of all, because it is localized and we are relocalizing our food systems through it, but not only that, it means that we are working with agroecology, relearning the skills that our grandparents had of preserving food. And this tomato preserve was made in Romania when a hail storm made the tomatoes unfit for the food boxes that were going to the CSA, but the tomato sauce was going to be going out during the winter to supplement people's boxes. So agroecology and community-supported agriculture today to large extent equate to what we understand is sustainable food systems because we have two key pillars, the first being food sovereignty and the second being solidarity economy. There are many benefits to local communities. First of all, the fact that it is really local so there are very few food miles. There's either no or very little packaging and we are working with ecological or agroecological farming. We have safe, healthy, nutritious food from a trusted source. We build agroecological community systems and the word community is very keen because unless we rebuild our local economy and de-commodify food from the present situation where food is part of the World Trade Organization, we will never get there in terms of the climate crisis or food sovereignty. So we need to and we work on re-educating the community on food and breaking very strongly with the industrial agriculture and agribusiness paradigm, also to protect our local resources from land grabbing and it helps us to localize the sustainable development goals. Eva mentioned Niel and Europe. Now in the Niel and Europe Forum on Agroecology in March, 2015, there was a very strong part of the declaration on local markets and developing alternative options to finance and other mechanisms for both producers and consumers and reshaping our markets through the relationship of solidarity between producers and consumers. And this involves also developing our links with the ongoing solidarity economy. Now, just a very quick word, solidarity economy is essentially a holistic human rights-based approach to the economy in the commons. It touches on all elements and some are particularly relevant to the climate crisis like community energy management and community land and water management as well as seeds and production and consumption. So I invite you to look into that further after this webinar. In FAO, we managed to get the 10 elements of Agroecology accepted and that includes, sorry, that includes a reference to solidarity economy as being one of the key levers for transitioning to sustainable food systems. In terms of the climate crisis, we need to compare the industrial agricultural paradigm to peasant agriculture. It's really a case of monoculture versus polyculture. The question of externalities and in the industrial agriculture, it means virtually slave labor in terms of the way the food is produced. Whereas in agroecological methods, we have healthy soils, natural inputs and practice as a social movement, which is very key. Sustainable local food systems and community-supported agriculture needs to be extended as well to other solidarity-based distributions such as cooperative shops and also now there is the open food network that is another way of working towards social change and the low carbon footprint. Another very important aspect is green public procurement and working with local authorities. Another source of greenhouse gas emissions over and above the industrial agriculture per se is the huge amount of food loss and waste in the industrial food chain. Now, if you look at this little diagram, you can see that in the CSA, the total food loss and waste in the whole chain is approximately 6.7% which includes unusable parts. Whereas in the supermarket and the industrial chain, it is 55.2%. So that is another very strong argument in favor of the kind of work we're doing. In terms of nutrition, it's very important to consider that pesticides and other chemical inputs are harmful to people's health and children in particular and there's a very poor nutritional value in terms of fats and sugar in the over-processed foods that are available in supermarkets. A step in the right direction is industrial organic but that of course still leaves us with a very weak soil microbiome and lower nutritional value. So it can also and very often is shipped over a very long distance which means there's a lot of nutritional loss and value in terms of the food. Whereas locally grown agro-ecologically sourced food is both much richer in terms of nutrients and soil microbiome contributing to a healthier human microbiome but also in terms of optimal nutrition and taste. So the key question really is whose economy is it that we want to support to fight the climate crisis? We're living in a period of excessively strong neoliberalism which is opposed to the grassroots ownership of the system or outcomes. We see that on a daily basis in our negotiations both at EU level and in the Rome-based agencies of the United Nations. The stakeholder model that was being promoted by the institutions is perhaps more participatory which is really the key. So our economy and food sovereignty represent economic change and they are based on agro-ecology. Judith, you're having problems with your sound as if you're hitting your microphone. Yeah, sorry, is that better? Food sovereignty and agro-ecology must include the economic paradigm change otherwise we will not get there. So the key questions are where and how is the food produced and can consumers buy their food, access their food in an affordable way outside the industrial food system? What are the impacts of an increasingly urbanized society? What are the options? What systems of governance are there for the alternatives? And how does this connect with the nutritional dimension? So how can we move forward from cheap industrial food and poverty for farmers and other food producers including fishers to decent livelihoods and affordable healthy nutritious food? Now, each CSA is self-governed with shared risks and benefits. There's a commitment to agro-ecology and local communities. As I already said, the carbon footprint is very light. Nutritious food is also seasonal. There's a possibility to work with local authorities and to include sliding scale payments to make it more affordable. And CSA networks are national and international with a strong coherent advocacy that we work on together with other social movements. And we now have increased global recognition. So this is just a little chart to show you the different kinds of benefits. I will make this available to other people if they want to have a look at it in more detail. What we're really looking at is a biodiverse bouquet of community-centered flavors in terms of the response to the crisis. Part of the challenge that we're facing is that all the different aspects, land, workers' rights, seeds, water, peasants' rights, fishers' rights, consumers' rights, indigenous peoples' rights, and climate depend on different instruments and different institutions. So what I feel today as being a critical aspect is that we need to work more strongly together to join up and try and get these institutions working together to address the question. And we need to do this collectively as social movements. So overcoming the challenges means placing a lot of importance on the building framework legislation that links food sovereignty, solidarity economy, nutrition, and agroecology. And this framework legislation is very difficult to push through because of the corporate instances blocking us on a daily basis at all levels. Social movements support policies that focus on change, on participatory governance, and truly sustainable food systems. And consumers represent a constituency that is part of social movements because we do feel that it is wrong to place the responsibility on the individual. So on behalf of urgency and all of our team, I would like to say thank you very much. And this picture represents a bitter cucumber. The cucumber is bitter and the seeds are very sweet. Thank you Judith, that was excellent. So that's got us off to a good start. And we're gonna have two other short interventions now and then open up for some questions. So if you've got any insights or questions from Judith, we can bring them in in about 20 minutes. So we're gonna do a little section we're calling Voices from the Field. And as I look through the chat, it's a rich field that we're operating in and many of you could have contributed to these sections. We're going to hear from Bridget Murphy and Hissa Fingleton. And then we're going to take some questions or reflections and we're gonna hear our keynote from Thomas Waits, the MEP in Ecological Farmer from Austria. So let's start this Voices from the Field section and bring in Lisa. So Lisa, you're very welcome. Lisa is an artist, a writer and grower at the Barnaway, an eco-social organic farm and native woodland in Kerry. Her book, The Local Food Project, explores the power of growing and eating local food. Every September, she organizes the 30-day local food challenge, which many of you may have seen recently on social media. And she's currently the Kerry visual artist in residence exploring issues around climate, creativity and food. You're very welcome, Lisa. So maybe in the short time we have, maybe you could tell us a little about what you've been doing and your different initiatives bringing, especially that artistic or creative aspect to our local food economies and any lessons that might be useful to share. Perfect. Listen, it's lovely to be here and I'm just looking at all the chat and all the expertise in the room. So I'm guessing that a lot of us know the taste of real food. And I think I'm realizing more and more, David, that a lot of people don't know what it tastes like. You know, they're not used to eating it. So as David said, my name is Lisa Fingleton. I grew up on a farm in Stradbilly, counted each in the midlands in Ireland. And I suppose I was kind of gardening from when I was five, but I was eating local food from when I was born because my dad grew all our food and my dad is now in his 80s. And he's still growing food to feed all of us and all the extended family. So the food must be doing somebody something good. So I grew up always thinking that everybody ate like this and we didn't eat in a restaurant, I think, until I was late teens. So I just always ate from home. And now I'm here in Kerry with my partner, Rena Blake, and we have an organic farm here just on the Wild Atlantic Way in Baribunian. And we call it the barn away. We just had actually a arrival of 10 women arrived from Poland, just as I was coming to speak to you today. So that's really nice, so I'll talk to them later. And I suppose from going as a child, thinking that everybody was eating like this and everybody ate food, I've become more and more anxious about the fact that we are becoming more and more disconnected from our food. I've never intended as an artist to make my work all about food. It just seems to keep happening. So, and I'm assuming that a lot of you here today are quite anxious, even a little bit sometimes depressed, about the state of the system. So I thought it might be useful just to talk about some of the things, the projects that I've been doing that hopefully might be a bit inspiring and a positive note. So as Davey mentioned, the Local Food Project is this book, The Local Food Project, and it's about sort of the journey that I came to in terms of thinking about local food. A lot of it started with a sandwich, which is here in a drawing behind me. Again, I rarely buy food out, but I bought a BLT one day and was quite hungry at the end of an evening and realized there were 43 ingredients in a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich. And I was just like, what has happened? What has happened to our system, you know? So I drew it out then that I ended up doing workshops with children and with adults about food. And I got people to design their own sandwiches. So I was asking children, well, if you could design the ethical sandwich, what would it look like? And as I was doing these workshops, I realized children didn't know where tomatoes came from. They didn't actually know that bacon came from a pig that had to be killed and all these kind of things. So it started to bring up so many different issues. And then I suppose from there, then I published the book, The Local Food Project. And yeah, I suppose I thought, I mean, I need to do more than that as well. Like the Local Food Challenge happened at the same time. So every September, there's about 700 people on a Facebook group and you're welcome to join that, The Local Food Project. But every September, what we try and do is we try and eat from the island of Ireland for 30 days. Now, in the very beginning, I was doing 100%, six years ago we started this. So I was doing 100% food from the island of Ireland. For 30 days. And the feedback over the years has been, it's very expensive for a family to do that. So this year, some people just did literally a meal a day. But I have to say, even the meal a day gets such comments and such reaction. David was asking me, what did I learn? The main feedback that I'm getting is people's frustration with labeling and their contact to me be going, but how can I find the food? So a lot of you here today, I've seen a lot of networks that I would recognize. So we have access to farmers markets. We can do that. But there's a lot of people who are going into supermarkets to feed a family and picking up bottles. I have a drawing of this here and I don't want to pick on just one bottle, but this really sent me over the edge. So it's orange juice. And it's got a Blasna here in award and the taste of Ireland. And it's expertly squeezed in Carlo. And I'm thinking, does nobody, does nobody think there's something wrong with this? That the taste of Ireland is so disconnected from what's actually in the ingredients. And I would say that's one of the biggest things that people are feeding back, that frustration. And I suppose the fact that when I was a child, we had the guaranteed label and we still have the guaranteed Irish label, but now if I import some food and I add value to it, I can then label it as an Irish food award or a Blasna here in award. And I think that that is causing real problems. I know Eva was saying about not putting the responsibility back on individuals, but I think we need to make it easy for people to support farmers and producers. And I don't feel that that's the case. And I suppose one of the things that I've been concerned about is, you know, when we say local, I in no way mean that we are looking inward. I am doing this because of my concern about climate. I was doing a talk at the Barris Festival recently and the president, Michael D. Higgins, was on before me. And he talked about the 82 million people who are displaced in the world since June and that that has doubled in the last decade and that 1% of our population, our global population are displaced. So for me, I'm always thinking of this much bigger picture and how the poorest of the poor in the world are going to be most impacted by our actions. And when I used to work as a community worker and a lot of those big issues, you know, really just weighed me down too much. And I find that art helps me to in some small way express my devastation at times at where we're going as a planet. So, you know, it's very much in that context of the bigger picture that I'm trying to do things here locally. You know, the other statistics that shocked me and I'm really bad at math. So I don't ask me questions about figures, but the figures that I think are really shocking was Eurostats 2016. I haven't had an update since that only 1% of our farms grow vegetables. 1% of our farms grow vegetables. We were the lowest in the Europe and I keep asking for information to find out if that's still the case, it could even be worse. And that also only 2% of our farms in Ireland are organic. And, you know, as the earlier speakers were saying, this is all so connected, you know, our rivers are being polluted at a ferocious rate because of all the effluent and all the chemicals that are going into the ground. So for me, food is integral to everything. We can't sort out our water. We can't sort out our air unless we sort out our food systems. We can't sort out poverty in the world until we change our food systems. And the idea that 30% of our food is going into the bin and yet we're still listening to this crap that they're saying, oh, we need to produce more. We need to produce more. No, we don't. We need to support rural communities. We need to support farmers. We need to support small growers. Stop trying to wipe us out. And then we need to support consumers who are trying to make the right choices a lot of the time but are simply not given the information. So I'm just very conscious that that's about seven minutes. And I've got a follow on question. I'm interested. That was great, Lisa. Thanks so much. I'm interested as your role was as an embedded artist and then the potential of the arts to help us engage with what we're talking about today are local food systems, restoring our ecosystems, making sure we have a strong local economy to make us more resilient. So is there any lessons from the creative arts or some of the processes you use that we could all learn from? Absolutely, I'm so glad you asked me that. So I'm the first visual artist in residence. There's lots of other artists in residence, but I'm the first visual artist in residence in Kerry. And when I started, I asked the arts office, could I just focus on climate change, food and biodiversity? And she was very happy for me to do that. And I suppose it's quite timely that Creative Ireland launched a fund in the middle of the residency as well about how do we spark imagination? Because I think it can be so overwhelming that a lot of people I speak to just tell me they're turning off the television. They just can't bear to listen to the news. And it's not that it is our responsibility, but I think for those of us who have the energy and who have the passion, I think it's a great opportunity that this now is being funded by the Arts Council and by the Creative Ireland. So just very briefly, I had a 40-day residency. The first 20 days were about engaging the community. We had 1200 people at workshops in 20 days. And that was all about biodiversity. And it was all from here on our farm, people drawing in nature, sitting out, children doing biodiversity workshops. So I feel and I absolutely believe that there is a huge appetite for people to engage on these issues, but to engage on these issues in a way that, I suppose acknowledges their potential contribution, that we're not hammering down kind of the very depressing and heavy stuff all the time, which are finding ways that people can creatively respond. Because I believe absolutely that when we're creative, we're able to process things. We're able to take in the information and we're able to put it out. And for me, I'm just in the middle of writing a poem. I spent the last few years writing poems in the pandemic and drawing. And I just find for me personally, that is the only way to process it. And I was thrilled to have 1200 people here in the forest here behind me. We planted 10,000 trees last June as part of our, I suppose, work-around climate. And I was able to choose people to the trees and it was amazing. And I think there's a huge appetite that I just wish my residency was longer. It finishes. And I think you're totally right as this crisis of imagination that we have that we can't actually imagine other ways to provide for ourselves or procure our needs or work with each other. And that's the challenge, isn't it? You know that's critical, Daisy, because if we don't, I saw a quote the other day that said, a map without utopia on it is not worth consulting. And we don't have the vision of the type of world we want. If I can't be saying to providers, why are our procurement rules not changing? Why are we not feeding every child and every adult who is sick in hospital with COVID or anything else, why are we not feeding them local organic food and getting them better? Yeah. So that we need a vision. And I think as artists, we can do that. And as singers and as musicians. And change the narrative so that we understand there's a rich sort of benefit for our own health, our own well-being, our mental health by engaging with each other, by engaging with our ecosystems, getting involved in a community supported agriculture project or a food hub or a food co-op. So thank you, Lisa, for joining us there. You're going to come back in a second with Judith and Bridget for some questions. Bridget, are you there with us? Yeah. Okay, hi, Bridget. So I delighted that you're here with us. Bridget is a regenerative hill farmer based in County Sligo, Ireland and is a core member of Talibbeo, which is a new alliance of farmers, growers and land workers on the island of Ireland. And our like are a representatives in Via Camposina as well. Bridget's background is in land use, a tenure, a grain and reform in Southern Africa and in Ireland with a dedicated focus on women. And you may have seen in Talibbeo's social media last week a big emphasis put on why is there, but where are the women in agriculture? Why are they not recognized? So Talibbeo are members of Via Camposina and just published a local food policy framework. Welcome, Bridget. And so maybe just to get us going, could you tell us a little bit about Talibbeo and maybe something around some of the elements of your local food policy framework? Great, Davie, thank you very much. And it was wonderful to hear Judith and Lisa's and just to add in there for Lisa, you know, Ireland has 2% of land that's under organic production, but it's actually going backwards because the age profile of the people who got involved back in the 1990s, they all getting to retirement age. So what we actually finding is, instead of us moving forward to that, the goal of 7.5%, which is incredibly low anyway, we actually falling below the 2% and might even fall back below the 1%. So on so many levels, this is actually quite frightening. I didn't actually grow up on a farm or have absolutely any connection with agriculture. As you say, I grew up in South Africa and I qualified as a lawyer. The bigger picture, the injustice was always something that motivated me and I worked with rural communities, black communities who had lost land to apartheid and claiming it back. I came to visit my parents about 22 years ago and here I am, a hill sheep farmer and an activist and still trying to make a difference, as you say, particularly as you mentioned, the woman's angle. It's just important to note that there are actually no roots for women to get to the tables, but that we can come to at some point in time. So Tel of Bjo, yeah, Tel of Bjo is a relatively new farming organization. We set up in about 2019. Like so many other organizations, we found that this two year COVID hiatus has limited our ability to get onto the ground. And this approach is critical because our signature is that we operate from the ground up. We lead by example. We lead our regenerative and agroecological practices on the ground. We start with healthy living soil and that's where our EIP comes in. We've recently been awarded a one-year European Innovation Partnership project, which we will be launching soon. It will be an online digital platform. It's a peer-to-peer, farmer-led, farmer-designed soil biodiversity project and we're going to be blogging it in real time over the growing season next year. The idea is going to be for farmers to learn what exists beneath their boots and how activities on your farm affect this biodiversity. So for example, what happens when you spread slurry out or what happens when you put compost out? We also lead our policy by practice from the ground up that too is led by the farmers and by land workers. We've developed a focus to four campaigns to be taken forward over the next while. As I said, our boots on the ground is our jewel in the crown as we mentioned. The Soil Biodiversity Project, we're looking at a rights-based cap strategic plan which would include the dedicated focus on gender mainstreaming and then our local food policy, which today is all about. So TelefPO is about delivering and living a landscape where people and ecosystems can exist and thrive together. We support the principles of food sovereignty which provide a framework for the democratic reorganization of agricultural and food systems. We put the farmers, the land, the people and the communities at the center of decision-making. So TelefPO supports a critical transition to agroecological farming systems. We want to see the cap moving away from a focus on industry and agribusiness and growth and global markets towards a focus which secures future livelihoods for family farms based on care and well-being. We want to see the resilience that Judith was speaking about built in and we aim for thriving communities and ecosystems. Our cap campaign is based, as I say, on the fact that the cap is by far the most important policy framework that exists to achieve these goals. And the Irish Strategic Plan has the potential to transition Irish farming from a system based on mass production for export markets to one which truly regenerates our land, ensures livelihoods and fairness for all farmers and meets the challenges of climate change. And this perspective is not at the social partner stakeholder forums and we need to get it there. Now, looking at our local food policy, it's based on the fact that Irish citizens want to live in this thriving environment, that they want to have access to high quality food. They want this high quality food to be produced by farmers who earn a fair wage while they regenerate rating those ecosystems and soils. And finally, this food should be affordable to all people including the most vulnerable and marginalized communities and our societies. And it should be moving as directly as possible from farmers to consumers without the use of intermediaries. We believe the first step in supporting this sector is to offer the recognition to farmers who are producing primarily for the Irish market. Coupled with a completely new set of complimentary supports that don't exist at the moment. Our proposals, which as you say, Fergal has worked incredibly. There's a really, really wonderful policy framework sitting there. It's based on looking at income supports where as local farmers are delivering into the market the support matches their contribution to a maximum of 30,000. So say for example, if the farmer is turning over 12,000 they would be matched with that with a further 12,000. So their income would be 24,000 for that year. So it's actually based on delivery as well. We look at finance. People and farmers producing in this way need access to credit and micro-credit. There's the labor and the social aspects. We recognize that this type of food production is highly labor-intensive. And Tull of Theo supports a specific set of supports that include training and upskilling of new entrants into the sector. Access to land and young farmers is always a critical problem. The aging farming population and rural townlands wondering what their communities are going to look like into the future. I always kind of point out Tull of Theo has a photograph of a campaign that they did of soil in the city in Dublin in 2019. And I love pointing it out to politicians and saying to them, look at the age demographic there. I mean, apart from one or two oldies that are kind of going gray, the bulk of the people that are sitting there are in their 30s. And it's evenly male and female and their kids in those pictures. The regenerative and the agro-ecological perspective really does draw interest from this age demographic. And as I say, we just need to get it to the table so that we can start doing that. So I suppose we need to recognize that multi-department integrated approach, but as I say, we need numbers. The establishment is not allowing us to participate without numbers. So we're going to be asking people to come along and kind of join us to start building that momentum, that social movement that people are talking about. Richard, could you link as in the chat to Tull of Theo's work and especially your new local food policy framework that you're sort of mentioning there? I'm going to bring Judith and Lisa back in. And I just want to reflect on something. When I was talking to you yesterday, Brigitte, you mentioned this need for numbers. And I said, we just have to count differently. It's not how many members Tull of Theo has. It's not how many CSAs we have. But once we take who's involved in this community led or cooperative regenerative local food movement, we have a lot of numbers. And we just need to reflect that. So, and this is a great example today seeing the different initiatives that people are involved in of the participants. And we know there are thousands out there. So thanks, Brigitte, for that. Thanks, Lisa and Judith. I'm going to open up to any questions or reflections that people have. If only a short time before we introduce Thomas Wealds, the MEP, for his presentation. And there's some good questions in the chat. We could kick them off, kick off with that if no one wants to put their hands up. Because there's quite a few of us I can't see everyone. So if you could use the reactions button and raise hands. And maybe just a question that I saw in chat that was good from Kerry Melville who's been involved in food for herself. She's finding increasingly exhausting. How do you keep your foot in the petto without burning out? Maybe Judith, back to you for that. How do we do that ensuring that we have an impact but not crippling ourselves or draining ourselves too much? I think the first thing is to make sure that you're surrounded by people who energize you and are involved in work that energizes you. I mean, there are days when I don't want to get out of bed, it's so bad. But the fact that we are a community of practice collectively and being thankful for that and taking from each other's force and strength. I mean, listening to people like Lisa and Bridget is hugely energizing for me because the last couple of weeks have been so hard with the Copa Cajaca, the industrial food lobby in Brussels trying to kill the farm to fork. And the week before that, we had all the corporate impacts on the agro-ecology and the sustainable food systems and nutrition policy documents. So I think basically surround yourself by people like Lisa and Bridget who will give you strength. And I have other many, many close friends within the food sovereignty movement to keep my energies up. I like how you brought in communities of practice. We're seeing this more and more across the social solidarity and movements of sort of peer networks that can support each other, help each other solve problems but deepen our ability to have impact while we stay buoyant. Lisa, Bridget, anything to add to that? And if anyone has questions, please put your hand up. I'm happy to answer that if that's okay. For me, genuinely, I think creativity is a real resource to us. As I said, I used to work in community development and I wasn't using my creative side and I found that things really dragged me down and I didn't have the resources to pick myself back up. So I think whether it's that you sing or you dance or you just get it out, whatever way you can get it out, get it out and process it that way. And the other thing is the food that we're putting into our own bodies. Somebody said to me the other day, I said to her, listen, I need your help, I have to put this book finished and then I have this other book. And then she goes, what are you drinking? Are you drinking jungle juice? And I thought, well, actually, I am liquidizing the cucumbers, the apples, everything from the farm every day. So yeah, I guess it is. So just to be mindful of what we're eating ourselves and that we're not feeding ourselves the crap that's poisoning the system. And then the third thing, I just, it a very simple thing. A counselor said to me one time when I was having a bad time, she said, write your lists, because we will get burnt out. And it's very hard to be the voice that somebody said one time, you're standing up in a river that's going this way and you're trying to stand up and say, wait, stop. That is draining. So what she said to me, and I thought it was great advice, she said, what are the things that you need to do on a daily basis to keep yourself well? Write the list. What do you need to do on a weekly basis? And what do you need to do on a monthly basis? And they will be connecting with certain people who give you energy and eradicate the people who drain you as much as possible or limit their time. And you'll have a support circle, I think if you're going to take on this work. We're not islands. Building community, getting creative, having creative processes, I think would be really good. Bridget, anything to add? And if we want to move in a different direction, if anyone wants to put their hand up and reflect or ask a question. Yeah, no, I'd like to carry on what you're saying there about building community. You know, we do end up in our own little organizations and as you say, almost burning out in them. But it is, it's time to link up. I mean, I hear what you say that the numbers are there. We just need to look at them differently. But unfortunately, the establishment uses that old metric to say, well, you know, I mean, we had this the other day up in Dublin with a senator saying, you know, your work, the stuff that you're saying is mighty. She said, the Irish Farmers Organization is 52,000. You have 250, why should we be listening to you? And that's where we need to kind of like come out and actually start supporting each other. You know, if Lisa, if you planting trees, we pitch up and plant trees with you. But if we kind of going out there and kind of saying we need the numbers for people to just dig in and kind of say, you know what? I'm not going to join this organization for the rest of my life. But yeah, I'm actually going to kind of throw it my number. I'm going to kind of throw it that little bit of weight just while the system is actually still using that metric. We are ahead of the system. We designing the new system. The old system kind of needs to be made obsolete. But unfortunately, sometimes we still need some of the, what is the word I'm looking for? Inspiration, the motivation, the... Requirements. Yeah, I mean, well, also, I mean, just what they need to allow us to kind of participate. One of the things I was talking to Judith and earlier was the need for networking networks. A lot of what I do now is weaving different networks together and being involved in the CSA Ireland network and then urgency that Judith is the president of also in repess and the social solidarity. But there's so many different movements and networks that all have a similar mission and objective. How might we, just thrown out there for a few minutes, how might we think about connecting, networking or moving beyond their individual networks? And one of the things I love from platform cooperatives, just as a principle, which I love is mission before organization. So then when we start to see the shared mission, the institutional ego that we have of looking out for just our organization's interests suddenly becomes looking out for the interests of all. Does that spark anything? Or would anyone want to add anything to that? I'm laughing. I have a group of Polish women looking in the window. What are you thinking? But I think, you know, Davie, I think we all have a place that gives us energy and there are so many networks. And I don't know about you, but I found at one stage they're all waving at the window, hello, I'm coming. But you know, we can get drained by meetings. I used to go into meetings, meetings, meetings. And I think somebody said to me the day about finding their tribe, you know, they went to a group and they found their tribe. And it's not being afraid. I love what Talib feels good doing. It makes me smile, do you know what I mean? I read it and I think these just brilliant and I joined and I'm delighted to be part of it. Now I may not make it to meetings and I may feel a little bit guilty about that, but we can't do everything. And I don't want to be using carbon driving up and down the road to go to meetings, but I'll support anyone I can from here. So I think it's, you know, some people are brilliant at that. And if we all come to the table with the skills that we have, you're like, you're a, you're a networker, you're a mobilizer. You can bring people together from other places and other people will join in little bits of that. And I think it's just coming to the table in our full strength, in our full health and saying this is what feels good to me to do. Judith is a master network. Thanks for that, Lisa. Judith is a master networker and network weaver. Any suggestions here? Because this is, I think, one of the things that we really need to, as Bridges saying, build on numbers, identify a bigger base. Any suggestions, Judith? I think one of the questions I always ask myself when I meet new people is what can we do together to reach our common goals? Okay, that's nice. And maybe since there's no questions from the participants, maybe that's what we'll pause and stop on. So thanks, Bridget, Lisa and Judith, for your contributions and joining us today. So I'm going to now introduce Thomas Waltz. Thomas, you're very, very welcome to our session. Thomas Waltz is an Austrian MEP and has this unique position of also being an ecological farmer and forester. And he's also a politician, obviously, but for the Green Party and has been a member of the European Parliament since November 2017. You're very, very welcome, Thomas, to this session. Our question to you today is, how from this unique perspective that you hold might the practice of food sovereignty help us respond to the climate and ecological emergency and maybe if there's any examples or signposts to what you see from European policies and actions that might support agroecological initiatives or local food initiatives. Thomas. So first of all, thank you for the invitation and sorry for being late. I'm in Strasbourg. We're having a parliamentarian week and it's a rather busy week. So I had to run to come even still late. So yes, okay, let me come from this angle from the European Union. Oh, let me maybe start with the COVID crisis. The COVID crisis has brought some very interesting new developments, at least in many of the states of Central and Northern Europe, which is first of all, that citizens have acknowledged what high dependency the European food system or agricultural system has from importation, from global streams in both directions. So importation and exportation. And what we've seen across the European Union is that more and more citizens started to be concerned of where their food is actually coming from, how it is produced. It's also linked to the fact that people were not traveling abroad anymore and they were spending their free time mostly around their homes. They were going out of their cities, out of their villages, seeing the landscape, seeing the forests, also seeing what happens in agriculture more than ever, which steered a very interesting development. But I'll come back to that later. So there is a grown interest into our food systems as one of the outcomes of the COVID crisis. So we're talking about food sovereignty. Well, what are we talking about when we mean sovereignty? Europe is the biggest agricultural exporter of the world. So our agricultural system to describe it in a few words is basically that we are importing millions of tons of fodder, of animal fodder from anywhere of the world, a lot from South America, but from other regions as well. We're stuffing that into animals within the European Union, maybe chicken, pork mainly, but also even soy is used meanwhile for milk production and for fattening bulls. So we're putting all of that into the animals. We're growing them here, we're fattening them here, and then we're selling them either alive or in form of meat again to half of the world. And what stays here is the stink, it's the manure, it's the over nitrification of our soil, it's the environmental destruction, it's the biodiversity destruction, it's the creation of dust zones in our seas wherever our rivers meet the sea. So we're actually keeping the destruction here. And this is an agricultural system which we are funding centrally from the European Union and all of you with your taxpayers' money, we're funding this because it's just not possible to produce for world market prices in a European production environment because the production costs within the European Union are far higher than in other regions of the world. Let me just take two of the examples, an agricultural worker in Ukraine who we have a free trade agreement with and a session association agreement, that's how to put it. An agricultural worker costs 150 euros per month. In Brazil, where we import a lot of fodder but also meanwhile beef and chicken meat from, there an agricultural worker costs 80 euros. In the European Union, there were different levels but in my own country, Austria, for me it costs around 2000 euros to have an employee and then the person is still not earning very well. So, but I could go into detail, the production costs are just much higher. So what are we doing? We're actually producing for world market prices. We're using billions of taxpayers' money to keep the farmers alive, to keep their families fed, to keep them working on the ground and just to actually export the goods but the profits from exporting the goods are not helping our farmers, they are not, that's not who they are, which they are serving. It's not really helping our local economies, it's not helping our rural areas because due to industrialization and intensification, we're losing more and more jobs on the ground in agriculture. So rural areas are under high pressure of depopulation with all the side effects this has. And just to keep the market for a very few amounts of companies, multinational companies that do the global trade, interestingly, it's the same companies doing the import trade with fodder and so on as the companies do the export trade. So the first point, the first interesting aspect of food serenity would be to change this narrative, this strategy of agriculture, European agriculture policy towards an angle to say, well, let's put as a priority on taking European money to support European producers, to produce healthy food with best respect on environment for European citizens. And that's what we should use taxpayers money for. And why, what is the arguments for that? Well, first of all, it's the overall economical picture, you know, the bigger picture of our economies. Today, the fact is that conventional production has not implemented in its pricing the externalities. So the external effects or external damages of the production, it's not covered by the food price and it's not paid by the producers nor by the traders. I give you a very concrete example in my home region, there's very intensive pork production. So due to the intensive pork production, there's a lot of manure spilled on the fields. Due to that manure on the fields, we have a high level of nitrate in the soil water. Due to that high level of nitrate, the regional water provider has to develop all kinds of strategies to reduce that amount of nitrate, filtering, mixing it with other waters which they bring in pipelines from the Alps. And the effect is that the water costs in the region are among the highest of all over Austria. So every single citizen pays with his or her water bill the actual price for this so-called cheap pork meat production. This is just one example. If you integrate the environmental damages, the climate damages, the biodiversity damages into pricing and if you even see the negative effects of low vitamins, low mineral, so bad food on our health, the health effects of industrialized produced food are enormous, they're putting an enormous pressure on our health systems, they're creating enormous economical downturns which if we see the whole picture and if we integrate the whole picture into pricing, organic products are 30% cheaper than every conventional product in average. So just to, that is a very valid argument why we should really rethink our way of production and food sovereignty is for me that also the basis of argumentation to say, well, look, Europe produce good food for your citizens but stop spilling the global market with dumping price products, dumping prices that are based on our tax payers money actually paying for the production and stop compromising food sovereignty of other countries in the world. Very much developing countries which then suffer from the direct effects of our cheap food exports, may it be milk powder that is much cheaper in African countries than the local milk production or may it be the leftovers of chicken, the carcasses and winds that we're dumping on the markets and killing the local chicken production from local farmers causing directly that farmers have to give up their businesses moving to the slums of the city and are increasing the poverty of these countries and the structural problems of the future. So our agricultural policy is directly compromising the food sovereignty of many developing countries and by implementing food sovereignty concepts within our very own agricultural policy, this is one of the main effects would be to also release the pressure on all of these countries which are mostly poorer and mostly have also problems with hunger and with a lack of food supply. Let me go a bit further. I mean, the common agricultural policy we fought hard for every little green thing that you find in there and acknowledging the situation in Ireland with only 2% organic farming, I can even see that this common agricultural policy even shows some progress for your agricultural scene because we managed to get quite some stuff in it. As an example also a clear aim to support organic agriculture, agroecological methods. But to my point of view, we did by far not go far enough. If you see that actually agriculture and forestry are the only concrete proposals how to get CO2 back out of the atmosphere and not just getting it back out of the atmosphere but actually changing the way we fertilize our fields from artificial fertilizer to green fertilizer which are plants that collect CO2 via photosynthesis and produce plant material, maybe wood or leaves or vegetables or just fertilizer which we then dig into the soil and through this create compost, create humans create fertile soils which are able to store water to sustain our food production also in times of droughts to prevent ourselves from floods. To change this model so this would be the biggest contribution towards CO2 neutrality we could have the whole sector would have a massive potential to actually deliver. This has not been met by the common agricultural policy even if some parts are quite okay. Found to Fox strategy was also mentioned already we voted on it today. I think we mentioned I didn't see the outcomes yet but I think we managed to defeat the trice of the mainly meat lobby to actually kill the process in the very last minute. So we will see a farm to Fox strategy that calls for minus 50% artificial fertilizer and for minus 50% pesticides and for 25% organic farming all over the European Union and why is this a fertilizer story also a question of food sovereignty because if you use green fertilizer then you are depending with your production on your land and they're on the ability to grow something on your land. If we use artificial fertilizer which is basically made for the production you need gas so you need approximately two kilo of gas for one kilo of artificial fertilizer. So we are depending on gas imports on fossil fuels on our farms and then independent and sovereign farming would mean grow based on your own land what you're able to grow on that. So this would also contribute to sovereignty the same is with seeds. There's less and less non-hybrid seeds on the market that more and more is captured by big corporatives which are by the way the same corporatives that produce the chemicals. So then we'll always sell us seeds that need the chemicals because that's their business model. So also growing our own seeds again the old varieties defending our rights to grow seeds and to share them with each other is that direct contribution to food sovereignty. Also growing animals based on the land you have same concept if you're sovereign if you're able to feed your animals yourself that would also prevent us from over nitrification then we would have a kind of a circle economy on the farms where animals can play a role where they have a respected place in the circulation of fertilizer and so on. To not get too long. Well, just one last sentence on farm to farm where's that resistance coming from? Look, no matter if you go completely organic or you even seriously try with in conventional agriculture to go agroecological who is losing money? Look, me as an organic farmer I don't buy the artificial fertilizer so the industry loses. I don't buy the pesticide again the industry loses. My animals do not need medication or very, very rarely the next big industry farmer industry loses. Yeah, so you see I produce the seeds myself so the seed industry loses and if you sum that all up farmer industry chemical industry, seed industry, fossil fuel industry you have the biggest multinational companies of the world that are profiting from this agricultural system it's not the farmers because the farmers are closing their farms. Every day we're losing hundreds of farms in the European Union because the small and medium sized farms cannot produce, cannot stand that unfair competition anymore from the big industrialized plants so it's not them profiting not at all it's the big multinational companies that are lobbying us and that are doing whatever they can to stop this kind of green deal policies that I was talking about and just to give some positive perspectives. So what happened through COVID is that people started especially in Central and Northern European Union to go out and meet the farmers to see where the food comes from we had a massive increase on direct marketing whatever marketing scheme you have whether it's the farmers market it's direct delivery of vegetable boxes whether it's food cobs like in cities that were a whole house with many flats starts to buy directly with the farmers and distribute within the house the interest on solidarity farmer community based farming was increasing massively there were many more people that were willing to buy a share and actually farmers that were able to offer this kind of participatory farming method so that increased substantially and also the demand for organic food increased substantially and yes sure I mean do you need to have the farmers to actually then also fulfill the demand and I'm talking from a privileged position because in Austria we're having 25% of all land under organic farming meanwhile and that's why also we can move on and we do move on with public procurement with organic food I think Judith has mentioned it or Lisa I don't recall now but that's a key issue if you see how big the share is of all the kindergartens, the schools the elderly homes, you know the hospitals the canteens in universities it's a big share of the actual whole market and there is so many reasons as I mentioned earlier you know all the externalities but also the health costs so there's so many reasons for the state itself to invest into organic and to change towards regional and organic food supply for this public kitchens and for this public procurement that this can steer the demand and really kind of skyrocket the production very fast we just need to take responsible positions and decisions also in the political scene and it's very important to push for that to argue for that because this can really unchain a huge development towards organic production yes and also the cooperation with tourism is key because hotels and so on they more and more especially in central Europe they're more and more seen as a quality sign if they can tell well this beef comes from there and these vegetables come from there they're actually putting it on their menu a whole list of who supplies them with what that's more and more let's say an added value and more and more citizens, guests, tourists actually appreciate that and prefer these kinds of restaurants to go to so also these corporations can really steer demand and direct cooperation in the region short food chains, short transportation little carbon and also the knowledge that the cook or maybe even the waiter can say well just go into the next village is the farmer so and so and if you want to see how their cat lives just go and go there this gives you know, authenticity this gives a direct feel what you're actually eating there's good concepts on the ground and there's very good development across the European Union and I hope that Ireland is now with that cap strategic plan you were talking about finally joining this pan-European effort to change our agriculture towards a sustainable one towards a self-sufficient or sovereign one towards a local one and that we finally get out of this destructive industrial agriculture system and I thank you so much for all of your personal contributions to that change Thank you so much, Thomas it's great to hear a politician speaking like this and a farmer stepping into the political sphere to make a difference so thank you for your work I'm going to open up to questions now and maybe I might just start by asking you a question you sort of refer to when you talked about procurement is there any talk or is there might we see some policies that would support community wealth building a sort of local and green procurement that would encourage or even force big spenders in our regions or cities to use organic food or to use co-ops and social solidarity initiatives rather than the money just escaping our region so keeping our wealth circulating as we see in the model of Preston or Cleveland any hope for that or Thomas any reflections on that? Well, first of all the common agriculture policy that we have negotiated now is allowing that to the minimum states we had a major shift in the way the cap is actually constructed before the old cap had certain measurements defined and the member states could choose within that list of measurements now it's only goals defined and every nation decides on their own how they're going to reach the goals and they can kind of have to propose that in the cap strategic plan to the commission they have to show how they create a positive impact on biodiversity how they create a reduction of 30% of CO2 emissions which is directly leading to agroecological methods or even organic and they have to also show how they re-strengthened regional food systems we clearly have the goal to rebuild local food systems, regional food systems and there is allocation of money or funds for that but again, it's a decision of your government how much they make use of the different possibilities the cap offers one thing that we were able to include which was quite a battle was all the new forms of agriculture so community-based agriculture so the direct agriculture all these direct interlinked consumer producer concepts which were not eligible for agriculture fundings up to the last cap but they will be now at least there's no obstacles from the European side again, it's very much in the hand of your governments so yes, basically the legislation is there to let it happen but it also needs the political will of the member state Brilliant, thanks for that Thomas we want to hear some other voices so I'm going to bring Judith then, you have a question if you want to come in, can you raise your hand probably in the reactions below because I can't see everyone but Judith Yep, thank you very much Thomas that was really, really good and I was so happy to hear about the farm to fork vote because I hadn't managed to get the feedback on that yet because it was a real struggle On the question of public procurement for example, in the Spanish Basque country they now have a significant victory because public procurement