Invoking the spirit of international peasant farmer movements La Via
Campesina and Brazil's Movimento Sem Terra, hundreds of people entered a
five-acre plot of land at the Berkeley/Albany border on Sunday April 22, in one
of this spring's first high-profile actions of the Occupy movement. Their goal?
To farm the land and share the food with the local community.
Under the banner "Occupy the Farm," a coalition of local
residents, farmers, students, researchers, and activists broke the lock and
entered the UC Berkeley-owned Gill Tract on a sunny Sunday afternoon, bringing
with them over 15,000 seedlings, a pair of rototillers and a half-dozen
chickens in mobile chicken-tractors. Hundreds of people, including a dozen or
so children, went to work clearing weeds, tilling garden beds, filling holes with
compost, and planting seedlings. At the end of four hours, they'd planted an
estimated three-quarters of an acre.
After last fall's burst of Occupy actions raised a challenge to
corporate control writ large, organizers of Occupy the Farm say they are kicking
off the spring season with efforts to reclaim land not just as a way of
occupying space, but to meet the needs of communities through food production.
The group's press release, which garnered significant media attention
and brought several TV crews out to film the rebel farmers, said, "Occupy
the Farm seeks to address structural problems with health and inequalities in
the Bay Area that stem from communities' lack of access to food and land.
Today's action reclaims the Gill Tract to demonstrate and exercise the peoples'
right to use public space for the public good. This farm will serve as a hub
for urban agriculture, a healthy and affordable food source for Bay Area
residents and an educational center."
The Gill Tract, an agricultural research plot owned by UC Berkeley, is
the last five acres of Class 1 soil in the East Bay. Generations of UC
researchers have farmed here; now UCB Capital Projects, which holds the title
to the land, has slated it for rezoning in 2013. Ironically, the activists say the
company most likely to buy it up for development is Whole Foods Corporation.
Hence the Occupiers' slogan: "Whole food, not Whole Foods."
The organizers say the UC-owned Gill tract is significant not only
because it is the last and best agricultural land in the East Bay, but because
the struggle over this land is tied to the struggle to keep the public
university serving the public interest. Over the last decade, through
investments by Novartis, Syngenta, BP and other corporations, the University of
California has become increasingly captured by private interests, which have
come to control the research agenda and the land use policy. Now, Occupy the
Farm says, the public is taking it back.
Early on a fog-bound Monday morning less than 24 hours after the
occupation began, Anya Kamenskaya, in blue pinstriped overalls, is stretching
her arms and legs to recover from a night sleeping on a groundpad. "We're
going to have to institute morning calisthenics," she says with a laugh.
Kamenskaya, a UC Berkeley alum and educator, says, "Farming
underutilized spaces such as these can create alternatives to the corporate
control of our food system. Five acres can feed up to 250 families using a
community-supported agriculture model. A major component of what we're doing
here is showing that urban land can and should be used to meet the food needs
of local people."
Kamenskaya
studied with Miguel Altieri, a widely respected professor of agro-ecology who
works hard to bridge the divide between university research and the needs of
farmers, especially in his native South America. As an undergrad in 2008,
Kamenskaya says, she got Altieri's approval to start a farm-to-school program
with a local elementary school, using a piece of the Gill tract to grow the
food.
"We got quite far in the process," she says. "But the
university thwarted us, and it became just another in a long string of attempts
to preserve this land for agriculture, and community education for food
sovereignty."
"UC Berkeley is a land grant institution and this land is being
administered by a university for the public. Everything done here is supposed
to be done for the public good," she said.
Kamenskaya became interested in agriculture as a young girl at a farm
camp in Mendocino. She recalls learning about the Zapatista uprising in Mexico
in 1994. The fact that indigenous people were illegally taking over land to
grow food struck her deeply.
Like many of the Occupy the Farm-ers, Kamenskaya participated in key
mobilizations last year, such as the Oakland Port shutdown and General Strike.
But this is her first time playing the role of organizer.
"We're kind of an 'Occupy 2.0' in that we're taking the momentum
of the Occupy movement and directing it to something very specific in our
community."
A bearded man in a straw hat and overalls who identifies himself as
"just Christoph," also worked the Gill Tract as a UC student. "A
new urgency developed around this land when we learned that a chunk of it was
slated to be developed for a Whole Foods," Christoph says. "This
piece of land is a unique resource that needs to be preserved. When the city
council of Albany considered making a permit for the Whole Foods, the developer
came back and said they wanted the land 'in perpetuity.' We thought, once this
is paved over, it will never be accessible for farming again, or, at best, it
will take generations."
Despite a warning from UC police who maintained a brief presence
Sunday afternoon, the first night of the occupation passed without police
intervention. But the specter of police clubbing protesters at Sproul Plaza and
Wheeler Hall last fall, and the infamous pepper-spraying incident at UC Davis,
loomed large.
I asked Cristoph if he really thought they could hold onto the land in
the face of the imperative to develop it, and the UC authorities. "Farming
is an unimpeachable offense," he said.
Occupiers see the effort to sell off the Gill Tract as the latest in a
string of privatization schemes by the university. Over the last several
decades, the university has increasingly shifted use of the Gill Tract away
from sustainable agriculture and toward biotechnology, with funding from
corporations such as Novartis and BP.
"Most of the research being done here is corn genetic
isolation," Robbie Zeinstra, another UC alum, tells me. "It could be
harmless or it could be used for genetic modification and more of a capitalist
approach to agriculture."
"We don't know if the researchers on this plot are being funded
by Novartis, Syngenta or BP," Zeinstra said. "We can assume so. But
the trickle-down happens in that what the university is prioritizing. It's not
prioritizing growing food for people or creating an agriculture compatible with
people and local cultures. It's fostering an agriculture that's only compatible
with a large market system."
Zeinstra seemed eager to finish our talk and get to tilling. But he
had a final point: "Regardless of what kind of research is being done
here," he said, "this land is under threat of being developed. If the
land is developed, no one is going to do any research here or grow any food
here. That's really why we're here -- to contest the development of the
land."
All
of the half-dozen occupiers I interviewed said their priority is to empower
communities to control their own resilient food systems for a stable and just
future. The group consciously terms this practice "food sovereignty,"
in solidarity with La Via Campesina and the Movimento Sin Tierra (Landless
Workers Movement) of Brazil.
"I think what we're doing fits nicely into the global food
sovereignty movement," said Anya Kamenskaya. "Obviously on a
socio-economic scale our struggles are different than those of peasant farmers.
We live in one of the richest countries in the world. But everyone in the world
shares the problem of food access because corporations control so much of
global food production. Communities all over the world can understand the
imperative to wrest control over food from the grip of the corporations."
The plan to Occupy the farm was hatched in late fall of 2011, and kept
secret until it was pulled off. To get the thousands of seedlings needed to
move in and plant all at once, dozens of farmers from Berkeley down to Santa
Cruz volunteered to plant seeds, and tended them all spring awaiting this
weekend's action. But none of the growers knew the final destination of the
peas, lettuce, chard, carrots and squash they were tending.
On the first night of the occupation, a dozen tents went up, giving
the site the appearance of other Occupy sites. One of the tents, which had made
the rounds of Bay Area Occupy sites from San Francisco to Oakland, bore a Woody
Guthrie-inspired slogan in large purple letters: "This tent kills
fascists."
But organizers insist this project is unique, and heralds a new
beginning for Occupy. One of the organizers, Gopal Dayaneni of Movement
Generation Justice and Ecology Project pointed to the ground at his feet and
said, "We located the tents right here specifically because this is where
we're going to till tomorrow. The idea is, this is not an encampment -- this is
a farm. We don't want to accumulate the stuff, and the human presence, of other
Occupy encampments. We want to farm."
By the next morning, as planned, the tents had been moved; people with
machetes were chopping down head-high mustard stalks and piling them in
windrows. In the center of a pile of weeds stacked eight feet tall and 40 feet
around, a composting toilet had been built.
Dayaneni, who took a lead role in the organizing, brought his two
children and their friends to work on Sunday. "They worked their tails
off, and they loved it," he said.
That night, when the first flush of work was over and it came time to
set up camp and begin laying the ground rules, Dayaneni congratulated everyone
on the hard work, and urged that the space be made as community friendly as
possible. "If I can't bring my kids," he said sternly, "I
ain't coming back."
Several neighborhood residents who'd joined the work party applauded
the sentiment.
Seeing this as an evolution of the Occupy movement, Christoph says,
"We're trying to be a model for the Bay Area, for the Occupy movement and
for the nation about what land occupations can do." Citing the other
tactics of the movement, he says, "A foreclosure defense will keep a
family in its home. A space occupation will put people into a new space. These
are good things, for sure. But a land occupation can feed hundreds of people.
If all that happens on this land is that we grow food, then it's a
success."
Related link:
Occupy the Farm
Related link:
Occupy the Farm
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