Peer2Politics

Growing food should present no legal problems. You plant seeds, care for the plants, harvest the food, then save some seeds for the next year. Right?
Not anymore.

“Water Governance for 21st Century, by Shiney Varghese at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, makes a compelling case urging advcates and policy makers to advance an approach combining the commons framework and the Public Trust Doctrine principles. Shiney notes that the tendency of recent trends to rely on market and rights–based policies has exaccerbated the failures in water governance. These approaches do not “solve problems such as poor management, existing over-allocation or failing water governance.”

 

If you have not yet discovered project Farmbot, this interview will be a revelation to you. The project in question, has the ambition to bring digitalization into one of the oldest processes in society, that of agriculture.

The co-author of a new book on reconciliation with the land reflects on a Brazilian community that models “abundant kingdom homesteading.” 

“Exchange and virtual currencies networks refer to activities organised by groups of citizens in specific regions or across the whole of Greece, where transactions are taking place without the use of money. They are based either on the exchange of products and services or on virtual currencies such as the unit of time or coupons issued by the networks’ members. Some of them are online networks where the members can notify when they want to give something away for free or when they need something.

 

“What would the world look like if we began to re-conceptualize food as a commons? Jose Luis Vivero Pol of the Centre for Philosophy of Law at Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium has done just that in a recent essay, “Food as a Commons: Reframing the Narrative of the Food System.”

 

Inspired by the idea of building resilience around local, grassroots economies in response to peak oil and climate change, the transition movement has evolved into a global network of cities, towns, and neighborhoods that self-organize around the principles not only of reducing CO2 emissions but doing it by fostering happy, healthy, and creative communities.

FOR CENTURIES OUR ANCESTORS PRODUCED SEED TO GROW THEIR OWN CROPS. EACH YEAR THEY SOWED IT. THE SEED GAVE PLANTS AND THE PLANTS GAVE SEED. EACH YEAR, FARMERS SELECTED SEED FROM PLANTS…

“Communication, collaboration, cooperation—those are skills, not just words,” said Salim Al-Nurridinn, founder of the Healthcare Consortium of Illinois, while standing at the gate of the Cooperation Operation (Coop Op).

By the end of this year, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, will witness the completion of a cutting-edge partnership in urban agriculture and retail — a 20,000-square-foot rooftop greenhouse built on a Whole Foods supermarket. 

Hosted by Carter Wallace and Rishi Kumar
This episode first broadcast on September 7, 201

Beyond the theoretical and historical arguments about the effects of enclosure on real property lie the question of how well those arguments translate to the world of the intangible and intellectual. It is that question which this chapter raises. Christopher May, A Global Political Economy of Intellectual Property Rights: The New Enclosures? (London: Routledge, 2000) offers a similar analogy—as do several other articles cited in the text. The key differences obviously lie in the features of intellectual property identified in the earlier chapters—its nonrivalrousness and nonexcludability—and on the ways in which a commons of cultural, scientific, and technical information has been central to the operation of both liberal democracy and capitalist economy. I owe the latter point particularly to Richard Nelson, whose work on the economics of innovation amply repays further study: Richard Nelson, Technology, Institutions, and Economic Growth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005)." 

A new food gleaning and supply-sharing program called Cropmobster has created simple and effective solutions to address food waste and hunger and increase farmer visibility in a decentralized, community-based way.

Due to lack of media coverage in the United States, many are unaware that the massive farmer strikes which paralyzed Colombia last month actually stem from a controversial free trade agreement with Washington.

“I’ve written before about the challenges faced by permaculture enterprises. Farms, like other land-based permaculture projects, are faced with the formidable task of regenerating ecosystems and communities, while surviving in a system that rewards the destruction of the same systems. Permaculture projects have to compete with degenerative enterprises and institutions that are happy to take the efficiency ‘bonus’ from unsustainable and exploitative practices.