CFGN Gathering Sunday 26th February

The London-based ‘Community Food Growers Network’ has been organising seasonal gatherings for information and skill-sharing, network business discussion, and to take part in practical tasks and visits to different community growing project sites.

If you want to get more involved in the network come along to the next gathering on Sunday the 26th Feb or check out the website for future dates, details of the network’s manifesto, and how groups can become members.

connect // cooperate // support // defend // celebrate

When: Sunday 26th February 2012

Time: Meeting 1-5.30pm (Practical work starting at 11am)

Where: Grow Heathrow, Vineries Close, Sipson, West Drayton, UB7 0JG

Directions: From Central London: Travel to West Drayton in TfL zone 6 in 20 minutes by train from Paddington. From West Drayton either take the 222 bus towards Hounslow and get off in Sipson Village or follow the cycle path towards Sipson. Our site is a 1 minute walk from the King William Pub which is in the middle of town.

Contact: info@transitionheathrow.com, 07890751568

Timetable

11-12.30: Practical tasks on the Grow Heathrow site: Mulching, preparing compost and seeding area

12.30-1.30: Lunch

1.30-4.30: Tour of Grow Heathrow & Meeting (see draft agenda below)

4.45-5.30: Seed swap

Draft Agenda:  e-mail additional points to info@transitionheathrow.com or bring to the Gathering

1. Project Updates

2. Via Campesina

3. International Day of Peasant Struggles 17 April 2012

4. CFGN Annual Gathering -  at the last gathering we resolved to make the quarterly meetings smaller ones for members only, and put our organising energy instead into organising an exciting annual gathering, to which we encourage loads of other CFPs to come to. Lets get a date, venue, and a bit of a plan for how the day will be run and publicised.

5. GM Crops in Hertfordshire – the GM trial in Herts is a focus for the GM campaign. How can London growers best support this campaign and organise against the trials? Would be good to have someone who went to the recent GM gathering report back on the latest

6. Allotment in Acton under threat

7. Stories of Food Sovereignty evening with Reclaim the Fields & PEDAL

Harmondsworth Great Barn saved

This week the infamous Great Barn in the village next door to us, Harmondsworth was saved! After years of controversy over what would happen with it, English Heritage have finally purchased it for £20000.

The building once dubbed “the cathedral of Middlesex” is Grade Ι listed and was being looked after by community group ‘The Friends of Harmondsworth Barn’ who have been working tirelessly to secure it and are extremely pleased to have it back. The Barn will now be available for use by local communties and plans are already in place to open it for free to the public on two Sundays each month from April. Barn dance anyone?

Greeks reclaim Athens Airport for growing food

A group of community-minded gardeners have turned a former Athens airport into a blooming vegetable plot, showing how Greece’s eroded soil holds the keys to a revival in farming and a way to buck the jobless trend.

‘If we want to survive on this land we must first help to heal the earth,’ said Nicola Netién, agro-ecologist, teacher and co-creator of the NGO Permaculture Research Institute Hellas. He was talking to a group of some fifty people of all ages who had gathered for two days of workshops on self-sufficiency, how to self-organize, agro-ecology and composting. This small gathering was taking place on a beautifully sunny autumn day at the former Athens airport, Ellinikon.

When the airport moved to another location 10 years ago in preparation for Athens hosting the 2004 Olympic Games, there was the hope and the State’s promise that this now available land would become a park. Then the ‘crisis’ landed and rumors began spreading that the site had been sold to an international developer who would pour yet more concrete on the chaotic sprawl that is Athens. This is when a small group of local residents, bearing seeds and armed with shovels, moved in. Their mission: to create a communal and productive agricultural space that will encourage an exploration into antidotes for the ecological-economic-educational and cultural crisis.

‘Thirty percent of Greece’s arable land has salinized and every year Greece looses 750,000 cubic meters of topsoil as a result of erosion and poor land management,’ Nicola continued as his demonstration compost pile grew. Just a few kilometers west and the political drama of a failing government and national bankruptcy was unfolding. The world watched the theatrics of politicians scrambling for self-preservation, while the contagious and desperate fear of being ejected from the Euro spread and the markets turbulently responded.

Natasha, one of the first to start working this small plot at the Ellinikon, told me that since the beginning of the current crisis, more and more people are visiting this small edible garden. She understands why. A year ago she was anxious that her future and her basic needs were dependent on the State that employs her. She had no survival skills. Now, she says, she feels empowered by being proactive in forming her community and learning how to grow food.

There are other examples of Athenians taking matters into their own hands to reclaim small plots of land so as to create communal green spaces; sometimes quietly and peacefully and other times after long drawn out battles with riot police. An example of the latter is Navarino Park in the centre of Athens. This again involved a broken promise by the State. One of the most densely populated areas of Athens was hoping for a park, so when the plans changed to build a parking lot, the local residents organized and resisted. Despite the violence and threats by police, residents stood their ground and cultivated this small plot that is now a budding potential of urban agriculture.

All these examples are neighborhood initiatives. It would be wrong to suggest this is a single coordinated movement. Often confused by the scale of change that is needed and starved for stories of hope, there is a tendency to inadvertently prescribe meaning to and inflate such examples so as to enthuse optimism in ourselves and in others that we are well on our way to dismantling ‘business as usual’. But this would be doing these small groups of activists a disservice. This is not their story, at least not for now. They are in the process of finding their way.

Life in Greece has gotten harder and people are quite literally going hungry. The cultural and the economic reality on the ground and the systemic rot that is so pervasive demand an exploration into context relevant ways of organizing, empowering, sharing knowledge, and redefining our values and our identities.

Riots in Athens have become common; albeit an expression of discontent, the dynamic that has developed between rioter and State seems to maintain the status quo. As I understand it, these local activists are not interested in head on combat against the ‘business and politics as usual’ that is largely to blame for the erosion of land and values, but rather they undermine the status quo by actively participating and investing in their own communities’ potential.

Within each small neighborhood group there is a collective evolving, sharing knowledge, learning, building and growing together. Perhaps these small groups and their gardens will be catalysts for change-maybe they will become nodes in an emergent network of urban farmers-maybe not. Regardless, this is an account of people proactively engaging the challenges and opportunities they are faced with. When Greece’s dominant narrative, particularly of late, has been of bankruptcy, corruption, nepotism, inefficiency and violence, it is important to recognize that this is not the whole story. With respect for others’ work, as well as our own, and as a defense against the infectious cynicism of such depressing dominant narratives, we must conserve and in fact cultivate the space for hope to articulate itself.

‘We can compost anything that was once living. Soon we will be able to add our Euros to the pile,’ Nicola said with half a smile. For a brief moment the group became uneasy and nervously laughed. This unease though quickly dissipated. ‘A healthy compost pile should never smell bad…’

This blog was taken from The Ecologist website

Whose land? Our land

More and more people are becoming interested in growing their own food. But our ability to take this essential step towards a sustainable future is being stifled by the radical inequalities of land distribution, in a country where patterns of land-ownership have changed little since feudal times, and the access to land of those who don’t own it has actually diminished. We will not be able to succeed in our Transition aims without challenging these inequalities and improving access to land for the many.

At a recent Transition discussion I was at, there was much talk of the value and importance of local food growing to a sustainable future. The merits of small-scale organic farming are many – reducing the oil-dependency of our food-chains, and reducing our own dependence on systems which destroy biodiversity and alienate us from our environment. Rising food prices are a direct result of climate change and decreasing oil supplies, and are a key aspect of the social injustices embedded within these twin crises as the poorest suffer most – both globally and in our own country. For these reasons, and for many others (perhaps mostly just because it’s fun), more and more people are starting to grow their own food, which is a fantastic thing.

But there is a problem: there doesn’t seem to be enough land. Allotment waiting lists have been rising rapidly across the country, in some places as much as 15 years long, and the price of land is also on the rise. More of us than ever live in apartments, without any garden to dig, and those who vision the future of our cities seem determined that this trend should continue.

There are some really useful initiatives going on to mitigate this situation. Some Transition Town run garden-sharing projects, to match up those who want to grow with those who haven’t got the time to keep up their garden; and there’s an interesting project originating in Manchester called Allotment Finder, which is trying to get the data about the different waiting lists for different sites and inform people who are searching for space where they might be able to find it more quickly.

But fundamentally, these are just sticking plasters for a crippling disease. In the UK, 0.3% of people own 67% of all the land in the country. It’s no wonder that the other 99.7% struggle to share out the remainder between us: to find enough space for our lettuces or for our community spaces. Not only is the ownership of land centralised in the hands of a tiny group of aristocrats, little changed over hundreds of years, but large swathes of land are desperately under-used and ill-managed. The UK consists of about 60 million acres. Admittedly not all of this is cultivable, but we do not lack in fertile land on this island. Even in an inner-city borough, a little walk around your neighbourhood will probably reveal numerous empty plots and scraps, going to waste. Without enabling people to access this land, there is no way that they can start to transition to a more sustainable way of life.

When the MST visited Grow Heathrow

It is not a coincidence that access to land is a core issue in the achievement of our aims: the removal of access was a core element in the onward march of capitalism which has brought us into the unsustainable present. As land was gradually claimed and enclosed from the commons, those who were left without land had to find other means to earn money, in order to buy food and to rent back the space to live in from the landowners who had taken it all. In some parts of the world, this process is happening right now, igniting resistance from indigenous groups such as the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) in Brazil, the Landless Workers’ Movement.

The ZAD, in Nantes, France

Internationally, many groups are struggling on this issue. Reclaim the Fields, for example, is a Europe-wide network of community food growers who are very concerned about access to land, and Grow Heathrow – the squatted market garden where I live – is part of this network. In May last year I joined a RtF event in France, where about 200 people took over and cleared an abandoned field that lies in the path of another proposed airport near Nantes – you can read more about it HERE. The current government’s attempts to criminalise squatting will make it even more difficult for people to reclaim land to grow and live on, reinforcing the existing injustices at a time when a radical rethink is more necessary than ever.

This blog was taken from the Transition Network website as part of their social reporting pilot project.