What’s Natural About Capital? Agroecology as Resistance to the New Frontier of Colonial Capitalist Carbon Farming

ABSTRACT

The recent acceleration of the financialisation of nature, in which a farmer’s role as a good custodian of land has shifted from a moral obligation to an economic opportunity, has expanded capitalism’s spheres of accumulation beyond agricultural commodities to the very building blocks they rely upon: water, carbon, and biodiversity. This “metabolic shift” [Moore, Jason W. 2017. “Metabolic Rift or Metabolic Shift? Dialectics, Nature, and the World-Historical Method.” Theory and Society 46 (4): 285–318. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-017-9290-6] deepens the metabolic rift between economy and ecology in a self-defeating repudiation of farmers’ environmental values. The resulting hegemony in neoliberal colonial capitalism is accelerating rather than ameliorating climate change and biodiversity loss. In this paper, I analyse the values and activities of three farmer organisations in what is now called Australia, concluding that it is in convivial, not capitalist, agriculture – agroecology – that we will find intergenerational and decolonial justice and assure everyone’s right to flourish in common.

KEYWORDS:

• Natural capital
• capitalism
• conviviality
• agroecology
• carbon credits

Introduction

The evidence is in. The colonial capitalist crisis is alternately burning and drowning us. Australia’s 2019–2020 Black Summer incinerated 12.6 million hectares and over a billion animals (Werner and Lyons 2020). Year 2022 brought record floods, rendering thousands of homes uninhabitable in the same eastern regions that suffered conflagration just two years earlier. Yet, in the face of the cascading crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, and escalating hunger and obesity, most people still find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism (Palmås, Ekberg, and Åberg 2022).

Climate extremities particularly affect farmers’ lives and livelihoods, as well as threaten the existence of those in their care, from microbes and crops to cows and the billions of people farmers feed. Shocking images of dairy cattle washed down rivers and bumper grain crops under a metre of flowing flood waters were some of the realities Australian farmers faced in 2022, just two years after the Black Summer fires. In a country wedded to market-based solutions, many farmers and their organisations are calling for payments for ecosystem services (PES) in recognition of farmers’ vulnerability to the impacts of climate change and their role in ameliorating them. Yet, payments for ecosystem services embody the “Zeitgeist of crisis capitalism,” relying on an ideology that “if nature can be rationally abstracted and priced into assets, goods and services, then environmental risk and degradation can be measured, exchanged, offset and generally minimised” (Sullivan 2009, 18).

The situation we find ourselves in is complex. As a farmer-scholar-activist, I farm-listen-reflect-act through challenges, investigating pathways for transformation. I am a small-scale heritage-breed livestock farmer along with my bricoleur husband and a community of like-minded agroecologists on the unceded lands of the Dja Dja Wurrung, in what is now called the central highlands of Victoria. We are members of our local Landcare group, and I have collaborated with Farmers for Climate Action. I have also been the president of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA) since 2014. Following Borras (2009, 21) and Marx (1845), my project sees “critical scholarship [a]s concerned not only with interpreting the world, but with changing it.”

My positionality has led me to many questions, some of which I try to answer in this paper, including: Do farmers have a moral obligation to care for Coun try¹? How can we afford to do so in a context of climate chaos and globalised “free” markets in which critical infrastructure is controlled by a shrinking number of multinational corporations? Should we be paid to sequester carbon and conserve biodiversity? Who should pay? Should polluters pay by taxation or through markets? Is there a role for environmental markets in reducing emissions and protecting biodiversity? How can farmers be paid for carbon sequestration and biodiversity conservation without greenwashing polluters?

To answer these questions, here I investigate the rise of carbon markets, which have become the preferred political and economic response to mitigating climate change in the neoliberal settler colonial state of Australia. I interrogate the characteristic discourses using the case of AgForce, a conventional grazier peak state body, chosen for its representativeness of the sector. I explore the concept of “conviviality” (Büscher and Fletcher 2020; Illich 1973; Plumwood 1993), showing that the value of nature lies not in its capacity for capitalist accumulation, but in the ways it allows humans and more-than-humans to live abundant lives, where abundance is understood in the degrowth holistic sense of values rather than in terms of capitalist financial myopia (Kallis 2018; Saito 2022).

I next examine the climate advocacy of two farmers’ organisations that also primarily represent conventional farmers, but with explicitly environmental missions: self-professed “conservative capitalist” Farmers for Climate Action and the avowedly apolitical organisation Landcare. Noting efforts to help their members reduce emissions and sequester carbon, I engage in a political ecological analysis of the organisations’ neoliberal advocacy around natural capital, payments for ecosystem services, and environmental markets. I argue that their advocacy demonstrates the “self-defeating” (Rappel 2018) contradiction of advocating for the financialisation of nature to combat the consequences of commodifying nature, which meanwhile reinforces and reinscribes settler colonialism, undermining First Peoples’ relational ontologies and struggles for sovereignty. The final case study is the expressly anti-colonial, anti-capitalist small-scale farmers’ organisation, the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA), which posits a convivial approach to farming in a changing climate – namely agroecology. In order to illustrate the core capitalist versus convivial values, I have structured parts of the paper as a dialectic between examples of the organisations’ advocacy, on the one hand, and responses from the former vice president of AFSA, Randal Breen, an agroecology-oriented farmer (López-García and Carrascosa-García 2023) on Bundjalung Country in southern Queensland, on the other. I conclude with an analysis of the divergent discourses around Land, Country, and carbon, identifying hegemonic discourses of “climate capitalism” and counter-hegemonic convivial and decolonial ethics and practices of members of the food sovereignty and agroecology movements.

My analysis derives from a mixed methodology of ethnographic research, semi-structured interviews, and media analysis informed by political ecology and social theory. Ultimately, I seek to understand how farmers and our organisations can articulate and manifest a theory of change robust enough for the radical transformation needed. In providing a critique of organisations working to support farmers and Aboriginal Peoples through these challenging times, I have followed scholar-activist Jun Borras (2023, 20) and taken what I hope is a “half full approach,” so that my analysis can “contribute to enhancing and improving the movement or project” and compel more farmers and our organisations towards convivial rather than capitalist agriculture, to embrace the politics as well as the practices of agroecology (Alcántara 2023; Bless, Davila, and Plant 2023; Tittonell et al. 2022).

Neoliberal Governance of Climate Change and the Rise of Natural Capital

For much of the 20th century, the Australian government supported farmers through trade regulation (Eversole 2015, 48); however, the 1970s onwards saw Australia embark on one of the largest privatisation programmes in the world. Today Australian farmers are the least subsidised in the OECD along with neighbouring Aotearoa / New Zealand (Iles 2021). Successive Australian governments have claimed to support the industry through market liberalisation, pro-competitive reforms, and a heavy focus on exports (Richards, Kjærnes, and Vik 2016 , 65), and today, 72 percent of what is produced in Australia is destined for foreign shores (ABARES 2021). Yet, the mantra that Australia is “feeding the world” belies the reality that Australian exports are directed not to countries suffering widespread food insecurity, but rather the “highest value markets in developed economies and to the middle classes in developing countries” (Muir 2014, 5).

In the early 2000s, as concerns about climate change grew, political debate was polarised, with conservative politicians and high-emitting industry groups – including some agriculture peak bodies – questioning the scientific evidence for climate change and arguing that the economic costs of reducing emissions would be too high. In 2007, the newly elected Labor government introduced a carbon pricing scheme, which the conservative opposition (the Coalition²) dubbed “a great big tax on everything” (Butler 2017). The carbon tax was repealed by the Coalition when it returned to power in 2014.

A 2022 change of federal government back to Labor brought greater political will for tangible action on climate change, including a commitment to a stronger (but still low by global standards) emissions reduction target of 43 percent by 2030. Yet, the Australia Institute (2022b, 6) submitted that: “Currently it is unclear on the extent to which the current 43% emission reduction modelling relies on ACCUs [Australian Carbon Credit Units], and this is a major concern.” The requirement to purchase offsets is, in theory, meant to provide incentives for new practices and technology that would avoid or store carbon, but, in fact, credits are too cheap, and renewable energy investment has halved since 2018, while offset purchases have doubled (TAI 2023). ACCUs are granted to mostly land-based projects for abatement or avoidance activities, and most credits are for vegetation management. Twenty percent of those are for “avoided clearing,” which have been found to be largely non-additional (TAI & ACF 2021). That is, landholders were unlikely in any case to have cut down the trees they were granted carbon credits for retaining, leading to no additional carbon sequestration due to the credits. In 2022, the former head of the Emissions Reduction Assurance Committee Professor Andrew Macintosh, called the ACCU market “largely a sham,” asserting that 70–80 percent of ACCUs are not additional or not even real (Morton 2022).

The risk highlighted is that the Safeguard Mechanism, which requires Australia’s largest greenhouse gas emitters to keep their net emissions below a specified limit, has been designed in such a way as to increase demand for carbon credits, likely resulting in an increase in emissions. To date, emissions are not going down, and Australia still subsidises the fossil fuel industry to the tune of $11.6 billion (TAI 2022a ). On a more positive note, during the drafting of this paper, the Labor Government, supported by the Greens, passed an amendment that for the first time puts a hard cap on polluters’ total emissions (Crowley 2023). Share prices for all the major coal and gas companies declined immediately. The control appears to be Australia’s first potentially effective barrier to new coal and gas developments (Jericho and Denniss 2023).

However, the problems of carbon credits go deeper. Climate Active is the government-backed carbon-neutral accreditation scheme for businesses, which claims to have one of the “most rigorous” certifications in the world. Under Climate Active, National Australia Bank (NAB) and Cooper Energy are both certified carbon neutral; yet, NAB invests heavily in fossil fuels, and Cooper Energy is a gas exploration and development company. A 2021 Market Forces report found that the “lifetime fossil fuel expansions funded by NAB equate to 7 times Australia’s annual carbon footprint.” Like NAB, Cooper Energy’s calculated emissions under Climate Active certification do not include scope three emissions (those beyond their control), which in Cooper’s example include the end-use burning of their gas on the east coast of Australia (Kilvert 2023). Further, 80 percent of Australian gas is exported and burned in overseas markets and is not counted at all in companies’ emissions reporting (TAI 2022a) . At this point, omitting such relational geographies is no longer methodologically acceptable (Bergmann 2013).

Climate Capitalism’s New Commodities

Hard wired into capitalism is the profit motive, which requires constant increases in production, and the selling of its products based on exchange values that are often divorced from both the value of their use and from the real social, ecological and financial costs of production. Capitalist agriculture produces Marx and Engels’ concept of the “metabolic rift” (Foster 1999), referring to the flawed and fractured relations of capital to labour, and capital to soil. The separation of food production and food consumption systematically disrupts the nutrient cycle, pumping fertility from the countryside to become a manufactured “waste problem” in sewage ponds in cities (Saito 2022) full of workers alienated from land.

The neoliberal green economy encourages the abstraction of carbon and biodiversity, de-materialising nature in order to commodify and exchange it as fungible assets, creating a new market for capitalist agriculture, and reinscribing settler colonialism on Aboriginal lands and Peoples (Borras and Franco 2018; Yasin 2023) . Having over-exploited the nature needed to produce food and maintain a stable climate, colonial capitalist agriculture has made another “metabolic shift” (Moore 2017), and carbon farming is the new disaster capitalism, or “climate capitalism” (Newell and Paterson 2010). Carbon farming includes agricultural practices that sequester carbon or lower emissions, with a clear focus on maintaining or increasing profitability, largely achieved in Australia through selling credits in carbon markets (Tang et al. 2016). This de-territorialising of carbon and biodiversity deepens the metabolic rift, further alienating First Peoples and farmers from the very real carbon and species in their care. I propose that this is at the root of the “‘false consciousness’ – a false understanding of […] what specifically are the best means to realize some end” (Wright 2018, 130) – at the heart of the idea that carbon markets can save both farming and the climate. That is, while the damaging activities of extractive colonial capitalism are the root causes of climate change, the shift to the new frontier of carbon is touted as a form of climate action, obscuring the ongoing extractive cycle in which credits allow emitters to buy their way out of responsibility to future generations. The only winners here are mining companies, global finance, and the political class, while farmers and First Peoples continue to bear the escalating impacts of climate change on the land on which they rely for life and livelihood.

To illustrate the normative false consciousness around carbon markets, I will briefly examine AgForce Queensland, a conservative state body for conventional broadacre farmers, which has entered a Memorandum of Understanding with the Aboriginal Carbon Foundation (AbCF), an Indigenous-owned carbon market broker. The two organisations are unwittingly explicit about agriculture’s role in the metabolic rift in a co-authored piece in the Australian Farm Institute’s policy journal (Guerin and Foley 2019, 6):

For almost two centuries, the extraction of nutrients from the land to produce primary commodities has provided producers with inadequate financial surplus to replenish those nutrients. The decline in agricultural land condition has been strongly influenced by the cost-price squeeze.

That is, many decades of extractive agricultural practices that long ago broke the nutrient cycle have not proven profitable enough, so “let them eat carbon!” The discourse of commodity carbon and natural capital accounting has become commonplace amongst universities (Harris and Smith 2019), farmers’ organisations, and carbon market brokers such as the AbCF, the latter offering that “Carbon farming adheres to the same principles of supply and demand found in all agribusiness, however, the commodity produced are carbon credits.” Fairhead, Leach, and Scoones (2012, 242) have described this as a growth “economy of repair” in which “Nature serves both – and thus acquires value; some would say its ‘true’, full value.”

To deal with the rift, AgForce and AbCF (Guerin and Foley 2019, 7) assert that humanity will need capital’s well-rehearsed metabolic shift:

society continues to cling to a narrow, historical view of what agriculture is – growing things. Society, government and, indeed, our own industry, will need to “think outside the box” when it comes to the way agriculture is “defined” if the natural capital model is to work. Reducing emissions from agricultural industry and increasing the management and storage of carbon in agricultural lands requires a paradigm shift in societal attitude; from farms being regarded solely as producers of commodities, to being providers of numerous interdependent ecosystem services. Food and fibre production is only one of these ecosystem services.

While Guerin and Foley concede farmers have a role in reproducing nature in more sustainable ways, instead of acknowledging that role as stewards of the inherent value of nature and the use-value of ecosystem function, their framing is strongly geared towards “ecosystem services” to ensure capital’s valorisation is possible through exchange value.

The AbCF website further explains how it is only by placing financial value on nature that society can prioritise its health:

In its broadest definition, “natural capital” describes the entirety of a landscape’s natural assets, the symbiosis of animal, vegetable and mineral that makes life possible. Within the framework of this philosophy, a commercial value can be placed on all parts of our landscape based on the economic, social or environmental outcomes they offer, allowing society to prioritise its desired outcomes.

According to Marx and Engels (1988), labour mediates human relations with nature, which capitalism fundamentally disrupts through mechanisation, wage labour, de-ruralisation, and proletarianisation, as well as breaking the “law of replenishment.” Transforming carbon into a commodity deepens the rift, as farmers are financially rewarded for trading intangible elements in soil and trees. The reward is without a direct relation to farm labour (Fairhead, Leach, and Scoones 2012), nor to the purchasers of the carbon credits, though for commodity farmers, disconnection downstream has long been the norm. What is worse is that the buyers of carbon credits are the biggest emitters in Australia, predominantly coal and gas companies. This betrays even the tendentious relationship farmers may have with their sequestered carbon, as the sale justifies continued high emissions in direct contradiction to the farmers’ ecological values. This way, farmers directly support global level destruction beyond their own local agricultural contributions. The self-defeating nature of participation in carbon markets is even more profound when the sellers are Indigenous Peoples, underscoring the ongoing violence of colonialism to Aboriginal lands, culture and cosmologies that determine such survival strategies. Carbon markets have been extensively criticised and denounced by Indigenous communities and food sovereignty organisations globally (FOEI et al. 2021; GRAIN 2022; IITC 2021; LVC, et al. 2013; Tiohtiá:ke Declaration. 2005; WFF 2021).

In addition to the ongoing problem of elites designing new modes of accumulation – carbon farming catalyses new rounds of land grabbing – the short or “land” carbon cycle expressed in ecosystems cannot sequester the amount being emitted by the “long carbon cycle” whereby fossil fuels are extracted from millions of years of sequestration at a rate well beyond what the land cycle can possibly sequester (Carbon Brief 2021; Stabinsky 2020). To reiterate, commodifying carbon (and biodiversity) in environmental markets is yet another shift that deepens the metabolic rift. Commodifying carbon actively undermines efforts to reduce emissions and props up hegemonic power structures that slow down the urgent social, economic, and ecological transformations needed.

Convivial Responses to Climate Change

In contrast to capitalism, the notion of conviviality derives from – “con” (with) and “vivire” (living) – a “living with.” Büscher and Fletcher (2020, 9) critique the financialisation of nature, while developing the concept of “convivial conservation” in a way that illustrates the problem of the universalising tendencies of capital seen in environmental markets:

“Money” – the universal equivalent that is supposedly the tool to make nature “visible” under capitalism – only renders nature visible on spreadsheets and through necessarily simplistic, technocratic decision-making models outside of relevant contexts. This renders nature unidimensional – solely what it is worth to humans-as-investors.

There is a global movement of smallholders represented by La Vía Campesina, which includes the farmer members of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA), that advocates a convivial agriculture, agroecology, that rejects western dualisms and does not consider humans as separate from nature. In their recent article on agroecology as a decolonial project, Cubillos, Quintero, and Perea (2022, 13–14) write:

Agroecology can be understood as a lifestyle that conceives agriculture as the biological basis that allows us to maintain, inhabit, take care of, coexist and inter-exist with all other natural subjects.

Agroecology advocates a post-capitalist future that references the pre-capitalist past, where needs are met without exploiting people or mistreating animals, and without exceeding planetary boundaries (Grey and Patel 2015; Meek 2014; Rosset and Altieri 2017). Degrowth advocates and actors articulate this as a vision of frugal abundance that provides radical sufficiency for all. Wright (2018, 10) puts it in terms of intergenerational justice, asserting, “Future generations should have access to the social and material means to live flourishing lives at least at the same level as the present generation.”

A convivial response to climate change viscerally acknowledges the visibility, tangibility and importance of non-human nature, and makes visible capitalism’s destructive forces by rejecting its dualistic extractive logic (Cubillos, Quintero, and Perea 2022). Agroecology is a convivial form of agriculture, what Gamilaraay man and native grasses expert Jacob Birch prefers to call “reciprocal agriculture” (James 2023), as it puts people and communities back into right relations with Country.

Farmers and Their Organisations: Identity, Interests, Values

In Australia and much of the Global North, debates around agriculture and climate policy largely centre carbon markets as key solutions, a position I parse further in surveying two environment-focused farmers’ organisations that advocate natural capital approaches, one while simultaneously critiquing emitters that benefit from carbon offsets. Using capitalist tools to resolve the crises of capitalism is misguided, at best, and escalates the crises at worst (McAfee 2016; Rappel 2018; Stabinsky 2020; Tiohtiá:ke Declaration. 2005).

In thinking about Australian farmers and their organisations, it is useful to consider their prevailing identities, interests, and values (Wright 2018). Here I pay particular attention to livestock farmers, who are some of the most vocal in discussions around carbon sequestration. This is perhaps for obvious reasons given the promise of holistic grazing and tree planting to draw down carbon when compared with annual cropping systems, and also because of the role of livestock themselves in emissions. I focus on two distinct but overlapping identities of livestock farmers: broadacre cattle and sheep graziers increasingly aligned with regenerative agriculture, and small-scale livestock farmers who typically raise more than one species, which often include pigs or poultry, increasingly aligned with agroecology.

The majority of broadacre cattle and sheep graziers in Australia are multi-generational farmers, with average property sizes of 4331 hectares (ABS 2017), who, broadly speaking, identify as people of the land working to “feed the world.” Neoliberalism has deeply infiltrated Australian cultural values, with the hegemony of market logic and valorisation of productivism and exports normalised and entrenched. Nearly all broadacre farmers’ interests are in commodity and export markets, as structurally determined by their size and volume of production.

In contrast, most small-scale livestock farmers are first generation on less than 50 hectares (Acil Allen 2018) whose identities stem more from a desire to “save the world” than “feed the (whole) world.” The choice by many to farm pigs or poultry is a counter-hegemonic move to de-commodify the most commodified livestock in the food system, with strong values of animal welfare and localisation tying them to interests in access to and control of local processing infrastructure and markets.

I now turn to a more concrete comparison. I first look at Landcare and Farmers for Climate Action (FCA), farmers’ organisations with environmental missions but neoliberal values. I then turn to the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA), which was established on principles beyond environmentalism, including values of conviviality and an explicitly anti-capitalist mission, principles which have been constantly strengthened and deepened by nearly a decade of participation in the global food sovereignty movement led by La Vía Campesina and the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (IPC).

Case Studies: Capitalism v. Conviviality

Landcare Australia

Landcare is a 33-year-old Australia-wide network of community groups whose website describes it as “born from a collaborative approach towards sustainable agriculture and natural resource management.” Concentrating on addressing the consequences of capitalist agriculture, including soil erosion, salinification, and widespread tree loss, grassroots groups in Australia were established as early as the 1970s. Landcare was formally launched as a national movement by former Prime Minister Bob Hawke in 1989. While the organisation has a good reputation for supporting activities such as tree planting, fencing off sensitive areas, and weed and rubbish removal, its focus on sustainable agriculture beyond shelterbelts has been marginal for most groups (DAWE 2022).

According to Iles (2021, 25), Landcare’s origin story

itself was a case of neoliberal governance: the Hawke/Keating government saw Landcare as a means to devolve environmental care to communities and volunteers, a view that subsequent governments upheld. Landcare was somewhat narrowly focused on land degradation, tied to productivism, and did not emphasize ecological farming methods.

Landcare suffered a sharp decline in government funding under the Coalition (DAWE 2022) and has increasingly targeted corporate partnerships to make up the shortfall, which now constitutes nearly 25 percent of funding. Its website explains that it has recently “re-entered” the carbon market to deliver Landcare CarbonSmart,

which will provide corporate Australia with Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs), sourced from carefully-selected projects delivering outstanding ecological co-benefits, in partnership with leading nature-based carbon project developer, GreenCollar.

According to GreenCollar’s website, “Credits are generated from avoiding clearing of native vegetation or regrowth of native vegetation in regional Australia.” The website hosts several videos showing farmers walking through sparsely treed paddocks and talking about how carbon credits have enabled them to “leave the trees growing,” one noting, however, that “through the project, if it’s too thick, you’re allowed to sort of thin out a bit.”

I invited AFSA vice president Randal Breen to view one of the “avoided clearing” videos before our interview. He responded with disbelief (personal communication 2022):

It reeks of a pyramid scheme. It’s like the trees didn’t exist until they were put on a list. Weren’t they already sequestering carbon before they were on the list? How has anything got better? At no level from the farmer to the person buying the credits has there been any behavioural change.

Landcare is not only using carbon markets to bolster funding. Among the many corporate partnerships listed on its website is: one with global agrichemical input giant Syngenta. Syngenta is a formerly Swiss-owned company bought by the Chinese government in 2017, which is now the world’s largest agrichemical input firm. With the global push to reduce pesticide and fertiliser use, recently codified in Target 7 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, Syngenta’s business model is adapting. As Mao Feng, chief brand manager for Syngenta Group’s digital agriculture platform, explains (Patton 2021):

Before, we sold pesticides, seeds and fertiliser. Now we’re a farm services company – we sell service and technology … selling individual products, we had hit the ceiling, there was no more room.

While Syngenta may be helping fund Landcare’s programmes (meeting its interests), a partnership on biodiversity projects with a global agrichemical and biotech company represents a clash of values. It is contradictory and self-defeating, given Landcare’s concern for conservation and natural resource management. Between Syngenta’s control of a shrinking genetic pool of industrial seed and the devastating impacts of its agrichemicals on biodiversity, any partnership with Syngenta, but especially for biodiversity protection, is either extremely naïve or deeply cynical.

Farmers for Climate Action

According to its website, the mission of the eight-year-old lobby group Farmers for Climate Action (FCA) is “to influence Australia to adopt strong economy-wide climate policies and realise a prosperous and sustainable future, full of opportunity for farmers and farming communities.” Its former CEO Verity Morgan-Schmidt asked, “Who better than capitalist conservative farmers to push the government on climate change?” (Nunn 2019). FCA has provided a space and a voice for farmers who do not identify with the trenchant positions of the ultra-conservative National Party, which only recently accepted the science on human-induced climate change and supported Coalition policies towards net zero. FCA’s website offers a range of resources to help farmers take climate action, including information on renewable energy, storing carbon, reducing emissions, regenerative agriculture, water management, and managing climate risks on the farm.

An advocate for payments for ecosystem services, FCA has been calling for a national farm biodiversity scheme, which the government announced in August 2022. According to CEO Fiona Davis:

Paying farmers for the biodiversity in their remnant forest has the potential to greatly reduce Australia’s emissions by reducing land clearing. If a farmer is making money from the remnant forest on their land they will be less likely to clear it. This approach uses a carrot, not a stick, and will protect vital habitat for our birds, reptiles and animals.

Fundamental to FCA’s advocacy is the creation of “opportunities,” usually by placing a financial value on nature that it proposes should directly benefit landholders (meeting their interests). As with AgForce, the AbCF, and Landcare, the argument is explicit on realising nature’s financial value in order to conserve it.

When asked “if we were to agree that farmers should be financially compensated to sequester carbon, where should the money come from?” AFSA vice president Randal replied:

It has to be a redistribution of wealth – it has to come from the biggest polluters. You can’t buy offsets, you have to pay for your poor behaviour.

However, FCA has been critical of polluters’ capacity to offset rather than reduce emissions, and welcomed a recent government review of the integrity of carbon offsets, declaring on its website:

Carbon offsets are a huge opportunity for farmers to diversify into drought-resistant income whilst increasing farm productivity. It’s also important to remember the main game is to reduce carbon emissions at the source to drive deep emissions reductions this decade and protect our farming families.

This contradictory statement reflects the “false consciousness” that carbon markets can save farmers and the climate at the same time, blind to its inherent contradiction.

Without offering an economic analysis of the root causes of climate change – of which colonial capitalism is central – many of the solutions proposed by FCA actually deepen the crisis. Its proposed solutions are not aligned with its environmental values, and serve to reify capitalism as meeting the organisations’ interests (commodity markets), and economic and political values (neoliberal capitalism). To understand how non-transformative and imbued with capitalist ideology some of FCA’s initiatives are, their Climate Smart Agriculture Scholarships are instructive. “Climate smart agriculture,” (the framing preferred by FCA rather than the potentially divisive “regenerative agriculture”), “has a strong focus on technologies, policies and financing” (HLPE 2019), so it is an apt framework for a “capitalist conservative” organisation in that it avoids the political and economic critiques of capitalist agriculture. The scholarships cover carbon accounting on farm; an “Accounting for Nature” workshop, which promises to help farmers “get a foot up in the growing ecosystem services market”; an agriculture and climate change course delivered by the ANU; media and advocacy training; and regular virtual catch-ups with fellow farmer-scholars. Most aspects of the scholarships bake in the logic of capitalism further, with “experts” teaching the farmers “how to account for nature” so that they can realise the benefits financially and succeed in “the growing ecosystems market.” While the agriculture and climate change course seems more aligned with the mission to tackle climate change, nowhere in the course description is there a sense of place or farmers’ lived relationships with Country. Conviviality is absent. While there is opportunity for horizontal knowledge sharing in the “virtual catch-ups” with other farmers, if the topics are framed around natural capital, then the entire project simply contributes to the new frontier of value creation and colonial capitalist accumulation without addressing practical or policy measures to reduce emissions, or healing relations with Country and First Peoples. It therefore actively undermines the epistemic shift taking place and growing – especially in the Global South and within Indigenous/BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and other People of Colour) communities (Wittman 2009) . The result is to dodge the opportunity for a “dialogue of knowledges” central to agroecology (Cubillos, Quintero, and Perea 2022), in which farmers and Original Custodians speak and learn together from emplaced knowledge, skills, and belonging in addition to Western science.

Farmers for Climate Action advocates and provides support for farmers to take action on the ground. It is critical of offsetting, asserting that major polluters should be required to reduce emissions at the source. Yet, if polluters are the only ones paying, FCA will take the money and soften the critique, its members wittingly or not reinforcing colonial and productivist processes and structures. Its neoliberal values keep it from advocating for stronger regulation of emissions or government subsidies for sustainable farming practices. So long as the Safeguard Mechanism allows polluters to offset 100 percent of their emissions, being paid in credits directly supports continued high emissions, which is “self-defeating” indeed.

Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance: Reformists and Radicals

Finally, as an example of an organisation aiming to enact a more convivial approach to the challenges of climate change, I will turn to the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA). AFSA has a focus on supporting grassroots efforts of small-scale farmers towards an agroecological transition, and its website expounds its anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, pro-solidarity and convivial theory of change about how to achieve it, while acknowledging the challenges of doing so while holding title on unceded Aboriginal land. AFSA was founded in 2012 around the Peoples’ Food Plan, drafted democratically in response to the then-federal government’s proposed (and later abandoned) National Food Plan. Over a decade, AFSA has established several programmes of work to achieve the radical transformation of food and agriculture systems sought by the global food sovereignty movement, inclusive of a range of explicitly anti-colonial and anti-capitalist activities. At the reformist end of the spectrum, AFSA provides legal research and support for members dealing with scale-inappropriate land-use legislation and food safety regulation, as well as research and advocacy for the protection of First Peoples’ Country, Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), and genetic resources. AFSA has developed land-sharing resources to enable a flourishing of young and emerging small-scale farmers in the face of increasing land prices – under the mantle of Farming on Other Peoples’ Land (FOOPL), an acknowledgement that all non-indigenous Australians are farming on Aboriginal Land. FOOPL encourages landholders to embrace land back,³ land sharing, and/or land access for First Peoples, as well as landless farmers, and for all non-indigenous Australians to “pay the rent” to the Original Custodians of land they inhabit. Out of a synergy between the legal advocacy and FOOPL has arisen a project to establish an agrarian trust, with decolonial aims to improve land tenure for First Peoples and smallholders in non-capitalist agreements. There is also a nascent agroecology action research network connecting scholars to farmers and supporting farmer-to-farmer agroecology dialogues, with an explicit aim to strengthen the discourse, practice and politics of agroecology in Australia. Underpinning all of its projects is the continual development of a “First Peoples First” strategy to deepen and strengthen AFSA’s commitment to decolonial praxis. AFSA’s member engagement has informed its policy reform advocacy, as the organisation’s theory of change is aligned with Wright’s (2018) concept of “eroding capitalism” through targeted measures for building grassroots “emancipatory alternatives” and dealing with the “problem of the state” as collective actors.

In 2022–2023, AFSA undertook the first major update of the Peoples’ Food Plan, incorporating a decade of policy development in response to over 50 government inquiries and reviews, as well as the diverse views of its members from across Australia. The draft calls for taxation on emissions from industrial agriculture and mining and rejects plantations as carbon sinks due to their poor biodiversity values and impermanence. AFSA does not advocate payments for ecosystem services, because the organisation’s convivial values recognise nature’s intrinsic value, rather than its financial worth.

However, where FCA’s leadership is possibly less radical than some of its members, the AFSA National Committee finds itself in a continual dialogue to bring its members along to a more radical position. Similar to Calvário’s (2017) findings in her examination of the smallholder organisation EHNE-Bizkaia in the Basque territory, AFSA’s farmer members are under pressure from the economic and political context in which they farm. Many work off-farm to ensure their farm’s economic viability, and the stress of precarious access to abattoirs, butchers, markets, and in some cases, land, in part explains why some find it difficult to become more politically active. Conversely, it is these structural barriers that politicise many AFSA members in the first place, and probably explains the high proportion of members who raise livestock, as the barriers to market gardening are much lower. So while AFSA members express convivial values, they are not inured to financial pressures and the need to reconcile their values with their need for viability. As one member said (anonymous, personal communication 2022):

I’d never sell a commodity carbon credit but I wonder if we can dream up a scheme where I can be paid to plant trees.

AFSA vice president Randal summed up his farm’s, and AFSA’s, values well at an Agroecology Dialogue in 2022, saying that he and his wife Juanita are “on the journey of building a relationship with Country, animals, everything, and the community we feed.” He elaborated his thoughts on the various “debts” farmers need to pay beyond the financial:

We have financial debt, but we also have ecological debt as farmers. That debt doesn’t get paid down for a while. We have species/animal debt – the chooks – one has a helluva debt because it’s had its traits stripped … and we have a community. Those debts are like children in a classroom, and one kid is really noisy, and that’s financial debt. And when that noisy financial debt is pushing for attention we need to send it to the back of the class, and tell it to wait. We need to think about our ecological, our animal (microbes, wildlife, livestock), and community debt. How do we pay down those debts first and then try to work out the noisy one. Because I think if we pay down those other ones, the financial one will sort itself out.

Conclusion: Agroecology as Convivial Resistance to Capitalism

The hegemony of colonial capitalism is so invisibly totalising it renders most of us “unable to see beyond our cognitive, moral and practical horizons” (Wagenaar and Prainsack 2021, 15). To illustrate, Australians see vast monocultures of grain and believe that this is what we need to eat. In fact, around two-thirds of Australian grain is exported (Grain Central 2022), and more than half is eaten by non-human animals or converted to biofuels. Australia is not feeding the world; it does not even manage to feed all Australians (with 15 percent of the population experiencing food insecurity in the past year) (McCrindle 2023). Instead, the Australian government allows “robbery agriculture” to sell Aboriginal water and land in the form of commodities to middle class societies overseas (Muir 2014), to the detriment of smallholders and local communities on all sides of all seas. Twenty-six percent of agricultural water in Australia – the driest continent on earth besides Antarctica – is used to grow cotton. Ninety-nine percent of it is exported for the profit of about 1500 cotton farmers; that is, by my calculations, 26 percent of Australian agricultural water undergirds the profits of .006 percent of the Australian population (ABARES 2021).

It does not have to be this way. From Brazil to Tanzania, and Sarawak to Palestine, peasants and local communities are defending their rights to territory, culture, and customary law against the exploitative and extractive incursions of capitalism. Spending time with food producers from the majority world through my work as a global food sovereignty activist and representative of smallholders in several UN fora has heavily influenced my utopian thinking, or what Levitas (2013, 5) calls “informed, educated hope.” As we say in La Vía Campesina, “Globalise the struggle, globalise hope!”:

The first, necessary, step in utopia as method is to transform our criticism of a particular state of affairs into a genuine estrangement or alienation with that particular situation. (Wagenaar and Prainsack 2021, 20)

At our farm on unceded Dja Dja Wurrung Country – djandak – we have been transforming our criticism into a conscious estrangement from the hegemony of capitalism for more than a decade, experiencing first-hand the ways that right relations with Country are supporting our right relations with each other (Graham 1999). This experience is mirrored in Alcántara’s (2023, 2) ethnography with peasants in Tlaxcala, Mexico, where she describes how “place-based foodways […] have been used to transmit belief systems and ways of life that resist dominant frameworks of power across time.” Choosing to feed our community rather than the shareholders of banks is one way we manifest our rejection of capitalism’s profiteering cycle of debt. We do this by raising funds through our community-supported agriculture (CSA) members and the broader community to build infrastructure on the farm – what van der Ploeg (2013) calls “patrimony” rather than capital – by exchanging the products of our labour for cash and building at the pace of our bank balance to avoid debt. We do this also by valuing labour over capital – doing more ourselves with less, and with old and recycled materials. We also share rent-free land with the young First Nations and settler farmers of Tumpinyeri Growers to light a beacon for agroecology in both concept and practice. Alienation – in this case from capitalist and colonial circuits – has never been so joyfully communal. Climate change and the ecological crisis, intertwined with entrenched social inequality, embody the failures of extractive colonial capitalism and neoliberal governance. Developing alternative modes of relating to the land has never been more urgent. In Australia, agroecological farmers such as Randal and those here on our farm are rejecting capitalist colonial logic and embracing a custodial ethic and its emancipatory alternatives, as we have been urged to do by many Indigenous leaders for decades (Graham 1999; RiverOfLife et al. 2020; Yunkaporta 2020). This entails collectivising to oppose capitalist agriculture and to deal with the problem of the state as farmers and as local and global activists.

The stakes are high, and whether we choose a capitalist or a convivial future is critical. I asked Randal whether he thinks there is an ethical way for farmers to sell carbon credits. He thinks “you can definitely sell carbon credits to your consumers through relationships. By them buying food directly off you, you are trading in carbon, when they invest in you, they invest in carbon sequestration.”

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Project scheme (project number DE200100595).

Notes

1 Glaskin (2012, 305) describes how in “Aboriginal cosmologies, Country is sentient, Country has agency. Country assumes the social form of persons.” “Caring for Country” is a common English-language vernacular that can encompass a spectrum of things, from the Aboriginal relational meaning of reciprocal obligations between First Peoples and Country – often described as Mother – to more quotidian environmentally sound practices on farms.

2 “The Coalition” is the formal alliance between the Liberal and National Parties – both conservative in orientation, constituted historically from an urban and rural base respectively – by which conservative governments are formed in Australia.

3 Land back is a decentralised movement originating in North America that asserts Indigenous sovereignty over Indigenous lands, more recently taken up in what is now called Australia by organisations such as https://thelandback.org/, and supported by some non-indigenous allies such as AFSA.