Panel III: LAND MATTERS
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
10:29
Planet Matters. I am moderating the panel Land Matters in my function as the co-curator of the exhibition, Land for us all, that was shown here at the
10:41
Achete Du Tzentrum Wien from December 2020 to July 2021 and co-author of the publication with the same name. We looked at the topic of the escalating consumption of land both in the quantitative and qualitative way
11:01
with the viewpoints of architecture and planning. We had a strong focus on Austria and examined and tried to explain the historically grown mechanisms that lead to the spiraling destruction of land, be they related to the tax system, the planning system, or to economic imbalances. We looked at the
11:25
possible changes to the established systems, sometimes quite small changes, that could turn the development around and we also looked at international examples of projects that are beginning to do just that and could act as
11:40
catalysts for change. It is still possible to see a small excerpt of Land for us all featured in the exhibition Climate Care, part of the Vienna Biennale for Change at the MAC. Today's panel, Land Matters, was curated in collaboration with Bettina Leidl, director at the Kunsthaus Wien,
12:03
as well as Verena Kasper-Eisert, curator at the Kunsthaus Wien. There, presently, the fantastic exhibition Landscape Painting of the artist Ines Duyak is being shown and that deals with related subjects such as the
12:21
classification and naming of plants shaped by colonization as well as past and present acts of land-grabbing. In the Land Matters panel, we want to explore the land issue in the context of the climate crisis, food security, international politics, and colonialism. We will hear three lectures
12:43
covering the spectrum from an international research platform on agricultural land-grabbing to a photographic documentary on the company Monsanto to an exhibition showing strong artistic positions on soil, plants,
13:00
agriculture, and past as well as neo-colonial tendencies in relation to them. The panel's participants are an art historian and curator, an artist, and an environmentalist. For the discussion, we will be joined by an economist and me as an architect and curator will chair the panel. And apart
13:25
from being a challenge for me as a chair, I hope that this multidisciplinary discussion will bring us forward in trying to answer the following questions. How can science, art, and activism together increase awareness of
13:42
the significant value of the finite resource of land and soil on the world's environmental and social balance? What is the role that land and our handling of it play in safeguarding a climate-friendly future? How can we unmask neo-colonial tendencies in relation to land, land
14:04
ownership, and agriculture? Let us try with this discussion to achieve a cross-pollination between the disciplines, different disciplines that are all caring for soil. I will now invite the first speaker to the podium
14:22
who will join us online from Berlin. She should be here in a moment. Hello,
14:43
Elena, can you hear us? Yes, I can. Should I turn the camera on? Yes, please, you can turn the camera on. Thank you. Hi, you're welcome. Hello, good afternoon. Thank you. So, you already introduced me? No, not yet. I will introduce you now. I just
15:01
introduced the general panel. So, I will introduce you as our first speaker. This is Elena Aguido. This is Elena Aguido. She's a Berlin-based art historian and curator. She studied art history at the University of Venice,
15:20
Carfoscari, and in 2010, she received a PhD in contemporary art and design. Since 2013, she has been artistic co-director of Savvy Contemporary, the Laboratory of Form Ideas, which is an arts-based base in Berlin.
15:40
There, she curates and co-curates exhibitions, discursive programs, and series. She's also artistic director of the non-profit Association of Neuroaesthetics Platform for Art and Neuroscience, which is a project in collaboration with the Medical University Charité and the School of
16:01
Mind and Brain of the Humboldt University, encouraging both a dialogue and lasting cooperation between contemporary art and the cognitive sciences. Since 2017, she has been teaching at the Weissensee School of Art in Berlin. She had a guest professorship at the Kunsthofschule Verbilden de Kunst in Hamburg, and
16:24
was a resident fellow at Helsinki University of the Arts. Today, she will talk about the exhibition Soil as an Inscribed Body on sovereignty and agro-poetics, which she curated together with Marlene Boschen for Savvy Contemporary in 2019. Thanks for joining us. Feel free to share your screen if
16:45
you have a presentation, and we are very much looking forward to hearing about the project. Okay, thank you so much for this quite formal introduction. You're seeing the screen? Yes, we're seeing it. But maybe you're viewing it, Aspetta, on a slide show, like that. Yes, perfect.
17:09
Great, so it's also nice that you're seeing me smaller, so I don't feel too stressed about a huge image of me on a big screen. So, good afternoon. Thank
17:22
you for the introduction. I'm very happy to join this important conference, even if sadly just from Berlin, remotely. At least I have to say the carbon footprint that I'm producing is not too invasive and makes me feel not too bad about that. Also, the fact that I'm engaging in a
17:45
conversation with you from Berlin allows me not to delegate my care work as a mother to someone else, and I think at the end I'm making sense of it. I'm sad that I can't be with you, but this economy of energies is probably
18:00
not the worst thing. So, as it was mentioned, my name is Elena Agudio, I'm an art historian, I'm a curator, and since 2013 I am a co-artistic director of the independent art space Sabi Contemporary, a space founded
18:21
and directed by Bonaventur Ndikung since 2009 when it was founded. Before getting into the exhibition, the project on agri-poetics, I would like to make a short introduction about my curatorial practice. So, central to my
18:43
practice as curator is the important operation of questioning the role of the curatorial and of doing it from the porous space of the within and the outside. So, from inside the institution and the museum, because Sabi is somehow
19:03
a para-institutional, it's not institutional but it is institutional, and this possibility also to be anti, and anti as Fred Moten and Stefano Harney are talking about, it's for me an interesting space that allows us to go beyond sterile
19:24
exercises of institutional critique, and instead of really challenging the infrastructures and cracking with them. I work as an independent curator, or better said, to use a phrase that some colleagues of mine are using, and in
19:42
particular I want to mention Natasha Petris in Bacchylus, that you might know. I'm an interdependent curator. I'm especially active at Sabi, a space that is not representing the institution, as I was saying, but there is
20:00
interesting in cracking with dominant epistemologies and power structures. And I would like to say also that is interested in putting care and repair at the centre of our practice. In fact, care is maybe something that comes
20:23
also about when talking about this project on agri-poetic, and also a practice that puts listening at the centre, listening to be able to then curate in a polyphonic, choral way that is based on simple uses and making with,
20:43
rather than out of poiesis and self-making. I have to say this is always the way in which I curate, but in particular for this project I really think that this aggregation of subjectivities came together as the
21:03
one in a choral polyphonic form in a quite beautiful way. So many other projects that allowed me to navigate this space of repair, and the project that brought me to question the way in which we curators, the artwork,
21:23
are complicit with this system of extraction that we all try to challenge, at least in our theory, but also that is questioning the way we are working together, the way we are thinking infrastructurally, to analyse the way we perform our labour
21:42
and the kind of institution that we want to become and to enact. One that puts care work at the centre and sees it as its main commons. One that counter the imperatives of late capitalism and neoliberal progress-driven modes of living and thinking, and actually
22:04
takes enabled accountability instead, and that thinks about institutional ethics, teamwork methods, internal diversity politics, for repeatedly redefining who the institution intends to address.
22:21
So, yes, this was actually an image to talk about this conviviality, the way in which we work, and you can see some colleagues there. Strangely, in this photo they are all men, but I can tell you we are more women. So, yes, Sorry is an Inscribed Body on sovereignty
22:41
and agri-poetics was the title of this exhibition I've been invited to talk about. in this conference. And I would like to say that this, as I mentioned, is one of these projects that allowed us to really focus on questions of repair, because the fundamental considerations
23:07
that we did on the soil, on land, as the witness and subjects of man-made erosion, depletion, destruction, also allowed us to think about possibilities
23:23
of regeneration of collective care. So, I'm leaving just images on the background that are probably, yes, opening up to other poetic spaces, and this, for example, is a poem, like two lines of
23:45
a poem by Amilcar Cabral. I'm going to explain you why Amilcar Cabral is crucial to this project, but it starts saying, the land now, it is the storm be calmed. So, soil was and remains
24:03
a space of struggle and conflict. Globally, the devastation of landscapes, consumption and exhaustion of natural resources, vanishing of species and ecosystems, the proliferation of wars and cultural genocides have left their marks on the land, in the soil for centuries.
24:29
But yet, local communities across geographies and spaces have been and are experimented with forms of collectivization and autonomy as rejections of the capitalist and colonial model
24:45
of agriculture. Most of the discourses around the violence of the anthropogenic land use that raised in the past decades, all the discussions also about the Anthropocene,
25:01
actually failed a bit or did not take into account to match the deep interconnections of patriarchal, racial and neo-colonial patterns of extraction and destruction of life worlds. So, the project I'm going to show you materialized with a series of readings, workshops, with an
25:29
exhibition and also finally with a publication that I actually invite you to download because it's open access. You can find it on our website and also on the website of TIR that
25:45
co-produced this reader with us. So, with the project, we were really asking, can we read some of the current experiments that merge a grand tradition of self-sufficiency,
26:05
contemporary art and ecological practices as heuristic systems of knowledge production and sharing? Again, we were asking, what does a decolonial more than human sensitivity challenge
26:20
and make possible when bringing together practices of cultivation and liberation? And I would like to insist really on this relationship between cultivation and struggle for liberation. So, the project focused on both anti-colonial and the historical anti-colonial
26:43
and the current anti-extractivist struggles and resistance against the agribusiness. It took you from the figure of Amilcar Cabral, I was reading you before these two lines of his poem, and its double agency as an agronomist and as a liberation fighter in
27:05
Guinea-Bissau. I don't know if you're familiar with the figure, but we actually worked around the figure of Cabral together with Felipe César, and you're seeing in this image that I'm showing the installation she did at Zavi, and bringing to the fore this reflection that she did
27:28
on what she called the agri-poetics of liberation that Cabral did to reflect on how political theory has been and can be informed and subverted by agricultural practice.
27:47
We actually then contextualized it in the present, we were thinking also about what was happening in those months in Sudan and with the ideas of reforming agriculture and how
28:02
often a revolution starts from the land and from the soil exactly. But just to make a little parenthesis on Cabral for the ones that are not informed about his life and figure, Cabral is most known as the leader and the secretary general of the African party for
28:25
the independence of Guinea and Cape Verde, Cabo Verde islands, and he was assassinated by the Portuguese agents in 1973. What was central to this exhibition was actually reading
28:44
Cabral's practice as an agronomist that was working initially for the Portuguese academy and a scientific apparatus as a strategy, of course a resistance and subversive strategy,
29:01
that then germinated in a political formation and militancy, and to quote him really with his words, to advance the liberation struggle from inside using colonial resources to inform and strengthen the liberation movement. So in some way using the master's tools to destroy
29:25
the master's house. What you're seeing in this, maybe here it was more easy to see, what you're seeing in this image is exactly this understanding of the struggle as a
29:40
centrifugal movement that starts from within and then expands and it's a completely, yeah it's a military strategy but also an agricultural one. So by engaging with this work
30:03
we asked how Cabral studies writing and fights and reflection on the epistemology of the soil can enlighten the current struggles against monoculture, land grabbing, and neo-colonial
30:21
extraction across the globe. Of course it's not that we had answers, we were posing mainly question and complicating the issue by listening to the many, many, many
30:41
perspectives that we invited to join and polyvocally, as I mentioned, bringing it into a chorus. So for that I would like to show a couple of images that are accompanying
31:01
you through the exhibition that we installed and guide you through the narrative that we built. So with the project we reflected on the possibility of care and solidarity, especially that feminist practices and communities have been and are experimenting nowadays.
31:26
As Maria Puig de la Bella Casa suggests, against less ecological and uncritical modes we seek to engage with reflection about the disruptive phase of care,
31:40
reconsidering anthropogenic notions of care and understanding the fundamental collaboration of many agents, and agents it means not just humans, and communities as the real living web of care circulating in and constituting the natural work. Our project on agri-poetics
32:02
engaged not only with the question of sovereignty and land rights and with the concept of agri-poetics but also with some of the fundamental threats and preoccupation of some feminist colonial researches, namely the possibility of challenging the presumed
32:20
universality of the scientific discourse and problematizing and undoing its racist patriarchal western-centered and individualistic agenda and infrastructure to then unravel disruptive narratives on forms of care and community engagement.
32:41
Thinking agri-poetically became in fact in some way an opportunity of manifesting healing and repair in the face of environmental patriarchal violence and as a possibility of weaponizing agriculture. Soil as the earth's vulnerable skin,
33:04
so as a skin of the earth, in fact is holding a geo-trauma, is carrying the trauma of all the devastation that it lived, but is also pointing to the possibility of collective care,
33:24
healing and living. Talking about soil epistemologies makes urgent and impossible not to take into account movements for social change. When dealing with care, when agricultural, whether agricultural or curatorial, one needs to be sensitive to how
33:46
this is embedded in the control of knowledges that which can be said, done and the way in which it is said and done. Maria Puert de la Bella Casa suggests that, and I quote, scientific knowledge about soil is not just used but may well be produced by movements
34:08
for social change in a quest to transform ecological relationship between different beings sharing the earth. It's this planetary habitability of which people like Achille Mbembe
34:23
are talking about too, no? So what does a decolonial more than human sensitivity challenge and make possible when bringing together practices of cultivation and liberation? In the show we've been drawing on a more historical but also as well as contemporary
34:48
examples to question how entangled anti-colonial and environmental alliances are nurturing each other and how we can transform ruins, colonial erosion, damaged landscapes
35:06
and take up tactics of precarity to make living possible despite economic and ecological ruination. So to do that I am now really guiding you through the show and this is the corridor that was bringing you to the space of SAVI. Actually this is our old space because
35:26
in August 2020 we moved into a very different space, not far away from there but yes, the show was 2019, so before our move. So and the piece was opening with an invocation
35:44
to water in some way and rain because soil cannot live without water but also was bringing us to think about cultivation not only as something inscribing the body but
36:02
as cultivation of cultural objects and carriers of rituals. What you're seeing in this image is a sound installation, I cannot play the sound otherwise it's going to be too exciting and you want to listen to it for too long and we don't have the time, so I show you just
36:21
these images that were transcribing some of the words chanted in the sound installation by Dina Amro, whose title is Time Flows in All Directions, Water Flows Through Me.
36:42
So the installation was performing Palestinian songs that were chanted for for decades and centuries to summon rain in context where now water of course,
37:03
water resources are not very much available and that are controlled and cut by the Israeli government. So for us this was a good way to enter and problematize not only
37:20
the fact that yes when we're talking about anti-colonial it's something it's a struggle that is still to be performed nowadays for some communities but also because of this understanding of the soil as a carrier of rituals. Another work that you were encountering
37:47
immediately is the work of Elian Urvista, an exhibition pondering on sugar and its history and that was immediately bringing us into narratives of material extraction, slavery and
38:03
exploitation and making evident the geographical divide between a world of raw materials, cheap labor, trading companies and consumption. The artist conducted research in Indonesia,
38:20
where she's originally from, exploring the patterns of exploitation of the palm oil industry and the land grabbing politics performed by local government through foreign investment. Agrarian law and coloniality in fact as she was showing and realized are inherently linked in Indonesia and are translated into arbitrary and unclear situations
38:47
allowing opaqueness and a perverse liaison between corporations, multinationals and politicians and local speculators. So I just want to quote two words by Elian Urvista
39:01
who was saying to us, mostly the foreign investment was stimulated by the spectacle of colonial fantasies of conquest and discovery including risk, virility and violence. This fantastic or spectacular form of investment transnational in nature in turn colluded with
39:24
Indonesian corrupt government practices, mostly in the time of new order 66 to 98 under the term of developing the country. So of course the exhibition reflected in many ways on
39:42
coloniality. The interesting thing is that this sugar was in the duration of the exhibition melting and showing also how material resources are somehow disappearing. Elena, I'm very sorry, could you try to wrap up
40:06
because we unfortunately have to be extremely strict with the schedule since we have a lot of people coming in online. So I can show, I can just guide you through the exhibition, maybe I don't even have the time but you can have impressions. This was a work by Pedro Nieves
40:24
Marquez, this was Chorus of Soil by Binta Diao, this video was a very very impressive film by Lerato Shadi in which she was eating earth to remember the practice of slaves that to
40:42
liberate themselves or doing this geophagy to suicide and to set themselves free. Or the work of Cedric Nunn, Unsettled, talking about the resistance of the Xhosa people, the Trumelberg by Leone Contini, Uriel Urlo, other historical examples. Again now the struggles
41:11
of women, Amazonian women, that are fighting for liberation. Here it was about Monsanto and Bayern because we were actually, the show, our space was a couple of kilometers
41:25
far from the factory of Bayern in Berlin. And then this amazing project by Boubatoure that was recounting the story of this experiment in Mali, an amazing
41:45
agro-cological project in Sumakudikure, it's too long to explain what it is, this Kaban Bayar ve Yam Gwen, a project on fermentation by Zion Khan and a lot of books on
42:01
a table by Luis Berrios Negron. Maybe to conclude I can mention that through the development of the project we tried to learn from an ecology of practices of cultivation to reroute and reground
42:24
questions of sovereignty and land rights. Understanding and witnessing the practical care and the intimate relations of cultivation towards sovereignty was crucial to go beyond just theoretical epistemologies. So during, I just mentioned a couple of workshops that we did because
42:43
they were very essential for the developing of the project. This was in Morocco, a workshop called Seed as Relation in collaboration with the artist Hassan Darcy and we learned about practices of agro-cological gardens in a village in Bensleyman outside of Casablanca but also
43:05
learning from the farmers that were resisting large-scale queries that were threatening the villages and wanting to grab the land by of course buying that but for very little. Or another very fundamental moment was with these conventions of women farmers,
43:24
of feminist convention obviously, where here in Poland under the direction of Marwa Arsanius, an artist, we took part in a convention exchanging knowledge, stories, materials
43:40
of soil transformation with women farmers from across the whole world and most of them were indigenous. They were really talking to us about experiences of practice, autonomy and self-sufficiency. So the defense of sovereignty, land rights, the commons
44:01
and the broader struggle over natural resources emerged as a common thread across these initiatives as well as many others within the wider ecologies of practices. Among them we conversed with many different groups. One was the Garifuna, the black fraternal
44:22
organization in Honduras, the Jindvar village in Rojava in northern Syria, Saqiya in Palestine, Inland in Spain, the Foodscape Collective in Singapore, many connections that then we also
44:42
managed to bring together building a telegram group so where people were talking in many different languages to each other to share tactics and strategies and to stand up together. So yes I hope I managed to wrap it up and sorry if it was a bit too long.
45:06
Thank you so much that doesn't matter at all and I think we have the opportunity to get back to that topic of the collaborations later on in the discussion and a couple of the projects that you managed mentioned they will also resound in the other
45:22
lectures which one is about Monsanto and the other one is about large-scale land grabbing in the Ukraine. Thank you so much. I'm very sorry I missed that exhibition. I already downloaded the reader and I've started getting into that.
45:44
We have also a printed version but actually it's very beautiful to just have also one online. Thank you. We will now move on to Mathieu Asler who has already entered the
46:00
waiting room. I'm letting him enter now. Okay hello.
46:24
Hello welcome. Can you, well you can hear me, you can see me? Yes I can hear you, I can see you. We can see you. I will change the, do you want to do it actually? Hello I would like to introduce as our next speaker Mathieu Asler
46:44
who's an artist who works and lives in Arles in France. He began his career working on film productions in Caracas Venezuela but shaped his photographic practice in the United States. He holds a master's degree from the Ecole Nationale Superieure de la Photo in Arles
47:05
and his work mainly consists of long-term investigative documentary projects. His latest book Monsanto a Photographic Investigation was published in 2017 and received international acclaim winning several photo book awards. Amongst the recent venues where his work was shown
47:27
are Le Roncontre d'Arles in France, the photographer's gallery in London, the Photomuseum Antwerp in Belgium and the European Parliament in Strasbourg. He will today
47:40
present the project Monsanto a Photographic Investigation to us. Yes feel free to share your screen, we're listening. Sure thank you very much. Thank you for this invitation. I was exhibit in the festival a few couple years ago so I'm glad to be back.
48:07
So I want to of course talk about the book of Monsanto, about the project. I think let me, I'm sorry let me close the window so like that
48:20
to avoid any weird sound. So I would like to start with the idea, I mean what is the project about? The project is five years a work of photography but at the same time a lot of time invested on research to try to understand of course the subject and most
48:47
important to try to understand how to put the subject together and one of the biggest motivations of course is always the first time is the outrage about this big multinational
49:04
Monsanto for the people who don't know is today it was bought by Bayer so today belongs to Bayer so it's an agricultural chemical company. Their main business is a product for
49:24
the agro-industry. Their best known products are a Randolph and a genetically modified seeds, genetically modified seeds that work together with all these line of products they have.
49:40
It's a little bit, today agriculture is a little bit like an iPhone. You buy the iPhone but you need to buy also the phone line and you need to buy the case to protect it and you need to buy etc etc etc. So this is the way this new huge agricultural conglomerate
50:01
see agriculture at a big big scale. So as I was saying at the beginning of course the motivation to do this work and spend five years on it is it comes from average. Average is why this is happening, why a company like this is still doing business
50:27
and most important why a company like this hasn't been punished in the real sense. Of course Monsanto have paid lawsuits all these years and especially in the last few years
50:45
it's been hit very hard with lawsuits related to their product roundup and the cancer that has, that some people got by using their product. Today Monsanto has more than 13,000
51:05
lawsuits waiting. Last year or two years ago they decide to put buy or decide to put 10 billion with a B euros for a future lawsuit. So you can see the big problem that Monsanto is generating
51:26
to buy right now. So I will start of course talking about a little bit. I'm going to share my screen. I'm going to share the second one. Share. Perfect. So can you see
51:57
here? Okay so I want to show you a little bit the timeline of the project. This is Photoshop
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this is not what I wanted I'm sorry. So let's open this web preview. Perfect. So I will start
52:37
from the beginning of the project. So all this is of course me getting ready. I shot all the
52:43
projects on film a large format 4x5 and a medium format 6x7. And I travel all around the United States for all these five years actually more like three years, four years. I spent a year
53:02
and a half on research before I started traveling. Photographing all these places kind of lost in the United States. In Idaho but also in the south of the United States. As you can see I travel alone most of the time and to meet the people and the places
53:29
I need to photograph. I work a lot with archivals. Here I'm in the University of Colombia in in Illinois not in New York photographing archivals that I use in the book. I will show you that
53:52
later. This is again me trying to solve problems of representation of how to do a portrait of the corn and keep of course being able not only to see the corn but to see the place where
54:09
it is. And so this is the book. This is the dummy of the book actually. It's okay you can see it it's in a good size. So this is the the the dummy. Sorry
54:30
can you maybe show it full screen? Is it possible? Yeah let me let me do that right away. And here okay and we show it full screen.
54:58
View enter full screen. Yes that's good. Perfect so this is the book and I think that the book
55:11
is the best way to show the project. I use of course a lot of text. So the books start with a series of publicities I collected for during these five years. This is our non-retouched
55:29
original publicity that of course I scan and add to the book. So at the beginning of the book you have a booklet with around 20 of these ads from Monsanto. The ads are from the
55:42
30s 40s until the 80s 90s. The idea of that was to have Monsanto talk about theirself through their publicity. So the book is defined in a few chapters. Each chapter
56:03
talks about a specific problem. The idea is that the the the problem of Monsanto is so big that I needed to find the best examples that can illustrate the history of Monsanto because otherwise I could do like a Britannica encyclopedia with this work and it will be a
56:25
huge book and and so the idea was to keep it focused on which are these problems that can make the people who is looking at the book understand what happened with Monsanto and what is Monsanto about. So I start the third chapter in Anniston in a city that was highly
56:48
contaminated by a PVC produced by Monsanto. Monsanto knew that from the 40s they were dumping illegally these products on the river and the consequences of that today is a small city
57:05
completely contaminated. 10,000 people contaminated, places, land is really a big disaster. So I start the chapter talking about the house of the future of Monsanto. In the 50s
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end of the 50s Monsanto did a project with Disneyland in Anaheim, California and the idea was to build a house with the materials that Monsanto produced at the time, mostly plastics, and the idea was to show what is the future and what the house
57:40
of Monsanto looks like, the house of the future of Monsanto. Of course this is a publicity stone. The idea is to say we are the future. Monsanto is the future and this is what we represent and this is what you need. If you buy a product, you use your products, you are being a part of the
58:03
future. I just saw the story of my work with this picture 50 years, 40 years later, 4,000 kilometers away from this house of the future of Monsanto in Disneyland showing a house
58:21
today, this picture was taken in 2012, but showing what is that future that Monsanto promised 50 years ago and what that future looks like today, what it became of that future and this is one of the houses in this city, one of hundreds of houses that has been abandoned
58:41
because of contamination of the land. You will see all along my work, I use a lot of archival, I appropriate photography, I use postcards, I use documents that I photograph and it's important to understand that all this archival material is not less or more important than my
59:06
photography. I treat them at the same level of my own photography and they are very important to understand. They are important because they bring some kind of fact-based research at the
59:22
same time. This is not just me photographing places, but at the same time I go and research into archival and text that is being confirmed, that is being proved, that is a reliable source. So this is the town of Anniston, as you can see many abandoned business, of course the
59:47
contamination was quite big. We need to understand that that happened in the poor side of that town like in many contaminated places. This is internal documents from
01:00:00
Monsanto were explained very clearly, you can see in your left, in your right. We can't afford to lose one dollar of business. Our attitude in discussing this subject to our customer will decide the factor, it will be a factor, deciding factor in our success, good luck. So as you can see, money, money, money, money first
01:00:21
than anything else. This is, so I photograph also, of course the landscape, but I photograph people, people that are deeply affected by contamination and levels they have in their bloods,
01:00:42
very high levels of contaminations and the consequences of that is a very long list of health problems, from cancer, diabetes, learning problems, so the list is quite huge. Many of the people, at least few of the people
01:01:02
I photograph died already, like David here in this picture. This picture you can see the river, this is the river that was contaminated, the Chocoloco River. For 40 years they dumped a waste from PCV,
01:01:25
knowing this is how people got contaminated. Many kids used to swim in that river at that time, but also, of course, who talks about water, talk about land and how it permeates the land and contaminates the land.
01:01:42
So the important thing about this picture is, as you can see, is red, of course the river is not red, is a picture I paint with acrylic, I allow myself to speculate, but more than speculate, when I was there, there used to be kids at that time
01:02:02
and now they're older, they told me about a memory and the memory of this river being contaminated and this river being some days purple, some days red. Of course, this is not a fact, this is a memory, but nonetheless for me was important
01:02:21
to represent that memory. So this is why I allow myself to paint in my pictures. This next chapter talks about Agent Orange. Agent Orange is a chemical compound that was used, produced by Monsanto and down chemicals,
01:02:43
was, they discovered in the 50s, but it really was mass produced in the 60s and the United States Army used it in the War of Vietnam. Agent Orange is a defoliant, what means that they were sprayed with planes
01:03:01
in the Vietnam, in the canopy, in the Vietnam jungle, so all the leaf will die and the United States Army can see the movement of the North Vietnamese troops. Actually at that time, they say that was almost,
01:03:21
it was a humanitarian way of doing the war because they didn't need to bomb blindly. So when the canopy dies, they have a clear vision in the jungle and they can see very clear where are the troops, the Vietnamese, North Vietnamese troops moving so they can bomb with,
01:03:41
they can be very targeted and not bomb blindly. So for this chapter, I divided in one side in the United States because the chemical was produced in the United States, but not only that,
01:04:00
people, Americans got affected by the production of this product. So for me, it was very important to make that clear. It's not only the Vietnamese that are the victims, even if we need to admit that they are the biggest, looser when we talk about Agent Orange, but also people in the United States was affected.
01:04:22
So I start photographing the place around, the places around where they fabricate this chemical compound. This is in Poca River Basin in West Virginia. So I photograph many of the illegal,
01:04:44
they dump a lot of residual around the factory and they hide it. They make big holes in the ground and they put these big containers with all these residual. We need to understand that the active compound
01:05:01
in the Agent Orange is very, very dangerous. We don't know exactly how to get rid of that. So it's not something that you put on the ground and will disappear in a few years. The consequence of that, of course, is people that live in that place affected by that,
01:05:23
the numbers of cancers in that valley where they dump illegally all these substance. Very sorry to interrupt. I'm very sorry to be so impolite. There are three minutes left, just so you know.
01:05:42
All these people is being very affected. So at the same time, I talk about, of course, the veteran of the war in Vietnam, especially the children of the veterans of Vietnam that got affected genetically through their fathers.
01:06:02
And the last part of this Agent Orange is, of course, the new generation, third generations of children that their parents or their grandparents got affected by Agent Orange. So you can see it goes generation after generation.
01:06:23
The third part of the project talks about a place where they completely unregulated in the United States so they can put their factory. That talks about, of course, the politics of Monsanto and how much power they have. They can, politically speaking, irregularly things.
01:06:44
They can make their own law inside the regulations of the United States. The last part of this project talks about today and specifically the genetically modified seeds and how farmers are losing the right they have on seeds,
01:07:04
how seeds don't belong anymore to farmers but belongs to a corporation. The same thing of a software or many things. So for me, it was very important to meet the people that were lost by Monsanto and accused, wrongly accused
01:07:21
of using their seeds illegally. And the last part, I talk about this kind of souvenirs, Monsanto memorabilia. The idea was to put this very banal object and talk about how the banality of Monsanto
01:07:43
but at the same time, how bad it is and how dangerous Monsanto can be. The last part of the book, the last picture of the book is agreed with the people that fights against Monsanto. People like you, like me, everyday people
01:08:02
that decide to stop Monsanto. So activists, ONG, NGOs, scientists, lawyers. So yeah, this is very quick, what is my project about?
01:08:34
Thank you so much for this brief introduction to the book. I will definitely have to get that for our library.
01:08:40
It looks fantastic. How many years did you work on this project? Around five years, six years. I'm trying to stop the sharing of that. We will have one more speaker on this panel who is actually here.
01:09:01
So I would like to ask you to stay in the Zoom meeting but we will not project your image anymore to our wall but we'll get back to you once we are entering the panel discussion about 20 minutes time. Great, thank you. Thank you.
01:09:23
The third and final speaker of this panel, I would like to welcome Mikailo Amorzov who actually made it to Vienna today which we're very happy about and we are grateful that you took into account quite a few bureaucratic tasks around the coronavirus.
01:09:47
Mikailo holds a Master of Geography and Soils and Regulation of Land Resources from the Taras Tsevchenko National University in Kiev. He started his career at the National Ecological Center of the Ukraine
01:10:01
where he held the position of Project Coordinator. Since 2017, he works for the Center for Environmental Initiatives Eco-Action, a civil society organization in the Ukraine that unites efforts of experts and activists in the joint struggle to protect the environment.
01:10:23
He coordinates the regional focal point of the Land Matrix Initiative in Eastern Europe. This Land Matrix is an international collaboration project that builds an open database on international large-scale agricultural investments
01:10:43
across low and middle-income countries. This initiative was featured in our exhibition, Land for Us All, as well as the catalog which I can now show you here in case you don't know it yet. And he will present this project to us
01:11:02
in more detail today. Thank you and welcome. Hello, everybody. Thank you for inviting me to Vienna to present our work. So I would like to present my organization, Eco-Action.
01:11:23
We are working in different directions like climate change, energy transformation, and agriculture as well. And in the agricultural sector, I would say, we are working on land, especially land, and this Land Matrix Initiative is helping us
01:11:41
to look into land relations and issues in Ukraine and in Eastern Europe region in general. So let's see Land Matrix Initiative, how it started and how it goes now. Land Matrix, it is an independent land monitoring initiative that promotes transparency and accountability
01:12:01
in decisions over large-scale land acquisitions in low and middle-income countries by capturing and sharing data about these deals at the global, regional, and national level. So this initiative, based not in one place, but it's several, almost 10 different partners,
01:12:22
and you can see on this slide that it's an organization from Europe, such as CIRA, the Giga from France, Giga from Germany. And as you may know, in the beginning of 21st century,
01:12:43
there was like big rush for land, and some scientist was interested in this land rush and decided to look more precisely, look into this process inside and started to collect some data, like in spreadsheet, in sheet in the Excel in 2009,
01:13:04
but then in 2012, they were very successful to get some funds to create more better database to monitor land issues around the globe. So, and eco-action also is a partner in this initiative,
01:13:21
and as I said, we are working in Eastern Europe. So for why to monitor this large-scale land acquisition? So for us, for the metrics land, large-scale land acquisition is acquisition of land, more than 200 hectares, it's really large scale, but also we don't forget about much less land plots,
01:13:45
and we are trying to monitor them as well, but more focused on this very large land tracks. So why to monitor? It's like two main reasons for us, it's transparency and accountability, as around land issues, really bad transparency,
01:14:04
how these investments in land are happening, are going, et cetera, what the benefits local communities can get from these investments, what environmental impacts of these investments
01:14:22
on the ground. So, and please, you can try, follow this QR code and see more about these main reasons why to monitor. How we collect data? So this is like main bullet points, how we work with this, and for example, our region, Eastern Europe,
01:14:43
so without local partners in Eastern Europe, in Africa, in Latin America, in Asia, it was impossible to collect real, let's say real concrete data on how these investments on land are going there. So usually we are working,
01:15:02
like decentralized team in different regions, which trying to collect information from government, from local researchers, from local communities, from media, like really agriculture and media,
01:15:22
media focused on agriculture topics. So one important point, it's like that data campaigns in direct countries, if we couldn't get a lot of information from, let's say from Ukraine in Romania, we are trying to organize,
01:15:42
do some networking around NGOs in this region and trying to find local organization who can help us to understand context in this country and trying to collect information about large scale and acquisitions there. So what we have already,
01:16:02
it's about 1,500 deals on global level, so it's on 2016. It's this graph is from analytical report based on land metrics data we collected already on this year.
01:16:21
And you can see how divided this deals by, or is it concluded, or is it intended deal, failed deal. And yeah, you can see it on the graph. And for now, for 2021,
01:16:40
we have more than 2,000 deals on global level and most of them is concluded deal, so it's concluded deal and also they are in operation. So you can see on the bottom, this one, that mostly 80% of deals in operation
01:17:00
in active phase of using land. And on this slide, it's about agriculture intentions of land acquisitions, so most of the deals, area of deals using for growing of food crops and agri-fuels. For example, in Ukraine,
01:17:21
Ukraine is typically export-oriented country for food crops and usually agriculture products are exporting to Europe or China, yeah, it's like main markets for us. Let's go further, so it was for 2016
01:17:44
and now it's for 2021. And you can see that it's actually nothing changed, especially, so food crops still the main reason to invest in land. And yeah, it's very interesting that even livestock
01:18:04
not so very popular in intentions. Also, we try and not forget about other intentions, I mean, not only agriculture, but also about forestry. So forestry also is really popular among investors
01:18:20
to invest and get some income from this. And as we are in Austria, I'm proposing you to follow one of these QR codes and choose your country and then you will see one of the deals based in Romania, Ethiopia, or Ukraine.
01:18:41
So you can see that Austrian companies are investing in Ethiopia, Romania, and Ukraine and you can see this square of land under control. So did you choose your country already?
01:19:00
So I would tell more about Ukraine as I'm from Ukraine. So here you can see the map based on land metrics data and you can see that all deals located in this central part of Ukraine
01:19:20
and it's so-called Black Earth Belt, like part of Black Earth Belt, it's really rich soil and it's easy to get high level yield on this area. And investors from Austria control land on this green one.
01:19:44
But for now, this project closed because of bankruptcy. And very interesting thing that this investor is not Austrian citizen, but is Ukrainian citizen who registered his company in Austria for tax avoidance in Ukraine.
01:20:03
In the shadow. So you can see that investors prefer central part of Ukraine to invest in agriculture. And what about southern Ukraine? It's not very popular and why do you think?
01:20:20
Because of climate change. It is really risky region in Ukraine to invest in agriculture and that's why it's not so popular. You should invest even more than usually to build irrigation system and get your money actually. And I would like to show some story we collected
01:20:46
from the ground and it's about Zrno product MHP. In English it's like grain product MHP and you can follow this QR code also and it goes directly to the deal.
01:21:02
And this is company in Ukraine which has in central part of Ukraine controls around 100,000 hectares. And it's not directly, like direct property and they are controlling this land through
01:21:22
long term land lease agreements up to 49 years. And this is very interesting company that has interesting structure and also registered on Cyprus for tax avoidance again. And this company engages money from development banks
01:21:46
like Iberdee for example and we are also putting this data about funds to the database. And you can see this on this investor. We call it investor chain and it's one
01:22:01
of the most important part of our database to show who owns exactly this land. And this from another one deal, it's more complicated, even more complicated investor chain so you can see how investors organize
01:22:21
their structure to be more effective and efficient. It is from another one deal but let's back to this one. And here you can see the scale of this investments in central Ukraine, it's in this region. And in the center it is one of the villages
01:22:44
so called Olianitsa. And you can see around this small village, it's around 1,000 people, huge facilities of this company. It's like brigades, poultry, poultry brigades. It's like huge poultry farm.
01:23:02
And here is concrete and fodder plants. So it's a really huge impact pressure on environment and on local people. That's why it's really important to collect information from the ground and put it to such global initiatives
01:23:22
and tell this story to more people. And it's this brigade in more, just zoom in and you can see how it's huge and it's around 1,500,000 chickens in this brigade
01:23:46
and they are producing like huge massive of manure and you can see in this photo. And all this stuff is surrounding local communities
01:24:00
and they live in this condition. So we are collecting this information from them and trying to communicate these problems to our government as this company gets money, like subsidies from government. And also we are communicating these stories to Europeans
01:24:21
as MHP, this company, is exporting some grains and poultry to EU. So it is important to show us, especially through our database. But yeah, without, we hope to not be alone
01:24:46
with this initiative and would like to invite everybody to share their knowledge about large scale and acquisition and its impact. So you can easily to contact us and help with information and or you can use this information
01:25:02
for your scientific report, for your research or any other kind of reports. So that's it. I would like to answer to any questions you have. Thank you very much.
01:25:46
And while we are waiting for the other two, panelists to join us are here with Elena. Hello.
01:26:01
Hi. You can hear me. Great. So we are still waiting for Mathieu. Mathieu, can you hear us? Yes. Hello, great.
01:26:21
So we are all, we're complete now. Okay. Wait a second. I'll try to, because this is a new setup now. No, no, it's all right. Okay. I'm a bit confused because I have three views now, but I'm gonna try not to look at the screen. We are joined on this panel by Francine Bell
01:26:42
and I would like to start by introducing you. You are a senior researcher at the Austrian Institute for Economic Research, the V4. Francine Bell works in the field of agriculture and food policy, environmental and resource economics
01:27:00
and risk management. From 2008 to 2012, he was deputy director of the V4. He lectures at the University of Vienna and the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences in Vienna. He is an expert advising the European Commission on the preparation of the annual report
01:27:21
on the economic situation of agriculture and he's a board member of the Austrian Society of Agricultural Economics. I will keep it at that. I think this is the most important part of your impressive CV that you need to know. Thank you again for joining us on this panel, which is perhaps not the kind of panel discussion
01:27:42
you would usually join or usually take part in. This is, as I said in my introduction, a very multidisciplinary panel. So we have an economist, we have an environmentalist, and also activist, and we have an artist
01:28:03
and an art historian, curator. And I think I would like to start with one question, which is maybe start with you, Mr. Sinopelli.
01:28:23
What did you, how would you react to the three lectures we have just heard? Painting a picture, that is quite shocking really, but also apart from your lecture on the Ukraine,
01:28:41
not so much touching on Austria. What is the position of Europe, of the European Union's common agricultural policy, especially on the issues of land grabbing, climate change, as well as also genetically manipulated seeds and patenting of them?
01:29:01
Yeah, thank you. I'm trying to be not too long, and maybe add one thing concerning my background. I'm an applied economist, so I'm working in order to understand what is going on,
01:29:21
and I'm not that type of economist who knows how people should be, and what is the best policy, and how consumers should behave. And in order to understand what is going on, I usually differentiate three groups of people
01:29:43
or forces in our society. We have the consumers, and the consumers can make very good informed choices about the products they're buying and consuming, and the information we got today,
01:30:00
I think is very good in informing people to make better choices. For instance, to buy organic products, or to look at the labels where products are coming from in order not to support activities that have been shown,
01:30:25
and I think most of the people would like not to have around in the world. Apart from the consumers, we have the producers, and when it comes to producers in agriculture, we need to differentiate between two groups.
01:30:45
The one are the farmers, and the farmers, in many cases, are not the owners of land, but are affected by land-grabbing, or they do not have the resources to buy the land,
01:31:02
because investors who are interested in rendita are grabbing the land, and farmers eventually end up working for them, so this is one group of producers,
01:31:20
and the second ones have been shown here as well. It's the input suppliers that produce chemicals in order to enhance productivity, but eventually to make profits, and we have landowners who are interested in profits on land. They are not so much interested in what is done
01:31:42
with the land, in many cases, land is just bought, and let fallow, nothing is happening, in the hope that five years later, another investor will come and pay the double the price. That's the producers, and then we come
01:32:02
to the third agent in this game, and this is policymakers. We are all affected by policymakers, and we are in a lucky situation,
01:32:20
because we live in a democracy, and the initiative you are just pushing right now is contributing to forming the ways policies are made, and I look at these things from the European angle.
01:32:40
I'm not so well informed about what is going on in the rest of the world, but only one point. Biofuels were mentioned a few times in this session, and the negative aspects of these policies have become mainstream already 10 years ago,
01:33:04
and how does policy react in the EU? Policy reacts the way that first generation biofuels, the one that we were talking about, are now abandoned, and we're now moving into second generation biofuels,
01:33:22
but what we see is the land grabbing now switches from agricultural land to forest land, and forest land is the input for second generation biofuels. So society is learning and adapting. Policy is struggling to find new ways,
01:33:44
but what I see is it's environmentalists, the civil society, and art that is two steps ahead of what is implemented in policies.
01:34:00
Question which brings me immediately to the next question. I think it's very nice that this is kind of almost admitted, and it's a nice way to put it that we are two steps ahead of the policy. Could I ask all three speakers of today
01:34:21
that looking back at their projects and the problems that they have come across and the things that need to be changed, what would your input be for policy makers? What would your demands be from the policy side regarding the treatment of land and soil
01:34:42
and plants and people? Maybe we start with Elena, is that okay? Can you hear me? Yes, now we can hear you. Yeah, I mean, what we did with the exhibition would be exactly what I would convey
01:35:04
and say to the policy makers. All this extraction, all this careless politics that are really not taken in consideration, the damage that is done towards communities,
01:35:22
towards people, towards more than human agencies, and the policy makers should not only listen to what these people have to say, as we, for example, also did in our project by putting their voice of the communities at the center,
01:35:42
but really should invite them to become the policy makers because oftentimes there is this arrogance of knowing, saying in a paternalistic way what certain communities should do
01:36:03
to protect their land from grabbing, what the strategies they should develop, but obviously they have strategies. They are just that they are always being repressed, silenced and left aside. So my invitation would be really very straightforward
01:36:27
about bringing these people in the discussion because all these activists, we also saw many of these figures in Latin America, also on the African continent,
01:36:43
all these figures of, and often women activists that are standing up and are becoming mediatic forces, at the end they maybe receive prizes, people are celebrating them with projects, but then they never get to the position
01:37:02
in which they can really change things, the legal systems and the real policies, as you're saying. So I don't know if this is an enough clear answer, but yeah, that's what I propose. Thank you, that's a very good input. Mathieu, can I pass the same question on to you?
01:37:25
What would your demands be for the policymakers? You're muted. Great, I'm sorry about that.
01:37:42
So this is a tricky question and I wanna be as much respectful as possible with policymakers because I think that they make, they have a very good, a very important work and it's this bridge between the field and whatever is that field and of course the politicians.
01:38:06
Now, what is interesting to know is that we need to understand that today, as we see it, corporations, and it's important that I talk about corporations because I think corporations are in the heart,
01:38:23
in the core of the problematic. I think at first, we need to understand that any change, ecologically speaking, or even socially, it won't happen if we let this in the hands of corporations. The idea that corporations are becoming greener
01:38:41
and this is all, it's not true. It's a distortion of the reality. Yes, they are becoming, but actually what is happening is that corporations today are trying to make the changes,
01:39:02
the urgent changes that this is not me that said or a theory of conspiracy. Scientists agree. We are in a big mess. We have a very specific timing that we need to fulfill. After that, they don't say that everything will collapse,
01:39:23
but they say we have big possibilities of not being able to come back. So knowing this, we need to understand that corporations today, what they're doing, the changes they're doing is changes as slow as possible to keep the status quo
01:39:42
that exists today, that mean business as usual. So any change of any corporation today is not a real change. It's just a change so we don't change the things that need to be changed for things to get better. So this is very important to understand.
01:40:00
And I go back to the policymakers because I'm not sure policymakers today understand that completely. I think many of the policies we're changing today are not related to fit corporations and their need to keep this craziness that we have today
01:40:23
more than really find solutions because the real solutions, we won't find it in Bruxelles, we won't find it in Exxon, we will find it in the places that are really affected and the people that are really affected. So for me, and to summarize what I'm saying,
01:40:41
I think the most important thing right now for policymakers is, and I'm not saying that they don't do it, but I think that they need to be more radical on this. Stop listening to the bureaucracy of capitalists and corporations and start listening really
01:41:00
to what is happening today. For example, and to finish what I'm going to say, this example can illustrate very well. All the story of the carbon footprint, for example, was developed by a calm British company that worked for British petroleum.
01:41:20
And the idea was very simple, to shift the responsibility of industries to each one of the people because it's easy if each one of the people say, oh, I need to take responsibility. Then if we say corporations need to take responsibility. So, and the other thing is the choice the public has
01:41:42
to choice this or that, this is also, this is not true. This is a very sketchy way of seeing, yeah, but the public can decide to buy bio. It's not true. You have a big percentage of people that cannot afford bio to start. They cannot eat like that every day
01:42:01
because they don't have money to pay the rent. So they need to buy. The question is not why people is not buying bio. The question is why companies are producing processed food and why not more are being done to stop this. So I hope this answered the question and what I think policymakers should focus on.
01:42:23
Thank you, Mathieu. There is a reaction from the audience. I would like to now ask this question to you before we can perhaps discuss the input in common. Thank you. It is very good question, especially in case of Ukraine
01:42:42
as Ukraine is not part of EU, so we have kind of different reality in land relationships. So as for eco-action and work with policymakers, we are trying to bring these cases I mentioned about local communities. It's like case, like proof that you should change policy,
01:43:04
environmental policy, like environmental control, environmental standards in Ukraine. Also, we are pushing this idea that you should support local farmers, not the subsidies should go not to agro-holding.
01:43:21
We call it agro-holdings, not to a few big agribusiness, but to local small and medium farmers. Yeah, but it's quite difficult to do because actually this agribusiness has their representatives in national parliament
01:43:41
and in government, so it's quite difficult to communicate with them. But thanks to EU, actually, we have association agreement with European Union and we are trying to use these instruments. We have regarding this association, for example, how quickly should implement
01:44:02
environmental standards in Ukraine, especially in agriculture, and yeah, for sure in any other sector as well, but especially in agriculture, first of all, because Ukraine and policymakers don't see these links
01:44:20
between agriculture and its impacts on environment and especially on climate change. So yeah, something like that. I can sense that you would like to answer to the input we just got. Is that correct? Yeah, you. Me, yeah. I think this is a really interesting discussion.
01:44:45
We saw on the pictures the heaps of manure from the chicken fabrics and two years ago, there was a big uproar in whole Europe, not Ukraine, the European part of Europe,
01:45:02
because lots of chicken meat was imported to the EU and the farmers in the EU said, okay, look, we have the European environmental standards. We have to abit by them. Our production costs are twice of that in the Ukraine
01:45:24
and they can import, they can export poultry meat to the European market and we cannot compete with that. The reason is because our environmental standards are much higher.
01:45:40
The rationale of the EU was to say, okay, we want to have a strong partner on our Eastern partner and stimulating agricultural production and opening the market so that they can not only depend on AIDS
01:46:02
we're sending to the Ukraine, but they can also sell their products to the EU. That's our rationale. And when I listen to Mathieu, I think he has a very good point. My point was the consumers have the choice.
01:46:21
They can buy Ukrainian poultry. They can buy organic poultry. They can buy poultry from Austria or they can decide, no, I do not eat poultry. I get my protein from soya beans and I do not want to have animals killed.
01:46:43
Mathieu said, no, it should be regulated at the policy level. So not environmental friendly production methods must be out ruled. And I think this is the mess we are in
01:47:03
or it's the situation we are in. We have many choices and to be honest, I do not have the right answer. I just see the various developments and finding what is the best way.
01:47:20
For me at least, I try to do the best that I can, but to know that real answer, the one that solves all the problems, I did not yet find. It was again about the same company actually.
01:47:41
The photos I showed is the same company you mentioned about import to EU and yeah, it's really cheap to produce poultry meat in Ukraine and just export to everywhere you want. So yeah.
01:48:00
And also I would like to mention about this photo project by Mathieu and we also tried to do something like that in Ukraine, around Ukraine, but unfortunately it was unsuccessful, but it's really nice to see interest from artists to this problem.
01:48:23
Like not only experts interested in this topic. If I can add something very quick, if it's possible. I think what we need to understand that ecological justice cannot be put in place if we don't have social and economical justice.
01:48:43
So in the sense that it doesn't matter if we can choose, if we have many different type of meat and we have meat or vegetables that are organic and they have a certain conscious social ecological,
01:49:00
we need to understand if we don't have economical justice, it's impossible to access those products. So this is why I think that this idea of we can choose, it really depend of economical background and this is something that need to be put into the question.
01:49:20
But that is also something that I would like to now make a short input before we open the discussion to the audience very shortly because we are running out of time. In my research for the exhibition Land for Us All, it surprised me that as a farmer in Austria, I was told and probably in many other places as well,
01:49:42
if he has to actually acquire new agricultural land, will in his lifespan not be able to recover this investment with the sole production of a product that we actually really need to survive. And this, it seems strange to me
01:50:04
that an economy that is so vital for us can only live because it's heavily subsidized. And this in connection with a steady reduction of land or this leads to the steady reduction of agricultural land and in Austria,
01:50:20
we're losing 35 square meters of agricultural land every second that we're sitting here. And that has a lot to do with the fact that any kind of other use in connection with this land brings more money than agriculture. Which then in turn leads to the land grabbing
01:50:42
in the lower and middle income countries because we do need the food. Maybe I do pose it as a question, how do we get out of this spiral, of this economic spiral actually? Does anyone have an idea how this could be possible?
01:51:01
Yeah, we need to start paying food at the price that they're really cost of food. And right now we're paying nothing for food. So subsidize the consumers instead of the agriculture. I mean, we need to reward the good practices and we need to start also, for example,
01:51:22
these big supermarket chains, they take a huge margins on the food. We need to start, and this is, I don't wanna sound like a crazy hippie, but we live in a system, in a capitalist system that has worked very well until certain time. But now we're seeing the consequences of that.
01:51:42
What is the new system we need to put in place? I have no idea what is clear. And this is not me, even the most conservative. They say, yes, the capitalistic system has arrived to its limits. We cannot keep pumping from everywhere
01:52:00
just to make wealth. So, and of course I don't have the answer. Yes, some people maybe think, but we need to look into that and we need to stop thinking that we need to protect this capitalistic system and the way is doing it that now it's not a capitalistic system.
01:52:22
Now it's becoming almost a corporation, corporate fascism. This is where we're going. If we see Apple, Google, a CAFO, all these companies. So we need to start thinking it's not about protecting the capitalistic system,
01:52:41
it's about protecting and making the changes that is necessary to get rid of this system. Which one? Some people are putting things in places that work, a small scale, of course, but we need to look into that. And I think that right now, all the energy is invested in preserving our way of life.
01:53:02
And our way of life need to stop as it is. I'm sorry, and this is facts. This is not something, any conspiracy idea. I think we have time for one more speaker. Elena, you would like to put in a word?
01:53:23
Or I couldn't find the mic. No, I actually agree very much with Mathieu and I think this devastation that we are seeing not only in the fact that some capitalist words
01:53:42
are collapsing, but in the fact that the land is just carrying this destruction and these traces. They are just the urgent call. We just have to act. There is nothing else to do. And this hypocrisy of thinking that,
01:54:07
yeah, we are talking about getting more environmental, we're doing it, but it's true. It's just serving the corporations again. So yeah, I don't have so much to add because this time I agree with Mathieu.
01:54:23
Would you like to, maybe each of you can still add a sentence or two and then unfortunately I have to wrap this discussion up because we're running out of time. Yeah, thank you. I think we are at an economic discussion and it was mentioned we should pay the correct prices
01:54:46
for this cheap because the cost of producing it are put off the label. They are externalized. They are not internalized. And when we have the right prices for carbon emission,
01:55:05
when we have the right prices for the externalities associated with food production, food will be more expensive. And this will hurt, of course, many people. So we need to recycle the revenues
01:55:22
that come from the taxes on CO2 to those who wouldn't be able to afford food, which is an elementary need of any one of us. And that's what I hope will be done in the eco-social tax reform that is going underway right now in Austria.
01:55:42
Maybe another way is just to change the way we produce food and how much wasted food we produce. So I think we need to think not about how we will keep with the system and give the suspension to the other people, but how we can get rid of this system
01:56:00
as soon as possible. Of course, this needs to take time. We cannot do it right away. But I think this is what we need to change. It is about changing the way we produce and consume food. And how we can learn from these experiences, like these agro-ecological communities.
01:56:22
And I want to mention again, Suri Madikura in Mali, initiated by Bubatoure as a fantastic example. Of course, a political socialist example, but more than anything else, an example of how we can make it sustainable, how we can live with nature
01:56:41
and not just extract, but collaborate. And so also how we have to take care of our garden and not just always fly things from here and there, but do also in our small responsibility as citizen a lot.
01:57:03
And not just as consumers, but also as imaginative resources. So going back to the soil and healing with it by collaborating with it instead of just receiving
01:57:22
the fruits that have been exploited from it. Mikailo, would you like to have the last word? Yeah, I'm just thinking around your question and it's quite complex question. And for now, I'm sending an idea that maybe organic or bio-agriculture
01:57:42
can help to avoid soil degradation in some way, but it's not, someone says it is not decision for all soils, let's say, but it might be one of the ways to save our soils
01:58:02
and be healthy and yeah, yeah, yeah. And as I said, in an organization where we are pushing this idea to support small farmers, even individual farmers who, and we hope that they will be more environmental
01:58:22
responsible than big producer of food. So we are really rely on this transformation from large scale production of food to more smaller ones and also it can maybe helps with reducing of food waste as well.
01:58:41
Thank you so much at that point. Thank you to all the panelists for joining us today. Thank you for the lectures. Unfortunately, I couldn't open up this discussion to the audience, but it would be unfair towards the next panel if I took any longer. So we have a break now until quarter past five,
01:59:03
when we will rejoin together for the fourth panel with the name Natural Technologies, which will be chaired by Aziza Hamel. Looking forward to seeing you again later.