The Bord Bia scandal rumbles on – but it’s not really about Larry Murrin, because Larry Murrin is the symptom of a system which has been failing farmers for years. Whether he comes or goes, farmers need to look beyond the people and instead examine the systems if they want any real change. That means a real interrogation of who we want to produce for, if we are happy with where our produce ends up, if we are happy with what its production does to the land around us, and if we can stand over all that.
Food Sovereignty is about democratisation and control of food systems; wresting them back from private interests and putting farmers and citizens back at the centre. It is also about international trade – allowing countries to have food systems, agriculture and thriving rural populations which feed their people – not unregulated global markets and a race to the bottom in production.
This also means going beyond protesting about each mini crisis in the industrial food system to suggestions for structural reform. The Unfair Trading Practices directive will help bring more clarity to what happens to Irish food here in Ireland, and who benefits, but the best clarity comes from doing things yourself, with a community, or cooperatively.
There is huge frustration about the actions of the chairperson of Bord Bia, and rightly so. Surely if there is one product Ireland does not need to import it’s beef or dairy, right? Unfortunately corporate controlled food chains don’t work that way – in fact this is a predictable enough outcome of a system which is built to serve export growth and agribusinesses rather than farmers and consumers. It’s about time we began to see that those interests don’t always align.
Bord Bia’s role up until now has been to sell a story to international buyers, retailers and others; most famously with its “Origin Green” branding. It is selling a green image, but ultimately agribusinesses prioritise volume of production over any other metrics. Farmers have been forced into the Bord Bia regulatory regime in order to support agribusiness exports. Even Organic farmers, who have to meet higher standards than those in the Origin Green system, are forced to certify twice if they want to sell with Bord Bia approval.
Travel further down the chain however, and you enter into the shady world of shell companies, international trade and global commodity markets, where price and continuity of supply trump all other considerations; the obvious contradiction of the chair of Bord Bia selling Brazilian Beef to a fast food retailer in Ireland should not surprise us; the system works perfectly well from an agribusiness point of view. The issue is that most farmers and citizens don’t want it to work that way.
Irish farmers work hard to produce high quality produce, but the encouragement has always been to increase supply, lower costs, and accept price volatility. Instead of really leveraging Ireland’s unique capacity for grass fed beef and dairy and ensuring fair and stable prices for farmers, Bord Bia have been playing with fire. In spite of farmers’ efforts and all the Origin Green branding and consumer confidence tricks, the reality is that Irish water quality is decreasing year on year, biodiversity is in crisis and farmers continue to be threatened by the whims of the global markets and unscrupulous agribusiness traders. At some point those chickens may well come home to roost.
At the same time, our local markets, short food supply chains, and community based food production are sidelined, ignored and devalued. That includes local grains and our own feed supplies, with the market saturated with imported soy or other feeds. Farmers have largely ignored or failed to acknowledge the upstream and downstream aspects of their business. Unfortunately the first casualty of this is the integrity of the system itself.
We cannot separate the ongoing Bord Bia crisis from the realities of international trade, the Mercosur agreement and deregulation of trade rules. Farmers are right to be outraged that agribusinesses are devaluing their produce by selling a cheaper equivalent farmed abroad. But let’s be clear – we can’t have our cake and eat it. If Ireland wants to protest imports undermining our domestic production, we will have to recognise that our own produce may be doing the same somewhere else, including the sources of the inputs for that production.
If there are farmers in Senegal protesting dried milk powder from Irish agribusinesses flooding their markets and undermining their local production will our farmers stand with them? In Talamh Beo the answer is yes. If there are communities in Argentina protesting because they are surrounded by thousands of hectares of GM soya being sprayed with glyphosate to be exported to feed pigs or chickens in industrial systems will our farmers stand with them? In Talamh Beo the answer is yes.
Irish farmers are right to question Bord Bia, and question why the head of an agribusiness corporation holds so much power. But we should also question whether the produce from farms here undermines a farmer somewhere else – it can’t be one rule for us and another for everyone else. A fair system bases trade on solidarity, not competition, because for every farming family forced to leave their land the world grows a little poorer; be it in Burkina Faso, Ballinasloe or Bulgaria. The real path to a better food and farming system here in Ireland is through working with others internationally and changing the way the system functions, so it functions for farmers everywhere and so it leaves the place a bit better than we found it, be that here or overseas.
