The Irish state has encouraged a farming model that is heavily capitalised, resource and energy intensive and dependent on imported inputs. It has pushed farmers into a system tied to the weakest and most unstable links in the fossil fuel economy, be that fuel or fertilisers. That model now looks not only environmentally destructive, but economically reckless.The same pattern is visible across housing, fuel and food, where basic needs have been handed over to the market.
There has never been a better time to change direction – to turn our agriculture towards Agroecology. This means farming systems that work with natural processes, reduce dependence on imported fertilisers and other inputs, rebuild soil fertility, strengthen biodiversity and reconnect our land to our people by feeding us from the places where we live and the land around us. In Talamh Beo we are practicing those systems every day on our farms and in our fields. This is not a utopian fantasy. It is a practical response to a world defined by volatility, ecological breakdown and geopolitical instability.
We need a government which understands Food Sovereignty. Which takes food production for domestic consumption seriously. One which supports Local Food Producers economically and delinks food supplies from corporate actors, one which uses our land to meet the basic needs of people living here.
At this point in our history we can actually afford to invest in the future – we must use the state’s current wealth to pay for a deep shift in how we use our land, feed ourselves, and meet the basic needs of our people, from housing to health to transport and other infrastructure. The upside to this shift is that it has the potential to improve our lives, to build better food systems, reduce our dependence on global markets, and restore our degraded environment.
Talamh Beo wants:
A Transition to Agroecology: We must shift toward farming systems that work with natural processes, reducing the need for imported, fossil-fuel-based inputs. This builds soil fertility and economic resilience simultaneously.
Food Sovereignty as Policy: We need a National Food Sovereignty Strategy that delinks our food supply from corporate actors. This includes giving institutional recognition to local food producers, and supporting them economically as we rebuild local markets.
Market Intervention: The state must use its resources to establish stocks and intervene to stabilise prices for all basic needs when markets become too speculative or volatile. Market regulation is a tool to protect citizens, and it is a political choice not to use it.
Community Ownership: We should move toward community-owned renewable energy models—solar and wind—that ensure the benefits and the power stay local, rather than inviting further extraction by multinationals.
A Citizen’s Assembly on the Right to Food: We call for a national democratic process to establish the Right to Food in Ireland. This assembly should facilitate a national strategy to ensure that nutritious, locally produced food is accessible to all, delinked from corporate control and market volatility
The transition required is daunting, but when the state fails to provide a credible pathway forward, it leaves a vacuum. In that vacuum, simplistic and divisive rhetoric takes hold.
We stand with anyone who has been abandoned to the whims of a predatory global financial system, and support the right to protest. But we need to go deeper – we need to join the dots between extractive wars for oil, the climate crisis, and the cost-of-living reality in rural Ireland, and recognise that many of the architects of this volatility also profit from it. That increasingly global markets are manipulated to enrich the few, and utterly fail to serve the many.
The future lies in breaking our dependence on these markets, in opposing the warmongers and preachers of hate if we want better food, better soil, healthier communities, and more resilient livelihoods.
Talamh Beo offers a space to listen, talk, and act in order to build a better way forward. We want to bring people together around the things which matter most to us; food, land, people and community. If you are a farmer or citizen on the island of Ireland you can be a member of our movement. Join us!
