The Landworkers’ Alliance is a union of farmers, growers, foresters and land-based workers.
The Landworkers’ Alliance’s 2019 calendar marked the beginning of a collaborative relationship with artist Rosanna Morris: who works on the themes of food, farming and social justice.
It was the first in a series of beautiful and popular fundraising wall calendars from the LWA.
The calendar contained 13 unique lino prints of agricultural scenes, as well as twelve historical anecdotes that give an overview of the creation of our contemporary food system.
Some of the calendar’s images are based on the LWA’s influential film ‘In Our Hands’. Its subject matter, artwork and text give the calendar a rustic authenticity that roots it firmly in the social movement that gave birth to it. As the LWA campaigned for a fairer post-Brexit food system, this calendar spoke to that moment:
“Food and farming in this country is on a knife edge, with farmers leaving the fields just as the earthworms and lapwings are abandoning the soils and hedgerows. Now, with the political moment of Brexit however, there is also a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to turn this around!”
Below are examples three of the historical anecdotes that were featured in the calendar:
February 1846: The Repeal of the Corn Laws
The Corn Laws were a protectionist measure that made food imports too expensive to reach British plates. This meant people paid a lot for food, which maintained both British farming and the landowning class who reaped the rewards from it. The Anti-Corn-Law League (credited as being the first modern pressure group) was comprised of factory owners, liberal politicians and economist David Ricardo, and they opposed the Corn Laws in favour of the free market.
These representatives of industrial Britain wanted cheaper food so they could pay workers less whilst still keeping them working. They lead a highly successful campaign. In 1846, the Corn Laws were repealed and cheap imports of grain entered Britain from France, Holland and Ireland. British farming went into a slow but steady decline. The Repeal of the Corn Laws marks the beginning of the free-market era in food, and was a victory for middle-class liberals in parliament over old-fashioned Tory landowners. It also led to the dwindling of British farming, felt most harshly by the labourers who worked at the bottom of the pile. Rural Britain was not to take this lying down however. Whilst the disgruntled Tories retired to their shires, the labourer was emerging as a new force in rural politics.
June 1846: The Repeal of the Corn Laws
In 1882, the good ship Dunedin sailed from Port Chalmers in New Zealand for London. It carried a historic cargo: frozen New Zealand lamb. A herd of 10,000 Merino and Lincoln cross-breed sheep had been slaughtered specially and sewn into calico bags for the trip. The entire hold was frozen with a compression refrigeration machine that used three tons of coal a day and could keep the cargo cold even in tropical conditions. For decades, poachers, Luddites, Tolpuddle Martyrs, Irish nationalists and other convicts had been transported to Australasia, mainly to work the sheep ranges. Now the sheep were being transported back.
The Dunedin represents a technological innovation that used fossil fuels to facilitate long-distance haulage of perishables. But with this technology there also came a politics. Now that they had access to European markets for their lamb, rangers in New Zealand and Australia increased production. This in turn demanded a ramping up of indigenous land grabbing and further decimation of Maori and Aboriginal culture. At the same time European sheep farming went into decline, as cheaper wool and lamb was brought from Down Under. A global food economy was taking root.
October 1962: The Common Agricultural Policy
The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) was designed to support farming and make food affordable in post-war Europe. This was social democracy on an international scale. However, from its inception, the CAP saw technology and capital as the drivers of farm innovation, not the farmers and labourers themselves. As such it supported not only mechanisation, but also farm consolidation and even a deliberate plan to remove five million farmers from the land, called the Mansholt directive. TheCommon Market that went with the CAP originally just tried to stabilise trade between war-torn economies, but it ended up decimating local markets.
In Britain for example, two French apple varieties came to dominate the market of this apple-rich island. The farms, livelihoods and local food culture lost under CAP are its real waste, rather than the butter mountains and wine lakes more normally associated with it. As we leave Europe, we would do well to remember the social-democratic roots of the Common Agricultural Policy in thinking how to replace it.
Please Note: The text and images featured here are the property of The Landworkers’ Alliance and may not be reproduced without permission.