Dr. Zach Bush spent 17 years in academic medicine where he studied biochemistry, cellular biology, pharmaceutical management, disease and ultimately worked for many years in the hospital system. During the 1990’s and 2000’s he witnessed an epidemic of chronic disease in the US, that was hugely accelerated from previous decades where the main cause of death was trauma or infectious disease. He believes this is a result of the toxic pesticides that we have pumped…

This session will provide an overview of the climate crisis in these countries and the need for global and national policies. Speakers will share how the crisis in Pakistan devastated the country and the efforts that farmers have made to rehabilitate their communities with agroecology. Speakers from Bangladesh will share how they have used the floods to create a sustainable community development initiative.

This session will begin with a 35 minute screening of the film “Planet Local: A Quiet Revolution” which features grassroots activists from every continent alongside internationally known figures like Noam Chomsky, Jane Goodall, Pat McCabe and Gabor Mate. The film challenges the mainstream media narrative that “bigger is better” that has dominated economic thinking for centuries, and showcases initiatives that are already underway to protect and restore human-scale local economies, communities and the natural world,…

After two years online, ORFC is back in-person! Come and gather with your friends and colleagues in the Main Hall as we celebrate the movement and reflect on all we’ve been through over the last three years. There will be short opening addresses from each of the ORFC’s partner organisations and musical performances by folk singer, Kate Huggett and the Shumei Taiko Ensemble, featuring Natural Agriculture farmers from Japan, the US and the UK.

For over four decades, Vandana Shiva, has vociferously advocated for farmers’ rights, indigenous knowledge, diversity, localisation, and real democracy. She has been at the forefront of seed-saving, food sovereignty, and connecting the dots between the destruction of nature and indiscriminate corporate greed. In her keynote talk, Dr. Shiva will reflect on a life of activism, recounted in her new memoir, Terra Viva. She shares memories of her childhood in post-partition India, and reflects on how…

Raj Patel and Marion Nestle have forged careers focused on the politics of food and how to transform the current food system beyond its current focus on corporate profits to a system designed and conducted to promote human health and environmental sustainability.  Their books provide an analysis of the need for systems change and a roadmap for how to do it.  Nestle’s most recent book, Slow Cooked: An Unexpected Life in Food Politics, explains how and…

Evoking past colonial practices, corporations are now using digital tools to entrench industrialised farming methods into the practices of small-scale farming and fishing communities. Current trends in digitalisation thus threaten biodiversity, the wider environment and human health. So far, few have challenged the tech industry’s hype about this ‘fourth industrial revolution’. This session will outline the issues, based on ETC’s recently-published report Food Barons, explore how we can assess the pros and cons of digital…

Most fungi live out of sight, yet they're all around us, and make up a massively diverse kingdom of organisms that support and sustain nearly all life on Earth. The more we learn about them, the more fascinating fungi become. In this conversation, Doug Bierend and Merlin Sheldrake will discuss some of the ways these extraordinary beings – and our relationships with them – change our understanding of the world in which we live.

Just how much trouble are the invertebrates in; why does this matter; and what can we do about it? In this session we will be exploring these questions with Dave Goulson, Professor of Biology at the University of Sussex, who is one of the leading scientists studying the ecology, behaviour and conservation of bumblebees and a supporter of citizen science where the public can actively support scientists via observations. He is also a brilliant and…