2010 - 2024

Agriculture and the food system accounts for nearly one third of all greenhouse gases, but the vast majority of this is from the energy intensive production and distribution of a few internationally traded commodities. Whereas farmers operating agro-ecological systems around the world produce food and resources for their communities while reducing cO2 emissions from agriculture and sequestering carbon at the same time.

Many governments now accept the need for net zero but there is…

New research has found that for every pound spent buying organic food through a farmers’ market or veg scheme, almost £3 more is generated in benefits to farmers and growers, their workers, local suppliers, citizens and the environment. We show how buying food is an agricultural act with far-reaching consequences.

One of the main problems with our food system is that the price you pay often doesn’t reflect all the factors that have gone into…

The achievements of beginning farmer movements of the last decade are exemplary, but land access challenges continue to threaten to dead-end the bolder aspirations of would be farmers. At the very root of the problem are the legal, cultural and social rules that govern our sense of property—what it is, how it is governed and how it is transferred. In the “Global North” strong ideological commitment to the virtues of private property make visioning alternative…

Pandemics heed an ancestral warning in the United States, harking back to when too many Indigenous people were killed due to smallpox. That memory was especially acute for tribal regions across the United States with the onset of COVID-19. While many Tribal regions were quick to close their communities, many of them especially in the Southwest were still the hardest hit. Farmers, re-focused on ensuring good food was reaching elders and the most vulnerable, while…

Do we even have a right to be hopeful? With political and ecological fires raging all around, is it irresponsible to imagine a future world radically better than our own? A world of healed ecosystems? Of food sovereignty and equal access to land? A world where governments fear the people instead of the other way around?

These are questions that Naomi Klein and Nnimmo Bassey wrestled with when they conceived of a sequel to last year's…

Please join the ORFC Global team and UK folksinger, Sam Lee, for a brief closing plenary (15 minutes)

For those who would like to sing along with the final song here are the lyrics.

One May morning early I chanced for to roam
And strolled through the field by the side of the grove.
It was there I did hear the harmless birds sing,
And you never heard so sweet,
and…