Category Archives: Food

The Fabric of Convergence: Reflections from the Nyéléni Global Forum

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by Priscilla Claeys, Sylvia Kay and Jessica Duncan

In what ways can food sovereignty or agroecology act as a viable joint framing for systemic convergence? The third Nyéléni Global Forum in Kandy, Sri Lanka, brought together over 700 activists with the aim of weaving convergence and strengthening alliances between food sovereignty and social justice movements. The authors reflect on their experience at the Forum, highlighting successes in cross-movement collaboration as well as frictions in organising, representation, and frameworks. Looking ahead, the Kandy Declaration calls for actions to deepen dialogue, transform governance, and build collective capacity to advance systemic transformation.

Read the article here. 

Agriculture in Rojava and the Making of a Decolonial Future

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How a grassroots revolution in northern Syria is redefining democracy, ecology, and decolonization from the ground up. An blog-post/article by Joost Jongerden and Necmettin Türk

When the Syrian civil war fractured the authority of the central state, a new kind of revolution took root in the country’s north. In the Kurdish-majority regions known as Rojava, communities seized the opportunity not to build a new state, but to build a new society based on self-administration. Much of the existing scholarship on Rojava has focused on this network of self-organized communes and regions, particularly in relation to questions of recognition, namely the development of a governance model that is inclusive of various cultural, ethnic, and religious communities. Yet far less attention has been paid to the decolonization of Rojava’s agrarian economy—a transformation that is equally fundamental to the region’s broader project of liberation.

read more here: https://theamargi.com/posts/agriculture-in-rojava-and-the-making-of-a-decolonial-future

EU Cultivate – Replication study Freiburg – Zusammen Leben x WUR x Cascoland

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Plan

During the replication phase of the EU Cultivate project, WUR will travel with the Library of Citizen engagement to the Food Sharing initiatives in each of the six spoke locations.

Our first stop ? Freiburg im Breisgau – where WUR & CASCOLAND visited CULTIVATE partner Zusammen Leben.  

Zusammen Leben – (German for Living together) have been managing a 3500 square meter community garden – as an intercultural meeting space since 2016. And as part of the ten year anniversary of this intercultural civic space, Zusammen Leben hosted a Lab &Kitchen at the garden. As explained in our library, Lab & kitchen is a creative methodology that fosters collaboration, bridges knowledge systems and engages communities through participatory cooking and good sharing activities. Importantly, Lab&Kitchen evolves with each iteration, responding to specific community needs. In designing this Lab&Kitchen, Zusammen Leben and CASCOLAND agreed that engaging people with a migration background should take priority.

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Food Commons – Summer School 2025

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This June, the Rural Sociology Group (RSO) hosted its first ever Food Commons Summer School. In a new blog, Rohit Dash shares his experiences and insights from the event.

What if food could be shared like stories. What if, we could build the truly proverbial village in our communities to raise a farm of delicious, cared for and nutritious food. Imagine a world, where food systems were entirely “Commoned” stripped from the materialist notions of private ownership, instead nurtured by care and collective stewardship. How do we get to this utopia? Was there ever a precedent to such an utopia? or are there examples of islands of utopia that remain hidden in plain sight?

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The harm supply chain: food, agriculture and colonialism in Kurdistan[1]

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Joost Jongerden

Introduction
Food is not the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about politics. Yet the political does not always present itself explicitly as political (Day 2022). This is certainly the case for food. While food is essential for the reproduction of biological life and an important cultural and economic artefact, various authors have shown it is political too. Single food products, such as sugar (Mintz 1985), palm oil (Csevár and Rugarli 2025) and soy (Hiraga 2025), have been shown to be inseparable from the histories of capitalism and colonialism. Their examples illustrate how food is entangled with broader systems of power, exploitation, and domination. Similarly, in the development of a food supply chain in Kurdistan, we see that food can both foster life and community, and foil it, serving as a vehicle for the deliberate destruction of political and socio-economic existence.        

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