Julia Bar-Tal is an agriculturalist who operates a farm in Brandenburg, the German federal state surrounding Berlin, as well as being an agriculture consultant and an activist. She has long been active in the international solidarity movement, and in 2015, during the war in Syria, helped to create a network focused on food sovereignty.
She is involved with agricultural ecology on the practical, political, and scientific levels. Step by step, her farm has gradually become a meeting place for people to engage in these different issues. Recently, she spoke with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s Tanja Tabbara about what the land in Brandenburg needs, and what wartime solidarity among farmers can look like.
Can you describe what it is that you’re building here?
As a farmer, I really love having animals graze on large tracts of pasture, and I’m also very passionate about working with draft horses. When it comes to green areas, I also really like working in the big open pastures, as well as the smaller-scale structures in the field and the garden. Here on my new farm I’m developing a lovely vegetable garden, and a place where I can host people, too. That’s what brings me joy and it’s what I’m good at.
But politically speaking, I’m a proponent of diversity among the different farming operations in Brandenburg. It’s important to me that we advocate for farmers and not for corporations and investors. Now when I look at what’s happening in Germany, I have the feeling that we are living in an increasingly polarized society: agriculture and environmental protections are pitted against one another, or then there’s organic versus conventional farming.
You increasingly get the feeling that people are under so much pressure to defend themselves and retreat into their respective bubbles, that they’re often no longer capable of communicating with one another or breaking out of these polarizations. Therefore, I also want this farm to be a place for dialogue.
How is it for you to do that here in Brandenburg, where the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) received around 40 percent of the vote in the most recent federal election?
Well, I’m afraid to say the election result didn’t particularly surprise me. At the same time, I’m from the countryside so of course I’m sympathetic to the concerns of fellow farmers — it’s not fair to tar everyone with the same brush.
As a farmer, the strength of the bonds you form with the place, the climate, and the soil are such that if you lose the land it leads to a real identity crisis.
In four years on the executive committee of ABL Nordost [the north-eastern division of the German small farmers’ association], I’ve put my heart and soul into representing our farmers with all their differences, and I’ve always stood for solidarity and empathy with the people here — including with the many who don’t vote for the far-right, a demographic who tend to get overlooked. People from the cities can have a particular way of treating the countryside and its inhabitants.
To be blunt, out here we produce everything that urban areas need, and we get none of the privileges. In other words, all the energy, all the food, everything that the city consumes, is created here, but hardly any of that value stays in the region. These structural questions are left unposed and undiscussed.
What kinds of structures and initiatives are needed in rural Brandenburg?
As you know, if we fail to invest in the development of these regions, there will be consequences. But if “development” is a top-down process where the people get no say, then they will turn away [from politics] or feel abandoned. We need social infrastructure, we need dialogue, we need people with the necessary open-mindedness. But we also have to earn money with what we do here. If we can’t make a living from it, if farms go bankrupt, if people here can only get rubbish jobs that frustrate them and are poorly paid, then of course that’s a massive problem.
We do of course need to critically engage and provide opposition when people advocate for terrible things, but I also think that criticism works better when it is built on a foundation of solidarity. To approach the issues moralistically — pointing the finger without demonstrating basic empathy for people and for rural areas — isn’t very effective.
I’d hope for a kind of pluralism in the discussion, one that also opens up new perspectives. Most of the knowledge and most of the educational initiatives remain in the cities, and if they make it into the countryside at all, they barely go beyond the city limits before completely running out of steam.
You’re a farmer in Brandenburg — how did you go from that to working on international solidarity?
No matter whether it’s taking action on agricultural issues in Brandenburg and representing our farmers here, or supporting farmers in Syria or other countries, it’s only on the basis of my identity as a farmer that I can — or even want to — do these things. As a farmer, the strength of the bonds you form with the place, the climate, and the soil are such that if you lose the land it leads to a real identity crisis. We’re not just talking about a job or a place you could simply swap for another.
For people in countries that are affected by war, conflict, and expulsion, the extent of that violence is of course even more severe and more profound. Given my identity as a farmer, and my love and empathy — we could also call it solidarity — it doesn’t matter to me if the farmer is in Brandenburg, Bavaria, or Syria or Lebanon, or wherever else. The world can be very cruel to farmers, and we are often similar, both in terms of what we suffer but also in our strengths.
And it’s also not only about farmers — often people without land are affected, for example migrant workers or seasonal workers, or also activist gardeners, in Syria for example, where people in cities under bombardment built up networks for food sovereignty. This readiness to roll up your sleeves and look for solutions, that’s also a phenomenal strength common to those of us in this profession. When we act in solidarity with one another and support each other, it can move mountains. There’s incredible power in that.
You took part in founding the 15th Garden, a Syrian food sovereignty network. How did the network come about?
The 15th Garden is the first food sovereignty network to belong to Syria and all its people. We met for the first time on 15 March 2014, which was of course the anniversary of the Syrian revolution. The 15th Garden is the garden where we want to see the growth of self-determination, freedom, and dignity — in other words all the demands of the Syrian revolution and beyond. For all the people of Syria.
I feel so sad and desperate about the incredible suffering that is being concentrated in such an excruciating way on such a small stretch of land as Gaza, where hunger is being weaponized so ruthlessly and so blatantly in full view of the world.
The founders of the network, who came from all regions of Syria, expressed this in explicitly anti-sectarian ways. It was vitally important to them that this also be expressed in the network’s extended name: “The First Food Sovereignty Network of Syria and all its people, whoever they are.” Here, “of Syria and all its people” is also deliberate: meaning also in the geographic sense, because at that point the mass exodus, the refugee movement, was already occurring.
The network rapidly expanded into every region in Syria, becoming a very large network. To my knowledge, we were the first network to develop strategies for the defence of food sovereignty in wartime.
What does war mean for small-scale farming?
Take the Iraq War, for example, where in 2003 the seed bank was bombed, and then later with the imposition of the new constitution and laws on seeds, the ways that small-scale farming was organized and practised were destroyed. For farmers, that meant that their seeds, which have to be sown every year, were no longer propagated. The result being that the stocks were irretrievably lost.
The same goes for fruit trees and berries that are burnt or cut down, ripped up, or that die simply because they’re not tended to for a number of years. After that, they’re gone forever. In Afghanistan, 40 years of war have led to the total destruction of small-scale farming infrastructure and traditions.
In wartime, who stands to profit from famine?
There’s a form of cold violence that does not necessarily begin in the wake of hot violence, but often occurs at the same time. We then see how development aid or also food aid programmes already operate during periods of hot violence, doing damage for example through the introduction of hybrid or genetically modified seeds.
As we know, it is often the case that post-war markets are carved up, and rebuilding contracts allocated, while war is still ongoing. Emergency aid sometimes comes in the form of food packages. But when transportation routes are closed or the international community simply decides not to deliver aid, then hunger can be weaponized. We saw that in Syria, and we are seeing it in other regions. Right now, people are dying in Gaza while the trucks are stalled at the border. I simply feel so sad and desperate, as I think so many of us are, about the incredible suffering that is being concentrated in such an excruciating way on such a small stretch of land as Gaza, where hunger is being weaponized so ruthlessly and so blatantly in full view of the world.
In the network in Syria, we developed strategies to help people survive, or to continue to grow crops. Syria was drenched in so much violence during the course of the war that the network there was also wiped out. But knowledge is not something that you can take from people. The network continued to develop in other countries of the region, becoming a gift to the world. It is not yet entirely clear where the latest developments in Syria will lead. But I sincerely hope that in a free Syria, Syrians will once again be able to make use of what they know.
In what ways did the network provide concrete support to people in Syria?
We brought in seeds, for example. When I say “we”, I’m talking about a Syrian network. The network was Syrian and the work was done by people there. And then supporters would help. So I’m talking about a Syrian “we”, one I was very privileged to have been a part of.
These people now have to reinvent themselves from nothing. Their hope requires our solidarity.
My acts of solidarity then came to include bridge-building initiatives, for example when there was a need for seeds or particular information on a given topic. Syrians in Syria were also partly isolated and cut off from the rest of the world. Decades of dictatorship meant that they were without links to international networks. Much like here, Syria had seen an industrialization of agriculture and also a process of urbanization, where whole generations no longer have any idea how food is actually produced. Hence, the network developed knowledge and disseminated it: for example, about what hybrid seeds and genetically modified seeds are, or what seed saving is.
People no longer had any access to their own seeds. The knowledge of how to propagate your own seeds can be lost in one or two generations. The Syrian regime took control of everything and centralized everything. People risked their lives to smuggle seeds. When cities are under siege, when the aim is to murder people, to use hunger to bring whole municipalities to their knees, then even the slightest suspicion of bringing seeds through those blockades can get people killed. In other words, there were literally gardens in cities that were being blockaded, starved, and bombarded, where communities still had far too little to eat, but were at least able to survive.
How were decisions made in the network?
The aim within the network was always to find a solution that fitted each particular situation. Naturally there was never someone in an office deciding what the right thing was for people — rather, we as farmers and gardeners met up together, and each of us would describe where we came from and the challenges we faced, and we would work together to develop a strategy for each particular place. That included the sale and distribution of food.
For example, there were instances where humanitarian aid would bring food packages into regions where farmers were still producing. In many such cases, the local markets then collapsed. In those cases they needed to be able to market their produce: for food to not simply be distributed for free, but instead to work with local councils and communities to design strategies for a redeveloped local food cycle that would centre people’s participation.
How are the farmers of the network coping who now go back to Syria?
I’m mindful of the massive challenges facing the farmers in Syria right now. Since 8 December, a number of friends of people in the 15th Garden have returned to their villages for the first time in years. Will they just take a look around, or will they stay? And will their homes be piles of rubble, or empty shells, looted of all their possessions, long since ghost towns?
There is no electricity supply, no water. I think of all those fruit tree planters who are now returning to their villages, to where the trees used to blossom so magnificently, where the soil was alive, and water and fields were abundant, and where now it’s all a gravel-strewn wasteland, without infrastructure, without even a single tree. These people now have to reinvent themselves from nothing. Their hope requires our solidarity.
Translated by Marc Hiatt and Rowan Coupland for Gegensatz Translation Collective.