A Niemöller Moment: More on Being Cancelled Post Keynesian Style

By Thomas Palley

June 2, 2025

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

"Silence", street mural by Carlos Gomilo | Image via PXHere, Creative Commons CC0

Last week I e-mailed a note titled “Goodbye pluralism: cancelled Post Keynesian style” which detailed my suspension by the Post Keynesian Economics Society (PKES). That suspension unjustly sanctioned me for an earlier e-mail announcement of my article “The Ukraine war and Europe’s deepening march of folly”.

The PKES has now responded, claiming I violated its list-serve rules. I welcome their response. It creates an opportunity both to remedy this injustice and to reverse an intolerant turn within the PKES’s rules of discourse. That turn is the much more important issue and it should concern all.

But first, I must address the PKES response, which I believe is disingenuous about the real reason for my suspension. In my view, that reason is the desire of pro-Ukrainian sympathizers to ban discussions of the Ukraine conflict which challenge the Western establishment’s anti-Russian narrative. If my article had been about Keir Starmer’s Labour government fiscal austerity it would not have been sanctioned.

The PKES response is disingenuous

The PKES claims I have violated their list-serve rules. Their claim is false. Sadly, some have muddied the water by posting misinformation about my repeatedly violating the rules, while others have opinionated on the merits of my views about the war to justify my suspension. The prejudices expressed therein have reinforced my understanding of what is in play.

The only thing that matters is did my sending an announcement of my article “The Ukraine war and Europe’s deepening march of folly” violate the PKES list-serve rules?

In that regard, the website states: “The PKES mailing list is intended primarily as an economics-related announcement list for workshops, academic events, jobs etc.” Furthermore, e-mail answers to the entire list are discouraged.

The e-mail announcement I sent is clearly “economics-related”. It was also short and concise, and it was not a response to a posting by another.

The website instructions do not specifically list as permissible the sending of working papers, articles, and op-eds. The PKES seeks to use that as a loophole for justifying my suspension. However, the open-ended “etc.” permits e-mail announcements of economics-related articles and op-eds.

More importantly, the list-serve is actively used by many members to send announcements about their working papers and articles. My e-mail comported with that.

It would be a tragedy if my suspension means PKES members are prohibited from notifying others of working papers, op-eds, and materials of interest.

Ukraine: the real reason for suspension

In my view, the real reason for my suspension is Ukraine. I have not been told who requested my suspension. I suspect it was a member of the PKES committee who is pro-Ukrainian, and the request was then supported by others because they have similar sympathies or they wished to avoid internal conflict.

Ukraine and the suffocation of pluralism

Beyond the suspension issue, the deeper problem lies in the behavior of pro-Ukraine supporters who seek to suppress opinions challenging the Western establishment’s anti-Russian position.

For many years, the PKES system worked well, with openness to announcements on a wide array of issues of public concern. As regards my own experience, I often received appreciative feedback on announcements of my op-eds.

That changed with the Ukraine conflict, and there has since been a collapse of tolerance. Ukraine’s supporters have sought to block articles questioning the history and political economic logic of the West’s stance. It is that which has prompted the current situation.

Parenthetically, other progressive list-serves have experienced parallel problems. There, postings have been buzzed by pro-Ukraine supporters with argumentative e-mail replies. A similar pattern has emerged re postings on Zionism and Israel’s genocide in Gaza, with Israel’s supporters buzzing postings they oppose. Some list-serve members have objected to the stream of hostile e-mail traffic, opening the door for curtailing list-serve use.

An easy pluralistic remedy

For the PKES, there is an easy pluralistic remedy to this problem.

Persons should be allowed to post announcements of economics-related papers and op-eds. Those announcements can take the form of an embedded link or attachment. It should be an announcement list-serve, not a discussion list-serve. That is the critical institutional distinction.

Discussion responses should either be private, or via a discussion list-serve if the PKES deems to create one.

“Economics-related” involves judgment, which renders it problematic as “one person’s art is another’s ink blot”. For instance, war is economics-related. Regarding the Ukraine conflict, the US’s desire to sever Europe’s reliance on Russian gas and Europe’s economic engagement with Russia is part of the story. The interests of the US and European military-industrial complexes are also relevant, and so too is imperialism. Those forces express themselves through politics, which determines policy, calling for attention to political factors.

That illustrates the subjective complex nature of “economics-related”. Given its commitment to pluralism, the PKES should err on the side of an expansive definition. The delete button is an eighth-of-an-inch away. From a pluralist standpoint, the cost of deleting an unwanted e-mail is trivial compared to that of suppressing someone’s views.

Unfortunately, judging by my suspension and the reply justifying it, that is not the direction the PKES is headed in.

The Heterodox Economics list-serve has also responded to similar developments by restricting the scope of list-serve postings. That is a tragedy.

Given today’s intensified political struggle, progressives will need every available resource for pluralistic discourse. Capitulating to the disruptions of the intolerant by limiting communication, goes in the opposite direction. It is akin to shooting oneself in the foot.

A Niemöller moment

It is tempting to dismiss the current episode as a storm in a teacup. That is wrong. The issues it raises resonate with Martin Niemöller’s famous confessional poem, “First they came for”, about the Nazi era and the evil of not speaking out.

Unlike Niemöller’s time, this is not one when people are being disappeared. However, being disappeared is an extreme and is not the test of a Niemöller moment. The poem’s lesson is it is never to early to speak out, and no act of silencing is too small to speak out against.

That is what renders my own trivial suspension important. It is also why it is important to reopen the PKES and other progressive list-serves to pluralistic exchange.

The Guns Are Again Ablaze in Libya

By Vijay Prashad

June 4, 2025

Source: Globetrotter and No Cold War Perspectives

Sirte, Libya, after NATO “liberation”.

On 12 May 2025, Abdul Ghani al-Kikli, known to everyone in Libya as Ghnewa al-Kikli, was killed during a meeting inside a militia facility run by the 444th Combat Brigade in Tripoli. Ghnewa, as he was called, led the Stability Support Apparatus (SSA), which had ruled parts of Tripoli, and indeed sections of northern Libya, with an iron fist. The leader of the 444th Brigade, Major General Mahmoud Hamza, celebrated his troops for ‘overthrowing the Ghnewa Empire’. Hamza, although rooted in his militia, is the director of military intelligence of one of the several governments that claim to be the official government of Libya. The death of Ghnewa opened a new round of violence across Tripoli, as the SSA fighters took to the streets in distress at the death of their leader. As the SSA dissolved in despair, the 444th Brigade went into its vacated posts and properties to claim them. At this point, as if Libya needed more trouble, the RADA Special Deterrence Forces, led by the Islamist leader Abdul Raouf Kara, attacked the 444th Brigade. Kara’s al-Radaa or RADA forces are rooted in the Madkhali salafi tradition that is favoured by sections of Libya’s Muslim Brotherhood, and while the name of their force appears governmental, it is just another glorified militia outfit that spends its time going after non-Islamic political forces in Libya.

The clash between the 444th Brigade and the SSA, and then with the RADA Special Deterrence Forces, provoked another round of handwringing about tribalism and Islam in Libya. That was how the Western press and think tanks reported what had happened in Tripoli. But this is utterly misleading. Major General Hamza responded to criticism that his 444th Brigade operates as militia for parochial purposes on his Facebook page, ‘For years, we have always been keen on the security and protection of citizens, preventing bloodshed and stopping the armed conflict. We were not advocates of war, and keen on the sanctity of the blood of innocent people and the protection of lives, property and honours. Our intervention in the past years to stop armed conflicts is evidence of the sincerity of our intentions’. He hastened to meet with the Prime Minister of Libya’s Government of National Unity, Abdul Rahman al-Dbeibeh and told him that the 444th Brigade had secured the major intersections in Tripoli, such as at Salahaldeen and Ain Zara. All seemed back to normal.

What NATO Created

When the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) exceeded the mandate of United Nations Security Council resolution 1973 in 2011, it did not provide a no-fly zone and prevent bloodshed in Libya, but it destroyed the institutions of the Libyan state and provided air cover to a range of militia groups. These militia groups, funded by a range of actors (Egypt, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, the United States), worked together against the remnants of the Libyan state, but had nothing to unite them. The moment that they brutally killed Muammar al-Qaddafi and claimed Tripoli, they turned on each other. A hasty parliamentary election called for 2012 brought some of these factions into stark conflict: the Muslim Brotherhood coalesced by and large around the Justice and Construction Party (led by a former hotel manager, Mohamed Sowan) and the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (led by a long-time exile, Mohamed el-Magariaf), the salafi Homeland Party (led by the cleric Ali al-Sallabi and the al-Qaeda fighter Abdelhakim Belhadj), and then the neoliberals of the National Forces Alliance (led by the US-backed Mahmoud Jibril). The pro-Qaddafi forces had been banned. No political leader emerged in parliament with a majority, while Islamist and other militias began to tear apart the country as the state’s monopoly over armed force vanished. Prime Minister after Prime Minister followed each other, but none had real power. The entire situation created by NATO in 2011 exploded in what is now known as the Second Civil War, which went from 2014 to 2020.

Three centres of power emerged. The Government of National Unity and the Government of National Salvation operate in Tripoli, while the Government of National Stability is in Tobruk and Bayda. Guns blared with ex-CIA asset General Khalifa Haftar trying on several occasions to seize Tripoli from the east and provide a military solution to the political disorder. But no one was able to prevail. Libya became chaotic, the oil wells clogged up, theft was rampant, and government institutions deteriorated. None of the major political forces could make a claim to being Libyan, with the result that no-one could rise above their parochial origins (leaders of this or that militia from this or that town) or of their limited power base (head of this group or that group with gunmen able to defend this or that neighbourhood or town). In the absence of any national force (a military or a political project), Libya spent the past decade bathed in violence and despair.

Ghnewa was a perfect example of the kind of man who dominated Libya. He was born in Benghazi, but his family comes from Kikla, a town in the western Nefusa Mountains, about 150 kilometres southwest of Tripoli (where his body was returned to be buried on 14 May). Ghnewa owned and worked in a bakery in Tripoli’s Abu Salim working-class district in 2011 when Gaddafi was overthrown. He had already become part of the local muscle in the tough neighbourhood, and shaped that experience into building a militia that increasingly took over parts of the economy and life of Tripoli. It was the SSA that ran many of the prisons in which migrants had been detained, tortured, and then sold into enslavement (recently the International Criminal Court framed a warrant for the arrest of Osama Elmasry Njeem, the head of one of these prisons; rather than hand him over, the Italian government, which had Njeem in custody, sent him back to Libya). While it is tempting to imagine that his death is part of an attempt to clean up the militia groups, it is in fact part of a broader internal struggle between the militias that characterised the Second Libyan Civil War. Social media shows the movement of militia groups from Warsehfana and Zawiya in western Libya toward Tripoli, perhaps in support of Kara’s RADA group. There is no immediate optimism about the situation in the aftermath of Ghnewa’s death. The baker lived by the gun and died by the gun. His life since the NATO war has been characterised by violence and corruption – dangerous ingredients that characterise Libya today.

Dangerous Tremors

A few days after the death of Ghnewa, Libya’s mufti, Sheikh Sadiq al-Ghariani went on Tanasuh Television to call for ‘people to take to the streets in their tens of thousands to call for elections and an end to the transitional phases’. Al-Gharani, a salafi preacher, had emerged in the chaos of the NATO war to claim this important seat and from there began to offer fatwas against Qaddafi and later against anyone who went against his view of the world. He remains very powerful, with close links to some of the Islamist forces in the country. Meanwhile, General Khalifa Haftar took advantage of the anniversary of what is called the al-Karama (Dignity) uprising of 2014 to offer his view that the military is the most important institution in Libya and should be saluted for its bravery and commitment to the nation. Between al-Ghariani and Haftar lie the two sources of power within the country, those who wield the Quran and the Gun, for political purposes. Even they are fragmented, though.

But the real source of power lies elsewhere. Since 2011, the United Nations has forty-four times passed resolutions calling for stability in Libya and for no outside interference. The ceasefire of 2020, rooted in the Berlin II process, created several platforms for stability and sovereignty, including the Security Working Group, the Economic Working Group, and the 5+5 Joint Military Commission. These groups have become vehicles for the intervention of foreign powers, from the United States to Turkey, that are interested in Libya’s future oil production. They simply will not allow Libya to breathe because that will mean that it might make decisions for the oil that do not please the outside forces. In each of these groups and the many others that have been set up since 2012, Libyan representation has been minimal, largely because Libya is itself fragmented and disoriented.

The guns are again firing in Libya. Money pours in from outside with the hope that one day Libyan oil will allow money to move in the opposite direction. In the shifting sands of Libya’s interior, hope is minimal. The desire is for no more conflict, but that is unlikely. There are so many men with guns across the country. And they have so many bullets.Email

Vijay Prashad

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power. Tings Chak is the art director and a researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and lead author of the study “Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China.” She is also a member of Dongsheng, an international collective of researchers interested in Chinese politics and society.

The UAE Lobby That Rages Its War in Sudan

By Mohamed Suliman

June 3, 2025

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Image from UNHCR website

The war in Sudan between the Sudanese armed forces and the Rapid Support Forces is closing in on its second year, millions are displaced, and thousands have been killed, in addition to severe damage to infrastructure. However, this war is also sustained by external actors pursuing their interests in the country. The UAE, the main backer of the RSF militia with money and arms, has also been lobbying government decision makers; its effort has succeeded several times in shaping the foreign policy of these countries towards Sudan, but there are many voices that, hitherto, remain independent.

The RSF emerged primarily from the 2013 restructuring of the notorious Janjaweed militia, its goal was to support the central government’s counterinsurgency operations in Darfur and South Kordofan. In 2017, the Sudanese parliament passed a law legitimizing its activities, over the years, the RSF militia committed countless crimes and atrocities during the ongoing war, including the destruction of villages, the killing of protesters, sexual violations and rape, mass killings, unlawful detentions, the targeting of hospitals and churches, and attacks on journalists and media institutions, in addition to ethnic-based killings and recruiting children as soldiers during the ongoing war.

For many years, the UAE has been supporting the RSF militia with weapons, money, and even foreign fighters. This support significantly increased after the outbreak of the war. The UAE has strong economic and political interests in Sudan that it assumes will be secured once the militia takes over power. These interests include exploiting gold and agricultural resources, seizing strategic ports in the Red Sea, and preventing the return of Islamists, its traditional political foe, to power.

The impact of the UAE funding to the RSF militia has been disastrous; it enabled the militia to sustain its war in Sudan and commit several massacres and genocides in the Darfur,  according to the UN experts, it’s estimated that 15 thousand members of the Massalit tribe were killed by the militia based on their ethnicity. In other parts of Darfur, women were raped and abducted, and children were piled up and shot to death. For months, Al-fashir city, the main refugee area in Darfur, has been besieged by the militia.

To wage its war in Sudan, the UAE had to influence Western countries or even neutralize its policy makers to align with its goals, and prevent them from taking any action that could negatively affect its plan in Sudan. 

In the UK, the UAE pushed its leaders to suppress any criticism of its role in the Sudan’s war, the UAE even cancelled ministerial meetings in the UK when it did not defend itself in the face of accusations of its support to the militia, which let the UK deputy prime minister make a secretive trip to the UAE reduce the tension, a step shows how heavy the UAE invested in lobbying the UK government to advance its interests in this War. Moreover, in May 2023, a Dubai-based private equity firm facilitated lobbying the UK  parliament for the RSF militia to disinform its members about its violations on the ground.

The UAE also sought to influence policymakers in the U.S. A recent investigative report exposed that hired several lobbying firms to mainly to reach out to congress members, such as Sara Jacobs, who are working to halt the U.S. arms sales because of the UAE’s involvement in Sudan, reportedly, the UAE also mobilized lobbyist to counter and sanctions due to its role in arming the militia,  during the ongoing visit to the U.S. the UAE national security advisor secretly met with Trump’s officials to discuss blocking any move by the ICJ to investigate the RSF leaders in addition to shield the UAE from any sanctions over its support to the RSF.

In Africa, the UAE has been seeking a new African Union commission to influence its members to keep its interests in Sudan. Moreover, the UAE leveraged its economic ties with countries such as Chad and Kenya to push them to join its camp in the war by transferring arms to the militia and hosting its parallel government.

Despite the substantial lobbying efforts, strong voices have emerged against the UAE and its role in Sudan. For instance, the U.S. Treasury Department recently sanctioned the RSF leader and several front companies associated with the militia. Additionally, members of the U.S. Congress introduced a bill to block arms sales to the UAE until it halts its support for the militia. In the U.K., a parliament member publicly urged the government to uphold international law and cease arms sales to the UAE due to its funding of the RSF militia. EU parliament members have also called for considering sanctions against entities in the UAE found complicit in supporting the militia. Moreover, the African Union rejected and condemned the RSF parallel government that the UAE backs and warned it could lead to the country’s partition. The standard, a leading local newspaper in Kenya,  described the RSF leader on its cover page as the butcher who committed several genocides in Darfur and cannot be trusted for any peace role. In April 2025, Northwestern University awarded the New York newspaper the prize for courage in journalism for their role in covering the War in Sudan and exposing the UAE arms supply to the country. 

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Mohamed Suliman

Mohamed Suliman is a researcher and writer based in Boston. His recent articles tackle the War in Sudan. He holds a degree in engineering from the University of Khartoum.

The Consumer Power Myth

Refuse consumerism and de-commodify food

By Gunnar Rundgren

June 2, 2025

Source: Garden Earth

Who determined that we eat carrots - and that they should be orange? Photo: Gunnar Rundgren

The globalization of trade has given the wealthier share of the global population the impression that you can eat what you want. This fits well with the neoliberal ideology that portrays capitalism as democratic where people “vote with their wallets”. But it is an illusion – even for the rich countries. Rather than putting our faith in green consumerism we should strive to de-commodify food.

The myth that the consumer is in command is an essential part of capitalist ideology. It portrays the market as a democratic institution which people can control by “voting with their wallets”. And, if markets are democratic, the best is to let markets take care of as much as possible – so the story goes. Regardless of the fact that some people have many more dollars in their wallet than others, it gives a totally distorted view of how markets work. Steve Jobs said “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them” and proved it with the iPhone. It is true also on a much larger scale in time and place. And it is particularly the case for food.

For almost the whole history of human kind, people have eaten what could be foraged, hunted or fished by them or by others in their proximity. The idea that ”consumer demand” would drive production would be uncomprehensible for our ancestors. Not only didn’t any ”consumers” exist as a category, there was no distinct demand or a market where such demand could be expressed. I am sure that people had their food preferences and that one day the band decided that it would be nice to feast on ripe figs or apples, and another day they devoured venison from a successful hunt. But people ate what was available, by reasonable efforts, in their ecological niche. Then as today, most people would eat the same as the others in the same group.

This didn’t change much with the advent of agriculture. The range of food was more limited in agrarian societies (although the transition was mostly much more intermittent and gradual than what most people seem to believe), and the notion of consumer demand would be even more surreal than in foraging cultures. Most of the food was consumed by those growing it, the remainder was shared with kin and communities, sacrificed to gods or appropriated by various rulers. A very small share was sold in anything resembling a market. What was on offer was also not a result of consumer demand but of the material and biological conditions for production.

Our ancestors decided what we eat

Starting with the very basics, our ancestors domesticated a rather small number of crops and animals. It might be that they sometimes was driven by desires of a particular taste or nutritional content, but largely what was domesticated or not was determined by the conditions at site and the properties of the plant or animals. It is hardly because beef taste better than bison that cows were domesticated but not bison or asparagus instead of bulrush, lettuce instead of dandelion.

Once some plants and crops were domesticated and in the process have become easier to farm and yields well, we start to adjust both our palates and the production system to these crops. A rift opens, both culturally and materially between cultivated crops and livestock and wild ones. It is remarkable that in many places where agriculture has been an ”imported” system or where it was spread by invading cultures, hardly any native plants were domesticated, but the crops and livestock brought in were instead adapted to the new conditions. In Sweden, where I live and farm, almost no crop that we grow has any wild ancestor, and even when there is such one (black currants and carrot grow wild) it doesn’t seem that we domesticated our wild varieties but took what was introduced.

It is astonishing that there have been so few successful domestication events for thousand years.

It is actually astonishing that there have been so few successful domestication events of major crops for thousand years. The Germans developed the sugar beet in the 18^th century as a result of them not having any colonies for sugar cane plantations, and this was just a refinement of the already domesticated beetroot. A number of fish species have been domesticated lately (even if fish farming has been wide-spread for a very long time), but still, an overwhelming majority of the foods consumed on the planet today were domesticated more than thousand years ago.

There is thus no consumer demand that has determined what food is available or what is not. It is the availability of certain foods that made us like them and therefore also consume them.

This is obviously also the reason for why people in various parts of the world have different food preferences. It is not consumer demand that led to consumption of cooked rice in Asia or bread in Europe.

The choice architects

When standing in front of a supermarket shelf, or sitting at a table reading a restaurant menu, there are many choices; a large supermarket may carry up to 50,000 food items. However, a very large part of food items are variations made out of the ‘Big Five’ – wheat, maize, palm oil, sugar and soybeans – and they are produced by a handful large companies, which source the raw materials from a few selected key locations. Farmers grow the crops and the varieties of those crops that the industry dictates and/or supply them with. There are many steps from raw materials to consumer and all those actors take decisions of what to produce and what not to produce or make available for sale. Mundane items and conditions such as shopping carts and transportation systems as well as the availability of a kitchen and the technical infrastructure in the kitchen also determine consumption patterns.

Government regulations rest heavy and restricts or promotes different kinds of products and production systems. In some countries you need to own a cow if you want to consume raw milk. Clearly, governments, agriculture input providers, the food industry and retailers are the real shapers of the food system, the ‘choice architects’ and their decisions shape what consumers can and cannot buy. It is no coincidence that the shop shelf space for crisps is ten times bigger than for fresh potatoes. In the Reko-ring in Uppsala, where we sell vegetables, there are many products on sale which are never made available in the shops and there are twenty five varieties of potatoes instead of three or four in the supermarkets.

Governments, agriculture input providers, the food industry and retailers decide what consumers can and cannot buy.

That people eat huge quantities of chicken and almost no magpies or starlings is not the result of consumer preferences but of the fact the hens were domesticated many thousand years ago. But even so, chicken was a luxury food for a long time, and therefore not much consumed (in the US they spoke about ”Sunday chicken” which gives you an idea). From the 1930s and onwards industrial processes of chicken production were developed. In addition, the food industry and restaurants like chicken as it is always tender, easy to process and tasteless so you can give it any taste you want. All this together has transformed chicken from luxury food to staple food and the relative price of chicken compared to beef or pork has gone down dramatically. Of course, one could say that consumers now ”demand” chicken, but that is really turning the story on its head.

Also within economics, there is even a ”law”, Say’s law, that states that ”‘supply creates its own demand ”. You can read more about it here or here. The notion of ”consumer power” is also an offense to the majority of the world’s population that has very little economic resources, as their choices are extremely limited.

The conscientious consumer

Especially in the environmental arena there is a lot of faith in using consumer demand as a tool for improving production. If we want to change consumption patterns we should, however, not see consumption primarily as an act of individual consumers. Consumption ”is a collective achievement in which consumers are both produced by, and part of producing specific capacities to act and consume” as expressed by Ingrid Stigzelius in her thesis Producing Consumers. And as I have pointed out above most decisions about our foods were already taken long before any ”product” reach the market.

People are not isolated individuals but social and cultural beings and our values, preferences and actions are very much predicated on collective norms. People prefer foods that are symbolically associated with their own culture. This is also the case for people making radically different choices than the mainstream culture, e.g. the rise of veganism or the strive to eat climate friendly or organic foods.

Based on all the above, it is apparent that markets and production methods are not consumer driven. It is important to call the bluff of consumer power as it is a major tool for justifying the current system and to make any ills the responsibility of ”the consumer”, instead of those in charge.

Having said all this, as long as you are a buyer in the market place it makes sense to make as good and ethical choices as you can. I believe the three rules are:

• consume as little as necessary,

• buy things for which you have a direct relationship with the producer, or at least intimate knowledge about under which conditions they were produced, and
• make ethical, social and environmentally sound choices.

Even within the context of the market economy, one can also act as a citizen rather than as a consumer to shape the market. This can be by pushing for regulations to ban certain production practices or improve the conditions for farm workers. One can also act politically towards the food industry and retailers. By and large, boycotts and shaming by committed people have made a bigger impact on the food chains than good consumer choices.

Refuse consumerism

More important than making ethical consumer choices, i.e. green consumerism, is to challenge consumerism as such. The ”consumer” perspective of food reduces food to commodities all the way from the farm to the plate. Commodities are produced for the market where every actor compete with other actors to sell. Commodity production will be made at the expense of the community, the environment, the rest of the living, workers etc. In a similar way, commodity consumption leads to deteriorating health, obesity and food waste. A commodity perspective, reinforced by the market, is simply not the appropriate way to organise our well-being and our relationship with the rest of the living. And food is the central piece of this relationship.

Therefore, a central task is to de-commodify food through multiple means, such as self-provisioning, co-producing, gifting and sharing or even just by having a stable relationship between producers and consumers. I see many such alternatives emerging and will write more about them in the near future.