Local network of farmers and political activists for food sovereignty and self-determination

Mondeggi Bene Comune – Fattoria Senza Padroni

The Commeetee Mondeggi Bene Comune – Fattoria Senza Padroni (literally Mondeggi Common Good – Farm Without Owners) was born with the main objectives of avoid the public Mondeggi farm (about 200 hectaries) privatization and to create the conditions to self-organize and facilitate popular custody of that Common, through the increasing of participation and social responsibility of the population of the territory. In order to do this, the project adopted an orizontal and inclusive decision-making model (rejecting the act of the vote), through regular assembler meetings, discussion and working groups, diversificated levels of decision, placed in a functional and coordinated structure. After 3 years since the farm collective recovery began, hundreds of people realized and stabilised many agricultural, social and cultural activities, through the take of huge aims and the multiplication af relations, around a different way of thinking and living the land, the rural life, the socialization and the link between the countryside and the city. The Mondeggi experience came from a campaign launched from Genuino Clandestino network, called Terra Bene Comune (literally Land Common Good), that reclaim a participated and autonomous management of public lands by local communities..

Genuino Clandestino:

Genuino Clandestino (literally Genuine Clandestine) was born in 2010 as a communication campaign to denounce a set of unjust rules that, by equating the requirements for the processing of peasant-produced food with those for large-scale industries, renders the former illegal. For this reason, since its beginnings, Genuino Clandestino reclaims the right of peasants to transform freely their produces, taking it back from its expropriation by the neoliberal system. Since then, the campaign has morphed into a network of mobile ties between individuals and communities in becoming that, beyond its initial demands, proposes concrete alternatives to the existing capitalist system through a variety of actions, such as: construct territorial communities who practice participative democracy; sustain and defend peasant agriculture; practice, inside the circuits of the local economy, transparency in the production and distribution of food; sustain through political practices the principle of food self-determination that is to say the right to real food that is economically accessible and that comes from the lands which we work; safeguard the agro-food heritage; sustain practical ways of ‘access to land’ which claim the land as a ‘common good’; sustain and defend civic and practical choices of resistance against the dominant system; construct an alliance between urban movements, individual citizens and rural movements; sustain local communities in their struggle against the destruction of their living environment.

Genuino Clandestino is an anti-racist, anti-fascist and anti-sexist movement.