ASEED’s broader goals within the Corporate Free Agriculture Campaign are to challenge industrial agriculture and be part of a growing agroecological movement. We work towards this goal through non-formal education, movement building, and direct action. Below you can read about some of our recent campaign strategies that we use to shape the narrative around fossil fertilizers and support agroecological solutions!
Campaign strategy
Fighting agribusiness corporations, with current focus the fertilizer industry
Our corporate campaign #Yarafertilizeschaos aims to make Yara International known for their exploitative and destructive actions against the environment, peasants and workers, as an example of corporate control of the food system. As part of this, we work to:
- Expose the harms of the production and use of fossil fertilizers (environmental, social and neocolonial harms)
- Challenge their narrative of “feeding the world” by demonstrating the limits of fertilisers and highlighting existing alternatives.
To combat the fossil fertilizers and Yara International at this pivotal moment, ASEED has three core strategies in this part of the campaign:
- Shaping the narrative through social media campaigns and non-formal education.
- Coordinating and engaging in direct action aiming to disrupt business-as-usual and spark public debate.
- Building and coordinating national and international grassroots networks to create opportunities of convergence on the topic of fossil fertilizers.
Supporting alternatives to the fossil-fuelled, corporate-controlled food system, such as agroecology
Currently, our work on alternative forms of agriculture is done through our active participation in the Dutch Agroecology Network. We maintain a direct connection to the farming world, stay up to date on current topics, concerns, struggles, and integrate them in our work. We are neither farmers nor builders but have access to this world and play a supportive role.
To connect, strengthen, and promote existing fair and sustainable food system alternatives, ASEED works to:
- Amplify pre-existing local solutions to the general public
- Connect city-dwellers with semi-urban and rural projects and farmers
- Create more connections between Dutch agricultural and agroecological contexts and the climate movement
- Be a radical voice within alternative farming spaces, politicizing conversations and bringing in systemic thinking.
At ASEED, we believe international solidarity and agroecology go hand in hand. We cannot see the systems of oppression in place in the Netherlands as separate from the global systems of oppression. We let ourselves be guided by the work of La Via Campesina in recognizing the strength of an interconnected agroecological movement worldwide, and hope to contribute to it.
Solidarity with Palestinian farmers
For Palestinians, the struggle for food sovereignty is an integral part of their fight for self-determination and against military occupation. ASEED stand wholly in solidarity with the Palestinian people. HERE you can find some of our zines and publications on Food Sovereignty in Palestine and Israeli Agritech. ASEED has been organising workshops around the topic, for example at Reclaim the Seeds or Fest der Agrerwende in Berlin. Moreover, we have been connecting with UAWC (Union of Agricultural Work Committees), the Palestinian section of La Via Campesina, to understand how the Dutch agroecological movement can build long-term solidarity with Palestinian farmers. Together with Toekomstboeren, we are in the process of setting up a Twinning Project between Dutch and Palestinian farmers, inspired by this project from Landworkers Alliance.
Campaign tactics
One of our strongest suits at ASEED is raising awareness. We do this by giving workshops at many of the camps, actions, festivals, and grassroots gatherings we co-organize or participate in. In addition to workshops, we also organize solidarity events with groups from different intersections with agriculture. We host guest talks, discussions, documentary nights, and more, in Amsterdam.
It is not our goal to educate others top-down, but to facilitate spaces where we can learn from each other and engage with these topics together.
Workshops and skill shares
In the past years, ASEED workshops have taken place at various gatherings in Amsterdam and beyond. We have created spaces for reflection and co-learning on the topics of strategy and movement building, fossil fertilizers and neocolonial practices, fighting fossil gas in industrial agriculture, fostering community projects for food autonomy, incorporating undocumented migrants into farming initiatives, and investigating the fossil fertilizer industry. Our workshops take many different formats and often include creative elements that suit many learning styles and spark imagination and critical thinking.
Creating informational material
ASEED has produced a range of informative material throughout the years, including social media posts, website articles, brochures, flyers, stickers, etc.
Examples of this include:
- “The Climate Crisis is a Food Systems Crisis: Resist the Industrial Food System, Grow Better Futures” brochure (2016) written at the early stages of the Fossil Free Agriculture campaign, aiming to shed a light on the lesser-known connection between climate change and industrial agriculture.
- The collaborative social media campaign #YaraFertilizesChaos (2023) aiming to expose the truth about Yara International, world leader of the fossil fertilizer industry, in collaboration with Les Amis de la Terre (FR), Les Soulèvements de la Terre Saint Nazaire (FR) and Spire (NO) in three different languages (English, French and Norwegian).
- Flyers on the critical role of food and agriculture on the Palestinian struggle and the colonial occupation. Through the creation of critical and informational content ASEED tries to be responsive to the current political context.
ASEED sees movement building as a core part of our organization. As a small non-profit with long roots, ASEED has created a far reach, and our network is still growing steadily. Together we are stronger, and we believe that we can raise grassroots power by joining forces in complementary struggles. We especially wish to connect the Dutch agroecological farming movement with other (activist) groups doing similar work, as well as bring the topic of food systems onto the agenda of the anti-gas and climate movement.
Agroecology Network Netherlands
ASEED has been active in supporting Dutch agroecological farmers to set up and maintain the Agroecology Network Netherlands. This is a network where alternative food systems actors come together and exchange strategies and tactics, with quarterly network meetings all over the Netherlands during the past three years—some of which have been co-organized by ASEED. The network centres the needs and wants of farmers. This is necessary to bring to the forefront those at the heart of our food systems struggles that are otherwise economically and socially marginalized.
Mycelia of Hope
ASEED has been a main contributor in setting up one of the working groups in the Agroecology Network, Mycelia of Hope. This is a platform to build bridges between farmers in the countryside and activists and other city-dwellers, who often live in disconnected worlds. We continue our involvement in this working group, co-organizing solidarity working days at different farms in the Netherlands. This allows for networking, “bubble hopping”, and sharing knowledge across different fields, finding common ground in shared visions for new food systems. The end goal for this initiative is to have a self-sustained website, where activists and farmers can be matched for shared projects.
Read more about Mycelia van Hoop on our page.
Attending anti-gas gatherings
In March 2023 and 2024, the Energy Council organized the European Gas Conference in Vienna, where major actors in the gas industry come together to promote their destructive agendas. Many activist groups and NGOs organized a counter summit to this conference, and ASEED was present at these events, holding workshops on the link between fossil gas and industrial agriculture (2023) and a reading group about fossil fertilizers (2024) while making connections to the many, many collectives that attended the event. Through such collaborations, we can achieve a paradigm shift in the anti-gas movement towards more inclusion of agricultural topics.
Initiating and contributing to a coalition against fossil fertilizers
This broad coalition includes various international and local Dutch NGOs, grassroots groups, researchers, activists and farmers. Since this network began in 2023, ASEED has maintained a leading role to push for a stronger, radical grassroots presence, and for example co-organized five bi-monthly calls throughout the year following the second strategy meeting. The members of this growing coalition have been using this recurrent online gathering to update each other on the latest political and industrial developments, as well as on their ongoing activities (from reports to actions to lawsuits), in the hope of forging stronger alliances and collaborations.
We aim to link local practical action with global political struggles by engaging in spectacular, inspiring, and effective direct actions that build increasing power from below to counter the lobby of the fossil fertiliser industry. Our actions should educate the public and trigger more and more people to confront those organisations that promote and profit from a food system that serves neither the people nor the planet. We target big multinationals and the politicians that support them, not the farmers that are victims of a corrupted system.
Our theory of change
ASEED believes that grassroots power leads to social change, and that fossil fertilizers are a key, untapped battleground where fights for food justice, energy justice and land justice converge. We believe that a well-connected, resilient movement with strong narratives that places farmers’ concrete solutions at the forefront can lead to powerful social change. Our goal is to help build a powerful emancipatory movement from below for a sustainable and just food system. Individual consumer choices will not adequately address the systemic root causes of unequal power relations in industrial agriculture.
ASEED has developed a theory of change that we believe complements and strengthens connections in the wider climate justice and food sovereignty movements. A useful tool has guided our planning, allowing us to better navigate and categorize the ecology of social movements:
Using primarily the “connect” and “break” strategies, our aim is to focus our work on filling an existing gap between anti-gas, climate, social justice, and food systems movements.