As communities around the world celebrate the new year and their respective traditions and holidays associated with this time of long nights and short days - in Palestine, the historical home of many of these traditions, nearly 10,000 children and more than 20,000 people have been killed and have not been celebrating with their families and communities.  Many still lie buried and broken under the rubble of bombed buildings, schools, hospitals, refugee camps.  Christmas was canceled in Bethlehem.  Many of our seasonal stories speak of redemption, but we do not live in a comforting story with happy endings - and we see signs of deeper commitment to the killing and destruction and oppression from Israel, the US and the other patrons of the war.  As an organization, we affirm our responsibility to speak for peace, and to advocate for an end to the genocide, apartheid, occupation, and dehumanization of the Palestinian people; this time citing the Nyeleni food sovereignty declaration of 2007, 

“Food sovereignty is challenged by repression and state terrorism, particularly as conflicts affect communities' control over territories. This limits their access to land, water, food and excludes their participation in decision-making. For peoples living under occupation, self-determination and local autonomy become crucial in order to achieve food sovereignty.”

2023 brought hardship directly to many farms and communities across Vermont and around the world: flooding, fire and other climate change related disasters; farm closures, and crop and equipment loss; loss and damage of housing and shelter; contamination of land and waters; economic and political marginalization related to dramatically increasing economic inequity making land, healthcare, and many essential needs further out of reach for the working class.  People work to recover here as they do globally - mutual aid networks among community members and local organizations grow into the spaces of need; farms redesign and rebuild, with aid from neighbors, and farming organizations and agencies; municipal governments and state governments do what they can with the little public resource that remains after decades of neoliberal policy which has impoverished the public sector and enriched private corporate interests. 

Our shared work towards food sovereignty and dignified lives and livelihoods for Vermont’s agrarian communities is part of and greatly strengthened by a larger, global social movement led by rural agriculturists. In early December, Rural Vermont Director of Grassroots Organizing Mollie Wills attended the 8th International Conference of La Via Campesina in Bogotá, Colombia as a representative of the National Family Farm Coalition.  More than 400 delegates of La Via Campesina, representing 185 organizations and movements in 83 countries, together with allies, came together from the 1st to the 8th of December of 2023 to affirm that:

“We, the peasants, rural workers, landless, indigenous peoples, pastoralists, artisanal fisherfolk, forest dwellers, rural women, youth and diversities and other peoples who work in the countryside around the world and united within La Via Campesina, declare that ‘Faced with global crises, we build food sovereignty to ensure a future for humanity!’ towards a just and decent food system for all, recognizing peoples’ needs, respecting nature, putting people before profit and resisting corporate capture.”

We are here for each other - our neighbors and family locally and globally. Silence and inaction is a position - and as we’re embarking on the new year, we affirm Rural Vermont’s commitment to not be silent. And we will continue to amplify your voice in the Vermont State House, in our meetings with our congressional delegation in Washington DC, and in hearings and meetings around Vermont with those in positions of power. 

We affirm that the scope of Rural Vermont - and all organizations whether they choose to acknowledge it or not - is necessarily local and global, and that our own democracy, food sovereignty, and well being is irrevocably tied to the political power, food sovereignty and well being of people all around the globe.  We will not be silent about the US funded and diplomatically and militarily defended starvation and genocide of the Palestinian people; about the need for publicly funded universal healthcare and social services and the ineffectiveness and exploitation of the for-profit healthcare system; about the catastrophe of the financialization of nature and the hollowness and inequity of the “net zero” climate philosophy and its tools of carbon “off-sets”; about the US domestic and international agricultural and economic policy which explicitly sought - and seeks - to reduce the number of farms and farmers, and to favor ever increasing agribusiness consolidation and the concentration of profits, resources, and political power. These are examples of fundamental threats to our food sovereignty, food security, democracy, and the wellbeing of our communities in Vermont and to the global community we are inextricably a part of. 

When you step off of your farm, out of this country, and into the international environment with a relatively proportional representation of the worlds’ peoples - in particular the peoples of the global south - your global and biological citizenship is immediate. You are one of many facing climate change, facing economic inequity, facing the challenges of accessing land and producing food for your community. The role of the United States and how it is perceived and experienced is part of your identity in these spaces, and the imperatives for responsibility, accountability, repair, solidarity, and just transition are paramount. This is our family - this is our home, this one planet, and we hold each other in the sturdy yet tenuous web of life. Together, we work towards Rural VT’s vision for “a just and equitable world rooted in reverence for the earth and dignity for all…in which communities of microorganisms, animals, plants, and humans tend one another and nurture generations to come.“

May this new year bring us greater understanding of and solidarity with our human and biological families; may it bring us greater willingness to not be silent to the injustices around us; may it bring us health, good harvests, and food sovereignty, with more people being fed with food grown by more and more people on more and more farms; may it bring us hope and joy in the company of one another, and the places we inhabit; may it bring us the fortitude to continue on, pressing for the change we need to grow a world in which everyone is fed, everyone can put their hands in the soil, and on the reins, and safely lay their head upon a pillow at the end of a day, in a place of warmth, with a solid roof over their head.