"We're Not Just a Band-Aid for SNAP" with Ryan Tenney
Growers & Organizers Talk “Beyond SNAP”
Image courtesy of the Land, Food, and Freedom Journal
So you know how people are always saying that there are similarities between the struggles and resistance of colonized people all across the world? Well, what about right now in the United States where millions of people are waking up to the idea that food can be utilized as a weapon against us at the drop of a dime? In our newly launched series, Beyond SNAP, the National Black Food and Justice Alliance gathers practical lessons so organizers and growers can act now and build toward self determination.
In this interview, we sit down with Ryan Tenney of Kansas City, Missouri, founder of Sankara Farm and a long time anti imperialist and food sovereignty organizer. We talk about his journey as an organizer and how this moment has exposed the global and domestic faces of U.S. imperialism. Let’s get into it!
TRANSCRIPT:
Ryan: My name is Ryan Tenney. Sankara Farm is my farm based in Kansas City, Missouri. I call myself a farmer and a cultural worker. Sometimes those things are.. it sounds like it's redundant, because farming is cultural work. But, you know, I've, I've always been an artist and, you know, growing up on under in the United States, under capitalism, you know, artists are told that, you know, either we sell high priced luxury goods and there's going to be a run on our stuff after we die, you know, or or we have to, you know, hang our work in, in and white, you know, white cubes that are often connected to ivory towers, you know?
Well, just like, personally my journey, I mean, I started out like 2007, 2008, I guess they call it the, you know, the “Great Recession.” This is kind of either right up to or leading, after, Occupy Wall Street. It seemed like we were getting on the slide of imperial decline. You know?
Image courtesy of Sankara Farm
I learned about, you know, what was then the Detroit Black Food Security Network, La Via Campesina, kind of a struggle, the struggle for food sovereignty that was taking place outside of the United States. In Chiapas, Mexico, the Zapatistas, of course, Cuba. You know, I you know, I saw, like the Black freedom movement, you know, budding, social movements in the United States that, you know, and then there was this budding kind of “slow food” movement, local food that was totally depoliticized, you know, “food deserts” is what they, you know, would talk about.
And, you know, being along that path over the past, you know, ten, 15 years: Trayvon, Mike Brown, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, right back here. There's, you know, this kind of coalescence of forces where Black farmers, urban farmers, urban growers, people are focused on healing the soil, healing the earth, healing the community. I had this potential to collaborate and build with, with, the remnants of Black Lives Matter.
NBFJA: A big part of your sort of, like, political development kind of came from being able to view more international struggles that have been happening against imperialism in a moment where the US government is kind of leveraging people's millions of people's ability to eat. How similar or different to you does that feel like the economic pressure, that we see that, you know, U.S. imperialism wages against people abroad. Like, do you see any connections?
Ryan creating prints at the 2024 Annual Member Gathering on St. Helena Island, South Carolina.
Ryan: Definitely, definitely. It's the chickens. We you know those that know chickens know they, you know they come home to roost.
NBFJA: That's Malcolm X!
Ryan: Yeah. Yeah yeah it's, it's you know but definitely I think it's, it's the domestic face of, of foreign policy. And foreign policy is how they treat our, our cousins and uncles and aunties. That’s our kin. Foreign policy is how they treat our kin. Haiti, Cuba. You know, I mean and so no, I do. I do think there's a lot of parallels.
I mean, it seems like this administration is, you know, a cognitive warfare comes to mind like a warfare of what to think, you know? And it has a lot of similarities with the cuts to USAID that we saw take place in the first few months of this administration that, you know, brought to the fore what is all this money going for outside the country. Right? And it was a mix of things. You know, there was HIV antiretroviral drugs being funded in Kenya and other places on the continent. At the same time, you know, there was, color revolution factories, you know, and, destabilization, full paid staff that work on destabilization, you know, with benefits and vacations and everything, you know? And they and they all came home for their like, oh, I'm home from from Chad.
I’m like, “what were you doing over there?” “Oh I was working for USAID.” “For real?” yYu know, thing? What did you what you're going to do now and the joke, the joke was kind of on us because what they do now is, oh, I'm going to go work for a nonprofit. So we see the domestic face of foreign policy.I mean, I think if we do a correlation of forces, yes, USAID, cuts to SNAP. Those are very similar.
And then also global white supremacy, the framework. We've seen Wole Soyinka get his visa revoked. We've seen Petros, President Petros from Colombia get his visa revoked. We've seen the intensification of deportations by the thousand Haitians, Venezuelans. Right? But we've seen we've seen the red carpet being rolled out for two groups, you know, white South Africans, you know, and Ukrainians, you know. And so the, you know, that's this is like the US, I mean, domestic international policy are now just so closely aligned.
Flyer courtesy of Via Campesina
We're seeing the decline of France at the same time as the increase of the GDP of Niger. Because when you're not getting your uranium stolen, and when you nationalize a mine or two, when you get paid, you know, for the resources. So yeah. So there's a, there's a, a balancing out like Amilcar Cabral said. There's the, the evolution, the, the development of the global majority. Once we made some restart evolutionary, state that we should be it, you know, it's going to there's a corresponding decline of the vampires, the parasites that sustain themselves off of our blood.
NBFJA: You were naming sort of how foreign policy is just how they dictate the way that they're going to cheat our cousins. Right. So for Black people or for anybody that's involved in sort of the the Black freedom movement, the Black food movement, the Black from justice movement as it exists sort of here in the United States at this moment when we look abroad toward our cousins and other people, are there, particular countries or movements, that you think are important for us to be paying attention to who can offer us some sort of like, practical examples for how we can respond in moments like these so that, you know, the next time the government announces that it wants to do something crazy to African America, you know, we don't find ourselves standing in the same position that we were in the last time?
Ryan: No, I, I think there's, I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of examples. I mean Burkina Faso and the AES has been a beautiful example. They've, you know it's just specifically around tomato production in the, in, in the AES of Ghana. They used to, they used to the Burkina Faso used to import tomato sauce from Ghana, even though they produce a lot of tomatoes across the whole region because they didn't have the, the processing capacity, you know, and so, investment in the processing capacity, you know, they can, you know, we could we could order a case of Burkina Faso tomato paste and, you know, have it for sale in our, in our co-op here, you know, like it's that. So that's a, you know, an inspirational story.
Ángel Prado, spokesperson of Venezuelan socialist commune El Maizal, and organizers lead protest in Lara State.
There's also, I mean, in this hemisphere food sovereignty has been like one of the pillars of social movements. Since the 80s, you know, coming out of Brazil and Mexico. The reason why Venezuela is, is going to be able to survive, this, you know, this imperial, build up and continued this destabilization campaign is because Venezuela has achieved food sovereignty. That’s one of the quietest kept secrets about you know, our hemisphere like Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, they have achieved food, food sovereignty.
It was a large part of the New J.E.W.E.L Movement in Grenada. Chiapas, Mexico. The Zapatistas, food sovereignty is a pillar of theirs. And so it's kind of incumbent upon, upon social movements in the United States to go see our cousins. You know, it's it's actually got me thinking about Agroforestry in in different ways, you know, because, you know, I mean, agroforestry means you're going to be there for a while, you know, this is something that they, you know, Thomas Sankara and Muammar Gadhafi. And then they, they, you know, they planted millions and millions of trees across the Sahel because they had a vision that there they weren't going to be destabilized by U.S. imperialism, because we've got all these trees looking after these trees. So, I mean, giving us that long term vision, you know, of surviving genocide, surviving the imperial decline.
I think farms are essential because it provides the opportunity to develop the means of production for all these things. And then, grounding with the planet, you know, maybe from a more philosophical position, there's a phrase to, “to see the earth before the end of the world.” And it's kind of like a call to a planetary inhabitation, you know, rather than, you know, occupying states and the layer of world that has been imposed upon the Earth, you know, world world being certainly a colonial imposition, you know, third world, new world.
Image courtesy of Sankara Farm
But this is a planet, and we're earthlings, along with so many other beings, you know, in the Bolivarian Revolution, which is being challenged, this is Venezuela. There is a spiritual grounding to their to their radicalism and their anti-imperialism. And it's kind of rooted in that, you know, spirit of, indigenous ways, of indigenous ways of knowing, pre-colonial impulses and beliefs, you know, that like this, this planet is also our kin.
And that's and that's like a global consciousness, you know, you know, that the spiritual undergrounding that we're, you know, we're not so much a Band-Aid for SNAP. We're not, trying to eat better under imperialism. You know, we're actually trying to renew the Earth.
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Learn more about Ryan’s work with Sankfara Farm.