This is a comparative historical tale of agrarian resistance and change, as it has occurred over the longue durée in two lands situated at opposite ends of Earth. In the deep forests of Northern Europe, ancestral Latvian tribes lived in egalitarian societies far from the slave-owning empires of the ancient Afro-Eurasian world-system. This changed when German crusaders invaded the Baltics in 1195, beginning a period of colonization and imperial rule that would culminate in the Soviet occupation of the twentieth century. In sunbaked Southern Africa, South African tribes likewise maintained egalitarian societies apart from the ancient imperial world. Dutch merchants invaded the Western Cape in 1652, engendering a trajectory of colonialism that would result in the formation of a White supremacist apartheid state in 1948.

In both countries, peasants resisted the alienating yoke of authoritarian rule by maintaining Indigenous knowledge systems grounded in social and ecological connection. Imparting life-affirming values, these intellectual and cultural currents succoured communities through desperate times, empowering people to mount collective resistance to state repression. When the Soviet and apartheid regimes collapsed at the end of the twentieth century, farmers took advantage of democratic reforms by investing in organic production technologies and establishing alternative trade networks. In Latvia, farmers have established a vibrant local and slow food movement to restore small-scale production and revitalize this nation’s precolonial agrarian heritage. In the Cederberg Mountains of Western South Africa, small-scale farmers have worked to secure their heritage as artisanal producers of Rooibos tea by establishing fair trade partnerships with international buyers at the heart of its geographical origin.

Their efforts join a broader global justice movement that is constructing bottom-up approaches to development and social change; and, within this manifold movement, food and trade justice activists are confronting a global agro-food regime dominated by large multinational firms whose interests are backed by powerful states. While the rationalization of agriculture has enabled the capitalist world-system to produce cheap food at an industrial scale, the exploitative production and trade systems that rationalism has produced are a key driver of the current existential crisis in development.