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Commoning

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Join the people who are fighting back against corporate control of global food production

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There’s something seriously wrong with the way most of our food is produced and sold. The corporate sector is gaining control of more and more of global food production, shifting the focus from nutrition, flavour and nature towards profit and profit only.

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Beware the ‘sharing’ economy – back door for a more rapacious form of capitalism

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Something that’s been troubling me for a while. The ‘sharing’ economy must be a good thing, right? I’ve been trying to see the good in it for a while. Sharing anything must mean that fewer resources are used, less waste produced, people get to know each other in their communities. All sounds great, doesn’t it?

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The Yamagishi Association: successful, moneyless, leaderless network of communes in Japan and elsewhere

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In the 1990s I visited the headquarters of the Yamagishi Association in Mie-ken in Japan. It’s a federation of intentional communities that is still going strong – but even then it comprised 3000 people in 30 villages all over Japan

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Why does the planning system make it so difficult for people who want to live on the land sustainably?

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Being able to go through the process of making a planning application for a low impact development may be a sign that there has been some progress for those of us who have hitherto lived, to paraphrase, as outlaws on the planning frontier.

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Communities in Scotland may soon be able to purchase land even if the landowner doesn’t want to sell; where do you stand?

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There are radical changes on the table when it comes to land ownership in Scotland. The Land Reform Scotland Bill is intended to address the huge disparity in land ownership in Scotland – but there is one clause that is making some people extremely hopeful, and other very worried.

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More details of the ujamaa collective village system in Tanzania (from first-hand experience)

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This is an account of my visit to two ujamaa villages in Tanzania in the early 1990s, plus a lot more background information on the system itself. The ujamaa system has since been dismantled after pressure from the World Bank, but at its height, 20 million people out of a total population of 24 million

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How Julius Nyerere’s Ujamaa idea could form the basis of a new global political system

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In 1991, I spent a couple of months in two Ujamaa villages in Tanzania. The Ujamaa system was introduced by Julius Nyerere in the early 1960s, and the World Bank effectively killed it as a system in the late 80s, although a few independent Ujamaa villages survived into the 90s. I’m going to briefly describe

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