Lama Khatieb: Reclaiming local knowledge for food interdependence (ep405)
“[...] The United States started to heavily invest in subsidizing growing wheat for exporting purposes. That resulted in flooding international markets, including Jordan’s markets. Cheap American wheat left many of the small-scale farmers unable to compete under record prices.”
In this episode, we welcome Lama Khatieb, co-founder of Zikra for Popular Learning: a Jordan-based collective that aims to empower community members to revalue their identity and culture, through the cultivation and sharing of their local and traditional knowledge. We visit themes of agricultural interdependence in relation to Jordan’s history of wheat and bread production, how small grassroots initiatives are taking matters of food sovereignty into their own (literal) hands, and more.
Lama endeavors to draw the richness of village life and local harvesting practices to our attention. Through the efforts of the Al-Barakeh Wheat Project (whose name also entails the practice of blessing and abundance), Lama and fellow participants respond not only to Jordan’s current dependence on imported wheat but aim to tap into the wider cultural and ecological ramifications of losing local practices.
Join us as we dive into what the spirit and practice of “Barakeh” teaches in terms of cultural reclamation, small-scale initiatives, food interdependence, and relationships with the land.
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Artistic credits:
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Cheery
Episode-inspired artwork by Lucy Halsam.
Dive deeper:
Learn more about Al-Barakeh Wheat Project
Zikra for Popular Learning, a collective founded by Lama Khatieb and Rabee Zureikat
Learn more about the work of Ibn ‘Arabî, Munir Fasheh, and Judith Butler
Expand your lenses:
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Transcript:
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Kamea Chayne: I would love to begin by inviting you to share a little bit about your background and your earlier inspirations to become passionate about revitalizing local knowledge and food sovereignty.
Lama Khatieb: I'm a dentist by trade. I was born and raised outside my country. I was born and raised in Doha, Qatar. I came to Jordan in my college years, and it was a rediscovery of, let's say, my motherland. One of my graduation projects was regarding how much knowledge people in the village have compared to urban dwellers regarding their oral hygiene and how they take care of themselves. And this was my first time, the first introduction to the richness of village life.
People in the village are usually seen as those who live a kind of lifestyle that needs to borrow from the city, how to be more, 'civilized', but they are rich in ways that we need to learn from.
After graduation, I struggled to find a job right away, so I started to work on distributing oral hygiene kits and making some workshops.
This was my journey to unlearn everything that I have previously learned about what a civilized or developed person means. I started a project with a colleague of mine where we aspired to reclaim local knowledge to find solutions for social, environmental, and economic challenges in many areas across Jordan. Usually, when we think of solutions, we think of important solutions, and yet we fail to see many treasures around us that were enabling us as communities to survive for decades without relying on international NGOs, without relying on the military institutions as agency for the job market.
13 years later after this work, we've established different kinds of projects that are economically based and that are inspired by local communities' rich knowledge and lifestyle. What we found out later on, what we learned is that what holds the community together is working together on the main crop, the main food, which is in the Fertile Crescent, in our case it is wheat. And once you take this away from people, you disintegrate the community. And here we started researching how come Jordan, a place that was home to the oldest bread loaves, documented as being 14,500 years old, now producing 2% of its native wheat, when up until 1969, it produced 200%. So what happened here? That there must be a story that needed to be investigated.
Kamea Chayne: You perfectly cued in my next question for you, which is just this recognition that Jordan has played a significant, significant role in the advent of agriculture, as you shared, being home to the world's oldest loaf of bread from over 14,000 years ago. Yet today, Jordan imports more than 97 of its cereals. So I'm curious to learn more about this. What can you tell us in regards to how the country lost most of its local wheat cultivation, to the point where today bread made from local wheat costs more than imported ones?
Lama Khatieb: So this is a compound problem. As I mentioned, around the late sixties was when Jordan started to receive white flour for the first time, as part of food aid programs that were directed to Palestinians dispossessed from the land to Jordan. This flour as well was distributed to many wheat farmers in villages in Jordan. They received those sacks of flour as donations.
Parallel to that time, the United States started to heavily invest in subsidizing growing wheat for exporting purposes. That resulted in flooding international markets, including Jordan's markets.
Cheap American wheat left many of the small-scale farmers unable to compete under record prices.
In addition to all of that, here the military institute started to promote itself as an important escape for a more secure job option for the younger generation of farmers. So now you have a generation of those who hold the knowledge of farming and growing and offspring who joined the military. And you have a gap among this generation who started to look for more secure job options. Urban development was also a cause here in Amman, the capital city of Jordan, it used to be the highest percentage of grain agriculture and is now a city with condensed, concrete blocks.
One of the neighbors here [...] Quoted by others, which translates literally into piles and piles of wheat, is now a marketplace for car mechanics. IMF and World Bank also played a role in 1989, when Jordan was forced to sign economic reform agreements with subsidies on agriculture, and the public transportation sector was lifted. So the result is you'll be able to receive, let's say, tons of wheat arriving from many controls up until Aqaba port. It would be cheaper than any wheat produced in a nearby village, which is crazy, of course.
Kamea Chayne: As you mentioned, it is a lot of compounding factors leading up to where you are today. And so to add to this, you also share that with free trade agreements and structural adjustment programs enforced by international financial institutions. Jordan was not allowed to subsidize local farmers. I would appreciate it if you could elaborate more on why the country hasn't been able to subsidize its local farmers to support its food sovereignty. What created these barriers? And do they still exist and persist today?
Lama Khatieb: They still exist. If you are asking me maybe to go through a look through the whole of the agreement works, I'm not sure that I am the qualified person to answer. It just simply means that the subsidies that are usually put in place to help the farmer, for example, in the seventies, in Jordan, there used to be a union for the farmers that was extremely efficient. It was called the Agricultural Co-operative. So they owned the machinery, and they had a plan to go from one area to another with a queue of machinery use. So it would be much cheaper for farmers, instead of renting the machinery, to use it from the union. This union was part of the government, it was run by the government, but it was closed as part of the agreement.
Kamea Chayne: There's certainly a lot more to learn about this, I'm sure. But I would love to get into more of the picture of today. So after the COVID-19 pandemic hit, over half of Jordanians became vulnerable to food insecurity. And I believe it was towards the start of it, when you co-created the Al-Barakeh Wheat Project to promote collective farming of Jordanian wheat to support people's food sovereignty. Can you share more about your story and motivations to start this collective and how exactly you went about it? As in, what resources or land did you work with to get things rolling? And how did you get people on board?
Lama Khatieb: Well, actually, it started before COVID, but it was a coincidence that COVID took place in the middle of it. So after my colleague and I went through Jordan meeting the last generation of wheat-growing farmers trying to investigate the story of this severe decline in the last 40 years. We said that maybe you have to go through the experience ourselves, we have to go through growing our own wheat. And of course, we do not have a background in that. So we rented the land in one of the villages and we asked a wheat farmer to help us learn how to grow our wheat. This was in December 2019. A few months later, the pandemic hit and the lockdown took place in June. We went to harvest, lacking any previous knowledge of agriculture. We were able to harvest two and a half tonnes.
During the pandemic here in Jordan, the police took control of distributing bread to people here. If you Google it, you'll find buses full of police officers who have bread, and they will distribute it to neighborhoods to have control over how bread is consumed. We have our wheat and we were distributing it to our friends and family. So it was a very empowering feeling. And this is something that we felt we have to share. So during the next season, we made an announcement on social media asking if any of our friends have a plot of land that is suitable to grow wheat and if you can lend it to us during the season, please let us know. And if you are a family or a person who wants to learn how to grow your wheat and have your, let's say, supply of wheat for one year, you can also join. So we collected subscriptions from people to cover the cost of buying the seeds, the land, preparing it to be grown, and also for the small-scale farmers who will be leading the process or teaching us how to do it.
And the first year we did it with 45 families in different areas in Jordan in a month inside the city. In the second year, we did it with 165 in addition to five schools. They all took part in growing wheat inside Amman and this developed a tense relationship to their surroundings and the city. One of them said that I used to see Amman before as blocks of buildings, I would see those plots of land as transparent now I see it the other way around. I start noticing the food producers inside the city. They used to be transparent to me. So this is amazing. At the end of each season, let's say the harvest that is grown together is distributed among all the school students, each will get around 50 kilos. Together, we will learn how to make bread from local whole wheat, and how to make other dishes prepared from wheat.
Kamea Chayne: Inspiring. And of course, the collective has grown since its beginnings with hundreds of Jordanians on board. And I'm sure this is just the beginning of the movement and the collective. And it reminds me of our past interview when Vijay Prashad told us about the Landless Farmworker movement in Brazil with food collectives reclaiming and occupying unused land to grow food. Just examples of people not waiting for permission, but taking matters into their own hands and working with whatever they can get access to. But yeah, what else can you tell us about how this wheat collective works in practice today and what its impacts on your local people and communities have been?
Lama Khatieb: Okay, so the project has two arms. The first is to develop a learning-training garden where families or city dwellers take part in learning how to have food sovereignty over their main food, which is wheat. The other arm, which to us is very important, is the economy. So what we do is we established a network of approximately 20 small-scale farmers, grain farmers from across Jordan, and we connected them with bakeries and restaurants so they could supply them directly with whole wheat flour.
As simple as that sounds, this never took place before in the history of Jordan. For the past decades, the state presents itself as the only buyer of local wheat. And therefore the state doesn't pay an efficient amount of money. That is not encouraging for farmers to continue growing. We pay approximately 15 to 20% more than the government pays per ton, and we take care of labor, transportation, and seed cleaning, which is very economically efficient for farmers. We can do that. They have increased in price by making this popular. So now we have four bakeries; one of them is a large commercial chain bakery and 25 restaurants in addition to one hotel will take their supply of whole wheat flour from those farmers.
We reshaped the economic system of local grains completely, and they compete in the market and people choose it not because it is local, but because it is delicious, it is highly nutritious. They know who grew it and it's connected with the land and it's becoming part of the body.
And this is important.
Kamea Chayne: And based on the picture of current land access and economic injustice, do you see this collective as something that is scalable in practice and that is a model that can kind of be syndicated across Jordan and beyond to begin to reverse that figure of 97% of its cereals being imported? Do you see this as something that can only work because of certain things in your local communities or something that can also scale beyond where you are?
Lama Khatieb: Well, it should scale beyond. But when I think about scaling, I do not think that doesn't necessarily mean that the hope or aspiration is to reach 100% sovereignty in wheat, not necessarily. If you reach 30 to 50% also good. But a 2% is like an urgency or an emergency status. So this is dangerous. It's really bad if you keep encouraging the farmers of the country to grow cash crops and not their main food, we are relying on importing their main food.
But I also think about interdependency instead of sovereignty….
because, okay, great. So I produce everything I need regarding wheat and I can give the excess I have to my neighbor. But that is completely different than having an open market in the region where each of the neighboring countries collaborates in producing and distributing food among them. And this is something I think we need to think about, not regarding Jordan only. Because if we focus on that, this is not very different than thinking in a nationalist way. Amazing that we have food sovereignty, but this food model needs to be interdependent with our neighboring countries. Not to consider, I have to think about what's inside Jordan's borders. No, not the entire region. How we collaborate with one another.
But think about Sudan, for example. Internationally recognized as the food basket, not only for the Arab region but for the world. I think we have to rethink what resources and opportunities we have around us. Here in Jordan, for example, the Jordan Valley is considered the food basket of Jordan, the most fertile piece of land. The focus of the growing is cash crops, bananas, broccoli, and tomatoes, not crops that are naturally growing there as part of the agricultural cycle. But part of the agricultural cycle, the grain will absorb the extra salt in the agricultural cycle- that region is very close to the sea, so it's very, very salty land. So the cleansing of the land will better the crops for the upcoming seasons. It requires one-third of the amount of land compared to vegetables, and yet you have your food produced. You can serve it for the entire year, this is not like tomatoes that you have to sell within a week. So yes, this year we have grown 300 dunams in the Jordan Valley. Hopefully next year we will want to experiment with making freekeh with the farmers.
So freekeh is wheat that is harvested while it's green. And then you set it on fire. So you smoke it from the outside. And you can only do it with hard durum wheat because it gets the outer shell will have a smokiness without burning the inside. And it's a dish that we use here instead of rice, for example. Freekeh is very, very famous in our dishes. And you can increase the economic value per ton by 10% if you do a high-quality freekeh. So that's an excellent income-generating opportunity for farmers in the region and by producing wheat, not cash crops.
Kamea Chayne: I see. Yeah. I just find it important to emphasize what you said earlier, that revitalizing local food systems isn't about closing a local region off but revitalizing that system to enable trade that is mutualistic and based on reciprocity rather than something that is extractive. So I appreciate you highlighting that and I also really appreciate it learning about the spirit of Barakeh when you share about how 10% of the wheat harvest is given to families in need, and also how a farmer rejected the idea of using a scarecrow to prevent birds from eating the wheat because the birds have a right to some of the seeds as well. But how would you introduce the meaning and cultural significance of Barakeh? And what are some other examples or stories you can share related to this invitation to share rather than compete?
Lama Khatieb: I'll answer with a story if you allow me. So before I started to grow wheat for the first time, the farmer who used to teach us told us that you have to make sure for every durum, you have to put 14 kilos in addition to two kilos for the ants. And this was a surprise for me to hear for the first time. What would you mean by two kilos for the ants? And he said, You will never learn to receive Al-Barakeh, which means the blessing and abundance until you learn how to share what you have at the beginning of the season.
And that was when I learned about this very humbling tradition, which is a prayer farmers recite while they throw the seed. I will share part of the prayer. So the prayer says, "Oh God, feed us and feed to us. Feed the birds and the darkness of the night, feed the colors of the earth, feed the strong one, the weak one, and the one lying sick." So growing and planting is an act of sharing life. This is a very different mindset than, let's say, calculating the input and output of every crop to achieve cash, to achieve certain materials. This is a completely different mindset that sees the human as part of a whole, of an entire system, not separated from the land, not separated from the birds, not separated from the ants.
In Al-Barakeh, we try to celebrate this concept, we celebrate it as work, as being, as how we see ourselves in the surrounding, how we can even reproduce it as a tradition.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, it's really beautiful, really nurturing abundance rather than holding this mindset of scarcity and competition. And I also feel like holding the mindset of sharing, giving, and abundance is how we can become more regenerative in terms of how we relate to the land rather than being extractive, depleting, and exploitative in that dynamic.
Your initiative has been helping to reshape people's relationship with the land and with food, and I'm curious what shifts or transformations you've witnessed in terms of how this reclamation of Jordanian wheat has been changing, how people look at food and also relate to each other? I wonder about how reclaiming something so culturally significant to your people may also be helping to grow the intimacy of your communities as well.
Lama Khatieb: I think I'll answer the more basic question, which is I think this journey has been brushing with the possible because, at the beginning when we started, we said that we intend to grow our wheat and learn more about it. What we keep hearing from everyone is that no, wheat in Jordan is not good for bread, it's very poor quality. If you grow it, it will fail, you're not allowed to grow it.
Sometimes it's enough to have one successful experience for people to reread their history and reconsider the kind of knowledge that has no roots but everybody adopts.
So this was interesting. So people started to find that, oh, we can grow wheat, the procedure is very simple. The variety we have here is very versatile, very delicious, very high in nutrients, it makes amazing bread. Everything that you were told about growing your wheat has been false, so now you start reading your history differently. And that's what's important.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, it's inviting people to question some narratives that have been out there and to revitalize this alternative story. And more broadly, you run Zikra for Popular Learning, which empowers community members to redefine their relationship with their identity and culture and to inspire sustainable solutions while also generating economic gains. What would you like to highlight in terms of why you felt there's a need to shift people's relationship with identity and culture? And maybe what we just shared in terms of these shifting narratives is a core part of that as well.
Lama Khatieb: Well, because you learn that the skeleton or the backbone that holds [..] is growing their crop of food together, harvesting together and growing together, sharing the land, sharing one goal. And once you take this away from people, the community will disintegrate. So this is the backbone. And if you want to rebuild anything, you start from there. So this is this square one of working anything in regards to having an empowered sovereign community that [..] Here in Jordan, for example, the role of international NGO has been extremely politicized. And to be able to think that you can create a narrative or work without having any kind of international NGOs is not only possible, but it's a demand.
Kamea Chayne: In the very beginning, you kind of talked about this idea of development, and I'm interested in hearing your perspectives on the idea of sustainable development because I know a lot of rural and land-based communities have been pushing back against kind of top-down and imposed ideas of development, which kind of take agency and autonomy away from local people. I'm curious, when you talk about economic development and development in general, what has been central to this vision for you, and how do you go about it?
Lama Khatieb: In the case of Jordan, it's for people to start noticing the riches of resources around them and that sometimes solutions are not imported from the outside, and they are not in the hands of international NGOs. And that's not easy, because if you start working with people on that, I think they would start noticing the riches inside themselves, right?
If you see everything around you in the eye of scarcity if you start to look around you and notice the resources and the riches, you start to notice that it's inside you.
And this is important. We can inspire a lot by the ways of living of our older generation and ancestors. How they were able to have sustainable lives and dependence completely, and amazing ways of cohesive, independent communities without necessarily labeling what they do as, oh, this is environmental, all this is volunteering, oh, this is coexisting. But they do it naturally. They do it because they believe or they live in this sense of community and they are in touch with the land. And I think we start adopting this concept because we feel very disconnected.
For example, one of the traditions that is very famous here in Jordan used to be called [..], which can translate into giving away. So basically any shepherd who owns flocks of sheep will give part of their flock to those who do not have any to use their milk, use their wool, and take care of them as a way of social cohesion or helping without naming it as helping. In the harvest season, the yield would be distributed to those who do not have a piece of land as they take part in the harvesting and working. These kinds of social systems are completely different now. People think, I will pay for labor, and then I will sell, and then I will say how much cash this will produce. This is a completely different lifestyle than the lifestyle that sees the community as the starting point.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, it's important to reframe a lot of these visions. We are nearing the end of our time together, but if it feels relevant to you, I did want to bring in your remark that, "The dominant culture in Jordan promotes instruments like the guitar and piano and marginalizes local instruments, music, songs, and dances, along with their social and cultural stories that were part of people's lives in the region for hundreds of years." How does this relate to the story of the loss and now the reclamation of Jordanian wheat? And what could lie in the power of reclaiming local culture and knowledge in all of these other diverse ways as well, through music, songs, dances, and stories?
Lama Khatieb: Well, I believe culture and arts have to be a byproduct of life with each other. For example, I'm not sure this is true for every other community, but the harvest season is usually the season where many songs are produced and many dances, and it's usually a wedding season because people celebrate the end of the Al-Barakeh of the season. So once you take this away, also art and culture [..] are not always isolated from life, but they generate the art from the inside, not with the engagement with the outside, the land, the people.
Kamea Chayne: And that again points to how the land and agriculture hold a lot of things together. So when this has been taken away, a lot of these other cultural aspects of life could be impacted as well. And before we go into our closing, I just wanted to leave space for you to share anything else on your mind that I didn't get to ask you about maybe any upcoming projects or anything else and otherwise, any calls to action or deeper inquiry you have for our listeners?
Lama Khatieb: I would like to share the experience of working with bakeries because I think that this is important for anybody who's trying to work with changing how a system works.
Anybody who's in the industry would know that industrial bakeries are usually designed to operate with white flour.
White flour is distributed heavily in the world because it works well with machinery, so it can produce well, it can produce abundance, and you can sell per hour more loaves in comparison to other kinds. So working with producing local whole wheat was not easy. Working with bakeries involves trying to explore ways of resetting the machineries for them to work with the viscosity of whole wheat flour, which is not the case for white flour.
So the process not only includes convincing the businesses, it also included a lot of education that goes in the kitchens. And this was not an easy process, but I'm really happy that businesses understand the value of it and if people adopt it, you'll be able to see some change.
For example, even after introducing this, these loaves of local whole wheat people started noticing, oh, we thought the loaves of bread should be brown because we were told that the healthy whole wheat loaves are brown, but we do not see brown loaves.
This was when people started to learn that whole wheat flour is golden in color, but industrial bakeries usually use brown dye to sell brown loaves for people to think that they are healthy, and this is legal.
This doesn't take place only in Jordan, so the brown loaves you see mostly are white flour with a dye that is made from roasted barley shells that are ground. So the base is white flour, it's not whole wheat flour. So once the people started to learn that, oh, now we know the color of the right loaf of bread, people started to hold bakeries and restaurants accountable. They will go to the bakery and restaurant and tell them, please change the label, we do not want to see this, we want to know the real bread when we see it. And then the bakery will call and say, we do not know what people are talking about, because many of the bakeries, just follow the regulations that are set by the ministry, right? They do not necessarily know, since the whole wheat bread hasn't been previously introduced. They do not necessarily know what people are talking about.
But to me, this was a very important part of the movement for the people to hold bakeries and restaurants accountable. For example, someone will go to a pizza restaurant and they will ask, where are you buying your flour from? I will not eat here if you do not change where you are buying your flour from, I want local options. And this is important and the businesses will start calling us and saying, what are my customers talking about? We need them to buy an alternative.
Kamea Chayne: I'm kind of mind blown right now because my impression was also that whole wheat bread is brown. So I'm sure that this does not just happen in Jordan and is probably a prevalent practice across the industry. And so it sounds like education is a key part of this as well, and just the power of getting more and more people involved in this awareness and movement.
With that in mind, if you had anything else you wanted to add in terms of calls to action for people in Jordan and beyond as well, you're more than welcome to share that so we can continue to grow this awareness and movement, and seed more changes across industries. I don't know if you have suggestions for what people can do based on where they are, or anything else that comes to mind.
Lama Khatieb: Start by noticing food producers around you, where they come from, where they live, and what kinds of land or plots of land they use to produce their food. Ask the bakery where they get the flour from, who grows the wheat. What kind of loaf are you eating? What does it mean to have a whole wheat bread loaf? Compare it to the bread loaf that you're eating. What are the differences? Who is taking advantage of taking out the wheat germ and the bran in compromise for your health?
Because if we think about cheap food, there's no such thing as cheap food, because you always pay a price for the cheap food you are buying.
This price can be political, this price can be your health, or this price sometimes can be at the expense of the cheap labor where this food was produced. So good, healthy food is not cheap. And you have to question, why is this loaf of bread extremely cheap? Why is this loaf of bread more expensive? Who is producing this flour? What does it mean to have roller mill flour? Who takes advantage of me eating white flour?
For example, here in Jordan, you will hear the government complaining that, oh, we do not have the resources to invest in agriculture and we are forced not to do that, and so on. But yet the government is putting a lot of funding towards the diabetes center. But if you do not have a community that is dependent on this very cheap white bread that is loaded with sugar and it is the main source of calories because it is cheap, they will not have diabetes, but it's a reverse way of thinking.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, problem-solving rather than problem prevention or having that preventative intervention.
~ musical interlude ~
Kamea Chayne: What has been one of the most impactful books that you've read or publications you follow?
Lama Khatieb: I mostly read philosophy. I don't have a name of a book specifically. I like to read for an Ibn 'Arabî, who is a [..] philosopher. I read Munir Fasheh, who has many publications in English as well, people can look him up, he's an educator. I think the work of Judith Butler is very important as well.
Kamea Chayne: What is a personal motto, mantra, or practice that you engage with to stay grounded?
Lama Khatieb: Al-Barakeh, absolutely.
Kamea Chayne: We appreciated learning that from you today. And what is one of your greatest sources of inspiration at the moment?
Lama Khatieb: I think observing how people are taking it into their own hands to reshape how the movement of reclaiming their bread is taking place. For example, it's touching to see that the culture of bread here in Jordan, is no longer in the hands of the market. It's in the hands of the people, and this is inspiring. It goes beyond me.
Kamea Chayne: Well, Green Dreamer, this is a wrap for our conversation here, but we will have more references from this conversation shared at greendreamer.com in our show notes. And for now, Lama, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. It's been an absolute honor and pleasure to speak with you. For now, though, what final words of wisdom do you have for us as Green Dreamers?
Lama Khatieb: Try to locate Al-Barakeh in your lives.
