All posts by Nick Rose

agroecology, Argentina, Capitalism, Churchill Trip 2014, Collaborative cultures and networks, Community gardening, Corporate control of food, Democratic food systems, Ecology, economics, fair food movement, Fair Food systems, Food policy, Local and regional food economies, Supermarket Duopoly, Urban agriculture

Food Tank interviews Dr Nick Rose

Republished from Foodtank – original article here – Interview with Dr. Nick Rose, Australian Food System Activist – Food Tank

Food Tank recently had the opportunity to interview Dr. Nick Rose, Executive Director at Sustain, about the health of Australia’s food system and his view on what are the key factors impacting on a healthy and resilient food system in Australia.

Food Tank (FT): What are some of the biggest opportunities to support Australia’s food system?

Nick Rose (NR): The single biggest opportunity lies in the field of education, with the introduction for 2017 of a paddock-to-plate food literacy curriculum, Food Studies, as an elective for all Grade 11 and 12 students in Victoria, Australia’s second-most populous state. As a result, in a few years, as many as 10,000 students could be taking Food Studies. These students will form a growing cohort of capable tertiary graduates who can inform and lead the development of good food policy at the local, state and federal government levels. If other states follow Victoria’s lead and introduce a Food Studies curriculum, the wave of food systems change generated by tens of thousands of highly informed and motivated youth will, I think, be irresistible.

Other significant opportunities include the embrace and resourcing of sustainable and regenerative forms of food production, as well as the expansion of new and fair distribution systems and enterprises, such as farmers markets and food hubs. Legislative and planning protections for Australia’s major food bowl areas close to capital cities are sorely needed. Governments at all levels have a crucial role to play in these and other necessary shifts.

FT: With increasing innovation in the food system and networking technologies, what are you most excited about?

NR: I’m excited about creating a dynamic, multi-layered, and searchable food systems directory that will, for the first time, reveal the scale and breadth of Australia’s growing food systems movement. The development of this directory is a project that Sustain is now working on, with the support of the Myer Foundation, and we’re looking forward to making it a reality in 2017.

FT: From your extensive travels, what are some successful innovations in other countries that could be applied in Australia to improve the food system?

NR: I have a strong personal interest in the great potential of urban agriculture to transform the food system as a whole, and I saw dozens of examples of innovations on my Churchill Fellowship visiting the mid-west United States, Toronto, and Argentina in July–September 2014. Those innovations include: community urban land trusts to make city and peri-urban land available for sustainable and intensive food production, education, and social justice; capturing large organic waste streams to support sustainable and highly productive urban agricultural systems; planning overlays and zoning to facilitate commercial-scale urban agriculture production; the multiplication of inner-city farmers markets with dedicated space for urban farmers; the establishment of small-scale artisanal food processing facilities to incubate food entrepreneurs; the facilitation of city-wide urban agricultural networks; and, the development of comprehensive and inclusive urban agricultural strategies that recognize, value, and support the work of urban farmers and the organizations they are embedded in.

FT: How do organizations and individuals get involved in supporting a healthy and resilient food system in Australia?

NR: There are so many points of entry for individuals, from growing some herbs and vegetables, to supporting a kitchen garden at your local school (as a parent) and, or, your local community garden (more than 500 across Australia). Also, shopping at your local farmers market (now more than 180 in Australia) and, or, fair food enterprise, supporting local and sustainable producers wherever possible. Major change is needed at the level of policy, legislation and regulation, and here organizations can make a difference by joining one of the many local and regional food alliances that are in existence around Australia, or forming one if it doesn’t already exist in your region.

FT: If you could change one thing in Australia to improve its food system, what would it be?

NR: The single biggest obstacle in my view is the concentration of economic and political power represented by the supermarket duopoly—Coles and Woolworths. In the past 40 years, the grocery market share of these two companies has more than doubled to 75 percent. Meanwhile, Australia has lost more than 40 percent of its farmers, with the average age of farmers now approaching 60 years, compared to 42 years for the workforce as a whole. These two trends are deeply connected. As a country, we need to confront our tolerance for oligopolistic concentrations of political-economic power, and the supermarkets present the most urgent task, regarding the long-term sustainability and fairness of our food system.

FT: What personally drives your work to improve Australia’s food system?

NR: My drive stems from years living in Guatemala (2000–2006). It was here my political consciousness was awakened on realizing that the deaths of 200,000 Guatemalans, mostly Mayan indigenous peoples, could be traced to the refusal by the United Fruit Corporation and the then U.S. government of President Eisenhower to countenance even the partial redistribution of its massive landholdings and excessive wealth. This story is all documented in Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the CIA in Guatemala. It was a book that changed my life.

I believe that in working to improve Australia’s food system, I am part of a huge and growing global movement to transform the world’s food system. I dedicate my efforts to the memory of those who died in the struggle for a fair Guatemala.

Uncategorized, Urban agriculture

Urban Agriculture: Making Australian Cities Edible

Republished from Matters Journal – original article here Urban Agriculture: Making Australian Cities Edible — Matters Journal

Australia loves to consider itself a foodie destination, but imagine a city where every inch of public space is covered in something you could actually eat. Urban agriculture expert, Dr Nick Rose, believes our cities are ready to feed themselves. Melissa Howard catches up with him only to discover his ideas aren’t that hard to swallow.

Dr Nick Rose, corporate lawyer turned fair-food scholar-activist, has a vision for our cities. He wants us to embrace urban farming to the point that when we walk down the street we’ll be able to spot food everywhere. “You’ll see fruit and nut trees, vegetables in planter boxes and on street verges,” he says. “People will be gardening, kids harvesting fruits and vegetables, and people sitting out in their front gardens sharing food, tips and recipes. Nobody is hungry, we don’t have malnutrition and food is a source of happiness, health and wellbeing.” If that sounds like a crazy pipe dream then, well, you haven’t met Dr Rose.

Rose is the executive director of Sustain: The Australian Food Network, where he sees his role as helping to promote the transition to a better food system. One that feeds all Australians well, cares for our land and ecosystem, and pays farmers fairly. A tall, sometimes-bearded man with a large grin, Rose is today wearing a t-shirt with a cauliflower and an eggplant on it, both holdings placards: “The future is vegetables” reads the cauliflower’s sign and “Occupy lunch” says the eggplant’s. “You can’t work in urban agriculture and not look a bit like a hippy,” I say. “Very true,” he agrees.

Rose is showing me around a huge shared site in the Melbourne suburb of Alphington where Sustain and Melbourne Farmers Market have received funding from the Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation for a new project. The Alphington Food Hub will grow 500 square metres of food, host a weekly farmers market and a commercial kitchen, co-working offices, a farmers’ depot, and aims to give “everyone dignified access to good food at all times”.

I start by asking him what exactly is urban agriculture? “Urban agriculture, is the raising and growing of food by people in their own homes or shared spaces in, or close to, urban centres,” he says. It is, he tells me, community gardens, it is aquaponics, it is your elderly neighbour with nets over her peach trees and overflowing tomato produce she bottles once a year. It’s pots of herbs on the balcony of apartments, it’s keeping chooks and goats in the suburbs, and it has enormous benefits. “Anyone who walks around the city will know there are lots of empty blocks of lands that have a fence and weed growing out of concrete. Urban agriculture makes those spaces beautiful and makes them productive. It can provide employment opportunities for young people and provide markets to sell the produce to cafes.”

Rose believes that positive mental and psychological health benefits are an untapped benefit of urban agriculture. “When I was in Argentina I visited a mental health hospital where part of their therapy for people suffering from depression was participating in community gardening,” he says. “It certainly made a difference.”

Using food and urban agriculture to benefit our mental health could help confront the health crisis we are facing on a global level. The International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES) released a report in October 2017, which stated that the current cost of the negative health impact of our current global food system is a staggering US$13 trillion – that’s one sixth of the GDP. If we add on the environmental negative effects, that’s another US$10 trillion.

“Every week we see stories in the media about the dysfunctional nature of our food and agricultural system and the impact it is having on our bodies, our communities, our children’s future, our eco systems and on our climates,” Rose says. “Any of the major challenges that confront humanity right now, so much of it comes back to the way we produce, distribute, consume and dispose of food. It’s a crazy situation when the way we feed ourselves is actually harming ourselves,” says Rose. “The need for change is screamingly obvious and urgent.”

So, if urban agriculture is the way of the future and the solution to so many problems then why are we not doing it? Why isn’t every centimetre of land growing stuff? “The biggest obstacle is easy access to land,” he says. “A lot of our most agriculturally valuable urban land is eaten up by sprawl, add in steep land prices for private land and government reluctance to make Crown- and council- owned land available to community groups as other barriers.”

Rose is critical of something he calls ‘land banking’. “Developers acquire land and then don’t do anything. It’s land that’s left vacant, sometimes for years, and it seems like a huge waste of resources and opportunity. Even if it’s going to be built into apartments or something, there’s no reason why in the meantime, it could be a year, a couple of years, it can’t be made productive.” Rose believes incentives, such as a rates discount, could be used to entice developers to let their land be used temporarily. I suggest, similar to the Daniel Andrew’s Victorian government’s legalisation to tax empty houses to force more homes onto the rental market, we tax blocks of land that sit vacant? “I like the way you’re thinking,” he laughs.

But for now, Rose is co-editing an anthology on Australian urban agriculture and recently held Sustain’s Urban Agriculture Forum in Melbourne. Rose hopes the [work he’s doing with the] forum will put Australian urban agriculture in the public eye and bring farmers, gardeners, researchers, city planners, policy makers and the public together with a united vision to make Australian cities and towns edible. “If we are really serious about a healthy population, if we are serious about climate change we need to support people to do this,” he says. “It’s just the right thing to do.”

agroecology, Fair Food systems, Urban agriculture

A chat with Nick Rose from Sustain

Republished from Local Food Connect – original article here A chat with Nick Rose from Sustain | Local Food Connect

Nick is the director of Sustain : the Australian Food Network, an organisation that he founded after having previously written a PhD thesis on the global movement for food sovereignty. He believes that it is important to understand the collective contribution of people growing edible gardens in cities all over the world and encourages us to see ourselves as part of a movement that goes far beyond our own backyard. He also believes that access to good food at all times is a human right and is fundamental to the dignity of a person. And he advocates for a participatory and democratic food system in which decisions are not made in boardrooms and the lobbies of governments.

Consistent with these beliefs, Sustain promotes collective action towards the development of new food systems for cities and is working towards acknowledgement by local, state and federal governments of a defined ‘urban agriculture’ sector in this country.

Nick has seen innovative models of urban agriculture, often using underutilised and vacant land all over the world, in South American countries such as Guatemala and Argentina, in North American cities like Detroit, Milwaukee, Chicago and Toronto, and in Jakarta. As a result, he sees much potential benefit in using vacant land in Melbourne to grow food

In Indonesia, Nick encountered La Via Campasina, an international peasants’ movement of small farmers and indigenous people which was then based in Jakarta. The organisation is currently working against hunger in Brazil, supporting peoples’ struggle for land in the Philippines, fighting for the rights of migrant workers in Europe, helping with the relief effort in Pakistan and always trying to ‘articulate a different visions and future for food and agricultural systems’ and to explore the potential and prospects for change in this area.

He has also observed the city of Seoul’s plan to allocate billions of dollars to urban farming projects, with the intention of having 1,000,000 million farmers in a city of 10,000,000 making use of 240 hectares by 2024, and ‘build[ing] communities of urban farmers’.

Here are some of the Melbourne initiatives that Nick and Sustain have been involved in.

The Melbourne Food Hub

Launched by Sustain in 2018, The Melbourne Food Hub at 2 Wingrove Street Alphington is an urban farm and classroom. It also leases to some small food-related enterprises (including Farmwall, Sporadical City Mushrooms and The Mushroomery).

Oakhill Food Justice Farm

This urban farm operates out of an abandoned vicarage on the corner of Plenty Road and Tyler Street in Preston. The land is planted out with veggies and is maintained by volunteers.

‘A ‘food is free’ initiative, all of the produce grown on site is distributed amongst the Oakhill volunteers and through local food relief initiatives.

The farm is connected with Preston Primary School which has a passata project using wicking beds at the site to grow tomatoes, as part of their Seed to Stomach Program.

By offering training in urban agriculture and peer-to-peer networking opportunities, Nick believes that the farm not only builds food systems literacy but also empowers community members with new skills and stronger social connections.’

What are Australian governments doing?

Nick says that local councils in Australia have been at the forefront of government support for the emerging urban agriculture sector, being, says Nick, “the level of government in Australia most responsive, accessible and connected to community”.

But, says Nick, so far State and Federal Governments have been harder to influence, still viewing urban agriculture as a hobby and a niche not big enough for them to deal with.

Nevertheless, he is encouraged that the Victorian Government, through its acknowledgement of the artisan sector in Victoria, is talking about a ‘local food economy’. Sustain also recently worked with Agriculture Victoria to map urban agriculture in Melbourne, Bendigo, Ballarat, and Geelong. Nick notes that the Covid crisis was an opportunity for the State Government to take notice of the sector and that it put together a ‘Food Relief Task Force’ to address the problems of families experiencing financial stress was committed to improving both the ‘access and quality’ of the food available.

So, to summarise, Nick argues that the local food movement is much broader than just growing healthy food – it is also about human rights, dignity and social justice and can be seen in a new political ecology at the global level responsive to the climate and poverty challenges we face globally.

agroecology, Corporate control of food, economics, fair food movement, Local and regional food economies, Supermarket Duopoly, Urban agriculture

”In the mainstream Australian food system, it’s the supermarkets that hold most of the power”

Republished from Gourmet Traveller – original article at Dr Nick Rose of Sustain: The Australian Food Network on our broken food systems | Gourmet Traveller

I have been directly inspired by the visionary work of Dr Nick Rose, as he motivates all of us to celebrate and raise awareness of Australia’s urban agricultural movement. Nick is an excellent communicator, with an innate ability to empower those around him.

Together with South Eveleigh’s Aboriginal educator and environmentalist Clarence Slockee (Cudgenburra/Bundjalung), I can’t wait to help Nick spread his important message about food sovereignty within South Eveleigh and beyond.– Kylie Kwong

Dr Nick Rose on food sovereignty and fair food systems

Food sovereignty can be a tricky concept to wrap your head around. But it’s important that we do, says Dr Nick Rose, executive director of Sustain: The Australian Food Network. At its most simple, he says, food sovereignty is about creating a fair food system.”The idea of a fair food system is one that’s fair for farmers – they get a fair price for their produce. It’s fair for consumers – they get affordable food. And it’s fair for the land – it’s ethical and involves caring for country.”For too long, Dr Rose explains, Australians have taken their food system for granted, without thinking about where their food comes from, who grows it, or the impact it has on the land.

“We were left a legacy. When we came here as British colonisers, there was a food bowl here. Bruce Pascoe talks about this; there was a managed landscape that Indigenous people had been caring for, for tens of thousands of years. We’ve been here 240 years and we have, in many ways, devastated large swathes of the country.”

Nick Rose

His mission, through Sustain, is to design and build a fair food system and work alongside communities, councils and organisations to become empowered food citizens.

“We work with local and state governments to say we need to consciously shape our food and farming system and not just leave the dominant actors – the supermarkets in particular – to make all these decisions. They are making them with obvious interests at stake, responding to their shareholders. Those interests don’t correspond to the health and welfare of Australians, nor to the long-term sustainability of the Australian country … That’s what food sovereignty is all about. It’s about feeding people well and caring for the country.”

And why is that so important? Because food and diet is at the heart of good health, for a start. “The biggest burden on population health is diet now; it’s overtaken tobacco and alcohol as the biggest risk factor for chronic disease and early death. That’s a really, really big challenge,” says Dr Rose.

Food sovereignty is also critical in the fight against food poverty and ensuring future food security.

“The issues facing farmers have been decades in the making. We talk about farmers being price takers instead of price makers, which means that in the mainstream Australian food system, it’s the supermarkets that hold most of the power in terms of price setting and contractual arrangements.”

It’s a problem for the country in terms of food security because if all the farmers are getting older and all the young people aren’t farming, who’s going to grow our food in the future?”

And then, of course, there is climate change, which is making farming less viable and accelerating unsustainable forms of land management.

“These are really big, entrenched problems in the way that we relate to the country and manage the land. There’s a really big shift that has to happen, not just with Australian farmers but with the whole country. We need to understand this continent in a more profound way and engage in a process of dialogue and truth-telling with our First Nations peoples and understand what it is to live here and live here sustainably. Managing the land and caring for country and creating habitat for all the diverse creatures that make our life possible. Agriculture is such a big driver of land use change in Australia so this really comes back to the food system.”

But while the challenges are big, they are not insurmountable, says Dr Rose. And there is every reason to feel hopeful and optimistic about the future.

“The work I have been involved in over the past decade, I have seen a lot of things change. A lot more people have been involved – at a policy level, a lot of local governments are now getting involved. COVID was a bit of a wake-up call for a lot of people; a moment of rupture which is going to push things forward positively.”

It may be the case that the darkest hour is before the dawn. There are plenty of reasons to feel depressed and pessimistic but I choose to believe there is a lot of energy and momentum for change. The future is unwritten, it’s up to us to write it.”

Capitalism, Ecology, economics, Local and regional food economies, Resilience

COVID-19 and the Crisis of the Commodified Food System

Republished from www.sustain.org.au

History is being written right now. Are you authoring this chapter – or watching others do it for you?

“The COVID-19 health crisis has brought on an economic crisis, and is rapidly exacerbating an ongoing food security and nutrition crisis. In a matter of weeks, COVID-19 has laid bare the underlying risks, fragilities, and inequities in global food systems, and pushed them close to breaking point.

Our food systems have been sitting on a knife-edge for decades: children have been one school meal away from hunger; countries – one export ban away from food shortages; farms – one travel ban away from critical labour shortages; and families in the world’s poorest regions have been one missed day-wage away from food insecurity, untenable living costs, and forced migration.

The lockdowns and disruptions triggered by COVID-19 have shown the fragility of people’s access to essential goods and services. In health systems and food systems, critical weaknesses, inequalities, and inequities have come to light. These systems, the public goods they deliver, and the people underpinning them, have been under-valued and under-protected. The systemic weaknesses exposed by the virus will be compounded by climate change in the years to come. In other words, COVID-19 is a wake-up call for food systems that must be heeded.

The crisis has, however, offered a glimpse of new and more resilient food systems, as communities have come together to plug gaps in food systems, and public authorities have taken extraordinary steps to secure the production and provisioning of food. But crises have also been used by powerful actors to accelerate unsustainable, business-as-usual approaches. We must learn from the lessons of the past and resist these attempts, while ensuring that the measures taken to curb the crisis are the starting point for a food system transformation that builds resilience at all levels.

This transformation could deliver huge benefits for human and planetary health, by slowing the habitat destruction that drives the spread of diseases; reducing vulnerability to future supply shocks and trade disruptions; reconnecting people with food production, and allaying the fears that lead to panic buying; making fresh, nutritious food accessible and affordable to all, thereby reducing the diet-related health conditions that make people susceptible to diseases; and providing fair wages and secure conditions to food and farmworkers, thereby reducing their vulnerability to economic shocks and their risks of contracting and spreading illnesses.” (emphasis added)

COVID-19 and the crisis in food systems: Symptoms, causes and potential solutions

Communique by IPES-Food, April 2020

These opening paragraphs from the Communique released this month by the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) provide an excellent summary of what the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed about national food systems and the globalised, industrialised food system.

Our food systems, global and national, are fundamentally inequitable and unfair. While we have watched in fascinated horror as the daily toll of cases and fatalities from COVID-19 mounts, we have forgotten – if we ever gave it much thought – the silent, constant catastrophe of preventable early deaths caused by poverty, including lack of access to adequate nutrition, as well as safe drinking water and basic health care. According to the World Health Organisation, 6.2 million children and youth under 15 died from these causes in 2018. That’s nearly 17,000 every day, or around 12 deaths every minute. Every minute, every day. It cannot be said in strong enough terms: in a world where a tiny fraction of humanity enjoys lives of almost infinite riches, our politics and economy stand indicted as morally bankrupt, insofar as death and suffering on such a vast scale is effectively accepted within this paradigm as ‘normal’.

Yes, the international community of nations – the United Nations – has signed up to the Sustainable Development Goals. Goal 2 is ‘Zero Hunger’, with targets to end hunger and all forms of malnutrition. However, those goals and targets do not address the fundamental imbalances in power and maldistribution of wealth that produce so much poverty, suffering and hunger amidst so much abundance. As Eric Holt-Gimenez, Director of the campaigning organisation Food First, wrote back in 2012, “We Already Grow Enough Food for 10 Billion People…And Still Can’t End Hunger”. Why not? Because, as he argued, ‘hunger is caused by poverty and inequality, not scarcity’.

Nor, I would add, is it caused by natural disasters or pandemics. The COVID-19 pandemic is exacerbating this basic inequality in global and national food systems. It has been said that ‘we’re all in this together’ because the disease doesn’t respect boundaries of class or nations. That is true – up to a point. It’s also the case that those most impacted in terms both of exposure to COVID-19 and to the economic crisis that government public health policy responses have caused will be those who are most vulnerable. Low income and casual workers; farm and migrant workers; grocery store and delivery workers – all of whom do not have the option of working from home. And many of whom are not being provided with adequate protective equipment as they go about their essential work. As a result, increasing numbers of such workers are becoming infected with COVID-19 and many are dying. This is further proof, if it were needed, of a society and economy where the requirements of corporations for profit trump the rights of workers to a safe working environment.

Demand for the services provided by foodbanks has skyrocketed in the United States, as an extraordinary 22 million workers filing for unemployment claims in the past few weeks has seen queues of thousands of cars up to 10 kms long at many pop-up emergency food distribution points in various states. In the UK, the reports of a survey conducted for the Food Foundation over 7-9 April found that ‘the number of adults who are food insecure in Britain is estimated to have quadrupled under the COVID-19 lockdown’. The most heavily impacted are the disabled, the unemployed, and those from Black and ethnic minority groups. In Australia, where last year an estimated 20% of the population experienced food insecurity, emergency food providers are experiencing very high demand in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis even as supplies diminish through the collapse of the hospitality sector as a result of the enforced lockdown measures. Meanwhile in the US, the plunging of demand from restaurants and hotels has left farmers with no buyers for their produce; and as a consequence, millions of tonnes of milk, eggs and vegetables are being destroyed or ploughed back into the soil even as queues for foodbanks stretch ever longer.

The IPES-Food report also references the fragility of the industrial food system through supply chain disruptions, which may be caused by the closing down of processing facilities because of infected workers, or by a severe shortage of migrant workers due to border closures. Prior to the outbreak of the crisis, the entire model of factory farming, with its thousands and millions of animals confined in small spaces, was a known breeding ground for pathogens, most recently the swine flu and the avian flu. The COVID-19 pandemic is indeed a ‘wake up call for our food system’, in the words of IPES-Food. And this is without even discussing the other destructive impacts of the food system, such as its role in climate change, biodiversity loss and alarming rise in diseases linked to diet.

The case for change is urgent and overwhelming. It has been urgent and overwhelming for many years. What has shifted is that the COVID-19 pandemic and associated economic crisis has brought the sheer wastefulness and inequality of the global and national food systems into the sharpest relief. In 2016, the Right to Food Coalition, including Sustain, stated that Australian governments – at all levels – were ‘failing their legal and moral obligation to guarantee the human right to adequate food for at least 1.2 million people who don’t have access to safe, affordable and nutritious food’. The Right to Food Coalition noted that Australia, despite being one of the richest countries in the world, was actually regressing in terms of its fulfilment of this basic and universal human right.

That regression is accelerating in the contemporary crisis – but out of crisis also comes disruption and opportunity. In their communique, IPES-Food noted that the past several weeks have also been notable for a ‘remarkable upsurge of solidarity and grassroots activism’ in many places around the world. The crisis has thus ‘offered a glimpse of what new and more resilient food systems might look like’. One of the most extraordinary and wonderful examples cited in the communique is the state of Kerala in India, which has funded and supported hundreds of community kitchens run by women’s networks to provide nutritious and free meals to the most vulnerable, delivered directly to their doorstep. In Melbourne, a collaboration of social enterprises led by STREAT has established the Moving Feast initiative, aiming to source and provide thousands of free meals to those in need through a network of kitchens, councils, social enterprises and emergency food relief agencies. On a local level, Sustain is working with partners at the Melbourne Food Hub on a Food Security and Food Justice Drive to mobilise the power of urban agriculture in helping to make good  and fresh food available to those who need it most. We are supporting Community Gardens Australia and dozens of organisations and individuals who are calling on all governments across Australia to recognise community gardening and urban agriculture as an essential service, for the multiple benefits it provides to the Australian community – now more than ever.

History is being made as we speak. If you believe in the possibility of a better and fairer food system – and in a better and fairer world – now is the time to get involved in shaping it. We can and must do it together. Join us and let’s make it happen!

Annual review

2018 reflections

The passage of another year. Time for some further reflections on professional milestones and global politics.

Professional milestones

2018 was another big year for me and Sustain. They have mostly been captured in Sustain’s 2018 Annual Report, but I want to mention some of the main ones here too.

2nd national Urban Agriculture Forum, 23-24 February 2018

Bruce Pascoe in conversation with Ben Shewry, 2018 Urban Agriculture Forum

Undertaking events is always a major commitment, and this was no exception. But it was certainly worth it. Over 200 people attended this event held at William Angliss, and the range of presentations demonstrated the wonderful scope and multi-dimensionality of urban agriculture. A significant gap still concerns political support, recognition and government resourcing for the growing of food in urban spaces, and there is much to be done here. Still, momentum is building strongly at local government level, and I feel it is only a matter of time before state governments are forced to acknowledge and fully support this growing sector.

Kitchen table talks for Cardinia Shire’s first-ever Community Food Strategy, February-May 2018

I am utterly convinced that a lack of democracy throughout society is one of the greatest issues facing us. From lack of effective action on climate change leading to ecosystem collapse, to the tolerance of grotesque levels of inequality in which a tiny fraction of humanity have captured for themselves vast amounts of wealth, our political decision-making prioritises the interests of big business over those of the mass of the population, and of non-human life. Indeed the political-economy is accurately characterised as oligarchic, and is actively preventing us from taking the necessary decisions and actions to avert collapse, a dynamic that Kevin McKay describes and analyses very well in is book, Radical Transformation: Oligarchy, Collapse and the Crisis of Civilization. That is why, if we are working to transform the food system, we must simultaneously democratise it. And that is why this process we led in as part of the Cardinia Food Movement, as partial and imperfect as it was, constituted in my view such an important step in engaging with over 500 residents about their views and priorities for a better food system.

Initiation of the Melbourne Food Hub

Following on from a visioning day held in May 2017 with 50 representatives from 43 organisations, and then a successful application to the Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation for an Innovation

Alphington Food Hub Vision – Image courtesy Kirsty Moegerlein

grant, we launched the Melbourne Food Hub in Alphington as a joint venture with Melbourne Farmers Markets in mid-May 2018.

The first six months was a period of planning and laying foundations, for the construction of an above-ground urban farm, a community and commercial farm, and a food distribution business. Significant progress was made in 2018 with the launch of the well-attended Alphington Farmers Market and the securing of funding to run a Food Business Boost program supporting migrant women realise their food business aspirations.

3rd National New Economy Network Conference

NENA 2018 – Image courtesy of Russ Grayson

I am a big fan of Michelle Maloney and her amazing energy and dedication to the cause of ecological and social justice, first through the establishment of the Australian Earth Laws Alliance and more recently with the establishment of the New Economy Network Australia (NENA).  So it was a pleasure and privilege to work with her and the rest of the NENA team in co-hosting the 3rd NENA national conference at William Angliss Institute in Melbourne. We had over 200 attendees on all three days and it was packed program that was intellectually stimulating and politically satisfying. I was especially pleased to have food systems and food sovereignty embedded as a key theme throughout the program, with great contributions from Eric Holt-Gimenez, Charles Levkoe and Jose Luis Vivero Pol amongst many others.

Global politics

With the benefit of hindsight and distance, 2018 was a year of relative stasis compared to the social and ecological explosions that are now unfolding towards the end of 2019 (which I will cover in another post). It was a year of continued consolidation of the far-right globally, with the election of the authoritarian Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and the explicit incorporation of xenophobia into domestic politics in the US with the attacks on migrants from Mexico and and Central America, and the hardening of the southern border. The Brexit crisis rumbled on in the UK. Conflicts in Syria and Yemen continued, with the Syrian government consolidating its grip on power as it gradually gained the upper hand in its battles with US-backed hardline Islamists in the north.

Capitalism, Ecology, Ecosystems, Water

Ecocide, and the building of critical consciousness

The death of a million fish

On or around the 6th January 2019, a tragic combination of circumstances led to a massive fishkill, estimated to be in excess of 1 million native species, in the Menindee Lakes region on the Darling River.

Native fish species impacted in the January 2019 #fishkill

While the immediate cause for the massive #fishkill was the sudden die-off of a massive bloom of blue-green algae (and the resulting collapse in oxygen levels in the water), the obvious question is: how was the ecosystem allowed to reach this parlous state of extreme vulnerability? Industry bodies such as the NSW Irrigators Council immediately went into damage control mode, blaming the drought, while Cotton Australia sought to deflect attention by claiming that cotton irrigators were ‘sick of being the whipping boys’ for environmental disasters.

Yet, as Fran Sheldon wrote in the Conversation on 16th January, the impacts of excessive irrigation are incontrovertible:

Ecological evidence shows the Barwon-Darling River is not meant to dry out to disconnected pools – even during drought conditions. Water diversions have disrupted the natural balance of wetlands that support massive ecosystems.

NSW Irrigators – blame the drought

Politicians from the governing parties – the Coalition in both NSW and Federally – signally failed to take responsibility. The NSW Primary Industries Minister, Niall Blair, was afraid of meeting meet with locals having received death threats on social media, while it wasn’t until Jan 23rd that the Federal Government  mandated the conduct of an independent study to determine the cause of the fishkill.  To their credit, NSW Labor promptly issued a statement calling for a special commission of inquiry into what it termed the ‘ecological catastrophe‘, while Federal Opposition leader Bill Shorten called for the establishment of an emergency ‘taskforce’ that could lead to a ‘possible judicial inquiry’.

A ecological disaster foretold

An excellent investigation by the ABC Four Corners team that aired in 2017 – Pumped: Who’s benefitting from the billions spent on the Murray-Darling? raised questions of, at best, grossly negligent mismanagement of the river system; and at worst, very serious allegations of political corruption and water theft with the most contemptuous disregard for the health of the river ecosystem.  As a so-called ‘advanced capitalist nation’, Australia prides itself on its rule of law. In theory, this means that laws are enforced equally and properly and that ‘justice is blind’; in other words, it doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, you will be treated the same way in the eyes of the law. In reality, law in capitalist countries has always favoured the interests of employers over workers and landowners over the rights of indigenous peoples and the environment.

What the Four Corners episode revealed, amongst much else, was that once the NSW Department of Primary Industries Special Investigations Unit actually start to make progress and discovery that irrigators were rorting the system (e.g. by not having meters to track how much water they were extracting from the river, or by tampering with the meters so they didn’t work), and when the Manager requested a major investigation, the Unit was then mysteriously shut down and the staff sacked. The only reasonable conclusion to be drawn is that there was collusion between the irrigators and the Department, and an accommodation reached in which no investigation would proceed.

The consequences are now plain for all to see.

A disaster baked into the logic of the system

The logic of endless extraction, heedless of environmental consequences, has its inevitable outcome. We need only look to the experience of Uzbekistan with the Aral Sea, once the world’s fourth-largest body of fresh water. When the USSR commenced large-scale cotton production in the 1960s by diverting flows from the Amu Darya river that had replenished it for millennia, the levels of the Aral Sea began to fall. By 2014, as the image from Wikipedia shows, it was a tiny fraction of its former size.  Ecological vandalism on a grand scale has a price.

The fragility of ecosystems resulting from over-exploitation and over-extraction is now intersecting with the impacts of non-linear anthropogenic climate change, as recent research published in Nature Climate Change demonstrated:

The beginning of this century has seen an unprecedented number of widespread, catastrophic biological transformations in response to extreme weather events. This constellation of unpredictable and sudden biological responses suggests that many seemingly healthy and undisturbed [Australian] ecosystems are at a tipping point.

Reviewing various measures of the destructive impacts of the global industrialised capitalist food system on human and ecological health, I argued in a recent article submitted to the Australian Journal Of Environmental Education that

While these losses and costs are regarded as ‘externalities’ by agri-food corporations, such an accounting sleight of hand will merely delay the day of ecological reckoning. We contend, first, that the current industrial food system is not only undermining the health and wellbeing of large and growing numbers of people and the integrity of local, regional and global ecosystems and climatic stability. Secondly, we argue that by severely diminishing public and ecological health, the industrial food system is at the same time encountering its own biophysical contradictions: it is undermining the conditions of its own reproduction (Weis, 2010). It is thus not only destructive, it is self destructive, and thus unsustainable by definition. The case for transformative change is therefore overwhelming and urgent. How do we get from here to there? Following the pedagogical oeuvre of Paolo Freire (1970), we begin with the premise that critical consciousness-raising amongst large numbers of people is an essential pre-requisite to transformative change.

Building critical consciousness

So how do we build critical consciousness? There are no shortcuts. It will require the sustained and committed efforts of tens of thousands of activists in this country and all over the world.

As the crisis of the system intensifies, the contradictions and absurdities of the current political economy will become increasingly clear to more and more people. We know that is already happening in many, many ways – and the fishkill on the Darling is the latest of a growing ecological cacophony that is calling us to awake from our long decades of consumer apathy and begin to recover our power as political beings.

Rebellions are on the rise. Witness the Gilet Jaunes / Yellow Vests movement in France. The Extinction Rebellion in the UK. The mass strike of maquiladora workers in Matamoros, northern Mexico. These are expressions, both of the advancing distintegration of the hegemony of neoliberalism, as well as the growing levels of critical consciousness around the world as people come together to enter into struggle with the logic of the endless growth and exploitation of the system.

What happens next is up to us.

Selected articles published / linked on the #fishkill catastrophe, January 2019

 

Cry me a river: Mismanagement and Corruption have left the Darling dry, Helen Vivian, Sydney Morning Herald, 9 March 2018

Cubbie Station and Water Allocation Abuse, Tim Alderman, personal blog, 9 January 2019 (tweeted – original article 2 March 2017)

The fishkill is a tragedy, but it is no surprise,  Quentin Grafton, Emma Carmody, Matthew Colloff and John Williams, The Guardian, 14 January 2019

The other Murray-Darling wildlife disaster – it’s what you don’t see, Michael Pascoe, The New Daily,  15 January 2019

The Darling River is simply not supposed to dry out, even in drought,  Fran Sheldon, The Conversation, 16 January 2019

Fishkill highlights mismanagement of Australian waterways, Martin Scott, 25 January 2019, World Socialist Web Site

 

Backyard Gardening, Collaborative cultures and networks, Democratic food systems, Uncategorized

In the era of Trump

More than a year has passed since I last wrote here. What a year, professionally and in terms of global politics.

Cardinia Food Circles, courtesy of Kirsty Moegerlein

Professional milestones

  • 21 January 2016: Sustain: The Australian Food Network becomes incorporated as a company limited by guarantee
  • March 2016: Sustain secures funding from the Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation for three years, effectively covering my role as Executive Director for 2 days a week
  • April 2016: Sustain secures funding from the Myer Foundation for capacity building, supporting a) the establishment of an Australian Food Systems Directory b) the holding of an inaugural Urban Agriculture Forum c) the holding of the 21st Symposium of Australian Gastronomy d) the recruitment of a part-time comms officer and e) governance training for our Board and myself
  • May 2016: We complete the Food Hub Feasibility Study for Wangaratta, the second such study after the 2015 Bendigo Food Hub Feasibility Study
  • June 2016: Study trip to Canada to attend the Canadian Food Hubs Conference and meet with food organisations in Quebec
  • June-July 2016: Preparation for the inaugural Australian Community Food Hubs conference and tour
  • August 8-18 2016: Community Food Hubs conference and tour successfully conducted with 170 attending the two-day Bendigo event and a further 800+ attending events around the country
  • September 2016: Planning begins for the national Urban Agriculture Forum and the Symposium of Australian Gastronomy
  • October 2016: Contract signed for a multi-year food system re-design project: Cardinia Food Circles.  The first and most ambitious project of its type attempted so far as we know.
  • November 2016: The Urban Agriculture Forum takes place in Melbourne with 150 attendees, followed by events in Bendigo, Adelaide and Sydney. Cardinia Food Circles project gets underway
  • December 2016: 21st Symposium of Australian Gastronomy takes place in Melbourne, with 140 attendees, over four days of debates and feasting. The background mapping of the Cardinia Food System takes place
  • January 2017: We pause a little for breath…Discussions begin for the Alphington Community Food Hub
  • February 2017: The Australian Food Systems Directory is launched. The Bendigo Local Food Economy pilot report is launched.
  • March 2017: The Sustain / VLGA food governance position paper is finalised, articulating  the role of local government across health and wellbeing, planning, and economic development
  • April 2017: The Cardinia Food Systems profiling workshops are held in Koo Wee Rup, Pakenham and Gembrook, generating debate and passion about the current state and future possibilities of Cardinia’s food system. The Food Hub Feasibility Study for the Wyndham Food Hub is finalised and delivered to the City of Wyndham

Koo Wee Rup food system profile, courtesy of Kirsty Moegerlein

And so much more still to come! Not mentioned above of course is the launch in 2016 of Australia’s first Bachelor of Food Studies at William Angliss Institute, and in 2017 of the first Master of Food Systems and Gastronomy at the same place.

Global politics

The geopolitical tremor came first in June with the Brexit vote, with a slim majority of UK voters taking the historic decision to leave the EU. This rising tide of nationalism crested in November 2016 with the previously unthinkable election of the ultra-narcissist Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States, on an openly racist platform of America-first nationalism and xenophobia directed against Muslims, Mexicans, Chinese and non-Americans in general.

Trump’s first 100 days in office have been characterised by gaffes, mis-steps, broken promises and in recent weeks increasingly brazen saber-rattling and uber-militarism. In early April, a volley of cruise missiles was fired at Syria in supposed retaliation for a chemical weapons attack allegedly perpetrated by Bashar Al-Assad against civilians in a rebel-held zone. A week later the US military command in Afghanistan decided to drop the MOAB – Mother of All Bombs – the largest non-nuclear device ever exploded.

MOAB Bomb dropped on Afghanistan, 14 April 2017

At the same time Trump has effectively put the North Korean regime on notice that it’s next, and can expect a pre-emptive strike in the near future. North Korea has responded by threatening the US with annihilation. I can only imagine what it must be like for the residents of Seoul at this time, who will be first in the firing line should Trump carry through with his threats.

Meanwhile the rhetoric against Russia and Iran has ramped up considerably, and the US has them in its sights also. France is on the brink of electing the openly fascist National Front, as the forces of fear, xenophobia, racism and nationalism seem to be in the ascendancy.

The danger of war – and hugely destructive, nuclear war – feels very great indeed. I retain my optimism and belief that we are also on the cusp of some wonderful, transformative changes, but there are days when my optimism is sorely tested.

Still, this is the sort of thing that keeps me feeling hopeful: