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advocate, Corporate control of food, Cost-price squeeze, Food policy, Global hunger, National Food Plan, Supermarket Duopoly

A food plan for corporate agribusiness

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A National Food Plan, but not for us

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday 20th July, 2012

On 17th July, the Federal Government released its green paper for a National Food Plan. This is the next step in the development of Australia’s first-ever national food policy. The first was the release, in June 2011, of an Issues Paper, followed by a two-month period of consultation and invite-only roundtable discussions. The green paper will also be followed by a two-month period of public consultation, and I’ll provide the relevant link at the end of the article.

During the first phase of public consultation, 279 written submissions were received from Australians, many of them from ordinary members of the public, and from community groups and small farmers. One of them was Graham Brookman, CEO of a permaculture farm (foodforest.com.au) in Hillier, SA, which produces 160 varieties of fruits, nuts and vegetables.

DAFF

The Food Forest is a family farm, run by Graham, his wife Annemarie, and their two children. The family’s aim is to ‘ demonstrate how an ordinary family, with a typical Australian income, can grow its own food and create a productive and diverse landscape’.

Graham took the trouble to write 13 pages in his submission to the National Food Plan consultation. He pointed out that ‘the dogma that internatioanl free trade will solve food insecurity has been proven to be faulty over centuries, billions continue to starve while others die of obesity in a world with relatively free movement of food’.

This would seem to be a simple statement of facts. Close to half the world’s population is malnourished in one form or another, either because they have inadequate intake of key micronutrients, or excessive intake of the wrong types of (highly processed) foods. Free trade, vigorously pursued by Australia and many other countries for the past few decades, has not resolved these issues; indeed there is a good argument that it has made them worse.

But in the green paper, the Federal Government has shown, to quote a(n) (in)famous lady, that ‘it’s not for turning’ when it comes to free trade. On the contrary, it’s full steam ahead on the trade liberalisation agenda, and we can expect increasing amounts of food imports. The Government wants your opinion on free trade – but only for suggestions on how Australia can export more, not whether the free trade agenda itself might require further thought.

Then Graham pointed out that the impacts of climate change, peak oil and geopolitical instability mean that ‘the whole food system needs rethinking and massive effort needs to go into rebuilding the skills of our agricultural producers such that the nation can remain domestically food-secure’.  To the free trade dogma, Graham adds the ‘free market dogma [which] has given Australia the duopoly of Woolworths and Coles who have driven farmers from the land by reducing profit margins for producers to miniscule levels and requiring them to use every technical device available to maximise yields.’ Broccoli crops in the Adelaide Hills, he points out, are ‘sprayed with biocides approximately 30 times to meet the cosmetic standards of the supermarkets.’

But Graham and the Government are inhabiting parallel universes, it seems. According to the green paper, Australia ‘has a strong, safe and stable food system’ and ‘Australians enjoy high levels of food security’; our food industry is ‘resilient and flexible’ and we ‘have one of the best food systems in the world’. A key plank of our national food strategy should be about us becoming ‘the food bowl of Asia’, in the Prime Minister’s words. This is a frankly preposterous example of wishful thinking, given that even on the most optimistic scenarios, Australia would supply food for no more than 1% of Asia’s 3.5 billion people.

So it’s no surprise that Graham, on reading the green paper, wrote to tell me that, ‘in terms of a sustainable food future for Australia there is virtually nothing in the ‘national food plan’ or its structure that is acceptable’.

There’s a simple reason for this: the ‘National Food Plan’ is actually a Plan for corporate agri-business and retailers, not ordinary people. If we want a food plan that meets our needs, we’ll have to work on it ourselves.

occupy_our_food_supply_new

If you want to read the green paper and tell the Government what you think about it, follow this link: http://www.daff.gov.au/nationalfoodplan/process-to-develop/green-paper.

Update: 8th November 2013

Following the election of the conservative Liberal-National Coalition, led by Tony Abbott, there is considerable doubt about the future of the National Food Plan. Apparently the new administration is not that happy with it, and the proposed Australian Council on Food has already been abandoned. This is not to suggest that we are likely to see a change of tack on free trade or any other aspects of the big corporate agenda. On the contrary, we are likely to see an intensification of that agenda, via the so-called ‘Northern Foodbowl Plan’, of which more in a later post.

 

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advocate, Coffs Coast, Food policy

Food Policy Leadership at the Local Level

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Local leadership on food – or lack of it

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday, 7th July, 2012

A few weeks ago the City of Melbourne endorsed its inaugural Food Policy, following two rounds of extensive community consultation that took place from October 2011 to April 2012.

Motivated by concerns of individual and community health and well-being, social inclusion and environmental sustainability, this policy is a landmark initiative at the local government level in Australia. It marks another stage in the embrace by growing numbers of councils of food as core business.

Local governments such as the Cities of Melbourne, Maribyrnong, Darebin, Yarra and Port Phillip are now the trendsetters in progressive and integrated policy development on food in Australia. For them, gone are the days when all councils dealt with were ‘roads, rates and rubbish’.

The City of Melbourne’s Food Policy starts from the recognition that there are key drivers – a changing climate, and growing constraints on the availability of key resources (oil, land and water) – which, combined with increasing demand for food with a growing population, ‘mean that we can no longer take our food supply for granted’.

city of melb logo

Contrast this acknowledgement of the facts of basic physical reality, with the comfortable assumption underpinning the Federal Government’s development of the country’s first National Food Plan: ‘Australia is food secure’.  Why? Simply because, in gross volumes, we export three-fifths of what we produce. But we don’t produce enough fruit and veg for a healthy diet for the whole population, so already we have a food import-dependency.

Like other pioneering local governments in this area, the City of Melbourne’s Food Policy recognises the multifunctionality of food and agriculture; and not simply as a set of numbers on a trade balance sheet. The policy identifies the many groups – low income households, older adults, people with a disability, refugees and migrants, and the homeless – who struggle each day to eat well. It recognises that these disadvantaged groups will likely face further ‘food stress’ if, as expected, climate change and resource constraints cause food prices to rise.

The aim of the policy is ambitious: ‘to improve people’s health and well-being by promoting a food system that is secure, healthy, sustainable, thriving and socially inclusive’. The Council recognises that achieving this goal is the work of everyone, and identifies its own role in five areas: education and community development; leadership and advocacy; building and strengthening partnerships; regulation and infrastructure management; and research.

The City of Melbourne is now starting work on an Action Plan to implement the policy. It will be interesting to see what it comes up with; and I will be following this closely.

Coffs Harbour has had, as some people know, a Local Food Alliance (LFA) for the past four years. In 2009, the LFA released a draft Local Food Futures Framework, intended to guide inform and guide council and community action in this field over the coming years. This Framework identified many of the same drivers of change, and vulnerabilities in the regional food system, as the City of Melbourne’s Food Policy. Its vision was of ‘the Coffs Coast region as a showcase sustinable local food economy that supports and sustains healthy, connected, strong and resilient communities, who activiely care for each other and their environment.’

It set out a ‘road map’ for action, and identified a number of strategic priorities. Many education and awareness-raising actions at a grass-roots level have been carried out by the community gardening groups affiliated with the LFA in Coffs and Bellingen.

What’s lacking, however, has been a strong strategic commitment to the LFA and the Food Futures Framework from the elected officials and upper echelons in Coffs Council. Unlike the City of Melbourne, Coffs Council has no Food Policy, despite all the groundwork – and the paperwork – being laid some years ago by the LFA. Unlike the City of Melbourne, Coffs Council has not assumed any leadership or advocacy role in this area, preferring to devolve those responsibilities to time-poor community volunteers. This lack of commitment is disappointing, to say the least; and we’d hope for more strategic vision and leadership in this vital area from the new Council.

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advocate, Food policy

Climate madness in Melbourne

Climate madness in Melbourne

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday, 23rd June, 2012

Last month our Prime Minister spoke of her ambitions to make Australia a ‘food superpower’, so that we can become a ‘food bowl’ for Asia, and not just the region’s mining quarry.

Her lead was followed a couple of weeks later by Victoria’s Agriculture and Food Security Minister, Peter Walsh, who set for his State’s primary producers the ambitious target of doubling their output by 2030. He believes that just as Western Australia and Queensland have becoming mining superpowers, Victoria can take the lead in the push to convert Australia into a food superpower.

I’ve spoken recently with several research scientists in Melbourne, some inside government, some in academic and other institutions. These people are experienced professionals who’ve closely studied, over many years, Victoria’s agricultural sector and its performance. They’ve integrated climate modelling into detailed assessments of the anticipated performances of major crops and livestock in different regions over the coming decades. They spoke to me on a confidential basis, so I’ve not named them to protect their identities.

Regarding Peter Walsh’s target, they told that they ‘have no idea how he’s going to do it, where the best farmland is going to be’. Mid-range climate change forecasts of warming in the 1.5oC – 2.0 oC range, they point out, will see substantial declines in productivity across the northern half of the State. Warming beyond that range, which is looking increasingly likely, given the 40% increase in global greenhouse emissions since 1990, may mean the abandonment of agriculture across entire regions.

The most climate-resilient areas are those with the best soils and most secure access to water, including treated and recycled waste water. They are on Melbourne’s peri-urban fringes. But several thousand hectares of that land will soon be growing houses, not food, due to expansions of the city’s urban growth boundary, confirmed last week by Planning Minister Matthew Guy.

Drought in the Murray-Darling
Drought in the Murray-Darling

The people I’ve spoken with shake their heads in dismay at the astonishing incapacity of senior politicians and bureaucrats to grasp the longer-term strategic import of protecting prime peri-urban farmland with secure access to water. But it gets worse.

I was told that there is a strong strain of climate change scepticism and denialism that pervades the current Victorian government and sections of the bureaucracy. According to the research scientists:

“The problem is that a large percentage of [senior] people in [the government] don’t believe in climate change. Their vision of agriculture is large-scale commodity production, outside Melbourne, in areas that will be heavily impacted by climate change.”

Climate change is now, it seems, a dirty phrase in the Victorian Government:

“We started with climate change [under Labor]. Then some people started talking about climate variability…Then, with the change of government, it became ‘climate challenges’, then ‘climate volatility’. And a few months ago they discovered the words ‘climate evolution’. And now we’re basically not talking about it at all, it’s fallen to the wayside. To the point that they have even cut the climate change unit in the Department of Planning.”

There is deep pessimism across much of the scientific fraternity in the wake of these sorts of developments. “To a large extent, the battle for climate change has been lost for a long period, post-Copenhagen”, I was told. The reason? A rigid and doctrinaire attachment to a conservative political ideology which sees the market as holding the solution to all the world’s problems; and which pushes the natural sciences, and systems thinking, and broader and longer-term notions of resilience, outside the boundaries of acceptable political discourse or policy.

Drought in Australia's foodbowl
Drought in Australia’s foodbowl

This ideology dominates across the political spectrum, so changing governments is no answer. So what might bring it down? Perhaps only the ultimate enounter with undeniable physical reality:

“In twenty years, this thing will bite. There will be 50 oC days in Mildura, ten-year droughts, pestilence and so on, as in the Bible. Then there will be such a community reaction that the political parties will be kicked out. It will take a community groundswell through a crisis situation.”

advocate, Backyard Gardening, Resilience, Self-sufficiency, Urban agriculture

Angelo Eliades – Practising Permaculture in Preston

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A version of this article was first published in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday 9th June, 2012

A little over a month ago I introduced Angelo Eliades, and his permaculture food forest experiment in the Melbourne suburb of Preston. What Angelo has done embodies the wave of food self-sufficiency sweeping the inner north and west of Melbourne. This wave has been generated by individuals and community groups, but it’s increasingly being embraced by local governments, who are integrated policies on community gardening, edible streetscapes and urban orchards into their policies and strategic frameworks.

Angelo is remarkable for the methodical and systematic way he has built his backyard food forest, and in particular for his documentation of everything he’s done, from species selection, plantings, climate events and yields. All of this is available at his blog, deepgreenpermaculture.com.

Angelo built his food forest on the ‘leached and lifeless’ soil of his 80m2 backgarden during the winter of 2008. He calls his method ‘backyard orchard culture’. It’s based around the careful selection and strategic siting of a range of different tree species (Angelo has 30), interspersed with numerous varieties of berries (21, with multiples of several varieties), herbs (90) and other perennials, with some space left for annual vegies. Typically early, mid- and late fruiting varieties will be chosen, because ‘this gives extended seasonal cropping – instead of having one tree produce a glut of fruit all over a few weeks, you can extend your cropping [over several months].’

For Angelo, a key motivator is yield; his aim was to show what’s possible in a small space, the ‘typical suburban backyard’ in inner Melbourne. Remember, he wanted to counter the scepticism of folks in DPI and elsewhere who scoffed (and still scoff) at the idea that permaculture and backyard gardening can actually produce significant amounts of food.

Angelo Eliades in his garden in Preston, Melbourne
Angelo Eliades in his garden in Preston, Melbourne

But he’s also very interested in resilience: in selecting species that can do well in a Melburnian climate that is behaving increasingly erratically, with damp and cool summers, short and mild winters, freak hail storms, and extremely hot days in early spring. Never mind the droughts, the fires and the floods.

So he and his colleagues are looking abroad and at other cultures and agricultural traditions, trying out species that you wouldn’t think of as forming part of the ‘normal’ Australian diet, if such a thing still exists. The multi-functional and ‘very highly productive’ Peruvian root crop yacón is one. “It’s very sweet, you can eat is straight, or stir fry it; you can also produce a natural, inulin-based sweetener out of it”, says Angelo.

The cold hardy babaco, a member of the paw-paw family, is another tree that features in his food forest. It’s also known as champagne fruit, because it tastes ‘like a lemon-sherbet pineapple-strawberry blend and it’s quite fizzy’. It also has medicinal properties, having four times the bromelain (anti-inflammatory) content of pineapples. And, Angelo told me, it ‘makes great smoothies, too’. Unfortunately none were ripe when I visited. He expects the tree to yield 50kgs per year when it reaches maturity at four years.

Angelo explains the strategic thinking that informs the selection of perennials, not annuals, in this type of orchard design:

“They’re more flavour-intensive, they’re far hardier, and they grow much better. We find all these types of plants, like French sorrel, and perennial spinach, things that are high-yielding and good tasting. And then we propagate them, and distribute them out through the local community, so everyone gets hold of these plants. The more we share them, the more we have of them.”

You can see here the outlines of a vision for a community-based resilient food future, which I’ll flesh out more in a later column. But what about his yields? Angelo has documented approximately 200kgs per year, with a roughly 60-5- 35 split between the trees, the berries and the vegies. All his trees are a few years away from maturity, – a third are not yet producing at all – so he thinks 500kg a year is quite feasible.

Even his current yield equates to 14 tonnes per acres. Average dryland wheat yields in Australia are in the 2 tonne per acre range, even after many many millions of dollars have been spent on research and genetics. Makes you think, doesn’t it?

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advocate, Backyard Gardening, Resilience, Self-sufficiency, Small-scale farming, Urban agriculture

The rise of the dachniks

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This article was first published in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday 26th May, 2012

The rise of the dachniks

Last time I began telling the story of Angelo Eliades and his permaculture food forest in his suburban backyard in Preston, Melbourne. In response to that column, a friend sent me a link to some research that was carried out a few years back into the scale and productivity of agro-foresty and bio-intensive small-scale production in Russia. This research formed the substance of a PhD thesis submitted by Leonid Sharashkin in May 2008 at the University of Missouri.

This column will be in parenthesis to Angelo’s story, which after all, has a lot to do with the yields achievable in small-scale food forests. Next time I’ll return to his story proper.

If you’re really keen on the Russian research, you can download the full thesis – a mere 248 pages of text and tables – via ‘soilandhealth.org’. Here’s the (very) short version: Russia is a nation of small-scale gardeners, or dachniks; and they are very, very good at it. Some 35 million households, two-thirds of the country, grow a fairly significant portion of their food on a dacha, a small-scale garden plot with an average size of 600m2, belonging to urban dwellers, either privately or in a co-operative form.

The tens of millions of current-day dachniks are following in the footsteps of a centuries-old tradition of small-scale, self-reliant agrarian communities. As Sharashkin notes, this means that these practices did not suddenly re-emerge en masse in response to the economic collapse in the post-Soviet Russia of the early 1990s, but rather have deep historical and cultural roots that go well beyond the food production and economic dimensions.

Small'scale intensive production in Russia
Small-scale intensive production in Russia

Yet the productivity of the dachniks is impressive. Sharashkin reports that in 2004, they accounted for (conservatively) 51% of total agricultural output by value, around $US14 billion, or 2.3% of Russia’s GDP; a larger contribution than steel manufacturing or electricity generation. And when the focus shifts to staple food crops, as opposed to commercial crops for export, the figures are truly remarkable. Over 90% of Russia’s potatoes, over 80% of its vegetables and fruit, and over 50% of its meat and milk, are produced on small plots, with little or no machinery and minimal energy inputs.

And all this is achieved on a mere 2.9% of the country’s agricultural land, compared to commercial agriculture, which requires the other 97.1% of the agricultural land to produce 49% of total output.

Such extraordinary productivity is explained by two principal reasons. First, the care and attention that comes with labour-intensive gardening for self-provisioning. Secondly, the embrace of polycultures and perennial species, rather than single crop monocultures, characteristic of agro-forestry: plantings that ‘are intentional, intensive, integrated and interactive.’

And beyond their food yields, these spaces also generate a social yield. They are places ‘where a family comes together’ and where they ‘celebrate special occasions’. Dachniks watch over each others’ plots, and they share seeds as well as gardening experiences and tips.

As Prime Minister Gillard boasts of Australia’s potential to be the ‘foodbowl of Asia’, others look to the parlous state of the Murray-Darling basin, the impacts of the coal-seam gas industry on water tables and fertile soils, the growing reality of climate change and the looming shadow of peak oil, and wonder whether we shouldn’t first focus on feeding ourselves. In this debate, the dachniks of Russia have proven that ‘decentralized, small-scale food production is possible on a national scale’.

Which is why we should celebrate the growth of community gardening in this country, and in our region in particular. On Saturday, 2nd June, the Bellingen High School Community Garden will celebrate its first birthday, and everyone is welcome. There will be activities for children from 10.00 a.m., the pizza oven will be fired up for lunch, as well as live music and a photo exhibition. Come along and see what Charlie Brennan, Olivia Bernadini and their many helpers have achieved over the past year. For more details, visit the Facebook page of the Bellingen Community Gardens Association.

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advocate, Backyard Gardening, Fruit growing, Self-sufficiency, Urban agriculture

Food Forests – food for the future?

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A food forest in Preston

A version of this article appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday, 5.5.12

Recently I’ve been travelling to Melbourne a fair bit, as part of a team working on a research project funded by the Federal Government’s National Climate Change A­daptation Research Facility. NCCARF, as it’s known, is funding dozens of research projects over a wide range of social, environmental and economic fields, many of which will be discussed at its annual ‘Adaptation in Action’ Conference to be held in Melbourne from 26-28 June this year.

NCCARF is currently funding three food security projects, examining, respectively, the impacts of climate change for risk management and the preparedness of food industry leaders; creating a climate for food security in terms of business, people and landscapes in food production; and urban food security, urban resilience and climate change.

It’s the last one I’ve been involved with, and in a nutshell the aim is to better understand how urban and peri-urban agriculture can help meet the challenges of climate change and food security, and build more resilient towns and cities in Australia. Two case study areas have been chosen for this research, Melbourne and the Gold Coast, hence my recent travels.

I’ve met and interviewed  over 30 people from different walks of life, from local government planners, to health and nutrition professionals, community gardeners, market gardeners, backyard gardeners and food security advocates. I’ve been left with lots of impressions, not the least of which is that there’s an extraordinary  amount of activity and enthusiasm for urban agriculture and local food in Melbourne.

I’ve also been struck by the disconnect between this level of activity and enthusiasm, and the low value that the State government (both the current Victorian government and the previous one) has placed on prime agricultural land close to the city. According to the Planning Institute of Australia, on current trends regarding the constant expansion of Melbourne’s Urban Growth Boundary, 25,000 hectares of quality farmland will be lost to residential development by 2020. Doesn’t seem to matter whether it’s coal-seam gas or new McMansions, it seems pretty clear that food growing rates way down the list of priorities of State government planners and political leaders.

Many people, myself included, are firmly of the opinion that we – and most certainly our children – will rue these choices to chase the short-term buck over long-term sustainability and resilience.

The Melbourne urban food and agriculture movement, which seems to be geographically concentrated in an arc of suburbs heading north and north-west of the city, such as Fitzroy, Clifton Hill, Brunswick, Northcote, Thornbury, Coburg and Preston, is full of people and groups who see some sort of breakdown in the ‘Big Food’ system as likely. Here, and over the next few weeks, I’m going to introduce you to one of them: Angelo Eliades.

Angelo is a life-long resident of Preston, and has been a keen organic gardener since 2002. A few years ago Angelo taught himself the principles of permaculture – he subsequently did his PDC with Bill Mollison – and decided to put them into practice by taking three months off work and transforming his small suburban backyard into a permaculture food forest.

Angelo Eliades in his garden in Preston, Melbourne
Angelo Eliades in his garden in Preston, Melbourne

He was motivated to do this, he said, by the ‘scepticism towards permaculture’ he saw amongst horticulturalists. ‘There was just too much doubt, too much dissenting opinion, about whether it can really work’, he told me. ‘So I said, enough’s enough, it’s time to call their bluff, and build something that shows it really does work.’

And that’s what Angelo did with his backyard food forest. But Angelo is no starry-eyed idealist, he’s a working scientist. Which is what makes him, and his project, so unique. He set out quite explicitly to use his backyard as an experiment, to rigourously document everything he did, and all his yields, in order to establish that bio-intensive gardening of this sort can indeed be highly productive.

‘I have no time or space for wild speculation’, he said. ‘For me, my food forest was really to prove that the concept worked. As a scientist, if something’s scientific, that means it’s repeatable.’

In the next few columns, we’ll look at how he did it, what he’s achieved, and what his plans are for the future.

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Russia Sets the Standard for Sustainable food production

I wrote a column on this topic last year – this post has some additional info that I hadn’t come across, e.g. the Private Garden Plot Act. Seems that even as Russia lurched from Stalinism to gangster capitalism, its policy makers retained a fair chunk of good sense in terms of making sure the people could keep feeding themselves…

advocate, Co-operatives, Fair Food systems, Food Hubs, Local and regional food economies, New market mechanisms

Food Hubs – essential infrastructure for a Fair Food System

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Food Hubs

A version of this article appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday 21.4.12.

Last time I wrote about the efforts underway in Girgarre to turn a new page in the history of the Australian co-operative movement, by launching a ‘Food Hub’ manufacturing centre that is co-operatively owned and run by workers, growers and the broader community.

I’m happy to report that while Heinz has now sold its Girgarre site to another buyer, the Goulburn Valley Food Action Committee has found an alternative greenfield site in Kyabram, and are planning to launch the first of their new products, designed by Peter Russell-Clark, by the middle of May. The results of their feasibility study have now come in, and they show, according to Chairperson Les Cameron, that ‘demand for Australian product is greater than ever before…the Heinz approach of creating a product, marketing it and then trying to sell it through the major supermarkets is no longer the way to go. [The study] is showing a number of significant, medium-size companies are looking for Australian product; and sub groups who will not buy anything else.’

So far, so good. I’m following these developments with great interest. When their products are available in Coffs Harbour, I’ll be sure to let you know!

But back to the question: what is a Food Hub? In essence, it’s a conscious attempt to scale up local and regional food economies. If there’s been a single persistent and fairly persuasive criticism of the local food movement over the years, it’s this: that while its aims and principles might be great, and while farmers’ markets and community-supported agriculture might work quite well for smaller producers, local food as a whole actually fails to deliver the goods in terms of offering reliable markets with sufficient throughput and volumes for commercial-scale farmers.

That function, so this reasoning goes, can only be filled by central wholesale markets; or, in this country, by supermarket distribution centres.

The Food Hub is an attempt to tackle this criticism head-on.  Originating in the United States in the 1990s, Food Hubs have expanded across that country, with more than 100 in operation, and many experiencing strong growth and expansion. Their primary functions are typically the aggregation, marketing and distribution of local fresh and processed produce. In some ways they resemble a wholesaler, but with the key difference that their mandate is to source as much local produce as possible, and channel it into local businesses, institutions and households. In the process they create more demand for local food, help build the capacity of local producers, and get much better returns for farmers than they receive in the central market system.

All the things a Local Food Hub can do
All the things a Local Food Hub can do

Government purchasing power seems to have played a big role in fostering the growth of Food Hubs, with 40% counting among their clients public institutions such as schools and hospitals.

According to a recent survey of Food Hubs by the US Department of Agriculture, some of the longer-running hubs have become significant local businesses. One has 100 suppliers, including many small and mid-sized producers, and offers over 7,000 products. This Hub owns a 30,000 sq.ft. warehouse and 11 trucks, with 34 full-time employees and over US$6 million in sales in 2010.

But Food Hubs can do much more than aggregation, marketing and distribution. As in the Goulburn Valley, they can combine manufacturing and processing with innovative product development and multiple traineeships. The Local Food Hub in Charlottesville has a five-acre demonstration farm, where they run training days for local growers and offer apprenticeships and internships for the next generation of farmers. 20% of the food grown on this farm is donated to local food banks and anti-hunger organisations.

And so on. Because there’s no single business model, and because these hubs are locally-owned and controlled, responding to local needs and priorities, the forms they take will vary widely. That they are emerging and expanding at this point in time, when the existing food system is plagued by so many profound dysfunctionalities, is a cause for great optimism.

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Collaborative cultures and networks, Democratic food systems, Fair Food systems, Food sovereignty, Local and regional food economies

Food for Thought – Growing, Sharing + Eating Local Food

And another great read from Suzette Jackson – fond memories for me of Australia’s first Fair Food Week!

Food for Thought – Growing, Sharing + Eating Local Food.