Tag Archives: Australia

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

 

Corporate control of food, Democratic food systems, economics, fair food movement, Food sovereignty, Growth paradigm

Confronting Corporate Power with Democracy and Solidarity

Democracy and Solidarity

This is the text of my address to the Public Meeting on the Kernot Dairy, Gippsland, 12.5.15, held at RMIT Building 56, Queensberry St, Melb. 50 people were in attendance. 

We’re here tonight for a political meeting. This is not about party politics; rather, it’s about politics in the deep sense, of who holds power in our society, and how that power is exercised, for whose benefit, and with what consequences.

That’s what we’re here to discuss tonight, in the very specific context of a clear intention by one corporation to transform a Gippsland dairy farm into a highly intensified system of production.

 Our food system is facing a series of crises. One of them is the exploitation of vulnerable workers. Some of you may have seen the Four Corners program, Slaving Away, on Monday 4th May. It exposed the distressing and disturbing reality that significant portions of our cheap food system depend on the ruthless exploitation and abuse of migrant workers, most of whom are in this country on short-term working visas.

It’s all too easy in such circumstances to point the finger of blame at the few ‘rotten apples’, the unscrupulous labour hire contractors, or the few large farms that use their services. But the real beneficiaries are the major supermarkets, and the fast food companies, that buy these products at the lowest possible cost.

As Tammi wrote last week on the AFSA website, what this Four Corners program actually revealed is a system that’s failing, at many levels, to secure the well-being of all. These migrant workers are experiencing truly appalling treatment, without any doubt. But let’s not forget the millions of chickens and pigs in their cages in the dozens of factory farms that already exist in Australia. Let’s not forget the 1 million-plus Australians who experience food insecurity on a regular basis. Let’s not forget the millions more who suffer chronic pain and early death as a result of type 2 diabetes, and other diseases of diets based on cheap and empty calories.

WTF?
WTF?

Let’s not forget the farmers, who on average receive only 10 cents of every dollars’ worth of food they produce; and who feel so devalued by our cheap food culture, that they experience rates of suicide and depression at twice the national average.

This food system is failing the great majority of people, in this country and worldwide, and the non-human species that are caught up in its voracious maw of ceaseless production. But it’s not failing the handful of corporations that make a handsome profit off the misery of the majority.

And that’s the problem we face. We’ve inherited a system that’s primarily designed and operated to feed corporate profit, rather than feed people fairly. It’s all about production, for production’s sake, regardless of the consequences. That’s what the Kernot dairy issue represents, as we’ll hear shortly. It’s a choice for all of us as to what food system we want for our country: one that primarily serves large corporations and banks; or one that serves people and ecosystems.

What factory farming of dairy cattle looks like...
What factory farming of dairy cattle looks like…

* * * * *

We’re also hear tonight to reclaim our democratic culture, which lately has been under increasing strain. We have a journalist summarily sacked for committing the cardinal sin of criticizing the sanctification of Anzac Day. We have campaigning environmental organisations like Friends of the Earth under financial attack because they dare to mobilise communities to question the rush to frack our fertile farmlands. We have moves to criminalise animal welfare groups who dare to expose the cruelty meted out in factory farms.

TPP

At such times, it’s important that as many of us as possible stand up and speak the truth as we know it. Food sovereignty, we say, is the fundamental right of communities to democratically determine our food and farming systems. To participate in the making of decisions about who owns our farmland, and what sort of production systems should be employed. What should be grown or raised, and where and under what terms should the produce be sold? For the past few decades we have delegated all these decisions to a mythical and apparently all-powerful entity known as ‘the market’. But the market, far from being ‘free’ and a ‘level playing field’, is actually structured in favour of the largest and most powerful corporations.

How do we begin to change this? By gathering together in forums such as this, to hear directly from the producers and communities who are at the sharp end of these processes of ‘free trade’ and ‘globalisation’. By listening, and becoming informed of the issues, and what’s at stake.

And by taking action. Because that’s what this meeting is also about. Solidarity. Standing together with those who are trying to sound the alarm on what looks like a headlong rush to the intensification of dairy farming in Gippsland and elsewhere in Victoria. We have several people who’ve made the journey up the freeway to be with us tonight and share their stories with us. I’d like to invite them all to stand up now – and invite you all to give them a very warm round of applause. You are very welcome here; and we have come here tonight to support you.

But it’s also very important to remember that although the corporation that is planning the intensification of this dairy in Kernot is Chinese, we have no quarrel with the people of China. Food sovereignty is a global movement that embraces hundreds of millions of people in more than 80 countries, and it is firmly grounded in the principles of international solidarity and non-discrimination. What we oppose is a food system that privileges short-term financial gain for a tiny minority, over the long-term well-being of the vast majority of humanity, non-human species, and ecosystems everywhere. Ultimately we have one home, and it’s called Earth. And our responsibility is to adopt an ethic and a practice of care, and love, towards each other. Not only those closest to us, but those far away as well.

Corporate control of food, Supermarket Duopoly

Trying to tackle abuses of market power with social media

#TellUsWhy

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday 26th October, 2013

On Wednesday this week, the Victorian Farmers Federation launched a social media campaign with the hashtag, #TellUsWhy.

The targets of the campaign are Coles, Woolworths and Aldi, and the aim is to mobilise shoppers’ collective power, via Facebook and twitter, to pressure these mega-supermarkets to use Australian-grown produce in their homebrand product lines.

“We’re asking consumers – next time you’re in [one of those supermarkets] – check the fine print on the food you’re about to buy. If it’s an import take an image on your phone, then send it with the #telluswhyColes or #telluswhyAldi hashtag and your comments to the VFF – as a tweet to @VicFarmers or post it on the VFF’s Facebook page”, said VFF social media guru Tom Whitty, in the press release.

There’s a growing public awareness of the impact that cheap imported fruit (fresh and processed) is having on our growers and food manufacturers. Also this week the CEO of SPC Ardmona, Peter Kelly, issued an urgent plea to the new Coalition government for $25 million in funding, saying that without the money the company will be forced to close its Shepparton plant. The consequences of such a decision would be grim: 1000 workers redundant, the contracts of hundreds of local growers terminated, thousands of hectares of fruit trees ripped out ‘and a regional economy would be destroyed’, in the words of local Liberal MP Sharman Stone.

So the VFF is to be commended for its campaign, and apparently the building pressure has already had some impact, with Woolworths ‘committing to using Australian-grown frozen vegetables in its Select brand, and replacing $9 mn of imported tinned fruit with Goulburn Valley growers’ fruit”, according to VFF president Peter Tuohey.

Gary Gardiner
Gary Gardiner

But there are deeper dynamics at work which are placing inexorable downwards pressure on Australian growers and food manufacturers. One is the free trade agenda, which as I wrote last time is being ramped up several notches with the Trans Pacific Partnership deal.

And the other is the familiar story: the excessive market power of the big Australian supermarkets and the impacts of that power on farmers, workers and communities. The VFF campaign might persuade the supermarkets to buy more Australian produce, but what price will the growers and suppliers be getting?

This brings me back to Gary Gardiner, fourth-generation local farmer and now proprietor of Paradise Fruits in Sawtell, whom I first wrote about last month. With his intimate knowledge of the wholesale market system in Australia, Gary explained to me exactly how the supermarkets use their buying power to maximise their gains at the expense of growers:

“Coles and Woolies don’t just control 80% of the grocery market, they control the the market system as well. They’ll walk into a wholesale market and they basically control what’s going on. Let’s look at bananas in the Sydney market. There’s probably four main wholesale agents. With potatoes, there’s maybe two-three. So Coles and Woolies come in, they look at a product and say, right-o, that’s selling for $15 a carton. So they say to the agent, we’ll take all your production for $12, everything in your coolroom.”

“So that’s fine, they get a $3 discount. The agent’s going to say yes, because he’s on a fixed percentage. There’s no impact on him, it’s an easy sale. It’s the poor old grower who cops the hit”, Gary said.

“We’ve had so many stories. Let’s say there was a shortage of butternut pumpkin on the market. Let’s say it’s $1 a kilo. The [duopoly] will go in there and offer 70 cents a kilo, and take everything on the market. There’s usually one or two smaller growers there, holding out, and the price will automatically go to $1.50 a kilo, because there’s nothing on the market for anyone else to buy. Mysteriously, a percentage of the Coles and Woolies product will reappear for $1.50. Without even leaving the market, so they make a 100% mark-up on that product.”

Tell us Why? Indeed. To be continued.

advocate, Corporate control of food, Fair Food Week, Food policy, Local and regional food economies, Supermarket Duopoly

Fair Food Week arrives in Australia

Australia’s first Fair Food Week

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday 17th August, 2013

On the 1st August this year I attended Australia’s first Symposium on Supermarket Power. Jointly organised by the law schools of Monash and Melbourne University, the aim of this event was to explore the extent of supermarket power in Australia’s economy and society, the impacts of that power, and what if anything could be done about it.

It was a fascinating event in many ways. We heard from a financial analyst documenting the extraordinary sales growth and profit performance of Woolworths and Coles over the past decade, along with some cautionary words expecting both indicators to moderate somewhat in the current decade because of the entry of Aldi and CostCo into the Australian market.

We heard about the new supermarket adjudicator appointed under the UK’s mandatory supermarket code of conduct, and how she intended to exercise her powers, including by the imposition of ‘punitive fines’ based on a percentage of turnover in the event of repeated abuses of market power down the supply chain by the supermarket majors.

Tasmanian senator Peter Whish-Wilson announced that the Greens want to extend divestiture powers to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, and to impose an immediate moratorium on the opening of any new stores by the duopoly. We also heard from Robert Hadler, General Manager of Corporate Affairs at Coles, who welcomed the discussion and acknowledged that Coles (and, by implication, Woolworths) needed to do more to justify their ‘social license’ to operate.

I was invited to attend to speak about the challenges facing our food system and the emerging ‘fair food’ movement. I had the audience smiling when I put up a slide with that ubiquitous social media question, ‘WTF?’

WTF image

‘What does he mean?’, I’m sure they wondered. Then I showed the short film, Orange Tree Blues, which tells the moving story of Riverina citrus grower Mick Audinno finding himself forced to rip out hectares of healthy orange trees because he had lost his markets as a result of cheaper imported juice concentrate.

And then my next slide revealed two new meanings of WTF:

This is a question, I told the audience, that every Australian should be asking themselves. Because we are losing farmers at a truly alarming rate – an average of 76 per week from 2006-2011, expected to rise to 130 per week during the current decade.

A gentleman from the Victorian State government, himself a farmer, came up to me afterwards and told me I was being ‘mischievous’ with these figures (which, by the way, come from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and KPMG). His point being that it doesn’t matter if we lose eight ‘inefficient’ farmers, if we can replace them with one who is much more ‘productive’ and ‘efficient’.

WTF image 2

But this rather misses the point. In our singular and relentless focus on productivity and efficiencies, we lose sight of so much else, the value of which cannot be simplistically reduced to monetary calculations. This is what scholar John McMmurtry terms ‘the life-blind structure of the neoclassical paradigm’: the exclusion as a matter of definition of considerations such as human health and well-being, and eco-system integrity, that are actually fundamental to our continued survival as a species, let alone our civilisation in its current form.

In an effort to foreground a national conversation on food and agriculture that begins from the question, ‘What values do we as Australians want to underlie our food system?’, the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA) is facilitating the country’s first-ever Fair Food Week, from 19-25 August.

ffw-2013-logo

 

What we call ‘fair food’ is food that is produced in ways that are fair to all and that guarantee economic and nutritional health to everyone in Australia’s food value chain – Australian farmers, Australian food processors, small to medium size food retailers and we who eat the products of these producers and enterprises.

 

Already over 90 events have been organised around the country, including forums, workshops, film screenings, farm dinners, garden tours food swaps and much more. We have been humbled by the response Fair Food Week has received. It speaks to the emergence of a fair food movement in Australia that is rapidly growing in confidence and capacity.

advocate, Corporate control of food, Farmers Markets, Food policy, Local and regional food economies, National Food Plan, Small-scale farming, Supermarket Duopoly

Local Food, Local Farms

Local food and the 2013 Federal Election

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday, 3rd August, 2013

As the 2013 Federal election draws closer, policy announcements are starting to come thick and fast.

The Government has already set out its stall on food and agriculture, in the shape of the National Food Plan. The ‘big idea’ is that Australia will become the ‘food bowl’ of Asia, with a 45% increase in exports and a 30% in agricultural productivity by 2025.

The Coalition likewise wants a big increase in exports and foresees a ‘dining boom’ to replace the ‘mining boom’. The distinguishing feature from the Government’s plan is the emphasis on Northern Australia, with the damming of rivers and the clearing of land seen as the key to opening up the untapped resources of the northern frontier.

Meanwhile Bob Katter’s Australia Party has taken an entirely different tack, focusing on what he sees as the largely negative role played by Australia’s supermarket duopoly in terms of the viability of our farmers. He has accordingly introduced a Bill to Reduce Supermarket Dominance, which among other things makes it an offence, punishable by a $50 million fine, for any supermarket operator to retain a market share greater than 20% withinsix years after the passage of the legislation.

That $50 million fine contrasts with the $61,200 fine imposed on Coles after it was found to have engaged in misleading conduct, by selling as ‘baked today, sold today’ bread that had actually been made weeks ago in Ireland.

Katter’s initiative, which was supported by Nick Xenophon, has been branded by the industry as ‘radical’ and ‘extreme’. Forcibly breaking up companies is indeed radical, although there are plenty of historical precedents for such actions. I can’t speak for Bob Katter, but I imagine he might say that a situation in which two companies control in excess of 70% of the grocery market is itself ‘radical and extreme’.

On this issue, the Government and the Coalition effectively adopt a ‘do nothing’ approach. The Greens, on the other hand, propose that the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission be given divestiture powers, although they propose nothing as directly forthright as Katter.

Local Food Local Farms
Local Food Local Farms

What the Greens have announced in the past week is the establishment of an $85 million grants program to support various forms of direct marketing of produce by farmers and growers, including farmers’ markets, regional food hubs, and community-supported agriculture vegie-box schemes.

This proposal draws directly on the experience of the ‘Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food’ program operated for some years by the US Department of Agriculture. Partly as a result of such initiatives, the numbers of farmers’ markets in the US have more than doubled in the past decade, from 2900 in 2001 to 7000 in 2010. And the numbers of farms selling some or all of their produce through local markets rose to 136,000 in 2012, a 24% increase from 2012.

The $85 million in grants for direct marketing compares favourably with the $1.5 million grudgingly offered by the Government in the National Food Plan to support community food initiatives such as farmers’ markets and community gardens. That $1.5 million came with many strings attached, including a dollar-for-dollar matched funding requirement. I know of many groups that would have liked to apply but were put off by such conditions.

Many people in rural and regional Australia will be sceptical that the Greens are or ever could be the friends of farmers. That said, direct marketing and local food is growing at 5% -10% per annum in North America, with solid and bi-partisan political support at both state and federal levels, and with clear benefits to farmers. Indeed, net farmer numbers in the US recently increased for the first time in decades, with many new entrants being considerably younger than the average age of 58. Clearly something is going on here.

advocate, Coffs Coast, Corporate control of food, Food policy, National Food Plan

A vacuum of political leadership on food policy in Australia

Questions for the Federal Government – and the Opposition

A version of this article was first published in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday, 8th June, 2013

Two weeks ago the Federal Government launched the National Food Plan White Paper, after nearly three years of preparatory work.

With colleagues at the Australian Conservation Foundation, the Food Alliance (Deakin University) Gene Ethics and the Sydney Food Fairness Alliance, I have been going through the White Paper closely, in preparation for a briefing from the office of Minister for Agriculture Joe Ludwig.

So far we’ve come up with 10 pages of observations and over 50 specific questions. We’re not expecting the Minister’s office to address all of these in a 90 minute briefing, of course, but it should give you an idea of the extent of misgiving and disquiet about this Plan felt by the representatives of Australia’s Fair Food movement.

There are two headline targets of this Plan: an increase in Australia’s commodity exports to Asia of 45% by 2025; and an increase in agricultural productivity of 30% by the same date. Just in case the reader doesn’t get the message that this Plan is all about exports and productivity, it is rammed home through relentless repetition. The word ‘export’ and its derivations are mentioned 118 times in the 104 page document. ‘Productivity’ receives no fewer than 80 separate mentions.

The word ‘health’ and its derivations appear even more frequently – 140 times – but don’t be deceived: this plan is not mainly about health, or for that matter environmental sustainability. If we follow the money, nearly $40 million of the $42.8 million in new funding that this Plan represents is focused on growing exports and boosting productivity, with the largest chunk – $28.5 million – to be spent on researching Asian markets.

With the exception of the Community Food Initiatives and Food Literacy programmes ($1.5 million each) – which are welcome and somewhat unexpected inclusions, if symbolic rather than substantive – the whole question of health has been deferred to a National Nutrition Policy, work on which is slated to begin in 2014. Given that the Food Plan was intended to be an integrated, whole-of-government food policy, this is a major disappointment. Quite frankly, it’s a cave-in to big food lobbyists who always pushed for this outcome.

As well as side-stepping our health crisis, the Plan makes very light of climate change as a risk factor, and includes no targets or action plan for reducing the fossil fuel intensity of our food system. This is quite extraordinary, given that the latest data suggest that the Arctic may be ice-free in the summer within one or two years, contrary to the ‘worst-case’ projections of the International Panel on Climate Change that such an occurrence, with all its implications in terms of cascading non-linear feedback loops, would not happen before 2075.

Free trade is held up as the best and only route to happiness and prosperity. Meanwhile this week brought news that Simplot is threatening to close down its Devonport frozen food factory in the face of waves of cheap imports, with major consequences for Tasmanian growers. Ausveg rightly says that the loss of this capacity and with it many growers is a real threat to our food security.

Judging by the Food Plan, the Government is not concerned about such developments; and the Opposition’s only answer is that scrapping the carbon tax will solve all our problems. Such is the dearth of leadership on basic questions of our national security and our children’s future.

Veggie swaps - a growing phenomenon
Veggie swaps – a growing phenomenon

Meanwhile, some positive news on the local front. The first harvest swap in the Coffs Harbour region will take place at Sawtell Primary School on Sunday 23rd June, from 11.00 a.m. – 2. 00 p.m. If you have armfuls of surplus cabbage or kale, this is your chance to spread the love! (but keep the caterpillars at home!) If you want to attend, please contact Juliet Thomas, jtinthegarden@gmail.com

Corporate control of food, Food policy, National Food Plan, Uncategorized

National Food Plan and March Against Monsanto

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25 May 2013 – a significant Saturday

Two important events are taking place this Saturday, both emblematic of different visions for food and agriculture for food and agriculture in this country and globally.

First, at 8.30 a.m., the Federal Government is launching the final version of the country’s first-ever National Food Plan. This Plan was first mooted in 2010, in the run-up to the previous federal election.

As I have written previously in this column, the Plan has been widely criticised, both for its content and for the process of its development. While a full analysis will have to wait until we’ve had a chance to read through some of the detail, early indications are that not much has changed from the Green paper, released in July 2012.

In other words, the overwhelming priority and focus of the Plan is on pumping the land and farmers of Australia harder so that we can reach the supposed nirvana of becoming ‘the food bowl of Asia’. Never mind that even if we double production and export every last calorie we will only ever feed at best 4% of Asia’s population. Never mind that the land clearing and additional irrigation required will place severe additional stress on our already fragile and depleted soils, water tables and ecosystems.

And never mind that we have a major health crisis in this country that needs strong and effective action, not wishy-washy calls for ‘industry self-regulation’. Let’s say it plainly: our children need to be protected from the sophisticated and multi-billion dollar advertising of the junk food industry which pushes its products on them at every opportunity. But our Federal government is well and truly asleep at the wheel on this issue. As is the Opposition, for that matter.

We have heard one positive announcement coming out of the National Food Plan: the establishment of a $1.5mn small grants program for Community Food Initiatives. Grants of up to $25,000 will be available for farmers’ markets and food rescue operations; and grants of up to $10,000 for community gardens and city farms. We welcome this, as a small step in the right direction.

But on the whole, the National Food Plan is really a Plan for big business. For supporting and expanding the corporate control of the food system.

This is evident through its warm endorsement of genetically modified crops. The prime beneficiary of the further commercialisation of GM in Australia will be the company that owns an estimated 90% of all GM seed globally: Monsanto.

So perhaps it’s no coincidence that at 9 a.m. on this Saturday, an estimated 250 people will congregate in Bellingen’s Maam Gaduying Park (outside Council chambers) to take their part in a global day of protest against Monsanto. The Bellingen event is one of 10 across Australia, and 470 worldwide in 38 countries.

Whatever view one takes about GM organisms – and there are many legitimate and documented concerns about the impacts on human and environmental health – for me the principal issue is one of the excessive concentration of power and control. It is dangerous to allow one company to have large and growing control over the basis of our very existence.

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Power corrupts, so it is said. Monsanto wields its power with arrogance, pursuing 80-year old farmers to the point of bankruptcy through the US courts in order to enforce its patent rights, and prevent them saving seeds. WA canola farmer Steve Marsh lost his organic certification in 2010 when his neighbour’s GM canola contaminated two-thirds of his 478 ha farm, yet his claim to compensation for his losses through the WA courts is being vigorously contested. While supporting the GM grower, Monsanto has washed its hands of any legal responsibility via a ‘no liability’ clause attached to the sale of the seed.

And earlier this year, Monsanto made the most of its considerable political connections in the US, to secure the passage of what has become known as the ‘Monsanto Protection Act’, a provision anonymously inserted into an appropriations bill which grants biotech firms immunity from successful legal challenges to the safety of their seeds. In other words, it places them above the courts: a dangerous precedent indeed.

Anyone wanting to know more should make their way to Bellingen on Saturday morning.

advocate, Food policy, Food sovereignty, National Sustainable Food Summit

The 3rd National Sustainable Food Summit

An agenda for transformation – or business as usual?

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday 23rd March, 2013.

Transformation was the goal, of the organisers at least, of the 3rd National Sustainable Food Summit, just concluded in Melbourne. The summit organisers and promoters describe it as a ‘seminal event’ that ‘attracts delegates [from across] the food supply chain…It is the largest and most diverse gathering of practitioners interested in the sustainability of our food system.’

I attended because I had been invited to present on the work I’ve been involved in around the People’s Food Plan over the last 12 months, with the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance. I also spoke briefly on the second day of the conference about the need to take urgent action to protect and preserve Australia’s dwindling supply of prime agricultural land – a report last year found that we have lost 89 million hectares over the past 26 years to four main drivers: mining, suburban sprawl, forestry and national parks.

Homage to the Seed, Artist Sophie Munns, from the Cover of the People's Food Plan Working Paper, February 2013
Homage to the Seed, Artist Sophie Munns, from the Cover of the People’s Food Plan Working Paper, February 2013

 

There is little doubting the need for major changes in Australia’s food system – and indeed the global food system. What I challenged participants to think about was what sort of transformation they wanted, because the word actually has two meanings. The first is a ‘dramatic change in form or appearance’, which would indicate cosmetic changes – ‘window dressing’, or ‘greenwashing’, rather than substantive changes.

The second meaning of transformation is metamorphosis, an altogether different process. Think of the utterly profound process of change that a caterpillar undergoes in order to become the butterfly, and you’ll have an idea of what’s involved.

What immediately struck me about the Summit was the sheer lack of people actually attending. I went to the inaugural Summit in Melbourne in 2011, at which well over 200 people attended. Two years later, the numbers were down to 120, and by the last session or two they had dwindled down to less than 50.

There was certainly a diversity of speakers and a breadth of topics covered. We heard from organic and sustainable farmers such as Liz Clay of the Gippsland Climate Change Network, Jenny O’Sullivan of ‘Linking Environment, Agriculture and People’, and Ian Perkins, organic cattle farmer from Toowomba. These farmers spoke with passion and vision about the need to regenerate the soil, to care for their land and to understand and value the connectivities between land, farmers, animals and local communities.

They and several other speakers identified farmer viability and profitability as one of the most critical issues this country is facing.

Then we heard from Professor Andrew Campbell, Director of the Research School for the Environment and Livelihoods at the Charles Darwin University in Darwin. He exploded the myth that Australia can ever make a really big contribution to ‘feeding the world’ or being ‘the food bowl of Asia’.

Mixed in amongst these voices who were pointing to the need for truly transformative thinking, we had a couple of ‘info-mercials’ from the corporate social responsibility officers ot the major supermarkets, endorsed by a representative from the World Wildlife Fund.

For a number of people I know, this Summit’s credibility as a potential force for visionary leadership on the path to genuine sustainability was deeply undermined last year in Sydney, when WWF explained its partnership with Coca Cola. This company has recently provoked outrage across Australia after suing the Northern Territory government to force it to abandon its highly successful and popular container recycling scheme, on the grounds that it would reduce sales. An environmental organisation is lending its credibility to – and receiving millions of dollars from – a multinational corporation that many believe puts its profit interests ahead of ecosystem integrity.

And therein lies the disconnect evident at the Summit and indeed in discussions about ‘sustainability’ in general. I can perhaps best illustrate this with a metaphor I shared with conference delegates on the second day, courtesy of cell biologist Dr Bruce Lipton, author of a wonderful book, Spontaneous Evolution.

He says that humanity has reached maximal growth in our caterpillar stage of evolution. We can’t physically grow any further. Rather, our choice now is to make a qualitative leap to a new and much more co-operative level of personal and societal development. We can either dedicate ourselves to making that leap, or we can put our energies into a self-destructive and self-defeating exercise of maintaining business as usual.

It’s up to us.

advocate, Collaborative cultures and networks, Corporate control of food, Democratic food systems, Fair Food systems, Food policy, Food sovereignty, Local and regional food economies, National Food Plan, Resilience, Self-sufficiency, Small-scale farming, Supermarket Duopoly, Urban agriculture

An Australia Day resolution

An Australia Day resolution

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday, 24th January, 2013

The traditional and conventional thing is to make resolutions on New Year’s Day, or shortly thereafter.

That makes perfect sense. Start the year off on a positive note, turn over a new leaf, and all that.

But resolutions can be made at any time. So why not make an Australia Day resolution? Something that each of us decides that we can do to help make this country a better place to live in, and leave it a better place for our kids.

My resolution is to keep working, in the ways that I can, for a fairer and more sustainable food and farming system for our region, and our country. So that our soils are regenerated, rather than degraded. So that our water tables are replenished, rather than depleted and polluted. So that our cities are full of food growing and producing areas, in schools, in childcare and aged care centres, in streets, parks, vacant lots and rooftops. In backyards, frontyards, and community gardens. So that everyone, no matter who they are or how much money they have in their pocket or bank account, can enjoy healthy, nourishing food, every day.

So that our farmers get a fairer deal, and are not up to their necks in debt. So that five Australian farmers don’t continue to leave the land every day. And so that our children will want to embrace farming and food production, and caring for the land, as a fufilling and dignified life choice.

Because what we have forgotten, in our modern, information age and consumer economy, is that any civilization, anywhere, is ultimately founded on agriculture. If we don’t get the food production right, if we don’t look after the land, the water and the men and women who do the work of producing the food, then we may as well forget about all the rest.

I think these resolutions chime with the sentiments of a great many Australians. In fact, I know they do, because last September, in my role as national co-ordinator of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance, I was approached by the Australia Institute to include some questions in their regular national attitudes and behaviours survey.

These surveys go out to around 1,400 Australians, being a representative cross-section of men and women, city and country dwellers, different political affiliations, age groupings and so on.

We asked three questions in the October 2012 survey. The first was, ‘What top two measures should Australia adopt to ensure that sufficient quantitites of fresh, healthy and affordable foods are available to all?’, 86% nominated ‘Support local farmers to produce more’, and 63% nominated ‘Protect our best farmland from different uses, e.g. mining / housing’. 25% said ‘support people to grow more of their own food’, and a mere 5% nominated ‘import more of our basic food requirements’ as one of their top two choices.

The second question was, ‘How important is it to you that Australian family farmers and small-to-medium sized food businesses are economically viable?’. 62% said ‘very important’, and 30% said ‘quite important’. 2.3% said ‘not very important’ and a tiny 0.4% said ‘not important at all.’

Finally, when asked ‘What do you think should be the main two goals of Australia’s food system?’, a whopping 85% nominated ‘Promote and support regional / local food production and access to locally produced food’. 43.5% nominated ‘Achieve a globally competitive food industry and new export markets’, and 35.6% said ‘Ensure ecosystem integrity’.

Should any government or political party choose to take notice, these figures speak to a massive national consensus in favour of policies and public investment in regional and local food economies, and for support for our local farmers and food producers. Such policies enjoy twice the level of support of the goal of building ‘a globally competitive food industry and new export markets’.

Can you guess which is the primary objective of the Federal Government’s National Food Plan, due out shortly?