A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday, 22nd December 2012
Last month, Steve McGrane, President of the Coffs Harbour Regional Community Gardens Association, and a team of fellow gardeners headed north for a few days’ exploration.
They were on a mission, to visit half a dozen community gardens between here and Brisbane, in order to see what others were doing, learn from their experiences, and lay down a vision and goals for the Coffs garden at Combine St over the next few years.
The trip exceeded all expectations. “It was amazing to visit so many community gardens in such a short space of time. There were such big contrasts”, said Matt Downie, co-cordinator of the Combine St garden.
Among the lasting impressions the team took home, the presence of garden art, such as murals, sculptures, ceramic displays and decorative signage, was especially striking. Clear notice boards introducing the garden and its key people, as well as tasks, projects and how to get involved, are also now on the Coffs ‘to-do’ list.
Ceramic artwork Northey St
Even though most of the gardens were thriving sites of diverse food production, the team felt that it was the social aspects that were most important. Community gardens are all about building community, and activities like ‘swap meets’, where gardeners exchange surplus produce, is just one way in which this happens. They are also multi-functional sites with a strong educational focus, places where gardeners and visitors alike can get to know where their food comes from, and rediscover their connection to it.
The team visited gardens in Lismore, Nimbin, Tuntable Falls, Mullumbimby, Northey St City Farm in Brisbane, the Seed Savers’ Network in Byron Bay (run by Michel and Jude Fenton), and Yamba. They also briefly stopped by the combined market and community garden run by Gold Coast Permaculture in Ferry Rd, Southport.
The gardens varied in longevity, with Northey St, now in its 20th year, the oldest. So one of its most attractive features, which makes it a great place to spend time, are the well-established fruit trees, such as large mangoes, that provide excellent shade areas, for meeting and socialising.
Most of the gardens were considerably younger. The garden in Lismore, like Coffs, had been set up in the last couple of years, while Nimbin’s garden, located in a church on the main street, had been going for about 10 years.
But, according to the team, Nimbin’s garden appeared to be on its last legs. The garden looked dilapidated and un-cared for. Through talking to some locals, the team discovered the reason for the decline: political in-fighting. Things had gotten so bad that a virtual state of civil war had broken out, with one group actively sabotaging the garden projects and efforts of the other.
There was a very clear lesson here for the Coffs garden – and any community garden, for that matter: the need to maintain open channels of communication at all times, allow complaints to be aired and dealt with, and have good procedures for mediating conflict.
While in Nimbin, the team learnt of the community garden in the nearby intentional community of Tuntable Falls, which was not on their original itinerary. But it was a moment of serendipity. Not only was the Tuntable Falls garden a beautiful contrast to Nimbin, with abundant art and creative design; it was the passionate and strong community that had built it, as well as a food co-op and a huge common hall, that most impressed the team.
The Mullumbimby garden also stood out, for its wonderful art, excellent signage and paths, and strong volunteer core, self-organised in 20 different ‘pods’. As well as smaller plots, the Mullum garden had larger spaces, up to 400m2, which were being leased on a semi-commercial basis, as a market garden.
Mullumbimby Community Garden Mural
All the gardens, the team noted, had started with some form of public grants. The most successful ones had built a strong and collaborative relationship with their local councils, and had also developed ways of becoming more self-sustaining financially. Northey St, for example, had a consultancy and design service, available to local schools and private householders; and they also ran permaculture design certificate courses several times a year. It also had a large and successful nursery.
Northey St signage
As the Coffs team plan their priorities for 2013 and beyond, this trip has provided fertile material for inspiration.
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.
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.
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.
A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, on 10th December 2011
Last time I introduced Tweed mango grower Mike Yarrow, whom I met recently while in Murwillumbah as part of a team working with the Tweed Council to prepare a strategy for sustainable agriculture.
Mike would like this process to be a success, but he believes that it’s ’30 or 40 years too late’, at least in the case of him and his wife; and other farmers of their vintage (Mike is 67), which is the vast majority of farmers in the region.
Your problem as I see it”, he told us, “is that we, the farmers, have reached the end of our working lives. There are no new young farmers.
The aging of the farming population is an issue that affects the country as a whole. By far the largest category of farmers in Australia is in the 65+ age bracket. In this as in other aspects of food policy, the Federal Government has made the complacent assumption that there is really nothing to worry about, and that what objectively appears to be a demographic crisis will simply correct itself over time. Projections issued after the Australia 2020 Summit in 2008 saw the age of the average Australian farmer peaking in 2011 at just under 55 years, and then gradually declining past 2030.
Yet no convincing explanation was given as to where the next generation of Australian farmers would come from. On the contrary, all the indications are that the decades-long trend of an aging rural workforce is likely to continue. According to Mike Yarrow, the heart of the issue lies in what he calls ‘the deliberately destroyed profitability’ of farmers.
In Mike’s view, successive Federal Governments wanted ‘to keep the lid on industrial unrest by keeping the gap between a worker’s income and the cost of living apart’. He recalls that when he and his wife arrived in Australia in 1974, petrol was 7 cents a litre, and the minimum wage was $1 an hour. Both have since risen about 20-fold, in line with general cost of living increases. A box of fruit, on the other hand, was $10 in 1974 – and hasn’t gone up much.
You could take issue with Mike; dismiss him as a conspiracy theorist; say that the Government has never intended to screw farmers; that it’s simply a case of the way the markets (and supermarkets) operate. But that’s exactly his point.
By de-regulating rural industries, opening Australia to cheaper imported produce, and generally ‘letting market forces rip’, the market has done what it always does. It’s a competitive system, and it produces winners and losers. In this case, the losers happen to be the majority of Australia’s farmers, and the big winners have been Australia’s two major supermarkets, whose market share has more than doubled since the mid-1970s.
You could argue that in delivering ‘cheap food’ for shoppers, the Australian public as a whole have also ‘won’ in this process. Yet as five farmers continue to leave the land every day, and very few are stepping into their shoes, the question remains: who is going to produce our food for the rest of this century, and beyond? Agriculture may be less than 3% of Australia’s GDP, but to understand its significance only through an economist’s eyes is unbelievably naïve and short-sighted.
At a deeper level, Mike is quite right. The market system – capitalism – has always depended on ‘cheap food’, in one form or another, to drive its major cycles of expansion. In the Industrial Revolution, it was sugar from the slave plantations of the Caribbean. Last century, it was the mountains of corn made possible by hybrid seeds, agro-chemicals and cheap oil. This century they tell us agricultural productivity will be driven by ‘environmentally-benign’ GM technologies. Meanwhile, food prices are starting to rise, and food riots are becoming more common. Food is too important to take for granted, and so are farmers. We need to be asking some hard questions.
Thanks to Juliette Anich for the opportunity to create this portrait. Being able to explain at length my motivations is a rare opportunity and much appreciated.
The National Food Plan – What prospects for change?
Nick Rose
This article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 3.9.11
Yesterday (2nd September, 2011) the deadline passed for submissions to the Federal Government’s Issues Paper on its proposed National Food Plan. In recent days, the Government has also been holding a series of ‘invitation-only’ Roundtables during which stakeholders in our country’s food and farming systems can directly present their views on the purpose and content of the Plan.
Federal Minister for Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, the Hon Senator Joe Ludwig
Colleagues of mine, affiliated with the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance, have attended some of these Roundtables. What’s emerging so far is that the Government will have its hands full in meeting the expectations that the idea of a National Food Plan has generated.
The general consensus is that Australian farmers are not being paid enough for their produce. This means, going forward, that we as a country won’t have the necessary skills, nor the strategies in place for skills retention, in order to grow the food we need to feed Australia in an increasingly uncertain future.
Representatives of peak producer bodies are looking for substantive change in this Plan. They support boosting production for domestic consumption, as well as measures to address the inequities Australian producers face vis-à-vis cheaper and lower quality imports.
The Government’s answer, however, is in essence to insist that farmers must ‘increase their productivity’, be fully exposed to the rigours of ‘free trade’, and ‘become more competitive’. As if they haven’t been doing this for decades! Volumes and yields have risen four-fold since 1950, but ‘normal’ market operations means that most Australian farms are not financially viable in their own right, and are dependent on off-farm income.
60% of all Australian farmers are expected to retire in the next decade. Who will replace them, and just as importantly, what will become of their farms? How many will be subdivided for development, or handed over for minerals extraction?
Health and nutrition analyses reveal that most Australians are not eating enough fruit and veg, and the country is facing a full-blown obesity epidemic that is collectively costing us $56 billion a year and leaving our children with a reduced quality of life and life expectancy. As many as 2 million Australians can’t regularly afford to eat healthily, and at the same time up to 40-50% of all our food ends up in landfill.
The current food system, in summary, is producing a multitude of perverse outcomes, and I haven’t yet mentioned soil degradation, groundwater depletion, fossil fuel dependency and climate change. Some would even say that It’s broken. The case for fairly profound change is overwhelming.
Yet Minister Ludwig and his department insist that ‘our nation’s food supply is secure’. The Issues Paper is very much a product of ‘business as usual’ thinking. Which is why many of those attending the Roundtables are sceptical as to what, if anything, the National Food Plan will achieve.
There are of course different approaches. One example is the Canadian People’s Food Policy, which was produced after a two-year process with the participation of 3500 Canadians in 350 kitchen table talks, as well as ‘dozens of tele-conferences, ongoing online discussions, and three cross-Canada conferences’. The outcome was a series of ten policy discussion papers, covering topics such as Indigenous Food Sovereignty, Environment and Agriculture, Access to Food in Urban Communities, Healthy and Safe Food for All, and Food Democracy and Governance.
Contrast this with the Australian Government’s Issues Paper, the bulk of which was devoted to steps to ensure a ‘Competitive, productive and efficient food industry’. 23 of the Issue Paper’s 35 specific questions were directed to this theme, compared with just 4 diet and health, and not on environmental issues.
The Canadian document contains important lessons for Australia, and next time I will look at some of its key recommendations.
This article was first published in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 20.8.11
On Thursday, the Federal Government made the historic announcement that henceforth New Zealand apples will be imported into this country.
This decision had been resisted by Australian apple and pear growers since 1919, both for biosecurity reasons, i.e. the risk of diseases such as fire-blight and European canker devastating apple and pear orchards in this country, and for economic reasons. The Australian Apple and Pear Growers’ Association estimates that on average its members will see a 30% drop in their incomes as a result of being exposed to large volumes entering the country from New Zealand and, subsequently, from China.
The decision to end the import ban was made at the behest of the World Trade Organisation, which ruled that it could no longer be justified for scientific reasons, and was therefore contrary to Australia’s trade liberalisation obligations.
Apple tree with fire blight
In theory, free trade sounds wonderful, an idea that no-one in their right minds would disagree with. Each country specialises in doing what it does best; domestic producers are exposed to international competition, and so must innovate to stay competitive; new businesses, jobs and products are created as a result; and consumers get progressively better prices. In turn, new markets overseas become available for Australian products, and so a virtuous cycle of wealth creation comes into being.
The trouble with theory is that all too often it fails to take into account the messy complexities of real world practice. Speaking about this issue a few weeks ago, independent Senator Nick Xenophon recalled how he had been told earlier this year by a union official that Australian trade negotiators are commonly referred to in international trade talks as ‘the free trade Taliban’. Trade liberalisation, in all sectors and all circumstances, has virtually become a religious catechism for them.
Leaving aside its merits or otherwise in sectors such as manufacturing, the question here is whether untrammelled free trade is an axiomatic good in the case of agriculture. The evidence to date, frankly, is not persuasive. Some farmers and growers have undoubtedly benefited from lucrative and growing niche markets: blueberries and pecans are two that come to mind. Whether WTO rules and free trade dogma were required for such markets to become available is debatable.
By far the biggest beneficiaries of greater trade liberalisation of agricultural commodities have however been the handful of multinational corporations that dominate grain trading, meat packing, proprietary seeds and agro-chemicals. Farmers in general have been the biggest losers. Their terms of trade, their standard of living and their numbers have declined worldwide. It’s been estimated that over the past 40 years, Australia has lost an average of five farmers every single day.
As the spectre and reality of famine returns in an increasingly uncertain world, more and more people are waking up to the reality that, at the end of the day, none of us can eat, drink or breathe money. The food system in all its aspects isn’t just a sector of the economy like any other: it’s the very stuff of life. It deserves special consideration and, yes, protection. Using that word as a term of abuse, as the free trade Taliban are wont to do, simply reveals the shallowness, not the sophistication, of their thinking; and the depth of their adherence to dogma.
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The Federal Department of Agriculture recently announced that, following requests from many groups and individuals, it has extended the deadline for submissions on its Issues Paper for a National Food Plan to COB Friday, 2nd September. If you feel strongly about the future of food and farming in this country, and what role government has in supporting it, then make your views known by visiting the DAFF website: http://www.daff.gov.au/agriculture-food/food/national-food-plan.
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Update – 6th June 2013
The Federal Government has now published the final version of the National Food Plan – you can download it in all its glory at the DAFF website. Over the two years of ‘consultation’, the writers of the NFP were little moved to make concessions in the direction of a more fair and sustainable food system. Their mantra of export more commodities, increase agricultural productivity, sign more free trade agreements and force open new markets, remains unshakeable. Personally I foresee their neoliberal dogma crashing hard against the shores of biophysical reality; indeed it already is. In the meantime, Australia continues to lose farmers and farmland at an alarming pace; and the obesity pandemic continues to gather momentum. Why is why I and my colleagues at the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance will continue to campaign for the People’s Food Plan for Australia.
This article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 16.4.11
On 5th and 6th April, I joined 320 others at the Etihad Stadium in Melbourne’s Docklands for the very first National Sustainable Food Summit. The Summit, presented by event organisers 3 Pillars, and sponsored by the likes of the Meat & Livestock Association, the Australian Food and Grocery Council, and the National Farmers Federation, was remarkable in several respects.
First, it managed to bring together, in the same room and quite often around the same discussion table, representatives of the biggest corporations in food and agribusiness (e.g. Coles and Woolworths); state, federal and local government officers; individual farmers; scientists and academics; and members of the growing community food sector. Every state and territory was represented. This was in itself a major achievement, which would have been inconceivable only a few years ago.
Secondly, the messages delivered by all keynote speakers were uncompromising in their honest presentation of the reality that if Australia wants to have a secure food supply – and above all one based on a healthy diet, produced in ways that restore rather than further degrade soil, water tables and ecosystems – then business as usual is simply not an option. More than that, it is quite simply not going to be possible to continue to produce current volumes of major agricultural commodities.
This seems counter-intuitive, given that Australia exports 60% of our agricultural produce. Yet, as speaker after speaker reiterated, there are several key limiting factors which will constrain the viability of large-scale monocultures in particular. They include: high levels of degraded soils; reductions in irrigation quotas to restore the health of the Murray-Darling system; the re-forestation of some agricultural land to meet emissions reductions targets; the impacts of peak oil, such as the diversion of food crops into feed-stock for biofuels; and the price and crop yield implications of peak phosphorous, given Australia’s dependence on imported fertilisers.
Add to this the pressures of the cost-price squeeze to which Australian farmers have been subjected for decades, and it’s not hard to picture the doom and gloom message promoted by science writer Julian Cribb, who was talking to his latest book, The Coming Famine: The Global Food Crisis and What We Can Do to Avoid It.
Thirdly, the solutions presented were also far-reaching and quite radical in their implications. A number of speakers questioned the knee-jerk response which always looks to greater volumes of production as the answer to any food-related issue.
Rather, as Professor Richard Hames said, we should be looking to produce more of the right foods, in the right places, by the right people. In other words, less subsidised over-production of corn in the US, and more food crops grown by small farmers in the developing world. This applies also to Australia, where most of us consume an inadequate amount of fruit and vegetables for a healthy diet, and where we import a growing percentage of these fresh foods.
The need to progressively eliminate the tremendous waste in the food system, to invest much more heavily in agricultural R & D, and to move away from a pervasive culture of cheap food that devalues farmers and the work they do, also featured prominently in the ‘to do’ list. Myself and many others were pleased to see that food localisation was widely seen as an obvious and necessary pathway forward, with strategic land use planning – urban and peri-urban agriculture, community gardens, edible streetscapes and so on – identified as an urgent priority for all local and state governments in the coming years.
Yet in spite of so many positives, there was a noticeable lack of political realism that pervaded the Summit. Yes, the challenges are immense; yes, change is unavoidable. But nobody wanted to ask the hard questions: how do we confront the entrenched economic interests that profit so handsomely from the status quo? How do we regulate food and farming markets so that they deliver the outcomes of human well-being, ecosystem health and farmer viability as first priorities, rather than shareholder value?
Maybe it’s enough for now that the conversation has started. But if history teaches anything, it’s this: necessary change doesn’t happen just because a group of well-intentioned people say that it should.
Farmers’ markets – ubiquitous before the age of supermarkets, then almost disappearing – have enjoyed a renaissance during the past decade. Ten years ago they were virtually unheard of in Australia; today there are more than 120, including of course the popular growers’ markets in Coffs Harbour and Bellingen.
Their growth in the United States has been equally dramatic, rising from 1,755 in 1994 to 6,132 in 2010. And in the UK there are now 550 farmers markets, from a base of zero in 1997.
This is a phenomenon in search of an explanation. There is the quality, seasonal, produce these markets offer. There is the convivial atmosphere, often enriched with arts, crafts and live music. There is the knowledge that each dollar spent goes directly to the farmer. And there is the direct connection with the person who produces the food, which contrasts so sharply with the antiseptic anonymity of the modern supermarket.
Farmers’ markets create ‘community through food’, as Shana Henry, one of the founders of the Nambucca Valley Local Food Network (NVLFN), puts it. It’s this capacity to bring people together which is perhaps the key to understanding their popularity, in an age when there has been such a widespread loss of any sense of ‘community’.
The NVLFN, launched last September, placed farmers’ markets at the core of its mission to create greater access to local produce for local residents. Inspired by the various sustainability initiatives launched in Bellingen over recent years, Shana and her co-founders felt frustrated by the low availability of locally-grown produce in such a fertile valley. “We just can’t get much local produce [where I live] in Macksville, unless it’s from a face-to-face exchange, and that’s what we want, those face-face connections.”
They soon found however that supporting a farmers’ market is not as easy as it sounds. Their first efforts were directed at the Valla Beach market, in existence for less than two years, but they feel disappointed by what they see as a drift in the market’s initial focus on local produce, and a lack of support from local residents. Jocelyn Edge sees the problem in the market’s lack of frequency: “It’s a bi-monthly market, and people don’t use it to buy their food.”
Last October, other members of the NVLFN in Taylor’s Arms successfully launched a farmers’ market supported by the local Primary School. Shana believes that this market may be more successful, because “they’re a small community, more easily mobilised”. She adds, “We [also] want to establish a [farmers’] market in Macksville, but we need to see how things play out with the recent opening of Woolworths.”
And what has been the impact of Woolworths on local businesses in Macksville? Not as bad as some expected, according to Shana. “Food Works [the local co-op] have survived, people have tried out Woolworths and came back. They [the co-op] were pleasantly surprised.”
“In some ways Woolworths have been their own worst enemy”, adds Gary Pankhurst. “They’ve cannabilised their own market, because now the Woolworths in Nambucca Heads is suffering.”
Apart from farmers’ markets, NVLFN members support each other through the sharing of skills, knowledge and information. “We’ve done breadmaking, and soap-making and candle-making, and we would like to involve the older generation in teaching us how to bottle”, says Shana. Recently the group organised a cheesemaking day, producing 8 kilos of feta from local cow’s milk. They’ve organised local food picnics, and have plans for a bush dance later in the year.
Though they may be relative newcomers to the Valley, Shana and her colleagues are attracting support from long-time residents. Recently Shana was contacted by a 79-year old lady in response to a NVLFN notice about sourcing goats’ milk locally. “She rang to tell me how she needed it years ago for her children, and she was just so happy to see that people were taking things into their own hands [again]”, said Shana.
