Tag Archives: capitalism

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, Corporate control of food, Supermarket Duopoly

Two supermarkets, no farmers

A country with two supermarkets, but no farmers

A version of this article was first published in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday, 9th March 2013.

In my last column I quoted ‘Farmer Bluey’, who runs a mixed farm producing not insignificant quantities of wool, wheat, oats and lamb. He is joining ‘all his friends’ and abandonding farming this year.

This week I’m going to introduce you to Oxley Island dairy farmer Jane Burney (now Jane Polson), who has a herd of 300 Stud Holsteins. Last July Jane became so outraged at the consequences to her industry of the $1 a litre milk price war between the supermarkets, that she fired off an angry post to the Facebook page of Coles. Here’s part of what it says:

The consumer is paying $1 a litre and the only winner here is the supermarket…Obviously it is cheaper to buy [produce] from overseas than from our country, grown in God knows what…Your latest ad campaign sprouting that you support Aussie growers is insulting…Eventually all the growers you so-called support will be out of business…The consumer will be stuck buying expensive, overseas produce…I am ashamed to watch your ads and us farmers burn in resentment when we do.

Now if you’re not a farmer, you may think Jane is exaggerating. But a couple of months ago the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released a Social Trends report on ‘Australian farming and farmers.’ Part of what it discusses are the changing demographics of farmers, as seen in this chart:

While the average age of the Australian farmer is now 53 (or 56, depending on which report you read), nearly a quarter of all farmers are over 65, compared to only 3% of the total workforce. We have thousands of farmers who are working past 75, and even past 85. Whatever happened to the principle of a dignified retirement and enjoyment of leisure at the end of a long working life?

The percentage of working farmers over 55 has risen from 26% of the total in 1981, to 47% in 2011. Just as worrying, the proportion of farmers under 35 has more than halved, from 28% of the total in 1981 to just 13% today.

My brother, a Federal public servant, retired  a couple of years ago at 55, and is now a man of nearly total leisure. I know he worked hard (though he wasn’t averse to the odd long Friday lunch!) – but was his work so much more valuable and important that he’s entitled to a relaxed and secure middle and old age, while such a prospect for many of our farmers, if it comes at all, will only be through a payout from a developer or mining company? Which of course raises a whole host of other questions about long term food security.

Farming generally has become so devalued that rates of suicide amongst farmers are nearly two and a half times the average for the workforce as a whole. Is it any wonder, then, that large numbers are joining Farmer Bluey and voting with their feet? In fact, according to a 2012 study carried out by accountants KPMG, no fewer than half of Australia’s farmers expect to leave farming in the next decade.

Meanwhile, delegates at this week’s ABARES ‘Future of Food and Farming’ conference were saying things like, ‘Australian agriculture has to become more globally competitive – we can’t afford a $7 minimum wage.’ So it’s not enough that we treat our farmers like dirt, we must create near slave-like conditions for agricultural workers in order to reach those holy grails of ‘increased productivity’ and ‘greater global competitiveness’.

Oxley Island Dairy Farmer Jane Burney (from the Australian)

It’s no coincidence that all this is happening as Coles’ and Woolworths’ share of the grocery market has doubled since the mid-1970s. I’ll leave the last words to Jane Burney, who ends with a brilliant piece of modern-day bone-pointing:

 

There is a growing backlash against your behaviour. Your suppliers and the community (your customers) are on to you. This dissatisfaction will grow to the point where the milk supply will be removed from you and placed back in the hands of cooperatives made up of dairy farmers, community reps and government. This is as is should be, as you have shown yourselves to be lacking in the vision, integrity and commercial strategic thinking required to be entrusted with such an important role re: key parts of our food supply and economy. History will look back on your behaviour over the last 10 years and say this was when the major supermarkets over-extended themselves, dodged their community obligations and ultimately destroyed their brands and shareholder value…Down, down? The only thing going down long term will be the Coles brand and its share price.

Jane’s post, by the way, has so far been ‘liked’ close to 77,000 times and generated nearly 5000 comments.

You can read the original post here: https://www.facebook.com/coles/posts/391593540904667

And here is the extended version: http://www.holsteinworld.com/story.php?id=6897

advocate, Corporate control of food, Food policy, Supermarket Duopoly

Cheap food = A country without farmers

Sugar, Rice and supermarket power

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

A big fortnight for food news.

We saw the release of new national dietary guidelines, which basically reaffirmed good, solid, grandma’s advice: eat a variety of healthy foods, above all your five veg and two fruits, go easy on sugary and fatty foods, and keep physically active.

The major change was the official recommendation, for the first time, that Australians ‘limit’ our intake of sugar, especially in soft drinks. Despite the Guidelines Working Committee basing their recommendations on no fewer than 55,000 pieces of peer-reviewed evidence, the Australian Food and Grocery Council (AFGC), which represents the likes of Coca Cola Amatil, weren’t happy at all about the advice to limit sugar intake. ‘The jury is still out’ on whether added sugar is part of a healthy diet, according  to them.

This reminds me of how the tobacco companies used to say ‘the jury was still out’ on whether there was a link between smoking and lung cancer, in order to resist and delay health warnings on cigarette packages.

Meanwhile, the burden of obesity on our public health system is getting ever larger. In the UK, which faces exactly the same issue, the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges has put out a demand for a 20% tax on fizzy drinks, a strict limit on fast food outlets near schools and other places where children and youth gather, the removal of junk food vending machines from hospitals, and a prohibition on junk food ads before 9.00 p.m.

I can just see the AFGC spokesperons going purple in the face if anything similar was ever proposed in Australia. Which it will be, as we get sicker and sicker, and finally realise why.

Then there was exciting news from India’s poorest state, Bihar (pop 100 million, and 50% of families in poverty), where the application of what’s called the System of Rice / Root Intensification (SRI) has ‘dramatically increased yields with wheat, potatoes, sugar cane, yams, tomatoes, garlic, aubergine and many other crops’, according to the Guardian newspaper. World-record rice yields of 22.4 tonnes per hectare have been achieved – with no GMOs, and no herbicides.

A fact sheet from Sunrice boasts that ‘Australian rice yields of 10 tonnes per hectare are the highest I the world’. Not any more they aren’t!

In the case of rice, SRI means planting out fewer, and younger, seedlings, in drier soil, and with regular weeding to aerate the roots. An advocate of SRI, professor Norman Uphoff of Cornell University, says that the agricultural shift of the 21st century has to involve moving away from the obsession with genetics and using chemical fertilisers, to better crop management practices: ‘We have tried to make agriculture an industrial enterprise and have forgotten its biological roots.”

Meanwhile, new reports in the United States showed that two million acres of native grasslands have been converted to corn and soy monocultures in the past five years alone, driven in part by government subsidies and targets for the ethanol industry.

Finally came the news that Australia’s competition watchdog, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), will investigate Coles and Woolworths for alleged ‘unconscionable conduct’ in the form of bullying tactics against food and grocery suppliers over prices and supply contracts.

We’ve been here before, in 2008. Professor Christine Parker, an expert in competition law from Monash University, says that this current investigation ‘only treats the symptoms and diverts attention away from the real cause of the problem: supermarket power’; and that because of the way the legal provisions are worded, it will be very hard for the ACCC to win any case against the supermarkets.

Coles Farmer Pain

In her view, the ‘tragedy of the Coles-Woolworths duopoly is the narrow, greedy, profit-oriented way in which they control and manipulate the relationship between all of us who eat food and those who produce it…Squeezing producers on prices is supposedly part of [the equation of delivering cheap food to consumers.’

In a piece on the ABC Drum site (18 February), farmer Sophie Love urged consumers to send a signal to the supermarkets and push for fair milk prices. She was met with a torrent of anti-farmer sentiment. But then there was farmer ‘Bluey’, who had this to say:

“Let’s look at a mixed farm. Last year I produced 5000kg of fine wool, 600t of good protein wheat, 80t of quality oats and 8000kg of lamb. Income was $183,000. Costs (fuel, fertiliser, freight, rams, shearing, rates, parts, tax, electricity, labour, interest, etc) $175,000.

We’re already broke and it isn’t even the end of February. We’re getting out this year, all our friends have already left. We can’t compete with mining wages, we can’t (and wouldn’t) strike and nobody gives a stuff.”

At the end of the day the real cost of cheap food will be a country without farmers. Is that what we really want?

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

More export markets – but who benefits?

Export! Export!

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday 18th August, 2012.

A fortnight ago the Australian Grains Industry Conference – ‘the premier industry-hosted conference for grain industry market participants and service providers’ – was held in Melbourne.

Described as a ‘high-level market event that brings together the Australian and global grain industry in a premium networking event’, this Conference was truly a gathering of the great and the good in the world of grains.

Which is why, when I heard that my colleague Fran Murrell, co-ordinator of MADGE (Mothers are Demystifying Genetic Engineering), had scored a ticket, I was fascinated to see what her impressions would be.

Grain Industry Report

She wrote to tell me that she had found the event ‘extremely worrying’. It’s not that anything particularly out of the ordinary happened. What’s shocking is simply the very ‘normality’ of how the large corporate players view the food and agricultural system as an arena purely for speculation and profit, regardless of the destructive social and environmental consequences of their actions.

This was made crystal clear when one speaker said that a significant reduction in the outrageously high levels of food waste – 50% or more of all food produced in developed countries is wasted, by some estimates – would represent a ‘threat’ to the burgeoning ‘investment opportunity’ that large-scale land acquisitions and clearances of rural and indigenous people in Africa and South America represents.

Let me illustrate the sheer, chilling insanity of this perspective by reference to a few facts about food waste, via Stuart Tristram’s excellent Waste: Uncovering the global food scandal:

  • ‘the irrigation water used globally to grow food that is wasted would be enough for the domestic needs (at 200 litres per person per day) of 9 billion people’
  • ‘if we planted trees on land currently used to grow unnecesssary surplus and wasted food, this would offset 100% of greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel combustion’
  • ‘all the world’s one billion hungry people could be lifted out of malnourishment on less than a quarter of the food that is wasted in the US, UK and Europe’

Just let those facts – and there are many, many more – sink in for a minute. And then reflect on the claim, endlessly repeated by the government and most media, that the world ‘must double food production’ by 2050 to meet ‘growing global demand’. There’s a very good case to be made, in my view, that the real challenge we face is how to curb wasteful overproduction.

Yet our federal government, in its wisdom, has placed increased production of commodities for export as the centrepiece of its ‘National Food Plan’, out for public consultation until 30 September. The grains industry, naturally, takes its cue from the urging of the Prime Minister, that Australia, in addition to being Asia’s quarry, also become its ‘food bowl’. It’s focused on supplying meat, wheat and dairy commodities to the Asian middle class, also exporting in the process all the diseases associated with diets based largely on these products.

The financial industry was also well-represented at the grains industry conference. Its spokespeople regard agriculture as the ‘shining sector of the economy for the next five years’. In their worldview, it’s assumed that the sale of Australian land and agricultural assets to sovereign wealth funds, global corporations and foreign investors will benefit Australian farmers and consumers.

Meanwhile US multinational Cargill is positioning itself as the farmers’ friend, as it increases its control of the Australian Wheat Board; as well as domestic grain storage, handling and marketing infrastructure. As Fran pointed out to me, while we’re being asked to trust that this type of foreign investment is in all our interests, we shouldn’t forget that Cargill is currently being prosecuted by the Argentinian government for large-scale tax evasion.

The corporatisation of our food system means that there will be a relentless and constant drive for efficiencies, all in the name of ‘global competitiveness’ and ‘productivity’. Amongst other things, that means far fewer farmers. The numbers of Australian grain farmers have fallen from 40,000 to 22,000 over the past thirty years. We can expect that trend to continue, even accelerate.

But don’t worry – it’s all going to be fine, because we’ll have new export markets!

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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, Co-operatives, Corporate control of food, New market mechanisms, Supermarket Duopoly

Heinz Meanz Mean

Co-operation in the Goulburn Valley

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, on 31.3.12.

The spirit of co-operation lives – in the Goulburn Valley town of Girgarre. And just as the original Rochdale ethic of co-operation was born of the necessity of finding reliable sources of non-adulterated food, so the turn to co-operation in Girgarre has also been driven by necessity. Not of finding safe food, but of safeguarding jobs, businesses and livelihoods.

This necessity materialised when the chill winds of ‘globalisation’ swept through Girgarre (pop: 633) and the surrounding district. Those winds took the form of an announcement in May 2011 by the Heinz Corporation that it was closing its tomato processing plant and laying off 146 workers. Estimates suggest another 450 jobs will disappear through the flow-on effects; and the livelihoods of many tomato growers will also be put at risk.

Globalisation dictates that capital must flow to those places where it can be most profitably invested. In this instance, that ‘law’ required the closure of three Heinz factories in Australia and their relocation to lower cost New Zealand. The tomatoes will be sourced from even lower-cost Thailand. In announcing the closure, Heinz took a side swipe at Australia’s highly concentrated supermarket sector as a major reason why it was no longer profitable to maintain their operations here.

Within weeks of the closure being announced, a coalition of growers, workers and others in the local community began exploring what I would term ‘the Argentinian solution’. In late 2001, as the Argentinian economy was imploding under the burden of an unpayable debt, and workers were being laid off in their tens of thousands, a movement known as the fabricas recuperadas – ‘recovered factories’ – began.

What these workers did was not simply ‘occupy’ their workplaces in pursuit of demands for better wages and conditions. They literally took them over and made them productive as going concerns, run as co-operatives, in order to preserve their own jobs and livelihoods. Even as the economy has recovered, many of these worker co-ops have continued to exist, and some have thrived. The movement has been immortalised in The Take, a 2004 documentary made by Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis.

The Take - the story of the 'recovered factories' movement in Argentina
The Take – the story of the ‘recovered factories’ movement in Argentina

What’s distinctive about Girgarre is that it’s not just workers involved in the push for the take-over (via purchase) of the Heinz factory and its rebirth as a co-op. It’s the workers in co-operation with the growers; and both in co-operation with the broader community. Remember that the history of co-operation in Australia has been marred by mutual suspicion between producer and consumer co-operatives, translating into a palpable failure to co-operate. This is a conscious attempt to turn a new page in that history.

One of the leading figures in this effort, Tony Webb of University Technology Sydney, told me that:

“The idea grew from just simply replacing Heinz with its out-dated model of competitive relations with suppliers and customers and production of a limited range of internationally branded products for the retail market.  We want to develop new niche markets in the retail and food service sectors for a wider range of agricultural products. The co-op will integrate local warehousing and distribution logistics and a regional food industry training centre on-site, and incorporate sustainable energy, water and waste practices into the production facilities. In short, it aims to build co-operative links between many of the elements of the paddock-to-plate food chain as part of a sustainable regional food hub.”

The breadth of this ambition, and the spirit of co-operation that the initiative has inspired to date, has also crossed party political lines, with the Goulburn Valley Food Action Committee (find it on Facebook!) attracting significant local, national and international interest. Celebrity Chef, Peter Russell Clarke, is helping out with the marketing campaign. Offers of finance to buy and equip the factory have been made.

Meanwhile, Heinz is refusing to sell the site to the co-operative, rejecting their offer of $750,000, three times what the company paid twenty years earlier. Worse, they have, according to Webb and his colleague Les Cameron of the National Food Institute, engaged in a ‘scorched earth’ policy of ‘industrial vandalism’ by stripping the plant of any and all equipment of value, even down to the rat-proof fencing.

But now momentum has been generated and the co-op members have the bit between their teeth. They are looking for a greenfield site, and are launching a campaign for one million Australians to contribute $50 each to become members of a national venture aimed at inspiring – and financing – similar Food Hub ventures elsewhere.

What’s a Food Hub, I hear you ask? More on that next time.

Update, October 2013 – The GV Food Co-op is now trading and inviting supportive members of the public to join as members. To learn more, visit their website: http://www.gvfoodcoop.com.au/

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advocate, Alternatives, Ecological constraints, Growth paradigm

Nicole Foss and the End of Growth

New ideas about ‘progress’

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on 21st January 2012

 

“I don’t think anything remotely like business-as-usual is going to come back in our lifetimes, or probably ever again, quite frankly.”

These are the words of Stoneleigh, aka Nicole Foss. One of the world’s leading writers and speakers on the global energy and financial crises, the deep connections between them, and the implications for advanced economies such as our own, Nicole is travelling to Australia next month on a speaking tour. She will be visiting Coffs Harbour on Saturday, February 11, and speaking and answering questions for a couple of hours from 12 p.m. at the Cavanbagh Centre. The Advocate is sponsoring her visit, and will be running a series of articles exploring aspects of her thought over the next few weeks.

Nicole Foss, aka Stoneleight
Nicole Foss, aka Stoneleight

“Business-as-usual” means all sorts of things, of course, but here Nicole is talking specifically about economic growth. An expanding economy is the very definition of ‘normal’, which is why deep recessions, and above all depressions, are regarded as so awful. The idea that we are perhaps on the cusp of entering a prolonged – very prolonged – period of deflationary depression is extremely hard to contemplate with equanimity. Yet this is the no-holds-barred perspective that Nicole offers; and she does so on the basis of a sharp and clear analysis, with the sole motivation of helping individuals and communities inform themselves and prepare for the seismic changes she believes are now unfolding.

Buen Vivir

Let’s assume for a moment that Nicole is right. This raises all sorts of questions, but the one I want to look at briefly here is this: can the end of economic growth actually be a good news story? If you ask any politician of any major party in most parts of the world, the answer would be a resounding ‘no’. The terrible experience of the 1930s has been seared into our collective historical memory as something to be avoided at all costs, and with good reason.

And yet…as time has gone on, many are saying that the costs of growth now outweigh the benefits. More growth means more pollution, more waste. Having more ‘stuff’ doesn’t mean that we’re any happier. Bigger doesn’t always mean better – have you watched SuperSize Me? Maybe it’s time to start thinking in terms of quality, rather than quantity.

That’s what been happening on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, in Ecuador and Bolivia. The citizens of both countries recently re-wrote their constitutions, and in them they included some old wisdom from the Quechua and Aymara indigenous peoples of the Andes as the guiding principle for the new development paradigm they wish to follow. Sumak Kawsay is a Quechau phrase that translates as buen vivir in Spanish; which in English we might understand as ‘good life’ or ‘living well’.

In contrast to individualistic ideas of progress based on economic growth, buen vivir seeks balance and harmony, amongst peoples, and between humanity and nature, as its primary goals. In a recent article, Thomas Fatheuer notes that it is ‘sharply distinct from the idea of individual good life’; and is ‘only conceivable in a social context, mediated by the community in which people live’.

Interestingly, buen vivir is being embraced by two of the poorest countries in the world, whose main source of ‘wealth’ has traditionally been based on the extraction of their natural resources, minerals especially. That they are seeking to strike out on a different path at this point in time should give us pause for thought, as we seek to keep riding on the wave of the minerals boom.

Maybe buen vivir is relevant to us; maybe not. But at the very least it offers a positive story for the future.

—-

Nicole Foss and her co-writer Ilargi Mendoz (touring Australia with her) write at The Automatic Earth: http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/

Thomas Fatheur’s discussion of buen vivir can be read here: http://www.boell.de/publications/publications-buen-vivir-12636.html

advocate, Corporate control of food, Cost-price squeeze, Demographic crisis, Ecological constraints, Food sovereignty, Growth paradigm, Local and regional food economies, Small-scale farming, Supermarket Duopoly

The poverty of farming in the Tweed

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The poverty of farming in the Tweed

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.

mangos

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.

Coffs Coast, Community gardening, Corporate control of food, Cost-price squeeze, Fair Food systems, Food policy, Food sovereignty, Global hunger, Growth paradigm, Local and regional food economies, National Food Plan, Self-sufficiency, Small-scale farming, Uncategorized

Interview: Nick Rose

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.

Ecological constraints, Growth paradigm

Roger Baker : Is Capitalism in Deep Trouble?

2 Comments

This well-written post poses a question that in my view will increasingly come to dominate political discourse in the coming years: in the face of growing constraints on cheaply-available energy, is GDP expansion as we have known it effectively over?

Which in turn raises a second, fundamentally important question: If ‘growth’, measured in quantitative terms, is coming to an end, how can we reconfigure our social measures of ‘progress’ in order to ameliorate the suffering that would otherwise come with a more or less permanent ‘depression’?

Roger Baker’s concluding paragraphs point to the urgency of the task ahead. The final paragraph shows why the People’s Food Plan, and the principles of food sovereignty, provide a sensible and prudent foundation for building resilience in highly uncertain times.

Nobody can accurately predict how long the current situation can be maintained but, given the facts of the matter, we can see that there is certainly going to be a global economic crisis. Only the timing, which is based on investor psychology and the Federal Reserve’s ability to keep the game going, is uncertain.

To sum up the situation we face, the scientists are warning us that even at best, a well-managed global economy can only avoid a severe environmental crisis for perhaps three more decades, because of the fundamental limits of nature. However, the chances of our poorly managed system of global capitalism lasting even that long are slight. Given the time typically needed to recover from a severe economic crisis like the Great Depression, this suggests that a severe global economic crisis or collapse must put an end to capitalism as we know it in the not very distant future.

Local economies centered around local agriculture and local production of the goods needed for survival are likely to be an important part of our future. We cannot start planning soon enough.

Roger Baker : Is Capitalism in Deep Trouble?.