Tag Archives: Sustainability

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

In the era of Trump

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

Cardinia Food Circles, courtesy of Kirsty Moegerlein

Professional milestones

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

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

Global politics

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

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

MOAB Bomb dropped on Afghanistan, 14 April 2017

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Uncategorized, Urban agriculture

Urban agriculture is key to a sustainable future for our cities

 

‘We are today part of a new revolution, The Urban Revolution. Cities that housed 200 million people, or ten percent of the world’s population in 1900 now accommodate 3.5 billion people, or fifty percent of the world’s population, and will, by 2050, accommodate 64 billion people or seventy percent of the world’s population… More than 80% of Australians already live in cities that are projected to double their size in the next 40 years.’

These are the opening words of the City of Melbourne’s, Transforming Australian Cities For a More Financially Viable and Sustainable Future, first published in May 2009 and updated in March 2010. For anyone who has spent time in Sydney or Melbourne recently, the prospect of these megalopolises doubling their size by 2050 is rather alarming, to put it mildly. Which no doubt explains the steady flow of urban refugees, the tree changers and sea changers, only too happy to exchange peak hour on Hogbin Drive for the daily grind of the M4 or the South-eastern freeway.

From my perspective, it was doubly surprising that the word ‘food’ did not appear once in the Transforming Australian Cities strategic document. At the heart of the strategy for ‘sustainable growth’ (an oxymoron, arguably) of our big cities was the concept of ‘productive suburbs’, with the iconic ¼ acre blocks forming corridors to become the new ‘green wedge’ zones of Sydney and Melbourne. There was discussion of ‘making backyards productive’ through installation of rainwater tanks and greywater recycling systems. This, combined with the rollout of solar PV panels and other forms of domestic-scale renewable energy generation would, it was claimed, help Australian households move closer to ‘self-sufficiency’ and therefore ‘sustainability’.

But what about food? Given that some of the projections of climate change anticipate a reduction in productivity of our major foodbowl regions – the Murray-Darling in particular – of as much as 60% by 2050 – surely any strategy for the sustainability of our cities must integrate as a matter of highest priority how the residents are going to be fed?

Or perhaps, more to the point, how they are going to start feeding themselves, if we are serious in talking about ‘self-sufficiency’.

This conundrum of feeding growing cities is not of course a uniquely Australian issue. Indeed it is driving the burgeoning urban agriculture movement in North America. New York City now has an estimated 700 urban farms. Some of these are familiar community gardens, where groups of residents work small plots to produce food for themselves and their families.

Increasingly, many others are commercial-scale operations that have negotiated supply contracts with restaurants, grocery stores and supermarkets. And one of the recent trends is for commercial-scale farming to take place on the flat roofs of high-rise office and apartment blocks.

rooftop farms

One of these is the 555 m2 Eagle Street Rooftop Farm, based on a warehouse on the East River in Brooklyn. Eagle Street is an open-air intensive market garden which supplies organic vegetables to nearby restaurants by bicycle, and operates a farmers’ market onsite during the growing season.

Other rooftop farms operate year-round, by erecting greenhouses and using aquaponic and hydroponic growing techniques.

Office and apartment blocks in a city like New York are inherently more suited for this type of production than similar buildings in Australia, because their roofs are already built to a higher load-bearing capacity because of snowfall. But that’s not to say that this type of ‘farming’ can’t happen in Australia. In fact recently I was lucky enough to visit what is one of the very first attempts to do it, at the Mesa Verde rooftop bar and cinema at 252 Swanston St, Melbourne. It’s the brainchild of Mr ‘WormLover’, Richard Thomas, and I’ll tell that story next time.

 

 

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, 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?

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

Food for Thought – Growing, Sharing + Eating Local Food

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

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

advocate, Coffs Coast, Collaborative cultures and networks, Fair Food systems, Food sovereignty, Local and regional food economies, Retailers

The Happy Frog

Nick Rose

This article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 14.5.11

This is the second of a two-part interview with Kim Towner, owner and manager of Tangellos and Happy Frog, and Coordinator of the Sunday Harbourside Markets.

Happy Frog was born two years ago, because Kim felt that Coffs Harbour was lacking a place ‘where you can go and buy the local fruit and veg all the time’, and help build a culture of sustainability – both social and environmental.

Kim chose the Frog because ‘it’s a measure of environmental health. I wanted to get everybody here, not just the vegetarians. I thought, let’s replace two meals a week with vego stuff, and let’s not have bottled water, let’s just look at those two things. And see what we can do differently.’

Happy Frog, Coffs Harbour
Happy Frog, Coffs Harbour

She gets as much local produce as she can, but not as much as she would like. At first, she bought largely direct from growers, but eventually logistical difficulties meant she had to rely on the services of a local wholesaler: Phil at A & D down at the Jetty. She speaks very highly of him – ‘he’s honest and fair and passionate’ – as do other businesses that preference good quality, fresh and reliable local produce.

The business has been very successful since opening – ‘people latched on to it really quickly, [they] heard about it through word of mouth’ – but Kim feels it’s still ‘really difficult to get people to buy here, and not buy in the supermarket’, even though the produce compares well on price.

‘I remember when we’d opened a few months’, she says, ‘and Woolies were offering a huge discount – 30 cents a litre on petrol – if you spent $300. I went and looked at their tomatoes and cucumbers, and worked out that if you bought tomatoes and cucumbers here, which were both local and beautiful – you would have saved $8, just on that one purchase of a kilo each of those two items. That [just] blew me away.’

The most profitable part of Happy Frog is the café. Thursday is always a busy day, because of the city centre growers’ market; Kim says other local businesses should ‘stop whingeing’ about it and look at their turnover on a Thursday.

One recent popular option has been a take-away dinner offer of $25 for four people, which is excellent value if you have tasted the many salads, lasagnes, lentil patties and kofta balls the café offers. The menu for the week is sent out each Monday to her growing email list of 150 people.

Kim and her team are now looking to expand on this by moving into catering: ‘We do party salads in bulk, and also funerals, and from that we do lots of meetings. This is a growing part of our business. It introduces a lot of people to the taste, and to the vegetarian thing.’

Kim is full of ideas for the future, both for Happy Frog and the region. There’s local value-adding: ‘We’ve just started our own dukkhas, semi-dried tomatoes, and I want to do jams, and relishes, and salad dressings.’ She also wants to ‘get in to school canteens…at Toormina High School – I’d love to do a Jamie Oliver-type thing, we could do some really good stuff, with the crew we’ve got.’

Her ‘favourite vision’ is to create a ‘shopping centre with a difference – a blend of shopping centre and markets. So that you had everything there – great big kitchens that made pasta, and bread, and jams, and you had a nursery, and a healing section where you got your hair cut, a massage – and you open the whole front of it up, with glass – and you played live music every day, and you had a kids’ playground there. And you had hand-made shoes, and clothing, and it was all there so people good see it. I reckon that would go so off – it would be like, this is how can you do it, a community shopping centre, but modern, and cool and funky.’

Her other big dream is ‘to see a hemp and bamboo industry [for Coffs Harbour’.

These plants grow abundantly, ‘they make beautiful fabric and great sustainable products. Coffs Harbour for ever has been flogging this tourism thing. I’ve got nothing against tourists – but it goes up and down, and changes. But let’s have something that’s really sustainable, for the long term….We could come up with some great name for hemp clothing that was made here, and exported to the damn world!’

These dreams will probably be for someone else to bring to reality, because there’s only so much one person – even one as energetic and visionary as Kim Towner – can do. But she and her team are living proof that the future here can be very bright indeed.

advocate, Food policy, National Sustainable Food Summit

Conversations for transformation?

4 Comments

The National Sustainable Food Summit

Nick Rose

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.

advocate, Backyard Gardening, Bellinger Valley, Seed saving, Self-sufficiency

Seed saving – the foundation of a democratic food system

1 Comment

Preserving the Genetic Base of Tomorrow’s Food – the Bellingen Seed Savers Network

Nick Rose

First published in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 6.11.10

If a system is going to endure long periods of time, i.e. be sustainable, then it has to be able to withstand external and internal shocks, i.e. it must be resilient.

Dealing with the lack of resilience in a globalised food system structured largely around the processed products of corn and soy is one of the biggest challenges we face.

A resilient system is diverse, and that’s why diversity – and diversification – are central to the transformation of the food and agricultural system that is now underway.

One manifestation of this transformation is the recovery of the traditional farmers’ practice of seed-saving. While an estimated 1.7 billion farmers still save their seed, they’re now supported by local and national seed-saving initiatives, such as the Navdanya project in Uttrakhand, Northern India. Founded in 1984 by Dr Vandana Shiva, Navdanya has conserved over 5000 crop varieties and set up 54 community seed banks in 16 Indian states. It’s also trained over half a million farmers in seed and food sovereignty, and sustainable agriculture.

In Australia, the Byron Bay-based Seed Savers Network was founded by Michel and Jude Fanton in 1986. The SSN website lists 76 local seed saver groups around the country, including in Coffs Harbour (CROPO), and the Bellingen Seed Savers Network (BSSN).

Established in 2008, the BSSN is coordinated by Irene Wallin. Irene, herself a relative late comer to food growing, fell into the role of coordinator almost by default, when the first volunteer for the job had to pull out.

Under Irene’s guidance, the group has prospered. It now has a ‘core’ of 30-35 members, and an email list of 150 people who want to stay informed of its activities. The members come from Coffs Harbour, Dorrigo, and Valla Beach, as well as the various valleys around Bellingen.

A key moment was when a number of keen and experienced local growers and gardeners joined the group – like Peter and Beryl Judd, from Dorrigo. They were able to supply a good stock of seed to share with the other members.

The Judds hosted one of the group’s first garden visits. “It was amazing”, says Irene. “[There were] huge, long rows of everything.”

When it comes to sustainable living, the first step is simply to begin. “You’ve got to make a start”, says Irene, “and we have. Here we are, two years later, and when I think about the number of seeds that we had to share with people at the Bellingen Plant Fair this time [September 2010], we’ve made really good progress.”

The group’s main focus is to collect and share seeds. “Our main objective is to get the seeds out and moving among the community”, says Irene. “The seeds we’re focusing on are edibles, and companion plants. It’s all to do with future food security”, she adds.

The loss of diversity in edible food crops is a real concern, and a key motivation for the group.

“You can look at the catalogues of the seed companies over time, and see how the seeds have just disappeared”, says Irene. “It’s the concern about the availability of food for everybody – it’s also about finding the varieties that will grow well here, and growing them, so they will adapt to the conditions.”

The visits to members’ gardens, and the informal sharing of seeds and knowledge that takes place during them, is the cornerstone of the group, and what has made it so popular.

“The host will talk about what’s working for them, and what problems they’re having, and how they’re overcoming them”, says Irene. “We all love being in one anothers’ gardens, it’s so interesting”, says Irene.

Alternatives, Collaborative cultures and networks, Corporate control of food, Democratic food systems, Fair Food systems, Food sovereignty, Growth paradigm, Local and regional food economies

Environmental Sustainability and Social Justice Requires Democratic Food Systems

This essay outlines the ‘biophysical contradictions’ and crises of legitimacy that the globalising industrial food system is now confronting. It argues that the system has become oligarchic by nature and is incapable of resolving these contradictions and crises within its own terms of continued geographical expansion and technological change, the dialectic of ‘plunder and productivity’. I argue that only a much more democratic food system can achieve lasting environmental sustainability and global social justice; and that developments in food sovereignty from around the world offer much promise towards these ends.

Hand plant

Some excerpts:

As in other spheres of human life, the most clearly apparent legacy of the era of neoliberal capitalism in food and agriculture is sharply rising inequality (Duménil and Lévy 2001: 578; Harvey 2005; Guthman 2011: 62). It is no exaggeration to categorise the global food system as oligarchic, even plutocratic, with a small number of giant transnational corporations controlling the sectors of research and development, proprietary seed, agri-chemicals, grain trading, meat packing, food processing and, increasingly, retailing, to the detriment of most producers and consumers alike (Patel 2007: 12-15). The system is designed to meet the needs of corporations for profit and capital accumulation, with the goals of human health and ecosystem integrity being secondary or tertiary considerations.

…

On one level, the plutocratic global food system faces a crisis of legitimacy, as the perversity of its operation, and the extent of its dysfunctionality, becomes more widely known. A crisis of legitimacy does not, however, translate into a systemic crisis, as long as the circuits of production and consumption can continue to be closed, enabling the system to expand and capital accumulation to persist. On another level, the system is confronted by a series of ‘accelerating biophysical contradictions’ (Weis 2010) which have the very real capacity to undermine its continued conditions of existence.

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The conclusion to be drawn from the above discussion is that industrialising capitalist agriculture finds itself at a serious impasse; and yet its promoters in Northern governments apparently find themselves capable only of urging its continuation and expansion because their worldview is so constrained by orthodox economics, and the vested interests of large corporations, that they cannot see any alternative. Further, the ‘long waves’ of capitalist expansion over centuries have in turn rested on a series of agricultural revolutions, beginning with the first English agricultural revolution of the ‘long seventeenth century’; succeeded by the second English agricultural revolution of the nineteenth century, and most recently the industrialisation of agriculture, led by the USA, in the twentieth (Moore 2010: 403). These revolutions have played this enabling role by bringing about, through a combination of outright ‘plunder’ (in the form of the dispossession of indigenous peoples of their land and resources) and technologically-driven productivity gains, an ‘ecological surplus’, with ‘cheap food’ at its centre, that has managed to restrain the cost of labour relative to other factors of production, and so enable sustained profitability (Gutham 2011: 54; Moore 2010: 392-3).

The trouble is that as capitalist industrial agriculture encounters its biophysical contradictions in the form of a series of planetary boundaries and a steadily widening ‘ecological rift’ between humanity and nature (Foster et al 2011: 76-79; Rockstrom et al 2009), and as the global capitalist system as a whole now appears to be stagnating and entering a period of crisis, no new agricultural revolution, and thus no new ‘ecological surplus’, is in sight. Large hopes have been, and continue to be, placed in genetically modified organisms, but the evidence to date reveals a disappointing ‘failure to yield’ (Sherman 2009). The current era of cheap food may be drawing to a close, thus elevating the current crisis into a truly systemic, ‘epochal’ one, and intensifying the uncertainties and risks of the decades ahead (Moore 2010: 398).

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Together, these pillars represent a pathway to a democratic food system. In transitioning away from the destructive oligarchy and plutocracy of market-led industrialised agriculture and agri-food regimes, the democratisation of food systems is a pre-condition to making them sustainable, fair and resilient. Many regions in North America have years of experience with democratic governance of their food systems via Food Policy Councils, and these models are now being embraced and adapted elsewhere (Food First 2009). At the global level, the reformed Committee on World Food Security offers the possibility of a more inclusive space for policy formation; and La Via Campesina have articulated a powerful framework for the protection of peasant and family farmers in their draft Declaration on Peasants’ Rights (La Via Campesina 2009). The food sovereignty movement has momentum: can it shift the power of vested interests?

To read the full article, follow the link below and go to pp33-39:

Political Reflection Vol 3 No 4