Category Archives: advocate

advocate, Coffs Coast, Fair Food systems, Food sovereignty

The real costs of cheap food

25 January 2015 vivalarevolucion13

The real costs of ‘cheap’ food

Nick Rose

This article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 19.2.11

There’s been plenty of talk over the past month or so about the impact that the extreme weather events north of the border will have on food and grocery prices, vegetables and bananas especially.

There’s lots of things to say about this, beginning with the fact that if the mid-north coast still had a viable banana industry, and if production wasn’t so centralised and concentrated in cyclone-prone areas of north Queensland, then consumers might not be so vulnerable to the sorts of price spikes we’re likely to see in the coming months.

Be that as it may, there’s a bigger question at stake which is rarely addressed, and that’s whether the ‘normal’ price we pay for our groceries is sufficient to maintain a healthy, diverse and viable agricultural sector in this country over the medium and long-term, given the way that current market mechanisms operate.

It’s hardly any secret that many farmers are doing it tough, and have done so for a long time. So it should come as no surprise that Australia has lost around 50,000 farmers since the mid-1960s, and the exodus continues, with five farmers leaving the land every day.

Nor should it be any surprise that the average age of the Australian farmer is approaching 60. There simply aren’t the incentives for young people to want to embrace agriculture as a career and lifestyle choice. Which begs the question: who’s going to do the work of feeding us in 15 or 20 years’ time, when most farmers will be approaching 80, and there’ll be 35,000 fewer of them?

Does this sound like a crisis-in-the-making to you? It certainly does to me. In fact, it’s a crisis that’s been with us for many years now.

Which brings us back to the central issue: the proper cost of food. Through the centuries, farmers have always sought a fair price – a just price – for their produce. The trouble in recent decades is that they simply have not been getting it. At the heart of the global crisis in agriculture – Australia is but one of dozens of countries affected – is that farm-gate prices have failed to keep pace with the rising costs of inputs, freight and labour. In many cases farm-gate prices have barely risen at all.

Alongside this cost-price squeeze, we have seen an equally strong trend towards the concentration of ownership and control of most aspects of the food-value chain: from seed, to agro-chemicals, to grain trading and meat-packing, to food processing and manufacturing, and to retailing. We have witnessed the corporatisation and monopolisation of food and agriculture.

Many would say that the two trends – the farm crisis, and the growth of agri-food monopolies – are closely linked. So closely, that the latter brings about the former.

There’s no simple answer to this, and I’m certainly not advocating a big price hike in groceries for consumers, least of all the many millions of middle and low-income Australians who are experiencing cost-of-living pressures already, with electricity and petrol price rises, not to mention the constantly rising cost of housing. But the question remains: how do we make farming viable – especially for smaller scale, bio-diverse farms – and yet keep food affordable?

We do need to move away from the culture of cheap food, where price is the sole criterion for making purchasing decisions. The logic of the food system as it stands points in one direction: the factory farm. And if you want to know why that’s a future we ought to say no to, come and watch Food Inc: see the interviews with factory farmers and workers in the United States; the conditions in which the animals are kept; the phenomenal waste that is generated, and the severe consequences for human and environmental health. The good news is that there are alternatives, and they’re being implemented all over the world, including on the Coffs Coast.

advocate, Coffs Coast, Food sovereignty, Local and regional food economies, Small-scale farming

Agricultural Democracy

27 November 2014 vivalarevolucion13

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on 15th November, 2014

Food and farming forums are the flavour of the month. On November 3^rd, we had the well attended and highly successful Mid-North Coast Food Forum. Key themes emerging were the need for prominent and coordinated marketing and branding strategies to raise the profile of the region’s producers and food enterprises, the importance of finding ways to enable young people to enter farming, and the need for better coordination and collaboration across the sector.

Next week, from 16^th to 18^th November, the focus will shift to the Northern Rivers and Byron Bay, with the 4^th Regional Food Cultures and Networks Conference. The focus is again very much on local and regional food: the Conference will “showcase innovative thinking and demonstrate approaches to the development and sustainability of local food; and examine the cultural, economic, social and environmental implications and opportunities around local and regional food.”

And two weeks after that a Fair Food and Law conference will take place at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, with the involvement of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance, the Australian Earth Laws Association, and Monash University. That conference will explore the role of law and regulation in supporting – or not supporting – the creation and expansion of a fair food system.

All of this activity I find very positive and encouraging. It is only through bringing diverse individuals and stakeholders into the same room that we can begin to transcend institutional barriers and ways of thinking and acting. These spaces allow us to identify and explore what we have in common and begin to develop creative approaches to addressing common challenges.

I keep coming back to the need to support and keep our farmers on the land, help them develop as diverse, financially viable and ecologically sustainable systems as possible. And critically, to build pathways for young people to enter agriculture.

This was highlighted a few weeks ago, on October 16^th , World Food Day, by the new UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Professor Hilal Elver. She pointed out that 70% of the world’s food depends on family farmers, most operating farms of less than 2 hectares. That’s right: small-scale family farmers, who, we’re often told, are ‘inefficient’ and ‘not productive’, feed the world, not giant agri-business.

Not that they get a lot of thanks for it. On the contrary, these farmers are at the sharp end of a struggle for their land, which large agri-business corporations and financial institutions, ever hungry for ever more profit, want in increasing quantities.

This ‘global land grab’ is a zero sum game. 2014 is the International Year of Family Farming. Industrialised large-scale monocultures are resource-intensive, wasteful, polluting and environmentally destructive. They also generate and intensify inequality, as I saw in Argentina, where the rapid expansion of the multi-million hectare ‘green deserts’ of GMO soy monocultures have forced hundreds of thousands of country folk into precarious villas de miseria (villages of misery) on the outskirts of the major cities.

Casas precarias in the so-called Villas de Miserias, this photo taken in Barrio Nestor Kirchner, part of the Cinturon de Pobreza that encircles a significant portion of Tucuman, in the north-east of Argentina. Similar ‘poverty belts’ and ‘misery towns’ can be found in many mid-to-large sized Argentina towns and cities.

This mode of production and social organization, the mindset that the earth is only here for us to endlessly exploit regardless of the consequences, so that a few ‘rich’ people can become ‘richer’, for a while – this is what has to change. And it is changing, and the producers and entrepreneurs and government representatives attending all the local and regional food conferences are the ones changing it.

This is part of what my colleague, regenerative sheep farmer and agrarian intellectual, Dr Charlie Massy, calls the Underground Insurgency: a ‘cascading series of personal transformations from soil up, culminating in the Great Turning’. I’ll say more about that in a future column.

advocate, Food sovereignty

There is a hunger and thirst for connection

12 August 2014 vivalarevolucion13

"Art in the Park" Growing Power Urban Farm, Grant Park, Downtown Chicago — “Art in the Park” Growing Power Urban Farm, Grant Park, Downtown Chicago

Growing Community principles, Victory Gardens Initiative, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

These famous opening words from Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities sums up how I am feeling after a week and a half in the Midwest of the United States: a week in Chicago and three days in Milwaukee.

Creativity Board, Sweetwater Foundation Aquaponics Demonstration Site, Southside Chicago

I feel excited by the scale and diversity of urban agriculture activity that I have witnessed. I feel inspired by the passion and vision and energy of the many wonderful people I have met. Every day brings someone new and lovely into my life. I feel uplifted by the warmth and generosity that I have been shown as a traveller and outsider. Everyone I have met has been so keen to show and tell me what they are doing, the projects they are involved in, the change they are part of.

With Sonya Harper, Communications Officer of the Growing Home Wood St Urban Farm

At the same time, I feel deeply saddened by the divisions and suffering that scar the two cities I have spent time in. It is one thing to acknowledge the reality of racial division and segregation in the abstract; it is another entirely to see how it manifests socially and geographically. During my first week here, I spent a fair amount of time in Englewood, a sprawling suburb on the south side of Chicago. I travelled there by public transport, and it was a sobering experience, as the bus went further south, to be in a minority of one amongst all the other passengers.

Abandoned house marked for demolition, Englewood, Southside Chicago

“Urban blight” are just two words that convey an uncomfortable sensation, until you see what they really mean in the Englewood context. Block after block with many abandoned, boarded-up houses. Block after block with many houses stamped with an ominous red X, which means they are slated for demolition. Block after block with growing acres of vacant lots, places where houses once stood.

Vacant lots and empty buildings, Englewood, Southside Chicago

The same is true in the inner northern suburbs of Milwaukee, a city of 650,000 which is an hour and a half north of Chicago. The City of Milwaukee now has 2,500 vacant lots on its books, and 1,500 foreclosed homes. 550 are marked for demolition this calendar year, and thousands more homes, most on the inner north side, are two years or more in arrears on their property taxes. Three years in arrears triggers the foreclosure process.

Productive urban lots, Growing Home, Englewood, Southside Chicago

Just as the built environment is in advanced decay, the social indicators are equally troubling. Unemployment amongst African American men exceeds 50%. Violent crime is rife: an hour after visiting one beautiful urban farm in north-side Milwaukee with a group of primary school children, the corner store a block away was held up at gun point and someone was shot. Obesity and dietary-related ill-health are endemic.

Concordia Community Garden, Harambee, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

But for all this desolation – which is writ large in Detroit, where I will be next week – there is so much hope and positivity. Such as the urban farms in Chicago which are growing hundreds of kilos of produce every month to donate directly to food pantries.

Transforming abandoned carparks into productive urban farmland, Urban Canopy Farms, Southside, Chicago

Like the Victory Gardens Initiative, which brought together over 500 volunteers for a fortnight in May, to create 550 edible backyard gardens in Milwaukee – on top of the 514 created in May 2013, and the 700 created in the three preceding years.

Victory Gardens Initiative Executive Director Gretchen Mead, with co-workers Colin and Ellie, Milwaukee

Like the City of Chicago Food Plan, and the Home Grown Initiative of the City of Milwaukee, both of which anticipate the expansion of urban agriculture both large and small across both metropolitan areas in the coming years.

The local governments and their communities are investing heavily in urban agriculture as a strategy for urban renewal and revitalisation. On one level it’s about growing food, but more fundamentally, it’s about re-creating the connections that sustain healthy communities and healthy people.

advocate, Food sovereignty, Local and regional food economies, Small-scale farming, Uncategorized

COMMUNITY FUNDED FOOD

31 May 2014 vivalarevolucion13

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday 31st May, 2014

About nine months ago I first wrote a column about the emergence of crowd-funding as an alternative means by which direct-marketing farmers could raise finance to invest in capital enhancements and equipment purchases. Those investments in turn would enable on-farm value-adding and diversification that could make the critical difference between going under and going from strength-to-strength.

Judging by the numbers of farm-based crowd-funding campaigns in the past few weeks and months, there is a growing community appetite around the country to get behind local producers. On platforms such as Pozible, fundraising is structured around a rewards system, so for every pledge, you receive a specified ‘reward’ of goods produced on the farm. The higher your pledge, the greater your reward.

Producers like it because, if well structured and well promoted, these campaigns help raise their profile as an innovative supplier of good food to local communities. And of course because, unlike a loan or mortgage from a bank, there is no obligation to pay any interest. Repayment is in farm produce.

As my friend and fellow Committee member of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance, Tammi Jonas, puts it:

“Your support helps us reach our goals to be ethically viable without taking on debt from the banks to line shareholders’ pockets. Instead of feeding the banks, let us feed you with our range of tasty rewards in return for your pledge to help us reach our goal!”

Tammi and her husband Stuart (Jonai Farms, rare breed pigs) have just launched a campaign to raise $30,000 to build on an on-farm curing room and commercial kitchen, following the success of their campaign last year to build an on-farm butchery. Another free range pig farmer, Lauren Mathers, has just successfully raised $15,000 to build an on-farm charcuterie to make pork small goods.

And a truly enterprising young poultry farmer, Madelaine, raised a record-breaking $67,986 to purchase an egg cleaning and grading machine so she could increase her sales of organic and free range eggs direct to customers in Melbourne.

Crowd-funding in NSW

In northern NSW, I’m happy to report that there is an exciting new food social enterprise initiative just starting in Mullumbimby. Future Feeders is a project launched by a small group of local young people, aiming to create pathways for young people to enter agriculture and be supported in developing their skills and capacities to have viable and long-term careers in sustainable food production.

As I’ve written in this column several times previously, Australia is facing an agrarian demographic crisis. According to ABS data, the percentage of Australian farmers under 35 had fallen to 13% by 2011, from 28% thirty years previously. A quarter of all our farmers are over 65. We are quite literally relying on a workforce of pensioners to do a lot of the heavy lifting in feeding us. This is both grossly unfair and dangerously non-resilient.

That is why it is so encouraging when groups of young people are motivated, enthusiastic and committed to enter agriculture. Future Feeders have a 2 acre urban farm operational in Mullumbimby, on which they have secured a five-year community land lease. They are looking to partner with retiring farmers on a land-share basis, to turn disused or under-utilised parcels of land into thriving centres of sustainable and diverse production for local and regional markets.

They are seeking support to raise start-up capital to purchase necessary irrigation, transport, fencing and storage equipment so they can hit the ground running. And they want to share their knowledge, expertise and resources widely through a co-operative farm management and community-supported agriculture model.

Simon Richardson, Mayor of Byron Shire Council, has this to say about Future Feeders:

“This group walks their talk: they get their hands into the soil and do so cooperatively, intelligently ad passionately. They are the future of the next generation of farmers.”

For more information, contact Joel Orchard, Project Manager, joel@futurefeeders.org

To support their crowd-funding campaign, visit www.chuffed.org/project/future-feeders

advocate, Corporate control of food

The Trans Pacific Partnership – An attack on our democracy and sovereignty

28 May 2014 vivalarevolucion13

Our sovereignty at stake

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday, 19th October, 2013

It is ironic that the candidate who staked so much of his political capital on his ability to ‘stop the boats’ and ‘protect this nation’s borders’, should roll over so promptly when in office like a Cheshire cat and have his political tummy tickled by the likes of Cargill and Monsanto.

Ironic, but not surprising, because Tony Abbott’s first words on winning the 7 September Federal election were to declare that Australia was now ‘open for business’.

While our men and women in uniform are dispatched to patrol our borders to make sure that no ‘illegal’ humans can enter, transnational corporate capital can come and go more or less as it pleases.

It is not enough that we roll out the red carpet for these ‘foreign investors’ as though they were royalty. Now, with the new administration’s commitment to sign up to the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) without reservation, we are ceding a large chunk of our sovereignty to them as well.

Not heard of the TPP? That’s hardly surprising, because, like nearly all free trade negotiations since the infamous ‘battle of Seattle’ back in 1999, the 12-nation TPP talks, involving Australia, the United States, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Japan, Vietnam, New Zealand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, have been conducted exclusively behind closed doors. More than that, it’s only due to the leaking of 2 of the 26 chapters under negotiation that we know anything about the substance of this agreement.

One of these chapters is titled, innocuously enough, Investor-State Dispute Settlements (ISDS). What this means is that foreign investors have the right to take state and federal governments to international tribunals if they dare pass legislation, or adopt policy, that conflicts with Australia’s obligations under the TPP.

One of Australia’s first civil society forums on the Trans Pacific Partnership, held at the Hawthorn campus of Swinburn University, on 14 October 2013. My contribution begins at 1:06 and ends at 1:25.

What does this mean in practice? Under an earlier free trade deal, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the oil and gas company Lone Pine Resources sued the Canadian government because the state of Quebec had a moratorium on coal-seam gas fracking.

While we don’t know for sure – because the draft TPP is a closely-guarded state-and-corporate secret – it is thought by those who have followed the process closely that other chapters will impact on our domestic freedom of action in a number of ways. For example, there may be well be prohibitions on any laws requiring the mandatory labelling of products containing genetically-modified organisms.

There may also be restrictions or even prohibitions on the ability of governments to adopt procurement standards that preference local suppliers and local jobs. National governments’ freedom of action to adopt laws and rules that safeguard the environment may be curtailed, should such rules impact on transnational corporate profits.

The trouble is, we won’t know what this agreement contains until the negotiations have been concluded, when it will be presented to the Australian Parliament, and the Australian people, as a fait accompli.

What we do know is more than enough to set alarm bells ringing loudly. The other chapter that has been leaked contains provisions designed to tighten already restrictive intellectual property laws. One Canadian media commentator, on reviewing the powers the draft TPP confers on international media conglomerates, said that it ‘would turn all Internet users into suspected copyright criminals [and] appears to criminalise content sharing in general’.

Before some of our most basic rights and freedoms that we take for granted are signed away behind some closed door, supposedly in the name of ‘growing the economy’ and ‘boosting employment and productivity’, we must at the very least be entitled to know the detail of what this agreement contains.

Whether or not he ‘stops the boats’ and ‘protects our borders’, Tony Abbott will be selling our national sovereignty to the highest bidder if his government signs onto to the TPP in its current form.

advocate, Coffs Coast, Corporate control of food, Cost-price squeeze, Fair Food Week, Farmers Markets, Local and regional food economies, New market mechanisms, Small-scale farming, Supermarket Duopoly

Crowd-funding for farming

21 May 2014 vivalarevolucion13

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday, 28th September, 2013

It’s been said many times: there is a crisis of profitability in Australian agriculture. Many factors are involved, including drought, the high Australian dollar, softening commodity prices, and the market power of the duopoly.

In May this year the Australian Financial Review reported that ‘at least 80 farming operations worth more than $1mn across Australia are in receivership or some form of financial distress.’

Debt levels feature prominently in this picture. According the Australian Bureau of Agricultural Research Economics and Science (ABARES), total farm debt for broad-acre farms averaged $476,000 as at 30 June, 2013. For dairy farms, average farm debt was $701,500. Debt levels in the Queensland beef industry have increased 500% in under 20 years, with most of the increase coming in the post-GFC period.

Commenting on the AFR report, financial blogger Steven Johnson of Intelligent Investor wrote,

“Any Australian farm funded with more than 50% debt is a Ponzi operation. There are thousands of them.”

Low interest rates bring some relief, and have been welcomed by the NFF. Before it left office, the ALP introduced a two-year Farm Finance package worth $420 mn of concessional loans (interest-only payments for 5 years, before reverting to market rates). But in the absence of a genuinely ‘farmer-friendly’ national food policy (which would likely include substantial tax breaks), this package, which is also supported by the incoming administration, may simply be deferring the inevitable.

At the other end of the scale, smaller scale farmers selling into niche local markets are successfully exploring a different financing alternative: crowd-funding. With its origins dating famously to Joseph Pulitzer’s 1884 campaign that raised $100,000 from 125,000 people to complete the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, crowd-funding has really taken off alongside the rise of the social network era of the internet. US platforms such as IndieGoGo, GiveForward and KickStarter have helped artists, musicians and others raise tens of millions of dollars, mostly in small donations from large numbers of individuals, to enable them to make music videos, write books, fund travel and a host of other projects. Pledges are made securely via encypted software (using a credit or debit card), as you would do if you were purchasing a book on Amazon.com, and typically are only redeemed if the campaign reaches 100% of its target figure within the alloted time frame.

In Australia, the Pozible website (www.pozible.com) was launched in May 2010, and by August 2013 had raised $13 mn for more than 4000 projects. These have included in the past few months: $12,000 to send 5 Australian farmers to the Via Campesina global conference in Jakarta (June 2013), $27,570 to finance an on-farm butchery at the free range heritage pig farm, Jonai Farms in Daylesford, Victoria (June 2013), and $29,250 to finance the making of Just Food, an Australian-first Fair Food documentary (August-September 2013).

In the Coffs region, the owners of Nana Glen Synchronicity Farm, Josh and Tomoko Allen, recently launched a pozible campaign, seeking to raise $30,000 to finance a ‘gourmet food hub’ based on their property. As well as creating a farm-gate store which will be an additional market outlet for local producers, they intend to build a community facility for educational workshops on organic farming, permaculture, aquaculture, shitake mushroom farming and a venue for long table farm lunches to support access to good food for community members on low incomes.

Synchronicity Farm Stall, Coffs Harbour Harbourside Market

Josh and Tomoko sell their heirloom fruit and veg at the Sunday Harbourside Market and the Nana Glen general store. Their campaign has around one month to run.

The project is in its early days, but it would make an important addition to food retailing diversity for this region. The food hub sector in the US is booming, with over 100 now in existence. It’s also starting in Australia, with projects in Casey, Trentham, Shepparton and Kyabram, amongst others. For more information, visit www.foodhubs.org.au.

advocate, Coffs Coast, Local and regional food economies

Suspended Coffee in Sawtell

13 May 2014 vivalarevolucion13

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday 31st August, 2013

As I have described in two previous columns, Coffs Coast independent coffee roaster Amelia Franklin has worked hard to get where she is today. Hers is a values-driven small business, with a strong focus on the ethics and sustainability of Fair Trade coffee. Her packaging, for example, is completely compostable, and she runs her coffee roaster on solar power.

Of course, having an ethics-driven business is one thing, but the product has to be top quality as well. And Amelia’s product is excellent, as recognised in her winning a Silver in the Golden Bean Roaster awards for 2012/13 in Open Class for her Mama Quilla blend: a combination of Peruvian Feminino beans, Chiapan (Mexico) beans, and Sumatran beans from the Aceh province.

“My Mama Quilla blend was the second-highest rated in the milk class (lattes, flat whites) against over 750 coffees entered”, said Amelia. “It’s not just Silver, because they give out ten of those. It was second-highest overall.”

In addition to these regions, Amelia sources beans from the Purosa co-operative in Papua New Guinea, and from co-ops in Ethiopia, East Timor, and Colombia.

How many beans will Amelia be processing at any one time?

“It can be anywhere from zero, to two tonnes. And if it’s two tonnes, I’m like, aagghhhhh!” she laughs. “A pallet is about one tonne, and that costs me $10,000, which is a big investment. I can turn around about a tonne a month. It takes me that long because I’m still using my little 5 kilo roaster – I really need to move up to a 20-25 kilo roaster, which I could still run on solar power. But that would cost me $80,000, if I was lucky, and I don’t want to get stuck in the debt cycle again,” Amelia says ruefully.

Beyond her own business, Amelia wants to link up and support women working in the coffee industry across Australia, whether as roasters, growers, or baristas, in the Australian chapter of the International Women’s Coffee Alliance.

You can sample Amelia’s Peruvian Feminino single origin coffee pretty much everywhere in Bellingen; but in Coffs Harbour and Sawtell you need to go to Wholly Cow café in 1^st Avenue, Sawtell.

And there you will find that the owners Ricky and Michelle Lee have just launched something that is big internationally, and taking off around Australia, but has not yet made it to the Coffs Coast – until now.

It’s ‘Espresso Sospeso’, or ‘Suspended Coffee’. The concept originated in Naples and has now gone viral, as they say, with over 40 businesses in Victoria, and more than 25 in New South Wales, taking part.

The basic philosophy is that you are practising a ‘random act of kindness’ to a complete stranger, a person in need of a warm and soothing beverage.

How does it work? Very simply, you buy a coffee for yourself at a participating business (in this region, Wholly Cow) and at the same time buy a ‘suspended coffee’, which will be entered in a register of such purchases.

That suspended coffee can be redeemed by someone in need, who may have just lost their job or otherwise find themselves in financial hardship. They can simply walk into the café and ask for a suspended coffee, which will be provided courtesy of the generosity of the paying customer.

We can hardly have too much kindness and generosity in the world, and this is a great way to build up those reserves.

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

Fair Food Week arrives in Australia

30 April 2014 vivalarevolucion13

Australia’s first Fair Food Week

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Local Food, Local Farms

27 April 2014 vivalarevolucion13

Local food and the 2013 Federal Election

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

advocate, Coffs Coast, Small-scale farming

Fair Trade – A story not told enough?

24 April 2014 vivalarevolucion13

Fair Trade Coffee

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

In food and beverages, ethical and sustainable products are a booming niche market sector, which has doubled in the last four years.

Fair Trade is leading the way, averaging an astonishing 50% year-on-year growth over the last five years, according to Fairtrade Australia New Zealand operations manager Craig Chester.

Talk about recession-busting. In barely 10 years, products bearing the Fairtrade ANZ label now generate sales in excess of $191 million.

Chocolate is largest segment of the fair trade market, at 62%, followed by coffee at 31%, and tea at 6%.

Fair Trade is a certification system that allows importers and retailers of products from developing countries to sell them under the Fair Trade label. So what does Fair Trade actually mean in practice?

This was the discussion I had with Bellingen-based coffee roaster Amelia Franklin. For Amelia, being herself perhaps unique as the proprietor of a 100% woman-owned coffee roasting business, a very important element of the Fair Trade system is its strong support of gender equality and the empowerment of women.

“To be Fair Trade is to be a co-op, which is a group of small farmers with small plots, getting together and selling their product as a community”, she explained.

“One of the main guidelines is that women have an equal voice in the co-op. There needs to be women representing all the farmers’ families, and there needs to be women making decisions. When you look at countries like Papua New Guinea (PNG), where the only people to sit in the circle are men, that changes the dynamic. That gives women a voice. I think that’s a good thing”, she said.

For Amelia, another very important part of Fair Trade is its support of education.

“The children are going to school, they’re not working”, Amelia told me. “So you’ve got maybe 500-1000 family members in the co-op, and one member might cover up to 15-20 people, including several children. If you have 500-1000 members, then that means that all those children are going to school, and all those women have a voice.”

Fair Trade also supports sustainable agricultural practices, although the system itself does not duplicate or replace organic certification. Fair Trade producers are typically small-scale farmers, working on two-hectare plots, so ‘they’re not putting fertiliser and pesticides on their coffee’, said Amelia.

Whereas in large-scale coffee production, ‘you’re looking at deforestation and full irrigation, and pesticides and fertilisers because you’re completely stuffing with the environment, to engage in that kind of monoculture’, she said.

In terms of the difference that the Fair Trade premium – 2% of the market price on green beans – makes, this is determined democratically by the co-operative through a discussion and voting process.

“[The co-op] will have a number of projects they want to achieve”, Amelia told me. “One of the first things they usually do is put in a nurse’s post in their community, so they have direct access to primary health care. I’ve been to PNG and in remote areas the basic health care is minimal. And many people don’t access that health care because they have to pay, and they can’t afford it.”

“Also there’s often no school nearby, so the second thing they do is build a school and fund a teacher”, she added.

Coffee – whether it’s Fair Trade or not – is a commodity crop for export. So what about support for growing basic food groups?

“There is a massive problem in PNG with the food quality”, Amelia told me. “It’s terrible. Many people live on a diet of canned meat and two-minute noodles. Supermarkets are full of canned produce from China, that’s what people are eating.”

“I visited a cocoa-growing Fairtrade community. Fairtrade were supporting a lot of women to be trained in horticulture, and encouraged them to grow their own food. Australians don’t see that as part of Fair Trade, they don’t see what it does on the ground [in countries like PNG]. There are so many good stories to tell, but Fair Trade isn’t telling them enough. It’s not perfect, but they do really good work”, Amelia finished.

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working for food sovereignty in Australia