Category Archives: Ecology

agroecology, Argentina, Capitalism, Churchill Trip 2014, Collaborative cultures and networks, Community gardening, Corporate control of food, Democratic food systems, Ecology, economics, fair food movement, Fair Food systems, Food policy, Local and regional food economies, Supermarket Duopoly, Urban agriculture

Food Tank interviews Dr Nick Rose

Republished from Foodtank – original article here – Interview with Dr. Nick Rose, Australian Food System Activist – Food Tank

Food Tank recently had the opportunity to interview Dr. Nick Rose, Executive Director at Sustain, about the health of Australia’s food system and his view on what are the key factors impacting on a healthy and resilient food system in Australia.

Food Tank (FT): What are some of the biggest opportunities to support Australia’s food system?

Nick Rose (NR): The single biggest opportunity lies in the field of education, with the introduction for 2017 of a paddock-to-plate food literacy curriculum, Food Studies, as an elective for all Grade 11 and 12 students in Victoria, Australia’s second-most populous state. As a result, in a few years, as many as 10,000 students could be taking Food Studies. These students will form a growing cohort of capable tertiary graduates who can inform and lead the development of good food policy at the local, state and federal government levels. If other states follow Victoria’s lead and introduce a Food Studies curriculum, the wave of food systems change generated by tens of thousands of highly informed and motivated youth will, I think, be irresistible.

Other significant opportunities include the embrace and resourcing of sustainable and regenerative forms of food production, as well as the expansion of new and fair distribution systems and enterprises, such as farmers markets and food hubs. Legislative and planning protections for Australia’s major food bowl areas close to capital cities are sorely needed. Governments at all levels have a crucial role to play in these and other necessary shifts.

FT: With increasing innovation in the food system and networking technologies, what are you most excited about?

NR: I’m excited about creating a dynamic, multi-layered, and searchable food systems directory that will, for the first time, reveal the scale and breadth of Australia’s growing food systems movement. The development of this directory is a project that Sustain is now working on, with the support of the Myer Foundation, and we’re looking forward to making it a reality in 2017.

FT: From your extensive travels, what are some successful innovations in other countries that could be applied in Australia to improve the food system?

NR: I have a strong personal interest in the great potential of urban agriculture to transform the food system as a whole, and I saw dozens of examples of innovations on my Churchill Fellowship visiting the mid-west United States, Toronto, and Argentina in July–September 2014. Those innovations include: community urban land trusts to make city and peri-urban land available for sustainable and intensive food production, education, and social justice; capturing large organic waste streams to support sustainable and highly productive urban agricultural systems; planning overlays and zoning to facilitate commercial-scale urban agriculture production; the multiplication of inner-city farmers markets with dedicated space for urban farmers; the establishment of small-scale artisanal food processing facilities to incubate food entrepreneurs; the facilitation of city-wide urban agricultural networks; and, the development of comprehensive and inclusive urban agricultural strategies that recognize, value, and support the work of urban farmers and the organizations they are embedded in.

FT: How do organizations and individuals get involved in supporting a healthy and resilient food system in Australia?

NR: There are so many points of entry for individuals, from growing some herbs and vegetables, to supporting a kitchen garden at your local school (as a parent) and, or, your local community garden (more than 500 across Australia). Also, shopping at your local farmers market (now more than 180 in Australia) and, or, fair food enterprise, supporting local and sustainable producers wherever possible. Major change is needed at the level of policy, legislation and regulation, and here organizations can make a difference by joining one of the many local and regional food alliances that are in existence around Australia, or forming one if it doesn’t already exist in your region.

FT: If you could change one thing in Australia to improve its food system, what would it be?

NR: The single biggest obstacle in my view is the concentration of economic and political power represented by the supermarket duopoly—Coles and Woolworths. In the past 40 years, the grocery market share of these two companies has more than doubled to 75 percent. Meanwhile, Australia has lost more than 40 percent of its farmers, with the average age of farmers now approaching 60 years, compared to 42 years for the workforce as a whole. These two trends are deeply connected. As a country, we need to confront our tolerance for oligopolistic concentrations of political-economic power, and the supermarkets present the most urgent task, regarding the long-term sustainability and fairness of our food system.

FT: What personally drives your work to improve Australia’s food system?

NR: My drive stems from years living in Guatemala (2000–2006). It was here my political consciousness was awakened on realizing that the deaths of 200,000 Guatemalans, mostly Mayan indigenous peoples, could be traced to the refusal by the United Fruit Corporation and the then U.S. government of President Eisenhower to countenance even the partial redistribution of its massive landholdings and excessive wealth. This story is all documented in Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the CIA in Guatemala. It was a book that changed my life.

I believe that in working to improve Australia’s food system, I am part of a huge and growing global movement to transform the world’s food system. I dedicate my efforts to the memory of those who died in the struggle for a fair Guatemala.

Capitalism, Ecology, economics, Local and regional food economies, Resilience

COVID-19 and the Crisis of the Commodified Food System

Republished from www.sustain.org.au

History is being written right now. Are you authoring this chapter – or watching others do it for you?

“The COVID-19 health crisis has brought on an economic crisis, and is rapidly exacerbating an ongoing food security and nutrition crisis. In a matter of weeks, COVID-19 has laid bare the underlying risks, fragilities, and inequities in global food systems, and pushed them close to breaking point.

Our food systems have been sitting on a knife-edge for decades: children have been one school meal away from hunger; countries – one export ban away from food shortages; farms – one travel ban away from critical labour shortages; and families in the world’s poorest regions have been one missed day-wage away from food insecurity, untenable living costs, and forced migration.

The lockdowns and disruptions triggered by COVID-19 have shown the fragility of people’s access to essential goods and services. In health systems and food systems, critical weaknesses, inequalities, and inequities have come to light. These systems, the public goods they deliver, and the people underpinning them, have been under-valued and under-protected. The systemic weaknesses exposed by the virus will be compounded by climate change in the years to come. In other words, COVID-19 is a wake-up call for food systems that must be heeded.

The crisis has, however, offered a glimpse of new and more resilient food systems, as communities have come together to plug gaps in food systems, and public authorities have taken extraordinary steps to secure the production and provisioning of food. But crises have also been used by powerful actors to accelerate unsustainable, business-as-usual approaches. We must learn from the lessons of the past and resist these attempts, while ensuring that the measures taken to curb the crisis are the starting point for a food system transformation that builds resilience at all levels.

This transformation could deliver huge benefits for human and planetary health, by slowing the habitat destruction that drives the spread of diseases; reducing vulnerability to future supply shocks and trade disruptions; reconnecting people with food production, and allaying the fears that lead to panic buying; making fresh, nutritious food accessible and affordable to all, thereby reducing the diet-related health conditions that make people susceptible to diseases; and providing fair wages and secure conditions to food and farmworkers, thereby reducing their vulnerability to economic shocks and their risks of contracting and spreading illnesses.” (emphasis added)

COVID-19 and the crisis in food systems: Symptoms, causes and potential solutions

Communique by IPES-Food, April 2020

These opening paragraphs from the Communique released this month by the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) provide an excellent summary of what the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed about national food systems and the globalised, industrialised food system.

Our food systems, global and national, are fundamentally inequitable and unfair. While we have watched in fascinated horror as the daily toll of cases and fatalities from COVID-19 mounts, we have forgotten – if we ever gave it much thought – the silent, constant catastrophe of preventable early deaths caused by poverty, including lack of access to adequate nutrition, as well as safe drinking water and basic health care. According to the World Health Organisation, 6.2 million children and youth under 15 died from these causes in 2018. That’s nearly 17,000 every day, or around 12 deaths every minute. Every minute, every day. It cannot be said in strong enough terms: in a world where a tiny fraction of humanity enjoys lives of almost infinite riches, our politics and economy stand indicted as morally bankrupt, insofar as death and suffering on such a vast scale is effectively accepted within this paradigm as ‘normal’.

Yes, the international community of nations – the United Nations – has signed up to the Sustainable Development Goals. Goal 2 is ‘Zero Hunger’, with targets to end hunger and all forms of malnutrition. However, those goals and targets do not address the fundamental imbalances in power and maldistribution of wealth that produce so much poverty, suffering and hunger amidst so much abundance. As Eric Holt-Gimenez, Director of the campaigning organisation Food First, wrote back in 2012, “We Already Grow Enough Food for 10 Billion People…And Still Can’t End Hunger”. Why not? Because, as he argued, ‘hunger is caused by poverty and inequality, not scarcity’.

Nor, I would add, is it caused by natural disasters or pandemics. The COVID-19 pandemic is exacerbating this basic inequality in global and national food systems. It has been said that ‘we’re all in this together’ because the disease doesn’t respect boundaries of class or nations. That is true – up to a point. It’s also the case that those most impacted in terms both of exposure to COVID-19 and to the economic crisis that government public health policy responses have caused will be those who are most vulnerable. Low income and casual workers; farm and migrant workers; grocery store and delivery workers – all of whom do not have the option of working from home. And many of whom are not being provided with adequate protective equipment as they go about their essential work. As a result, increasing numbers of such workers are becoming infected with COVID-19 and many are dying. This is further proof, if it were needed, of a society and economy where the requirements of corporations for profit trump the rights of workers to a safe working environment.

Demand for the services provided by foodbanks has skyrocketed in the United States, as an extraordinary 22 million workers filing for unemployment claims in the past few weeks has seen queues of thousands of cars up to 10 kms long at many pop-up emergency food distribution points in various states. In the UK, the reports of a survey conducted for the Food Foundation over 7-9 April found that ‘the number of adults who are food insecure in Britain is estimated to have quadrupled under the COVID-19 lockdown’. The most heavily impacted are the disabled, the unemployed, and those from Black and ethnic minority groups. In Australia, where last year an estimated 20% of the population experienced food insecurity, emergency food providers are experiencing very high demand in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis even as supplies diminish through the collapse of the hospitality sector as a result of the enforced lockdown measures. Meanwhile in the US, the plunging of demand from restaurants and hotels has left farmers with no buyers for their produce; and as a consequence, millions of tonnes of milk, eggs and vegetables are being destroyed or ploughed back into the soil even as queues for foodbanks stretch ever longer.

The IPES-Food report also references the fragility of the industrial food system through supply chain disruptions, which may be caused by the closing down of processing facilities because of infected workers, or by a severe shortage of migrant workers due to border closures. Prior to the outbreak of the crisis, the entire model of factory farming, with its thousands and millions of animals confined in small spaces, was a known breeding ground for pathogens, most recently the swine flu and the avian flu. The COVID-19 pandemic is indeed a ‘wake up call for our food system’, in the words of IPES-Food. And this is without even discussing the other destructive impacts of the food system, such as its role in climate change, biodiversity loss and alarming rise in diseases linked to diet.

The case for change is urgent and overwhelming. It has been urgent and overwhelming for many years. What has shifted is that the COVID-19 pandemic and associated economic crisis has brought the sheer wastefulness and inequality of the global and national food systems into the sharpest relief. In 2016, the Right to Food Coalition, including Sustain, stated that Australian governments – at all levels – were ‘failing their legal and moral obligation to guarantee the human right to adequate food for at least 1.2 million people who don’t have access to safe, affordable and nutritious food’. The Right to Food Coalition noted that Australia, despite being one of the richest countries in the world, was actually regressing in terms of its fulfilment of this basic and universal human right.

That regression is accelerating in the contemporary crisis – but out of crisis also comes disruption and opportunity. In their communique, IPES-Food noted that the past several weeks have also been notable for a ‘remarkable upsurge of solidarity and grassroots activism’ in many places around the world. The crisis has thus ‘offered a glimpse of what new and more resilient food systems might look like’. One of the most extraordinary and wonderful examples cited in the communique is the state of Kerala in India, which has funded and supported hundreds of community kitchens run by women’s networks to provide nutritious and free meals to the most vulnerable, delivered directly to their doorstep. In Melbourne, a collaboration of social enterprises led by STREAT has established the Moving Feast initiative, aiming to source and provide thousands of free meals to those in need through a network of kitchens, councils, social enterprises and emergency food relief agencies. On a local level, Sustain is working with partners at the Melbourne Food Hub on a Food Security and Food Justice Drive to mobilise the power of urban agriculture in helping to make good  and fresh food available to those who need it most. We are supporting Community Gardens Australia and dozens of organisations and individuals who are calling on all governments across Australia to recognise community gardening and urban agriculture as an essential service, for the multiple benefits it provides to the Australian community – now more than ever.

History is being made as we speak. If you believe in the possibility of a better and fairer food system – and in a better and fairer world – now is the time to get involved in shaping it. We can and must do it together. Join us and let’s make it happen!

Capitalism, Ecology, Ecosystems, Water

Ecocide, and the building of critical consciousness

The death of a million fish

On or around the 6th January 2019, a tragic combination of circumstances led to a massive fishkill, estimated to be in excess of 1 million native species, in the Menindee Lakes region on the Darling River.

Native fish species impacted in the January 2019 #fishkill

While the immediate cause for the massive #fishkill was the sudden die-off of a massive bloom of blue-green algae (and the resulting collapse in oxygen levels in the water), the obvious question is: how was the ecosystem allowed to reach this parlous state of extreme vulnerability? Industry bodies such as the NSW Irrigators Council immediately went into damage control mode, blaming the drought, while Cotton Australia sought to deflect attention by claiming that cotton irrigators were ‘sick of being the whipping boys’ for environmental disasters.

Yet, as Fran Sheldon wrote in the Conversation on 16th January, the impacts of excessive irrigation are incontrovertible:

Ecological evidence shows the Barwon-Darling River is not meant to dry out to disconnected pools – even during drought conditions. Water diversions have disrupted the natural balance of wetlands that support massive ecosystems.

NSW Irrigators – blame the drought

Politicians from the governing parties – the Coalition in both NSW and Federally – signally failed to take responsibility. The NSW Primary Industries Minister, Niall Blair, was afraid of meeting meet with locals having received death threats on social media, while it wasn’t until Jan 23rd that the Federal Government  mandated the conduct of an independent study to determine the cause of the fishkill.  To their credit, NSW Labor promptly issued a statement calling for a special commission of inquiry into what it termed the ‘ecological catastrophe‘, while Federal Opposition leader Bill Shorten called for the establishment of an emergency ‘taskforce’ that could lead to a ‘possible judicial inquiry’.

A ecological disaster foretold

An excellent investigation by the ABC Four Corners team that aired in 2017 – Pumped: Who’s benefitting from the billions spent on the Murray-Darling? raised questions of, at best, grossly negligent mismanagement of the river system; and at worst, very serious allegations of political corruption and water theft with the most contemptuous disregard for the health of the river ecosystem.  As a so-called ‘advanced capitalist nation’, Australia prides itself on its rule of law. In theory, this means that laws are enforced equally and properly and that ‘justice is blind’; in other words, it doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, you will be treated the same way in the eyes of the law. In reality, law in capitalist countries has always favoured the interests of employers over workers and landowners over the rights of indigenous peoples and the environment.

What the Four Corners episode revealed, amongst much else, was that once the NSW Department of Primary Industries Special Investigations Unit actually start to make progress and discovery that irrigators were rorting the system (e.g. by not having meters to track how much water they were extracting from the river, or by tampering with the meters so they didn’t work), and when the Manager requested a major investigation, the Unit was then mysteriously shut down and the staff sacked. The only reasonable conclusion to be drawn is that there was collusion between the irrigators and the Department, and an accommodation reached in which no investigation would proceed.

The consequences are now plain for all to see.

A disaster baked into the logic of the system

The logic of endless extraction, heedless of environmental consequences, has its inevitable outcome. We need only look to the experience of Uzbekistan with the Aral Sea, once the world’s fourth-largest body of fresh water. When the USSR commenced large-scale cotton production in the 1960s by diverting flows from the Amu Darya river that had replenished it for millennia, the levels of the Aral Sea began to fall. By 2014, as the image from Wikipedia shows, it was a tiny fraction of its former size.  Ecological vandalism on a grand scale has a price.

The fragility of ecosystems resulting from over-exploitation and over-extraction is now intersecting with the impacts of non-linear anthropogenic climate change, as recent research published in Nature Climate Change demonstrated:

The beginning of this century has seen an unprecedented number of widespread, catastrophic biological transformations in response to extreme weather events. This constellation of unpredictable and sudden biological responses suggests that many seemingly healthy and undisturbed [Australian] ecosystems are at a tipping point.

Reviewing various measures of the destructive impacts of the global industrialised capitalist food system on human and ecological health, I argued in a recent article submitted to the Australian Journal Of Environmental Education that

While these losses and costs are regarded as ‘externalities’ by agri-food corporations, such an accounting sleight of hand will merely delay the day of ecological reckoning. We contend, first, that the current industrial food system is not only undermining the health and wellbeing of large and growing numbers of people and the integrity of local, regional and global ecosystems and climatic stability. Secondly, we argue that by severely diminishing public and ecological health, the industrial food system is at the same time encountering its own biophysical contradictions: it is undermining the conditions of its own reproduction (Weis, 2010). It is thus not only destructive, it is self destructive, and thus unsustainable by definition. The case for transformative change is therefore overwhelming and urgent. How do we get from here to there? Following the pedagogical oeuvre of Paolo Freire (1970), we begin with the premise that critical consciousness-raising amongst large numbers of people is an essential pre-requisite to transformative change.

Building critical consciousness

So how do we build critical consciousness? There are no shortcuts. It will require the sustained and committed efforts of tens of thousands of activists in this country and all over the world.

As the crisis of the system intensifies, the contradictions and absurdities of the current political economy will become increasingly clear to more and more people. We know that is already happening in many, many ways – and the fishkill on the Darling is the latest of a growing ecological cacophony that is calling us to awake from our long decades of consumer apathy and begin to recover our power as political beings.

Rebellions are on the rise. Witness the Gilet Jaunes / Yellow Vests movement in France. The Extinction Rebellion in the UK. The mass strike of maquiladora workers in Matamoros, northern Mexico. These are expressions, both of the advancing distintegration of the hegemony of neoliberalism, as well as the growing levels of critical consciousness around the world as people come together to enter into struggle with the logic of the endless growth and exploitation of the system.

What happens next is up to us.

Selected articles published / linked on the #fishkill catastrophe, January 2019

 

Cry me a river: Mismanagement and Corruption have left the Darling dry, Helen Vivian, Sydney Morning Herald, 9 March 2018

Cubbie Station and Water Allocation Abuse, Tim Alderman, personal blog, 9 January 2019 (tweeted – original article 2 March 2017)

The fishkill is a tragedy, but it is no surprise,  Quentin Grafton, Emma Carmody, Matthew Colloff and John Williams, The Guardian, 14 January 2019

The other Murray-Darling wildlife disaster – it’s what you don’t see, Michael Pascoe, The New Daily,  15 January 2019

The Darling River is simply not supposed to dry out, even in drought,  Fran Sheldon, The Conversation, 16 January 2019

Fishkill highlights mismanagement of Australian waterways, Martin Scott, 25 January 2019, World Socialist Web Site