Category Archives: Growth paradigm

Corporate control of food, Democratic food systems, economics, fair food movement, Food sovereignty, Growth paradigm

Confronting Corporate Power with Democracy and Solidarity

Democracy and Solidarity

This is the text of my address to the Public Meeting on the Kernot Dairy, Gippsland, 12.5.15, held at RMIT Building 56, Queensberry St, Melb. 50 people were in attendance. 

We’re here tonight for a political meeting. This is not about party politics; rather, it’s about politics in the deep sense, of who holds power in our society, and how that power is exercised, for whose benefit, and with what consequences.

That’s what we’re here to discuss tonight, in the very specific context of a clear intention by one corporation to transform a Gippsland dairy farm into a highly intensified system of production.

 Our food system is facing a series of crises. One of them is the exploitation of vulnerable workers. Some of you may have seen the Four Corners program, Slaving Away, on Monday 4th May. It exposed the distressing and disturbing reality that significant portions of our cheap food system depend on the ruthless exploitation and abuse of migrant workers, most of whom are in this country on short-term working visas.

It’s all too easy in such circumstances to point the finger of blame at the few ‘rotten apples’, the unscrupulous labour hire contractors, or the few large farms that use their services. But the real beneficiaries are the major supermarkets, and the fast food companies, that buy these products at the lowest possible cost.

As Tammi wrote last week on the AFSA website, what this Four Corners program actually revealed is a system that’s failing, at many levels, to secure the well-being of all. These migrant workers are experiencing truly appalling treatment, without any doubt. But let’s not forget the millions of chickens and pigs in their cages in the dozens of factory farms that already exist in Australia. Let’s not forget the 1 million-plus Australians who experience food insecurity on a regular basis. Let’s not forget the millions more who suffer chronic pain and early death as a result of type 2 diabetes, and other diseases of diets based on cheap and empty calories.

WTF?
WTF?

Let’s not forget the farmers, who on average receive only 10 cents of every dollars’ worth of food they produce; and who feel so devalued by our cheap food culture, that they experience rates of suicide and depression at twice the national average.

This food system is failing the great majority of people, in this country and worldwide, and the non-human species that are caught up in its voracious maw of ceaseless production. But it’s not failing the handful of corporations that make a handsome profit off the misery of the majority.

And that’s the problem we face. We’ve inherited a system that’s primarily designed and operated to feed corporate profit, rather than feed people fairly. It’s all about production, for production’s sake, regardless of the consequences. That’s what the Kernot dairy issue represents, as we’ll hear shortly. It’s a choice for all of us as to what food system we want for our country: one that primarily serves large corporations and banks; or one that serves people and ecosystems.

What factory farming of dairy cattle looks like...
What factory farming of dairy cattle looks like…

* * * * *

We’re also hear tonight to reclaim our democratic culture, which lately has been under increasing strain. We have a journalist summarily sacked for committing the cardinal sin of criticizing the sanctification of Anzac Day. We have campaigning environmental organisations like Friends of the Earth under financial attack because they dare to mobilise communities to question the rush to frack our fertile farmlands. We have moves to criminalise animal welfare groups who dare to expose the cruelty meted out in factory farms.

TPP

At such times, it’s important that as many of us as possible stand up and speak the truth as we know it. Food sovereignty, we say, is the fundamental right of communities to democratically determine our food and farming systems. To participate in the making of decisions about who owns our farmland, and what sort of production systems should be employed. What should be grown or raised, and where and under what terms should the produce be sold? For the past few decades we have delegated all these decisions to a mythical and apparently all-powerful entity known as ‘the market’. But the market, far from being ‘free’ and a ‘level playing field’, is actually structured in favour of the largest and most powerful corporations.

How do we begin to change this? By gathering together in forums such as this, to hear directly from the producers and communities who are at the sharp end of these processes of ‘free trade’ and ‘globalisation’. By listening, and becoming informed of the issues, and what’s at stake.

And by taking action. Because that’s what this meeting is also about. Solidarity. Standing together with those who are trying to sound the alarm on what looks like a headlong rush to the intensification of dairy farming in Gippsland and elsewhere in Victoria. We have several people who’ve made the journey up the freeway to be with us tonight and share their stories with us. I’d like to invite them all to stand up now – and invite you all to give them a very warm round of applause. You are very welcome here; and we have come here tonight to support you.

But it’s also very important to remember that although the corporation that is planning the intensification of this dairy in Kernot is Chinese, we have no quarrel with the people of China. Food sovereignty is a global movement that embraces hundreds of millions of people in more than 80 countries, and it is firmly grounded in the principles of international solidarity and non-discrimination. What we oppose is a food system that privileges short-term financial gain for a tiny minority, over the long-term well-being of the vast majority of humanity, non-human species, and ecosystems everywhere. Ultimately we have one home, and it’s called Earth. And our responsibility is to adopt an ethic and a practice of care, and love, towards each other. Not only those closest to us, but those far away as well.

Corporate control of food, economics, Growth paradigm

Berry Beware

Berry Beware

 The widespread coverage of outbreaks of Hepatitis A in all eastern States and now in WA, linked to faecal contamination of frozen raspberries packaged in China, has proven a boon for Australian producers, with a surge in demand for local produce.

As someone who has been writing and speaking about the benefits of local food economies for many years, and warning about the risks and downsides of an increasingly globalised food system, these events feel like vindication.

The tragedy of course is that a number of individuals – and there will likely be many more – have had to suffer in order to raise these issues to the top of the political agenda.

That is unfortunately so often the case, however. Until something becomes a ‘media storm’, politicians see no need to act.

 

The suspected contaminated fruit in this instance is actually raspberries...
The suspected contaminated fruit in this instance is actually raspberries…

In this instance – as in just about everything else connected with our globalised food system – many people have been suffering for a long time. We just don’t get to hear about the near-Dickensian conditions of the largely female and indigenous farm workers in Chile who pick the fruit, or the factory workers in China who pack it. That’s not ‘news’.

Rather, their low wages and precarious working and life conditions are merely ‘factors of production’ that show up as a column of numbers in the balance sheets of the agri-business corporations that call the shots in the globalised food and farming system.

 

And their cheap labour is essential to keeping prices ‘Down! Down!’ and ‘Cheap! Cheap!’ at the supermarket checkouts.

The price of an item like frozen imported berries conceals so much.

As does the label, for that matter. In the wake of these outbreaks, much of the emphasis has been on improved labeling requirements and ensuring stricter safety standards, including more tests of imported produce.

Both would be a step in the right direction.

Meanwhile, claims that this outbreak boosts the ‘clean, green image’ of Australian produce need to be made with a little bit of humility. While our food handling and safety standards are certainly stringent, what about the use of chemicals in production?

The US Environmental Working Group releases an annual list of a ‘Dirty Dozen’ foods, that US Department of Agriculture Pesticide Data Program tests reveal have an unacceptably high level of chemical residues.

Creative Gourmet

These tests have shown that conventionally-produced blueberries – a major crop on the Coffs Coast – have residues of up to 52 chemicals, including 8 carcinogens, 14 neurotoxins and 17 bee toxins. While this data relates to US production, what do we really know about chemical residues on our local produce? What would a ‘Made in Australia’ label tell us about potential risks to human and environmental health?

 

Then there is the whole can of worms that is the free trade agenda, which I’ve written about many times before. In a globalised system that is all about driving down costs and boosting production – and that’s true both here and elsewhere – human and environmental well-being are always going to be secondary priorities.

 

Ultimately this is the conversation that we as a society need to be mature enough to confront. The ‘cheap food’ paradigm is essential to a growth-based consumer economy. Why? Because keeping food cheap means consumers can devote more of their income to servicing debt to banks, and on discretionary purchases.

Tackling that conundrum is going to be really tough, because we all want to have our cake and eat it. Most of us haven’t grown up in an era of sacrifice and hardship. But the chill winds of austerity are blowing ever harder.

My view is that we can enjoy rich and fulfilling lives, while supporting our local producers, and helping them to produce really clean and green food. But we will need to break out of this paradigm of cheap food, and growth-and-production at all costs, to get there

 

advocate, Alternatives, Co-operatives, Democratic food systems, Growth paradigm

Prospects for co-ops in Australia

The Co-operative Revolution – can it happen in Australia?

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday, 24th November, 2012

The National Co-operatives conference, held in Port Macquarie at the end of October, had two goals: to celebrate the successes of co-operatives in Australia, and internationally; and to identify opportunities for the sector to strengthen and expand.

A centrepiece of the conference was the release of new research mapping the extent of the co-operative sector in Australia by the Australia Institute. This research revealed that while most Australians (79%) are members of at least one co-operative or mutual financial institution – are you a member of the NRMA, for example? –  a small minority (16%) were aware of that fact. The report’s authors suggested that this low level of awareness of co-operatives – amongst both their own members, and the public generally – could be due to the fact that, unlike corporations, co-operatives spend relatively little on advertising and promoting themselves.

The take-out message was one of opportunity for the sector. Because co-operatives don’t have large advertising budgets, they deliver good value for money to their members; the report stated that an average mortgage with a building society or credit union, for example, costs around $75,000 less over the life of the loan than if it was taken out with a commercial bank. The challenge, it seems, lies mainly in better communicating the benefits of belonging to a co-operative.

From the Port Macquarie Co-op conference
From the Port Macquarie Co-op conference

Yet more is at stake than just brushing up marketing strategies. In my previous column I described the extraordinary revival of the co-operative movement in the UK, and how this had been built on a long process of internal reflection and a return to the basic core values of the movement.

This process of critical self-reflection is desperately needed in the co-operative movement in Australia. In his 2006 book, The Democracy Principle,  co-operative historian Gary Lewis (who was not present at Port Macquarie, unfortunately), delivered a scathing assessment of the many and continual failures of agricultural co-operatives to build a strong, cohesive, visionary and above all principled co-operative movement in this country.

While Lewis identified a strong confluence of external factors – geographical distance, parochialism and states rights, epochal shifts in global trade, ideological opponents, and a lack of supportive political leadership at the federal level, amongst others – it was the factors internal to individual co-operatives, and the movement as a whole, that have probably done most to stifle its potential. These internal factors include:

  • A marked preference for competition over co-operation – a failure of co-operatives to co-operate with each other
  • A first allegiance to commercial industries, and industry associations, rather than to the co-operative movement
  • A failure to invest in co-operative research and development, and co-operative extension services
  • A failure to invest in co-operative education, and thus a failure to capture the imagination of younger generations
  • A failure to invest in building umbrella institutions, and effective policy advocacy at the federal government level
  • The inability to establish a co-operative bank to finance co-operative ventures – a sine qua non of a vibrant ‘self-help’ movement

Cumulatively and collectively, these failures reflected ‘a triumph of the pragmatists over the idealists’, as well as the pursuit of ‘market share, competitiveness and growth for growth’s sake’, thus resulting in a ‘degrading of co-operative consciousness’ and ultimately a ‘short-sighted and stingy movement’.

In Port Macquarie, the process of critical reflection was beginning, albeit slowly. There was clear recognition of the need for a national council to advocate for the sector’s needs, and a commitment to bring this into existence was the conference’s most concrete outcome.

Achieving such an outcome will be testament to the extent to which the sector can truly ‘co-operate’. But the most exciting proposals came out of the the Youth Summit , where 30 delegates spent 2.5 hours engaged in asset mapping, brainstorming and dotmocracy to agree on a series of strategic initiatives to raise awareness of co-operatives amongst young people, and begin building a co-operative consciousness and sense of a movement. The brainstormed initiatives include a national road-trip, a youth festival, and getting co-operatives on the curricula of university business courses.

Co-operatives have a strong story to tell: Norco’s recent announcement of its $5.7 million profit for 2012, in difficult market conditions, is just one success among many. But the potential of the movement to be a powerful force for decent employment and strong economic development, in turbulent economic times, is yet to be realised in this country.

advocate, Alternatives, Co-operatives, Growth paradigm

Co-operatives – business as unusual

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Not Business as Usual

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on 3rd March 2012

The United Nations General Assembly, at its 65th plenary meeting on 18 December 2009, adopted Resolution 64/136, which proclaimed 2012 as ‘the International Year of Cooperatives’. This was in recognition of the role played by cooperatives in ‘promot[ing] the fullest possible participation in the economic and social development of all people’, as well as their growing emergence as ‘a major factor of economic and social development’ and their ‘contribut[ion] to the eradication of poverty.’

To talk of the ‘growing emergence’ of cooperatives as major economic players is somewhat misleading. Cooperatives as business entities have a history dating back to the 18th century in England and France. The modern ‘cooperative movement’ as a distint entity dates to the formation of the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers in 1844, in Lancashire, England. Building on the ideas of factory owner, social reformer Robert Owen, and Dr William King, the Rochdale pioneers were motivated by the simple philosophy of self-help: they wanted access to quality (i.e. unadulterated) food at a fair price; and so they opened a member-owned food co-op.

IYCLogo_original

Trying to learn the lessons of the failures of many of the earliest cooperatives in the first decades of the 19th century, the Rochdale Pioneers set down a series of principles, which have formed the guiding compass of the cooperative movement ever since. They constitute what’s termed ‘the cooperative difference’; what it is that distinguishes cooperatives from traditional, privately-owned and operated, businesses.

As restated by the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA) in 1995, the key principles are as follows: open and voluntary membership, based on non-discrimination; democratic member control (one member, one vote); member economic participation, and reinvestment of the surplus to develop the cooperative and the cooperative movement; autonomy and independence, based on the value of self-help; education of cooperative members and the general public about the benefits of co-operation; co-operation among co-operatives – strengthen and build the movement; and concern for their communities.

From humble beginnings, the cooperative movement spread rapidly, and was widely embraced by farmers in Australia from the 1880s, beginning with dairy farmers on the NSW South Coast. However, for reasons I’ll look at it in a subsequent column, the cooperative movement in Australia never reached the high ideals or the vision of the Rochdale pioneers to ‘create a “Cooperative Commonwealth”, a democratic, social-economy rising from a decentralised network of consumer cooperatives (shops) linked to primary producer cooperatives through a giant wholesale trading entity creating capital to fund other cooperative enterprises in the services, manufacturing and tertiary sectors, coordinated and governed by a Cooperative Union, a grand “parliament”, of democratic organisations.’*

That said, the cooperative movement now numbers in the hundreds of thousands, and embraces over 1 billion members across the world, with over 100 million employees, more than all the transnational corporations ‘put together’, according to Dame Pauline Green, President of the ICA and currently in Australia promoting the International Year of the Cooperative. She adds that the  300 largest coops are together worth an impressive US$1.6 trillion.

The ICA’s aim is to make cooperatives ‘the fastest growing business model in the world by 2020.’ Encouraging trends, says Dame Pauline, include the 79% switch in deposits to the UK Cooperative Bank from the major high street banks ‘in the last two years’, a rapidly emerging cooperative renewable energy sector, and cooperatively-run schools. Dame Pauline speaks of a ‘cooperative renaissance’, led by ‘community-based cooperatives, people coming together and saying actually we can deal with this, we are going to lose our village shop if this goes on so let’s all fall in together as a cooperative and let’s keep our shop going.’**

What are the prospects for this renaissance in Australia? In a later column I’ll look at a project for a grower-worker-community-owned cooperative based out of a recently-closed Heinz plant in Girgarre, Victoria.

* This quote is from from Gary Lewis’ 2006 book, The Democracy Principle, which I highly recommend for anyone interested in the history of farmer coops in Australia. It’s held in the Coffs Harbour Library.

** The quotes from Dame Pauline Green are from an interview published on The Age’s “The Zone”, on February 27, 2012: http://www.theage.com.au/national/full-transcript-dame-pauline-green-20120226-1twcz.html.

advocate, Alternatives, Ecological constraints, Growth paradigm

The Master Resource

Nicole Foss – Energy:  the ‘Master Resource’

A version of this article appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 6th February 2012

This is the second of a series of three articles outlining the thought of Nicole Foss, who will be speaking at the Cavanbagh Centre in Coffs Harbour on Saturday, February 11, from 12 pm – 2.30 p.m.

“Energy is the master resource. There is no substitute for it. If your total amount of absolute energy is declining, you are going to have to face consequences as a result. Other societies have lived on an energy income, [whereas] our societies have been based on a massive energy inheritance, in the form of fossil fuels. We burn probably 400 years’ worth of the Earth’s primary production every single year. But production from that inheritance is peaking, and you cannot continue to increase the flow-rate from a finite inheritance, [especially] when what we have left is the difficult, expensive-to-produce fraction…We are having to re-invest a significant amount of the energy we produce into the process of finding more energy. So we have less available as a surplus- net energy, or Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI) –  to actually do anything with, and that is going to have major implications…”

This is how Nicole Foss explains ‘Peak Oil’. The key term is ‘flow-rate’, or EROEI. Fifty-to-eighty years ago, when the ‘super-giant’ fields and the ‘gushers’ were first discovered, the EROEI was 100:1. Now it’s reduced by 90%, to 10:1. To maintain our current level of societal complexity, Nicole argues, we probably can’t afford to go much lower than that; yet many of the currently available alternatives have significantly lower ratios.

Ethanol, for example, is estimated to have an EROEI of between 1.4:1 to 2:1; Nicole argues that corn-derived ethanol is in fact less than 1:1. Nuclear power has a slightly better EROEI at around 3:1, but comes with a host of other issues, as the events at Fuksuhima last March demonstrated so graphically. There is an abundance of coal, but if it is substituted en masse for oil and natural gas, then its EROEI will drop sharply; and of course we can hardly forget that burning coal is a major contributor to the warming of the global climate.

The EROEI of renewables like solar panels and wind power is a hotly debated topic, with some suggesting flow-rates of less than 10:1, while others say that the latest thin-film solar technology has an impressive EROEI as high as 40:1.

peak-oil

Nicole however argues that we currently lack the production capacity and the infrastructure to make a large-scale transition to renewable energy sources; and that because of dynamics in the financial system, we are running out of time to mobilise the necessary investments. In particular, she points out that there has been a ‘chronic under-investment in grid capacity’; and that a ‘monumental investment’ would be required to re-tool the grid in order to make it fit for the purpose of channelling distributed energy generated by solar PVs located on private homes and businesses.

The main message is that ‘there are no easy answers’, and we are going to have get used to the idea of ‘doing with less energy; business-as-usual in not going to be option, reality is not going to negotiate with us’. The ‘hydrocarbon age’ will be recorded as a  relatively brief blip over the long-scale of human history.

Energy is a ‘major driver’ of economic activity; , and indeed ‘there’s an almost perfect correlation between energy and economic growth’. It follows that as we move from an era of energy surplus to energy deficit, we are moving from economic expansion to economic contraction. While this will be driven by the logic of the global financial system  in the first instance, the energy constraints will mean that attempts to restart the motor of growth will constantly bump up against physical limits. There will be no ‘de-coupling’ of economic growth from available energy sources. What we’re faced with is ‘not a stasis, but a de-growth scenario’.

In the final article, we will look at the implications of Nicole’s analysis, for individuals and communities.

advocate, Alternatives, Ecological constraints, Growth paradigm

Nicole Foss and the End of Growth

New ideas about ‘progress’

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

 

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

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

Nicole Foss, aka Stoneleight
Nicole Foss, aka Stoneleight

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

Buen Vivir

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

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

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

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

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

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

—-

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

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

advocate, Alternatives, Corporate control of food, Ecological constraints, Growth paradigm

Nature as a “free gift”

Nature as a free gift

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on 7th January 2012

Last time I discussed, in the spirit of Christmas, the tremendous and little-acknowledged extent to which our monetary economy depends for its continued successful functioning on countless daily acts of generosity, especially by carers and parents.

It also depends on the seemingly endless generosity of nature, which is almost always taken for granted. The idea of treating nature as a ‘free gift’ to humanity – our tendency to ‘treat as valueless everything that we have not made ourselves’, as the famous German economist and author of Small is Beautiful, Ernst Friedrich Schumacher, put it – has its immediate roots in the thought of the founding fathers of our modern market economy: Adam Smith, David  Ricardo, John Stuart Mill and Thomas Malthus. 

small is beautiful 1st ed cover m

Arguably it goes back much further than that, to the very founding stories of our Judeo-Christian culture: to a certain interpretation of the Book of Genesis, according to which God created the world, then created and placed humans in it, and gave them dominion over all living and non-living things. This is of course not the only interpretation of the creation story – another is that the role of humans vis-à-vis nature is not as ‘masters’, but as stewards – but it is the conventional and predominant one.

Treating nature as a ‘free gift’ has certain consequences. Most obviously, as Schumacher noted, it means that we ascribe no value (in monetary terms) to resources such as clean air and healthy soils. That’s dangerous, in a culture in which most of us understand something as ‘valuable’ only when there’s a price tag attached to it. It sets up an unhealthy dynamic between private riches, in various forms of property, and public wealth, in the form of resources that everyone, of necessity, shares.

According to the theory which underpins our market economy,  a monetary value can only be affixed to goods and services which are exchanged, because they are said to exist in a condition (either actual or constructed) of ‘scarcity’. Public wealth, on the other hand, is said to exist in abundance, and as such is not susceptible to monetary exchange.

The difficulty is that as private riches increase, public wealth diminishes. This dynamic is endemic to much of modern production, in agriculture as elsewhere. Coal-seam gas mining is a prime example: extraction of the resource brings profits to mining companies, but at the cost of depleting and polluting underground water tables.  

More than two hundred years ago the eighth Earl of Lauderdale, James Maitland, foresaw this destructive tension between an expanding sphere of private riches and a diminishing realm of public wealth. We live daily with manifestations of the ‘Lauderdale paradox’, perhaps the most severe of which is climate change. As the private wealth generated by our market economy has expanded exponentially in the past two centuries, the ‘liveable space’ provided by a stable climate appears to be rapidly diminishing for future generations.

You might think that the obvious answer to this paradox would be to put a price on the most essential aspects of ‘public wealth’; to treat them as ‘scarce’, and subject them to the laws of supply and demand. We pay for waste water to be treated; and from the middle of this year, we will be paying for the emission of carbon into the atmosphere, as the first step towards a full-fledged ‘emissions trading scheme’. But markets always produce winners and losers; and there are real questions as to whether an ETS will be an effective way to tackle climate change, much less a fair one. 

A lot depends on what we understand by ‘scarcity’; and, fundamentally, what our relationship to nature is, or should be. Many farmers, here and round the world, already see themselves as ‘stewards’, not ‘masters’, of the land they inhabit. There is a great deal of wisdom in such a perspective, and it points the way to a truly ‘sustainable’ future.

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

The poverty of farming in the Tweed

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The poverty of farming in the Tweed

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, on 10th December 2011

Last time I introduced Tweed mango grower Mike Yarrow, whom I met recently while in Murwillumbah as part of a team working with the Tweed Council to prepare a strategy for sustainable agriculture.

Mike would like this process to be a success, but he believes that it’s ’30 or 40 years too late’, at least in the case of him and his wife; and other farmers of their vintage (Mike is 67), which is the vast majority of farmers in the region.

Your problem as I see it”, he told us, “is that we, the farmers, have reached the end of our working lives. There are no new young farmers.

The aging of the farming population is an issue that affects the country as a whole. By far the largest category of farmers in Australia is in the 65+ age bracket. In this as in other aspects of food policy, the Federal Government has made the complacent assumption that there is really nothing to worry about, and that what objectively appears to be a demographic crisis will simply correct itself over time. Projections issued after the Australia 2020 Summit in 2008 saw the age of the average Australian farmer peaking in 2011 at just under 55 years, and then gradually declining past 2030.

mangos

Yet no convincing explanation was given as to where the next generation of Australian farmers would come from. On the contrary, all the indications are that the decades-long trend of an aging rural workforce is likely to continue. According to Mike Yarrow, the heart of the issue lies in what he calls ‘the deliberately destroyed profitability’ of farmers.

In Mike’s view, successive Federal Governments wanted ‘to keep the lid on industrial unrest by keeping the gap between a worker’s income and the cost of living apart’. He recalls that when he and his wife arrived in Australia in 1974, petrol was 7 cents a litre, and the minimum wage was $1 an hour. Both have since risen about 20-fold, in line with general cost of living increases. A box of fruit, on the other hand, was $10 in 1974 – and hasn’t gone up much.

You could take issue with Mike; dismiss him as a conspiracy theorist; say that the Government has never intended to screw farmers; that it’s simply a case of the way the markets (and supermarkets) operate. But that’s exactly his point.

By de-regulating rural industries, opening Australia to cheaper imported produce, and generally ‘letting market forces rip’, the market has done what it always does. It’s a competitive system, and it produces winners and losers. In this case, the losers happen to be the majority of Australia’s farmers, and the big winners have been Australia’s two major supermarkets, whose market share has more than doubled since the mid-1970s.

You could argue that in delivering ‘cheap food’ for shoppers, the Australian public as a whole have also ‘won’ in this process.  Yet as five farmers continue to leave the land every day, and very few are stepping into their shoes, the question remains: who is going to produce our food for the rest of this century, and beyond? Agriculture may be less than 3% of Australia’s GDP, but to understand its significance only through an economist’s eyes is unbelievably naïve and short-sighted.

At a deeper level, Mike is quite right. The market system – capitalism – has always depended on ‘cheap food’, in one form or another, to drive its major cycles of expansion. In the Industrial Revolution, it was sugar from the slave plantations of the Caribbean. Last century, it was the mountains of corn made possible by hybrid seeds, agro-chemicals and cheap oil. This century they tell us agricultural productivity will be driven by ‘environmentally-benign’ GM technologies. Meanwhile, food prices are starting to rise, and food riots are becoming more common. Food is too important to take for granted, and so are farmers. We need to be asking some hard questions.

advocate, Alternatives, Coffs Coast, Ecological constraints, Growth paradigm, Local and regional food economies, Self-sufficiency, Small-scale farming, Uncategorized

Local Food Film Festival, 2011

LOCAL FOOD FILM FESTIVAL

This article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 29.10.11.

Last Sunday the Coffs Coast Local Food Film Festival was launched at Bellingen’s Memorial Hall. In previous years the Festival has featured documentaries and short films from overseas, covering topics such as the collapse of global fisheries due to over-fishing, the inequities of the global coffee trade, the multi-functionality and vibrancy of community gardens, and the fundamental role that healthy soil plays in human well-being.

We continue that tradition this year, with two excellent feature documentaries. The first, Vanishing of the Bees, tells the story of the not-so-mysterious reasons for the collapse in bee populations worldwide, and the dangers this poses for food production. The second, The Economics of Happiness, argues that humanity must urgently find ways to transition away from the narrow focus on economic growth, and towards economic systems that place human and environmental well-being at their centre.

A big change this year is that, having successfully run the first-ever local food film competition, we are able to present some excellent short films made by residents of the Coffs Coast, telling local stories about the challenges and joys around growing, preparing and eating food. Entries came from Nambucca, Sawtell, Coffs Harbour and Bellingen.

The winning entry – The Bushman of Tamban – tells the story of Damien Mibornborngnamabarra Calhoun, as he provides the audience with a tour of his property outside of Eungai Creek, showing the abundance of tasty and healthy bush tucker that is seemingly everywhere he turns. Damien laments the widespread loss of knowledge about these sources of food, especially amongst indigenous people, who as a result suffer disproportionately high rates of diseases linked to poor diets.

Sharing this knowledge is very important, both to pass on this culture and keep it alive, and for food security. As Damien says, nearly all of us take our food for granted, but what will we do if the systems and shops that we have come to depend on so heavily should break down, for any reason?

Damien, and the winning film maker, Fil Baker, were at the Festival’s launch on Sunday; and Fil was happy to receive his winner’s cheque of $1000. Another surprise guest at the Festival was ‘the grandfather of Australian cuisine’, celebrity chef and owner of the newly re-launched Number One Wine Bar and Bistro at Circular Quay, Tony Bilson.

Chef Tony Bilson
Chef Tony Bilson

Tony and his wife Amanda, who were holidaying with a friend in the Bellingen area, prepared a special local snack for film goers: steamed garlic flowers with a rich avocado mayonnaise. If you can find these flowers (try the Coffs Growers Market) I thoroughly recommend this way of preparing them: it was absolutely delicious.

Tony was also there to tell the 70-strong audience about the publication of his new book, Insatiable, an ‘autobiographical review of contemporary Australian cuisine’.  Tony says that ‘a lot of people don’t understand contemporary Australian food, so what I’ve done is give it a context and a narrative’. ‘The biggest change’, he says, is that now ‘food doesn’t need geographical references, such as beef bourguignon, or chicken provençal. Now food is much more individual, and people are much more interested in texture.’

In partnership with the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land, the Northern Territory Education Department and the Federal Department of Aboriginal Affairs, Tony recently launched a 10-year horticulture, healthy eating and educational project. By creating communal and market gardens, and combining this with cooking and nutrition classes, the project aims to address health inequalities, improve community self-reliance and create jobs.

Local food, says Tony, is ‘one of the things that give food its true character’; and in his view, the movement for local food is ‘very significant’.