Category Archives: economics

 

Australia is a functioning representative political democracy, but with so many important decisions being made in the economic sphere of social life, most of us are effectively disenfranchised. Key decisions about the allocation of resources, job creation or job destruction, and what form of economic development we want for our country, are too often taken by a small number of wealthy individuals, behind closed doors.

I argue that a system based on the endless and limitless accumulation of private wealth is not only socially and environmentally destructive: it is ultimately self-destructive. We have seen this already in the past 100 years with two major world wars and a seemingly endless succession of minor wars. As inequality reaches stratospheric levels in the first decades of the 21st century, the globalizing capitalist system is once again at breaking strain, and the drums of war are beating loudly yet again.

Happily there are powerful alternatives emerging, in the form of the the peer-to-peer, commons-based economy, the co- operative movement and economic democracy. All of these have natural affinities with the global food sovereignty movement. All are expressions of the solidarity economy, which Brazilian author Euclides Mance describes as being practiced daily by millions of people,

[W]ho work and consume in order to produce for their own and other people’s welfare, rather than for profit. In a solidarity economy what matters is creating satisfactory economic conditions for all people. This means assuring individual and collective freedoms, generating work and income, abolishing all forms of exploitation, domination and exclusion, and protecting ecosystems as well as promoting sustainable development.

In the context of food sovereignty, this is captured by Via Campesina leader Nettie Wiebe, who describes how the experience of working together for a common vision and cause is unifying and powerful:

To stand…and to walk shoulder to shoulder with people who all recognise that what we’re struggling for here are sustainable, nutritious, locally-based, empowering systems of farming, and that that’s key to all of us, that’s a tremendous strength…The hardships that we suffer, and the joys we have, don’t look the same, but…they’re very real in our own context. That kind of solidarity, generated of course by the political necessity of standing in solidarity with each other, has been just a powerful, powerful dynamic internationally. And it has sometimes surprised us in La Via Campesina just how powerful that has been.

Topics in economics: [suffusion-categories child_of=182 title_li=0]

 

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advocate, Local and regional food economies, New market mechanisms

Local Food = Jobs + Health + Sustainability

The Economics of Food Localisation

Nick Rose

This article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 28.5.11

Local food and food sovereignty advocates identify many social and environmental reasons as to why the shift to local food systems is necessary and urgent.

And as I discussed a few weeks ago, this message is increasingly being heard and understood in government and policy circles, if the outcomes of Australia’s first-ever National Sustainable Food Summit are a reliable indicator.

The economic benefits of food localisation are also substantial, but there is little research on this area in Australia. Thankfully, this gap is now being filled by the pioneering work undertaken in the United States by Michael Shuman and his colleagues at BALLE, the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies.

Shuman, who visited Bellingen and Coffs Harbour in 2009 as part of a speaking tour of Australia, recently co-authored a report titled, ‘The 25% Shift: The Benefits of Food Localisation for Northeast Ohio & How to Realize Them.’[1]

Michael Shuman
Michael Shuman

As the title suggests, the centrepiece of the report was an economic impact modelling exercise. The authors examined the flow-on effect of all the economic actors – households, restaurants, grocery stores, wholesalers and distributors, and food manufacturers – of the 16 counties of the Northeast Ohio region (population, 4.14 million) increasing by a quarter the percentage of their food needs with produce sourced in the region itself.

This part of the US is economically depressed, with unemployment in excess of 10%, and major centres like Cleveland losing up to half their population since the 1950s, in the wake of the downscaling of the automobile and other heavy manufacturing industries.

At the same time, the local food movement is flourishing, with hundreds of established community gardens and urban farms in Cleveland and its surrounding towns, and dozens of new ones appearing each year; a ‘diversity of agricultural systems’, including ‘robust and cohesive farming communities’ such as the Amish and the Mennonites; innovative models such as farmer-consumer co-operatives; and ‘a rich history of businesses that support [these] farms through local purchasing and investment’.  The authors highlight many examples which reveal ‘the wholesale, restaurant and institutional buying power for local foods’.

So what did the study find? The conclusions were startling, showing that the 25% shift could:

  • ‘create 27,664 new jobs’, slashing the unemployment rate by an eighth;
  • ‘increase gross regional output by $4.2 billion’ and local and state revenues by $126 million;
  • ‘significantly improve air and water quality, lower the region’s carbon footprint, attract tourists, boost local entrepreneurship, and enhance civic pride’; and
  • ‘increase the food security of hundreds of thousands of people and reduce near-epidemic levels of obesity and type-II diabetes.’

Given its well-deserved reputation as a pioneer in local food, and given the thousands of dedicated individuals and businesses already working in the sector, one could be forgiven for thinking that the 25% shift would happen just by sheer momentum. But the authors highlight several weaknesses and barriers, including extensive poverty, significant numbers of food deserts, infrastructure gaps in wholesale, distribution and processing, a sceptical public, a lack of financial support for existing initiatives, and supply constraints.

Shuman and his colleagues are not fazed by the challenges, and offer 50 recommendations for how they can be overcome. These include innovative financing initiatives such as ‘revolving loan funds, municipal food bonds and a local stock market’; the creation of local business alliances to ‘facilitate peer learning and joint procurement co-operatives’; and the ‘deployment of a network of food-business incubators and ‘food hubs’ to ‘support a new generation of local food entrepreneurs.

 

This excellent study covers much more ground than I have described here; and anyone with a keen interest in this area should spend some time reading it.

[1] The full report is available for download at the following address: http://www.neofoodweb.org/sites/default/files/resources/the25shift-foodlocalizationintheNEOregion.pdf

advocate, Co-operatives, Coffs Coast, Fruit growing

Unity is power

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Bananas in Coffs Harbour – will the Big Banana be all that we have left?

Nick Rose

This article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 2.4.11

Bananas have left their mark on Coffs Harbour. Our local credit union, the BCU, was established by banana growers in 1970, by members of the Banana Growers Federation who, according to the BCU website, ‘found it difficult to get finance through the banks of the day [so] they pooled resources, and formed a credit union, locals helping locals’.

Forty-six years ago, the Big Banana was inaugurated as one of the first of Australia’s ‘Big Things’ attractions. The very first, according to Wikipedia, was the Big Scotsman in Medindie, Adelaide, built in 1963.

Isn’t Wikipedia a goldmine of information? A wonderful modern resource at our fingertips, perfect for finding out all the facts about obscure and not-so-obscure people, phenomena and places. But beware: you can’t always trust everything you read in Wikipedia.

Take its entry for Coffs Harbour, for example. It says that the town ‘is the hub for a thriving banana industry’. The page was last modified on 16 March, 2011.  Whoever the contributors are to that page, they obviously haven’t spent much time – or any time – talking to a local banana grower, or looking at what’s been happening to the industry.

Coffs Harbour was the hub for a thriving banana industry – several decades ago. Today it’s the hub for what some are saying is an industry in terminal decline.  South Boambee grower Ted Knoblock, with over 30 years’ of experience in the local industry, is phasing out the last half dozen acres on his family property, because, despite Cyclone Yasi, ‘the long term future for bananas here is zero now’.

Ted acknowledges the role played by the mega-production in North Queensland in the local industry’s decline, but he also says that the local growers have to shoulder some of the responsibility for their current predicament:

“[The decline is] not all do with North Queensland, it’s to do with the incompetence of growers here who just won’t move on. They won’t use new ideas, and new ways of marketing. They want to be individual, but unity is power – and they won’t accept that, so they get stung every time in the markets.”

Unity is power – the phrase that echoes down the centuries, and is still rich with meaning today. For the alienated youth and workers of the Middle East, it means millions of people in the streets of Cairo, Alexandria, Damascus and Sana’a, bravely staring down the guns and tanks of repressive dictators. For fruit growers on the Coffs Coast, it means organising into cooperatives, agreeing a single marketing strategy and sticking to it, so you can be price makers, not price takers.

That was the role played for 71 years by the Banana Growers Federation. At the time of its winding up, seven years ago almost to the day, long-time Woolgoolga grower Jim Limbert said that ‘without the BGF, the banana industry in NSW could not have prospered…The BGF was essential for the establishment of the industry in this state’.

There was no more powerful symbol of the decline of the banana industry than the decision by the-then remaining 428 members of the cooperative – down from 30,000 in the early 1970s – to wind it up in 2004. As to what’s replaced it, Ted Knoblock says that:

“We’ve got a marketing group at the moment – but one’s dropped out, and a couple don’t have any bananas. We’re not big enough to have any effect… If Yasi hadn’t come along, the industry would have been dead by the end of March this year. It’s that bad, nobody can afford to put fertiliser on ‘em…We used to put up to 800 cartons a week out of here – now we’re struggling to do 80…its uneconomic to irrigate them, with the high price of power.”

Can anything rescue an iconic industry that appears to be one step away from the grave? Ted reckons that a fair price for the grower might – if it was achievable:

“You’d need $16 a carton to make it viable, with the consumer paying $2.50 a kilo. Which is no different to what they’re paying now. But somebody in the middle’s getting a lot of it.”

Ecological constraints, Growth paradigm

Roger Baker : Is Capitalism in Deep Trouble?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roger Baker : Is Capitalism in Deep Trouble?.

advocate, Coffs Coast, Cost-price squeeze, Fruit growing, Small-scale farming

The decline of the big banana – Part 3

The story of Bill O’Donnell – Part 3

Nick Rose

This article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 5.3.11

Bill O'Donnell's property today, near Bundagen, Coffs Coast, NSW
Bill O’Donnell’s property today, near Bundagen, Coffs Coast, NSW

In the last of a three-part interview, veteran Coffs Coast fruit grower Bill O’Donnell shares his reflections on the future of agriculture in the region

Bill has spent a lifetime growing fruit in the region – first bananas, then tropical peaches and nectarines – and he has seen the changes ringing over the last 50 years. Unfortunately, they’ve all tended to be in one direction, and it hasn’t been favourable to the growers of the Coffs Coast.

We’ve already talked about the deep crisis in the local banana industry. The massive Queensland industry and the uniformity in appearance demanded by the supermarkets quite simply means that – in current market conditions, cyclones aside – it’s uneconomic to grow bananas on a commercial basis in our region. The industry is literally in its death throes.

The relatively high cost of labour is a major impediment to viability. As Bill says, bananas are physical work in this region, where the plantations are on slopes, compared to the heavily mechanised Queensland industry.

“When I was involved”, he says, “we could afford to hire workers and pay ourselves a fair wage, because we were getting a decent price from the wholesalers. These days you just could not afford to do that, because the price hasn’t gone up while the costs have. I heard the other week that they were getting $8 a box. I can remember in the mid-1950s we were getting 8 pound a box – that’s $16, and the wages were 5 pound a week. You only needed one case of bananas a week to pay the wages. And in those days we might do 100 cases of bananas a week.”

How times have changed.

Cost-price squeezes also turned Bill away from the central markets with his tropical peaches and nectarines.

He believes that if they wanted, the supermarkets could set a minimum floor price at a level which would keep fruit growing viable. ‘But they won’t’, Bill says. ‘They’re chasing the farmers out of it. They really are.’

Another serious problem in Bill’s view is the death of publicly-funded experimental farms, which used to import and test the new varieties, and share the knowledge with the growers. Now it’s all privatized, says Bill, with the supermarkets buying up all the plant variety rights and licensing them to selected growers only.

‘It’s a nasty one, that’, says Bill, ‘I don’t care what anybody says. Those PVR rights, that’s where they squeeze the little bloke out, because you just cannot get the raw material. They will say, we don’t buy that variety.’

Increasing costs, low farm-gate prices, low bargaining power, lack of public investment – these are all serious challenges for agriculture in the region – and the country as a whole.

Blueberries are doing alright, says Bill, ‘for now’; but he puts at least some of that down to the cheap labour that a genuine family farm operation enables. ‘But you can see the writing on the wall with them’, he adds, because you can grow them from Atherton right down – so there’ll be an oversupply. They’re having prosperous days at present, but it’ll be like the bananas in ’59.’

The result is that agriculture is an aging industry, ‘and that’s a real problem for the country’, says Bill. The only real key to it I think is the local markets. You’ve got to be able to sell locally, because the grower has to be able to get a retail price…the killer for the retailer is the rent. In the old days, shopfront rents were next to nothing for greengrocers. ..Half the cost of fruit and vegetables I think is the rent that these people have got to pay. It’s just – well I think it’s criminal.’

Farmers themselves though can be their own worst enemies – in their refusal to cooperate with each other.

‘ I’ve seen them’, says Bill, ‘they had the banana growers’ federation for years – and that was one of the most successful co-ops that ever was. It was fantastic. But it took one bloke to ruin it… He worked out that he could make a dollar a case more if he took it to Adelaide – money was all it was. The answer to everything’s money, somewhere along the line. That’s how things can fall apart.’

If nothing changes, in Bill’s view, Australia will ultimately ‘depend on imported produce.’

advocate, Corporate control of food, Cost-price squeeze, Demographic crisis, Small-scale farming

The real costs of cheap food

Food Inc - lifting the lid on the industrialised food system
Food Inc – lifting the lid on the industrialised food system

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, Cost-price squeeze, Fruit growing, Small-scale farming, Supermarket Duopoly

The decline of the big banana – Part 2

The story of Bill O’Donnell – Part 2

Nick Rose

This article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 5.2.11

In the second of a three-part interview, veteran Coffs Coast fruit grower Bill O’Donnell talks about his peach and nectarine orchards, and how his lifeline to farm-based economic viability was ultimately ended by the inflexible application of regulations.

Bill left banana growing in the early 1970s and took himself off travelling for some years. He also kept up his passion for fun-running, and even the occasional marathon – hence the nick-name, ‘Runner Bill’.

On his return to Australia and the Coffs Coast, he took up professional book-making, which he continued, fairly successfully, for the next two decades. Bill wanted to go back to fruit growing, because, as he puts it, he had ‘too much physical energy’.

He purchased a badly run-down 200-acre dairy property a few kilometres from the Bundagen multiple occupancy community. He spent the first few years cleaning up the farm, and then he had to make it pay, because the book-making started to go bad – ‘the crowds weren’t going to the races any more’.

Bill tells how he made ‘a couple of false starts’:

“I put in an orchard of oranges, which was alright, insofar as you could grow lovely oranges, but you couldn’t sell them. I had the first lychee plantation in the district, but that got wrecked in a gale – so I gave that away, and anyway I had the wrong variety.”

It was the local rep from the Golden Dawn agent who then advised him to go for tropical peaches and nectarines, early fruiting varieties. Bill put in 2800 trees – 1800 peaches and 1000 nectarines – in 1986, and they began fruiting two years later. But he was caught unawares by a ‘real stinker of a problem – the [fruit] bats’:

“.. I could sit at my place, and it was like watching the Luftwaffe coming over in the Battle of Britain. The first three or four would come, and then three or four hundred, and… then 30 and 40 thousand. You couldn’t sleep at night. And they broke the trees down… they’d just get so full of peaches and nectarines, and they were that heavy, and [the bats would] just break the branches down. It was just a complete disaster – I spent maybe $70-$80,000, looking to get a return, and I just lost it all. Never got a quid… There were peach seeds on the highway, from the Sawtell turnoff to the Bellingen turnoff – it was awful, a horrible experience.”

Not a man to be deterred, Bill committed himself much more deeply to his new orchard:

“So I had to net them. We had to trim all the broken branches, and it cost $90,000 to net the place. This was before I got any return. It took me a long while to get over that – that was when we were paying 16-17% interest. And I had to do it in one hit, if I wanted to survive, I had to protect the trees. It was crippling. But we overcame it…”

The trees recovered quickly, and Bill harvested a good crop the next year, which he sold through Paul Bayliss at Golden Dawn, of whom he speaks very highly. When Paul left, Bill sent his fruit to Melbourne through a ‘terrific little Italian bloke’ that Paul recommended.

And for a while all was good – but then Bill found that while his costs – wages, freight, packing – were rising, the price wasn’t. Why? “Because the supermarkets [have] conditioned the people to pay bugger all for their fruit.”

So at that point the ‘only solution for me was to go local, with the roadside stall in Bonville [8 weeks a year], and the Sunday markets, and that kept the show going.’ Bill’s roadside stall out of the Bonville caravan park was highly successful, and extremely popular.

The stall lasted 14 years, but ultimately its success was its undoing, as other fruit vendors complained to the council that Bill’s stall was a ‘traffic hazard’. The first council officer to investigate the complaints took a reasonably relaxed approach, but in the last couple of years another officer took a very hard-line approach, and Bill was forced to close the stall.

And the trees? All bulldozed, and the netting’s gone too.

Bill O'Donnell in the field where his peach and nectarine orchard used to be
Bill O’Donnell in the field where his peach and nectarine orchard used to be
advocate, Coffs Coast, Nut growing, Small-scale farming

Pioneers of the pecan industry in Australia

Reaping the Golden Harvest – Rosalie and Mark Nowland, Summerland Pecans, Nana Glen

Nick Rose

The article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 4.12.10

You don’t need to have been brought up on the land to be a successful farmer – or pecan grower. In the case of Rosalie and her son Mark Nowland, you start off as a nurse and a photographer.

Now, with nearly twenty years’ behind them in the pecan industry, they are two of the most experienced growers in Australia, and amongst the first to secure organic certification.

Asked why they went into pecans back in the early 1990s, Mark says it was a methodical cost-benefit analysis of the options that were available to them at that time:

I checked off different things that would work for us…And pecans were the only things that had every box ticked, basically.”

The key criteria, Mark says, include the soil and the climate – particularly the cold winters, as pecans need a certain chill factor in order to flower – as well as the ready availability of irrigation. As an infant industry, pecans also made sense commercially, as compared to macadamias which Mark says had been over-planted, leading to ‘turmoil’ in the industry.

Mark and Rosalie in their processing shed
Mark and Rosalie in their processing shed

Mark sees nuts trees as in many ways a more sustainable agricultural product than crops which require frequent cultivation.

“Trees”, he asks, “how much better can you get for your paddocks?”

And the beauty of the pecan – a tree that lives for 200 years, and is productive for 100-150 – is that while its productivity increases over time, the work it requires reduces.

So “the older we get, the less work we have to do”, Mark says. “Once the trees are a certain size there’s not much real pruning you have to worry about. It’s just a matter of feeding and watering them, and shaking them”, he adds.

Mark and Rosalie planted their first trees in 1991, and now have an orchard of 685 trees on 6 hectares of their 34 hectare property in Nana Glen. Their first ‘proper harvest’ was in 2004, which was about 3 tonnes, and this past year, with 9 tonnes, was their biggest so far. However the harvests have only just started their upwards curve, as Mark explains:

With 9 tonne, that’s only 10-12 kilos per tree. Generally they talk about 40 kilos per tree, when they’re fully mature…So we’re looking at working up to around 35 tonne eventually.”

There is, as with any crop, a sustainable level of production. It is possible to push the tree too hard, and there are risks in doing so. Ideally, according to Mark, you should be aiming for about 60-70% productivity.

“Otherwise”, he says, “you can really affect the physiology of the tree, and it can go into [a period] of shock, which it can take several years to recover from. During that time, it won’t bear a nut”, he adds.

So it’s better to work within the reasonable limits of nature by not aiming for excessively high yields.

Rosalie and Mark have seen their returns from their Coffs growers’ market stall rise over the years, especially when they started selling bagged kernels, rather than whole nuts. This is definitely what customers prefer. “We’ve got some regular customers who get upset when we finish the harvest”, says Rosalie.

Rosalie on the ride-on
Rosalie on the ride-on

Their main market, however, is overseas – exporting to China. They sent 7 tonnes there this year, the third year they’ve been exporting, at a price of $3.60 per kilo for whole nuts. It’s this bulk order which allows them to pay the running costs of the farm, and make some additional capital investments in machinery.

Next year, with the premium that organic certification attracts, they anticipate that this per kilo price will increase by 50-80%.

Australia is still a very small player in the growing global pecan industry. The biggest producers are America  – the native home of the pecan is the Californian floodplains – Brazil, and China itself, which has devoted massive acreages to pecan orchards. When these start producing to their full extent, Mark and Rosalie will have to look to other markets – they also sell to Pakistan, Korea, Singapore and America – as well as those closer to home.

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

Environmental Sustainability and Social Justice Requires Democratic Food Systems

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

Hand plant

Some excerpts:

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

…

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

…

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

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

…

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

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

Political Reflection Vol 3 No 4

advocate, Bellinger Valley, Collaborative cultures and networks, Community gardening, Food sovereignty, Land sharing, Small-scale farming

Sharing our land

Landsharing Australia

 Nick Rose

First published in the Coffs Advocate, 9.10.10

The soon-to-be launched Landshare Australia (www.landshareaustralia.com.au) is the work of ABC’s Garden Guru Phil Dudman and a partner, themselves inspired by the rapidly growing landshare movement in the UK.

Launched barely 18 months ago through the popular UK TV series River Cottage, Landshare UK now has over 55,000 growers, sharers (i.e., landowners) and helpers registered on its site, and many thousands more joining each month.

What the Landshare movement aims to do, according to the site, is “bring together people who have a passion for home-grown food, connecting those who have land to share with those who need land for cultivating food.” As Phil says, there’s been a tremendous loss of knowledge around food growing from the time when everyone either had their own veggie patch or knew someone who did. Together with closely-related movements like community gardening, Landshare is about recovering that knowledge and unleashing the spreading passion for food growing.

Landshare Australia is already generating great interest, even though the website will not be live till later in October. “We’re getting emails every day, especially from people with land to share”, said Phil. “That surprised us, because we thought that might be the most difficult part of it.”

The philosophy of Landshare, Phil says, is about sharing, i.e. making land freely available to individuals, families and community groups who want to grow food. In particular, Landshare Australia will be targeting church and other groups, encouraging them to embrace the challenge of making more of Australia’s idle agricultural land productive.

The focus on making land freely available doesn’t of preclude commercial leasing arrangements, although that is not something in which Landshare Australia will become involved. One such local arrangement which has been in place for 18 months is the leasing of five acres of Tom Hackett’s Kiwi Down Under farm at Bonville, by the specialist training and employment provider CHESS for its ‘Innovation Farm’. The five-year lease is a deal that “works very well for both parties”, said Tom.

The website will contain forums, blogs, tips and information about the Landshare movement. Importantly, it will also provide guidance for agreements between growers and landowners, setting out the rights of both sides. For example, says Phil, the guidance states that the grower must be working the land well and caring for it properly. It also recommends the inclusion of exit clauses, if the arrangement is not working out for either party.

There are a number of examples of non-commercial landsharing initiatives already underway in the Coffs region. Perhaps the best known is the North Bank Road Community Garden in Bellingen. Started by a small handful of individuals about two years ago on land owned by John Lavis and Hilary Weston-Webb, this garden now has around thirty regular gardeners and attracts large crowds to its local music and pizza oven evenings.

North Bank Rd Community Garden, Bellingen
North Bank Rd Community Garden, Bellingen

Crucial to the garden’s success, according to John and Hilary, has been the strong horticultural knowledge and expertise of the core group. John and Hilary have long wanted to share their land with local people to grow food, and after a number of unsuccessful attempts they appear to have got it right this time. “It’s not hurting us, it’s not hurting the land – they’ve enhanced the land”, said John.

His advice to any landowners thinking of sharing some of their acres or even their backyards to enthusiastic people wanting to grow food? “Just go for it!”, he grins. “It’s good for the young people, and for the little kids – why go to a supermarket and spend dollars, when you can grow things far better, and you know what you’ve done to them? And what you can’t eat, give it away, or sell it”, he adds.

advocate, Bellinger Valley, Fair Food systems, Food sovereignty, Local and regional food economies, New market mechanisms, Small-scale farming

Discovering the secret of being able to live your passion

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Small-scale farming in Thora, near Bellingen

Nick Rose

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 25.9.10

It’s no secret that small farmers are an endangered species. The logic of food production worldwide is ‘get big or get out’. Estimates suggest that Australia alone has lost as many as 50,000 farmers in the past 35 years.

 

The so-called ‘cost-price squeeze’ bears a lot of the blame. The cost of farm inputs, freight and packaging costs keep rising – particularly when the price of oil shoots up – while the farmgate price has barely moved for many items since 1980.

How do most farmers survive? Through off-farm income.

So it’s both refreshing and remarkable to discover small-scale growers who are now managing to support themselves entirely through the sales of their farm produce. This is Kathy Taylor and Bob Willis, of the Thora Valley, about 20 kms from Bellingen.

Their secret? Biodynamic methodologies, a willingness to experiment, and finding a reliable market in Melbourne through the Demeter Biodynamic Marketing Company.

Kathy and Bob have approximately one acre under intensive cultivation, with another acre used for mulch: the ‘agricultural silver’, as Kathy calls it.

Like many growers in the region, their principal commercial crop is garlic, a mix of Italian and Russian varieties. In the past year they’ve experimented with two other crops, both of which have been very successful.

The first was broccoli, a sprouting variety that produces side shoots after the initial head has been taken off. Kathy and Bob sowed 800 seedlings in March, and began harvesting in May. They sold the big heads locally, and since then have been sending the shoots – the ‘tender tops’ – down to the Demeter wholesalers in Melbourne, at a wholesale price of about $10 a kilo.

Why were the shoots not sold locally? Two main reasons. The first is the absurdities of the freight system, the logic of which is centralisation in the big wholesale markets: it costs Thora growers $8.80 to send one five-kilo box to Coffs Harbour, while they can send up to 11 boxes to Melbourne for a standard charge of $18.50. “It’s quite difficult to go against [the logic of the system] and do something different”, says Kathy.

The second reason is simply that Kathy and Bob’s tendertops would be perceived as competing against standard broccoli heads, whose price was much lower. But as Bob points out, normal broccoli production – whether conventional or organic – is highly energy intensive:

“They use a tractor to cultivate…a tractor to plant, and to weed [and] to mulch-mow…And to help them harvest…And the output of that is a head which is anywhere between 200 gms to 400 gms. And then it all starts again…”

Independently of fuel usage, there’s a lot of waste in such a system, because anywhere from 25-40% of the broccoli sold in retail outlets is the stalk, which most people just throw away. With tendertops, everything is used.

The system is labour-intensive rather than energy-intensive, as Bob explains,

“We cultivate with a tractor, but then we plant by hand, we weed by hand, we harvest by hand, and once the main head’s gone, we can get the secondary side-shoots. And that allows us to have these plants in here [for a whole season] – with one use of the tractor, and not multiple uses, and we get five-six kilos off a single plant.”

Their other main crop this year was tumeric, which they also sent to Melbourne, again at around $10 a kilo. Tumeric is a highly nutritious root that can be eaten fresh and added to almost any savoury dish. Unlike garlic, it can be left in the ground until the grower is ready to sell it.

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Ideally, Kathy and Bob would like to sell locally, and they have began experimenting with veggie boxes on a small scale, collaborating with a few other local growers, and with a small buyers’ group. They want to expand this in the coming years.

“I really think that in the future, the local sustainable seasonal veggies has got to be the way to go”, says Bob.