Category Archives: Fair Food Week

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Fair Food Week 2014

Fair Food Week 2014

This article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on September 27th, 20214

From October 10-19 this year, thousands of Australians all over the country will be celebrating the second Fair Food Week.

Coordinated by the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA), these days are dedicated to celebrating the work of women and men in country and towns who are striving to create a fairer food system for their families and communities.

Fair Food Week is also about raising awareness amongst the broader public on the many critical issues our food and farming system is facing, and what we can do to tackle those issues.

This year, the organising team at AFSA have created four central themes to provide a focus for the dozens of events already scheduled. The four themes are:

  • Beyond The Trolley – Fair Food shopping and eating. Events to raise awareness about the extreme concentration in the Australian supermarket sector, and promote locally-owned food businesses as alternative shopping options,
  • Support your local community Fair Food projects and groups. The now defunct National Food Plan created for the first time a $1.5 mn fund to support community food projects, like community gardens, farmers markets and community kitchens. 364 groups applied to this fund, but it was axed in February this year by the new Federal government. AFSA is encouraging communities to raise funds for local food projects,
  • Grow our Urban Agriculture. Having witnessed a small part of the dynamic global movement for urban agriculture over the past couple of months during my Churchill Fellowship, I am especially keen to see this movement flourish in Australia. I have spent time with local governments in Chicago, Milwaukee, Toronto, Rosario and Neuquen, and can see what a key role supportive policy frameworks – and resourcing – plays in the expansion of urban agriculture. So this is a great focus for Fair Food Week,
  • Support Gas-Field Free Communities. I was delighted to see that that Lock the Gate Alliance, which unites farmers and rural communities with urban environmentalists, is now a major sponsor of Fair Food Week 2014. As many in the Coffs Coast and Northern Rivers regions of NSW know all too well, the rush for unconventional mining – fracking – poses serious environmental and social risks that are yet to be properly evaluated. Which is more important – a new mining boom that may last a few years and enrich a handful of mining executives even further, or safeguarding our best farmland for food security for future generations?

 

Fair Food Week pic

As in 2013, the inaugural year of Fair Food Week, there is a wide diversity of events already scheduled. These include visits to farms and community gardens, long table dinners on farms, farm and garden workshops, Fair Food forums, community cooking events, local business open days, celebrations of ethnic and regional food cultures, permabliztes, soup kitchens and more.

One event I am especially pleased to see is the Food Security Conference in Sydney, to be held on October 13-14. Organised by the newly-formed Right to Food Coalition, whose members include the Sydney Food Fairness Alliance, Foodbank NSW, Red Cross, SecondBite, Blacktown City Council, NSW Department of Health (South Western Sydney District), Liverpool City Council and others, the centrepiece of this conference is the presentation by Joel Berg, Executive Director of the New York Coalition Against Hunger. Joel will be in Australia for a series of events during October. His focus is to raise awarness of the structural reasons why hunger persists in affluent countries like Australia and the United States, and why it is unacceptable to continue tolerating this reality.

Anyone can organise a Fair Food Week event! For more information and to see details of all events currently listed, visit www.fairfoodweek.org.au

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

Crowd-funding for farming

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Synchronicity Farm Stall, Coffs Harbour Harbourside Market
Synchronicity Farm Stall, Coffs Harbour Harbourside Market

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

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

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

Fair Food Week arrives in Australia

Australia’s first Fair Food Week

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

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

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

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

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

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

WTF image

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

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

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

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

WTF image 2

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

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

ffw-2013-logo

 

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

 

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