Category Archives: Local and regional food economies

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

Food Tank interviews Dr Nick Rose

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

agroecology, Corporate control of food, economics, fair food movement, Local and regional food economies, Supermarket Duopoly, Urban agriculture

”In the mainstream Australian food system, it’s the supermarkets that hold most of the power”

Republished from Gourmet Traveller – original article at Dr Nick Rose of Sustain: The Australian Food Network on our broken food systems | Gourmet Traveller

I have been directly inspired by the visionary work of Dr Nick Rose, as he motivates all of us to celebrate and raise awareness of Australia’s urban agricultural movement. Nick is an excellent communicator, with an innate ability to empower those around him.

Together with South Eveleigh’s Aboriginal educator and environmentalist Clarence Slockee (Cudgenburra/Bundjalung), I can’t wait to help Nick spread his important message about food sovereignty within South Eveleigh and beyond.– Kylie Kwong

Dr Nick Rose on food sovereignty and fair food systems

Food sovereignty can be a tricky concept to wrap your head around. But it’s important that we do, says Dr Nick Rose, executive director of Sustain: The Australian Food Network. At its most simple, he says, food sovereignty is about creating a fair food system.”The idea of a fair food system is one that’s fair for farmers – they get a fair price for their produce. It’s fair for consumers – they get affordable food. And it’s fair for the land – it’s ethical and involves caring for country.”For too long, Dr Rose explains, Australians have taken their food system for granted, without thinking about where their food comes from, who grows it, or the impact it has on the land.

“We were left a legacy. When we came here as British colonisers, there was a food bowl here. Bruce Pascoe talks about this; there was a managed landscape that Indigenous people had been caring for, for tens of thousands of years. We’ve been here 240 years and we have, in many ways, devastated large swathes of the country.”

Nick Rose

His mission, through Sustain, is to design and build a fair food system and work alongside communities, councils and organisations to become empowered food citizens.

“We work with local and state governments to say we need to consciously shape our food and farming system and not just leave the dominant actors – the supermarkets in particular – to make all these decisions. They are making them with obvious interests at stake, responding to their shareholders. Those interests don’t correspond to the health and welfare of Australians, nor to the long-term sustainability of the Australian country … That’s what food sovereignty is all about. It’s about feeding people well and caring for the country.”

And why is that so important? Because food and diet is at the heart of good health, for a start. “The biggest burden on population health is diet now; it’s overtaken tobacco and alcohol as the biggest risk factor for chronic disease and early death. That’s a really, really big challenge,” says Dr Rose.

Food sovereignty is also critical in the fight against food poverty and ensuring future food security.

“The issues facing farmers have been decades in the making. We talk about farmers being price takers instead of price makers, which means that in the mainstream Australian food system, it’s the supermarkets that hold most of the power in terms of price setting and contractual arrangements.”

It’s a problem for the country in terms of food security because if all the farmers are getting older and all the young people aren’t farming, who’s going to grow our food in the future?”

And then, of course, there is climate change, which is making farming less viable and accelerating unsustainable forms of land management.

“These are really big, entrenched problems in the way that we relate to the country and manage the land. There’s a really big shift that has to happen, not just with Australian farmers but with the whole country. We need to understand this continent in a more profound way and engage in a process of dialogue and truth-telling with our First Nations peoples and understand what it is to live here and live here sustainably. Managing the land and caring for country and creating habitat for all the diverse creatures that make our life possible. Agriculture is such a big driver of land use change in Australia so this really comes back to the food system.”

But while the challenges are big, they are not insurmountable, says Dr Rose. And there is every reason to feel hopeful and optimistic about the future.

“The work I have been involved in over the past decade, I have seen a lot of things change. A lot more people have been involved – at a policy level, a lot of local governments are now getting involved. COVID was a bit of a wake-up call for a lot of people; a moment of rupture which is going to push things forward positively.”

It may be the case that the darkest hour is before the dawn. There are plenty of reasons to feel depressed and pessimistic but I choose to believe there is a lot of energy and momentum for change. The future is unwritten, it’s up to us to write it.”

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

COVID-19 and the Crisis of the Commodified Food System

Republished from www.sustain.org.au

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Communique by IPES-Food, April 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

economics, Food policy, Local and regional food economies

Ontario passes Local Food Act

When will Australia have a Local Food Act? 

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday 14th June, 2014

At the beginning of November 2013, the Parliament of Canada’s most populous province, Ontario, passed the Local Food Act 2013.

This is a highly significant measure, because it represents one of the first instances of a sub-national legislature not only recognizing, but institutionalizing and resourcing, the growing local food movement.

The local food movement has been pilloried by many and dismissed by others as as little more than a ‘feel-good niche sector’, catering to the demands of the ‘worried well’ for ethical produce, but with little prospect either of feeding the hungry masses or of improving the bottom line of producers.

I have news for those critics. Local food is here to stay; and its significance and impact will only grow in the coming years.

Why? Let’s start with the preamble of the Canadian legislation:

“Ontario has robust and resilient local food systems: a highly productive agricultural land base, a favourable climate and water supply, efficient transportation and distribution systems, and knowledgeable, innovative farmers, food processors, distributors, retailers and restaurateurs. These resources help ensure that local food systems thrive throughout the province, allowing the people of Ontario to know where their food comes from and connect with those who produce it.

Campaign postcard for the Local Food Act
Campaign postcard for the Local Food Act

“The variety of food produced, harvested and made in Ontario reflects the diversity of its people. This variety is something to be celebrated, cherished and supported. Strong local and regional food systems deliver economic benefits and build strong communities.

 

“Maintaining and growing Ontario’s local and regional food systems requires a shared vision and a collaborative approach that includes working with public sector organizations. The process of setting goals and targets to which the people of Ontario can aspire provides an opportunity to work with industry, the public sector and other partners to promote local food and to develop a shared understanding of what needs to be done to support local food in Ontario.”

The arguments for supporting local food are multi-dimensional. Certainly the economic case is emphasized, and rightly so, because the benefits of the type of economic development fostered by local food systems are widely spread amongst all the players along the food value chain. And if those businesses are locally owned, as they often are, then the economic multiplier effect is strongly enhanced.

But in addition to the economic case, local food systems promote healthier eating habits (think school kitchen gardens), can improve access to good food for low income and vulnerable populations, and can encourage producers to transition to more sustainable and ethical practices of land-use management and animal husbandry.

Conscious of this multi-dimensionality, the Local Food Act mandates the Minister of Agriculture and Food to set goals or targets with respect to:

  • Improving food literacy in respect of local food
  • Encouraging increased use of local food by public sector organisations, and
  • Increasing access to local food

The reference to public sector purchasing is of particular importance, as the adoption of procurement goals and targets has been critical in nurturing infant local food enterprises, such as Local Food Hubs. The Local Food Act specifies that the goals and targets set by the Minister may be ‘general or particular in [their] application’. This means that the Minister can set targets for particular businesses or public sector organisations (including hospitals and aged-care facilities); for particular geographical areas; and for particular food groups.

The Act also has a social justice intention: it creates a ‘community food program tax credit’ for farmers who donate produce to food banks and similar organisations, of up to 25% of the ‘fair market value’ of that produce.

In addition to the Local Food Act, the Ontarian Government has also created a Local Food Fund, worth up to C$30 million over three years to support innovative projects that enhance the purchase of local food and contribute to economic development. The Fund’s outcomes are:

  • Increased awareness of and celebration of local food
  • Influencing Ontarians to demand and choose more local food
  • Ensuring local food is identifiable and widely available
  • Helping Ontario’s agri-food sector deliver products that consumers want
  • Strengthening local food economies from farm to fork

No Australian state has done anything similar, though that may well change in the next few years. However, at the local level, Coffs Harbour Council has given a high prominence to localization and food in its recently adopted Economic Strategy 2014-2017, and we’ll look at that next time.

* * * * *

If you support the demand for a Local Food Act in Australia, sign the petition launched by the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance last year. While this was in the context of the Victorian state election, the principles apply across the whole country: https://www.change.org/p/all-candidates-and-parties-for-the-2014-victoria-election-commit-to-a-local-food-act-and-local-food-fund-for-victoria 

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

Agricultural Democracy

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

COMMUNITY FUNDED FOOD

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tammi Pigs

 

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

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

Crowd-funding in NSW 

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

As I’ve written in this column several times previously, Australia is facing an agrarian demographic crisis. According to ABS data, the percentage of Australian farmers under 35 had fallen to 13% by 2011, from 28% thirty years previously. A quarter of all our farmers are over 65. We are quite literally relying on a workforce of pensioners to do a lot of the heavy 2014-01-12 16.59.45lifting in feeding us. This is both grossly unfair and dangerously non-resilient.

 

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

 

2014-03-14 08.55.43

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

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

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

2014-03-14 13.05.02

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

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

advocate, 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.

Coffs Coast, Corporate control of food, Cost-price squeeze, Fruit growing, Local and regional food economies, Retailers, Small-scale farming, Supermarket Duopoly

A long road to Paradise


In August last year Master Grocers Australia (MGA), a national employer organisation which represents independent grocery supermarkets and liquor retailers in Australia, released its ‘Let’s Have Fair Competition!’ report, calling for regulatory reform to redress alleged abuse of market power and anti-competitive practices that MGA claimed Australia’s supermarket duopoly – Coles and Woolworths – were engaging in.

The Executive Summary of that August 2012 report claims that the duopoly, through tactics such as ‘price discrimination, shopper docket schemes, store saturation and over-sized store strategies [building huge supermarkets in small local markets in order to drive out existing competition and prevent new market entrants]’, is ‘crowding out all competition [and] rapidly reducing the choices in shopping format, brands, locally-derived products and service levels’.

Faced with inaction on the part of policymakers, the MGA released in August this year a follow-up report, ‘Finding a Solution’, which makes a number of specific proposals for reforms to the Competition and Consumer Act to achieve the MGA’s goal of a fairer grocery retail market in Australia.

These are issues that Gary Gardiner, co-proprietor of Paradise Fruits, a small fruit, veg and grocery shop in Sawtell, is all too familiar with.

DSC_0127

 

Gary’s family has been living and farming on small acreages in the Boambee / Coffs Harbour region since about 1890, first in middle Boambee, then to Stadium Drive, and finally on Sawtell Road.

“The original farm was developed as a diverse farm, with dairy and small cropping. In the early 1900s my family did a run to Bellingen and Nambucca to supply the local shops and markets”, Gary told me.

A century ago, family farming on a small property in this region offered a viable livelihood.

“In the older days, 10 acres was about what one family could manage on their own. Any bigger than that, you needed multiple families and / or outside workers”, Gary said.

“Most farmers grew a commercial crop – usually bananas – supplemented with other, smaller, cash crops, like tomatoes, cucumbers or zucchinis. The income from the smaller crops was what they lived on, and what they produced commercially just about covered the costs of running the farm itself”, Gary said.

There was also a strong ethic of self-sufficiency. “Back in those days, most of the food the family ate was produced on the farm as well. That was certainly true during the Depression era – and even we still did that up to the 1970s”, Gary added.

Gary Gardiner
Gary Gardiner

As the food supply chain in Australia became steadily more centralised over the decades, the viability of the small-scale, diversified family farming model was increasingly threatened, as Gary explained:

“About 24 years ago, we were still growing bananas and small crops, and around that time we set up ripening rooms so we could supply the two Coffs Harbour independent supermarkets, Cox’s, and Tucker Bag. But they could only take 10% of our production. But the profit we got from that 10% equalled the returns we got from the other 90% going through the mainstream marketing system.”

“That’s how much we were all getting ripped off”, Gary remembers. “So we [aimed to] take out the middle men. And when you do that, you have a chance of actually making a living [as a grower].”

“It’s basically the difference between being a price-maker and a price-taker. If you were selling to the [central] markets, new cartons had to be used, so you had to buy those – $1.50 each. Freight – $1 per carton to get the product to market. Agent’s commission – $3 a carton back then. We were only getting $10 a carton.”

“And during the summer, when there was a glut, we got nothing back at all. You’d be doing all of that work, carrying all those costs, and you’d actually be paying to send your product to market, and you’d get nothing for it.”

Cox’s and Tucker Bag closed their doors not long after Woolworths opened, in the late 1980s. We’ll hear Gary’s thoughts on the impacts of the supermarket duopoly next time.

advocate, Coffs Coast, Local and regional food economies

Suspended Coffee in Sawtell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michelle Lee and Amelia Franklin
Michelle Lee and Amelia Franklin

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

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

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

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

 

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

Fair Food Week arrives in Australia

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.