Red Pepper » Food

An appetite for change in the food system

admin — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 10:00:14 +0000

Illustration: Cressida Knapp
Chingford is firmly part of outer London’s Tory belt. Both urban and conservative, it might seem a strange place for the birth of a movement for a radically democratic approach to our food and agriculture system. Yet it was here in July, at the Hawkwood Plant Nursery, that an enthusiastic bunch of food growers, activists and educators gathered for two days to work out how to bring to the UK an idea that is already common currency in parts of Europe, Africa and Latin America: food sovereignty.
Go to Hawkwood and you immediately see not only why the meeting was held here, but why initiatives already underway in the UK mean food sovereignty has a hope of catching on. Originally run as a market garden by Waltham Forest Council, the four-acre site had been unused for years when it was leased in 2009 to Organiclea, a workers’ co-operative that grows and distributes fruit and vegetables. With glasshouses as well as outdoor land on the site, Organiclea also provides educational and volunteering opportunities and runs a vegbox scheme and cafe in nearby Walthamstow.
The gathering itself was inspired by a week-long European encounter in Austria last year, which aimed to bring together a cohesive European movement for food sovereignty. With delegations from every European country and quotas to ensure producers and community groups were properly represented, the event catalysed a number of initiatives and a European action plan.
Yet while the UK sent a delegation and just managed to meet its quotas, its engagement was still dominated by the enthusiasm of NGOs that understand food sovereignty from a global perspective. With Britain’s farming politics long dominated by the high Tory, free‑trade outlook of the National Farmers’ Union, and no equivalent to France’s radical Confederation Paysanne, for instance, the UK lacks organisational structures and a certain militancy when it comes to progressive farming politics. This was one challenge that July’s gathering was trying to resolve.
Host of initiatives
A host of initiatives have sought in recent years to facilitate local and sustainable food production, funded by local councils, central government or lottery funding. Capital Growth has nurtured urban food production in London and similar projects exist elsewhere. Making Local Food Work is a national project that provides advice and support to community shops, farmers markets, buying groups and other initiatives in their hundreds that help people take ownership of where their food comes from.
Yet this has all happened largely in the absence of a radical narrative about transforming our food system. Indeed, it has been accompanied by the onward march of supermarket expansion, with 25 million square feet of supermarket retail space either under construction or with planning permission approved at the end of 2011.
Protests by dairy farmers this July over supermarket attempts to reduce the amount they pay for milk to below the cost of production are indicative of the direction this is leading, but also that a fightback is overdue. The UK now imports £37 billion worth of food, drink and animal feed per year, and exports £18 billion (although £4 billion of this is whisky). On top of the huge environmental impact of this international trade is the race to the bottom it allows in terms of working conditions in production, local environmental impact, land grabs and animal rights.
Alternative solutions
So where do we start if we want an alternative? The Kindling Trust in Manchester has been behind a number of initiatives that have begun to show what can be achieved. Helen Woodcock, one of its founders, explains where it all started: ‘Feeding Manchester is a network of sustainable food practitioners: commercial growers and retailers, community gardens, educators and so on. It meets three times a year and discusses what the barriers are to sustainable food production, and what solutions we can come up with.’
One of the solutions is the Land Army. During harvest times organic farmers can face a shortage of labour. Fruit, for instance, can literally rot on the bushes because hiring extra help at a reasonable wage would push the cost of production above what the fruit can be sold for. The Land Army organises volunteers who want to learn about organic farming to help with picking and other jobs. Helen hopes the initiative can feed into a better apprenticeship scheme.
Manchester Veg People is another project. It is a co-operative bringing together the five organic farms closest to Manchester and a range of buyers, including both small caterers and cafes and bigger buyers such as the University of Manchester. It was established to tackle both the lack of variety of organic food coming into Manchester and the fact that organic growers struggle to sell their produce above the cost of production, which results in rural poverty and people leaving farming.
Organic farmers plan crops each year based on their conversations with buyers and get a more secure market. Particularly central to the project is involving the public sector (schools, universities, prisons, hospitals) in procuring sustainable food. ‘It is about trying to make sure a wider range of people have access to it even if they don’t feel they can afford it in their own personal shopping,’ says Helen Woodcock.
Community supported agriculture
The principle is very close to that of community supported agriculture (CSA), whereby a small community organises to buy the produce of a particular local farmer in return for a say in what is produced. The community takes some of the risks (such as crop failure) with the farmer and gets affordable food with known provenance in return. The model is being promoted by the Soil Association, among others, and a European CSA conference is planned in October in Italy, a country where the Gruppi di Acquisto Solidale model is well established.
Helen Woodcock was most inspired by the model she saw on a recent trip to the Basque Country, however: ‘They have CSAs but with a collective of growers, about seven to ten per group. Farming can be a lonely, hard existence, and in a traditional CSA, the grower is often the poorest paid person in the group. With our projects in Manchester, what we’re not doing is creating another market; it’s political. In the Basque networks they do an induction with new farmers who join where they talk about the political issues and collective solutions.
‘They also have a global outlook, and an idea of having networks of co-ops in the global north and south for getting things they can’t grow. The issue isn’t that we need to be better at growing local food, it’s that we need to stop treating people so badly.’
Challenging the CAP
Whatever the viability of solidarity-based alternatives however, there’s no getting round the fact that government policy firmly supports big business agriculture. Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is a case in point. This year, however, as the eurocrats negotiated the CAP’s regular seven-year cycle of reform, they were met by a popular mobilisation. For the first time, the European parliament also got a say in CAP reform alongside the Commission, and the organisers of the Good Food March, which culminated on 19 September in Brussels, sought to use the opportunity to influence the direction of the CAP on issues ranging from the structure of the subsidy system, to support for ecological agriculture, to supply management in grain markets.
It’s an agenda that resonates with Jyoti Fernandes, a smallholder farmer in Dorset who was planning on joining the march as it reached Brussels. She is particularly interested in pushing for the CAP to support new entrants into ecologically sound farming.
‘The subsidy system pays people to own land, which pushes up the price of land. If you want to get into farming, buying land with a farmhouse is totally unaffordable,’ she says. Fernandes and her family live on a 43-acre farm they share with another family, in a house they built themselves. They practice low input mixed farming, keeping sheep and chickens in their orchard, growing barley and keeping pigs. They make a living on a small farm because they add value themselves, making jam and bacon and brewing cider.
Much of this kind of production needs access to expensive equipment and premises that conform to health and safety regulations. That’s why, in 2006, Fernandes and other local farmers formed the Peasant Evolution Producers Co-operative, an informal way of sharing the costs of production and helping each other to sell their produce, as well as making certain products together, such as cheese. This approach is hardly the norm for British farmers, Fernandes acknowledges: ‘It’s similar to what happens in some parts of France for instance, but UK farmers don’t usually want to work in co-operatives.’
The problems for small-scale agro-ecological farming aren’t just limited to the CAP and British individualism, however. For a start, DEFRA policy seems to encourage farmers to do anything but grow food. ‘You can get funding for a catering business, or to open a bed and breakfast, but no help for the basics of farming,’ says Fernandes.
She’s also concerned about the de-skilling happening in farming, especially when it comes to anything other than chemical agriculture: ‘Agricultural colleges aren’t teaching the basics about ecosystems. You just get a series of certificates in corporate-controlled farming. It becomes an industrial system: buy this grain, spray this pesticide and so on.’
Pushing GM again
Alongside carbon-intensive farming, we’re now seeing a renewed offensive by the GM industry. The climate change crisis has been seen by Monsanto and others as an opportunity to push GM crops again in places where they decisively lost the battle in the 1990s, particularly Europe.
The climate argument for GM is easy to demolish. Not only do polycultures offer the best prospect of resilient farming in a world faced with unpredictable and often extreme weather patterns, but organic agriculture actually sequesters carbon dioxide into the soil – at a rate of up to 900 kilos per acre per year, according to a 10-year study by the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania.
Yet surely there’s no harm in scientific experimentation?
If science was some realm of reason that could be separated out from capitalism, that might be the case. But GM trials take place in a context. The recent trial of GM wheat at Rothamsted may have been publicly funded, but the beneficiaries of any research are likely to be corporate. While the organisers of the ‘Take the Flour Back’ action at Rothamsted highlighted a panoply of objections, from raising doubts over food safety to claiming the science itself is flawed, contemporary anti-GM activism largely situates itself in a narrative about food sovereignty in a global context.
The Rothamsted protest featured as a speaker Gathuru Mburu, co-ordinator of the African Biodiversity Network, who put his finger on the key issue: ‘Beneath the rhetoric that GM is the key to feeding a hungry world, there is a very different story – a story of control and profit. The fact is that we need a diversity of genetic traits in food crops in order to survive worsening climates. Above all, people need to have control over their seeds.’
Against the ever-tightening grip of multinationals, the global food sovereignty movement asserts a democratic food system. Local food is an important aspect of this, not only because it reduces our food’s carbon footprint, but because it renders visible the social relations that feed us. Britain’s incipient food sovereignty movement hopes to both galvanise opposition to corporate control and fertilise the shoots of real alternatives.
A small multitude of community-supported agriculture schemes, non-commercial growing projects and co-operative enterprises have sprung up in the UK in recent years. Whether they are incorporated into the logic of capitalism, fail completely or become the basis of a new solidarity economy around food is dependent on many factors, but the beginnings of a self-conscious movement for food sovereignty is surely one of those factors. It’s a long-term organising effort that could bear much fruit in the struggle for a better world.
For more on the UK food sovereignty movement go to www.foodsovereigntynow.org.uk

A cagey business

emma — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 17:01:36 +0000

Jonathan Safran Foer , Eating Animals, Penguin 2010
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-food World, Bloomsbury 2006
Jonathan Safran Foer is the successful author of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) and Everything is Illuminated (2002). In his most recent book, Eating Animals, he turns to non-fiction. Michael Pollan’s, The Omnivore’s Dilemma is slightly older and was first published in 2006. Both give unflinching accounts of factory farming and the alternatives to it but in somewhat different ways. They discuss the United States and the specifics cannot necessarily be applied to Europe but the issues they raise are universally relevant – as Foer makes clear in his brief preface to the British edition: “A British reader who cares about the issues raised in this book should not find any peace in being British”.

Eating Animals isn’t simply an argument for not eating meat (though in the process of writing it Foer did become a committed vegetarian) it is instead a consideration of what it means to be human – and thus an argument against factory farming and all that that implies. And, in the American context, where 99.9% of chickens for meat, 97% of laying hens, 99% of turkeys, 95% of pigs and 78% of cattle are reared in in-your-face factory conditions, there is precious little else to eat if you want to eat meat.

Eating Animals once again finds Foer playing with form, as he interweaves horrific facts and figures with intimate dinner time memories. The first and the last chapters are both called “Storytelling”. “We are,” says Foer, “not only the teller of our stories, we are the stories themselves”.

The book is wide ranging: from an infatuation with a puppy called George to the cruelty of long-line fishing, from breaking into a poultry factory farm to the genetics of modern farm animals. There is an interview with a factory farmer and one with a vegan who designs slaughter houses. There are reflections on avian flu and a chapter on the meaning (or meaninglessness) of so many of the words central to the discussion: animal, bycatch, cruelty, free-range and fresh (both of which Foer dismisses simply as “bullshit”). Foer visits farms that try to do things differently; Frank Reeves’s poultry range, Paul Willis’s pig farm, Bill and Colette Niman’s cattle ranch nestle amongst the realities of the slaughterhouse and the dehumanisation of those who work there. All this is underpinned by Foer’s moral frame of reference, which constantly calls into question what it is to be human, asking why we allow the cruelties of factory farming, or how we can feel whole while deliberately forgetting.

The factory farm provides animal protein at a historically cheap price. But it only does so by externalising the real costs. For instance, animal agriculture makes a 40% greater contribution to global warming than all transportation in the world combined. The health costs are also severe: all kinds of pathogens (like new strains of salmonella and e coli) are spread in factory farm environments, and indeed affect much supermarket meat. It is not for nothing that the Centres for Disease Control estimates there are 76 million cases of food-borne disease in the US each year. As Foer comments: “Your friend didn’t “catch a bug” so much as eat a bug…in all likelihood… created by factory farming”.

Factory farms contribute to the growth of microbial-resistant pathogens simply because of the vast quantities of antimicrobials they consume: compare the three million pounds of antibiotics given to people in the US each year with the industry estimate of just under six times this amount fed to animals (the Union of Concerned Scientists thinks it is probably between eight and ten times as much). It happens because animals fed antibiotics put on weight faster than they otherwise would, and because animals in the overcrowded conditions of the factory farm get ill, so it’s better (for profit) to treat them prophylacticly.

There is every reason to believe that factory farms are creating the conditions for a new super pathogen. All flus have an avian origin, transmitted to humans either directly or via other animals, farm pigs being common. As recently as 2005 it was proven that the Spanish flu epidemic was avian in origin. The recent scares over SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) and ‘swine fever’ are harbingers of what is to come; 6 of the 8 genetic segments of the currently most feared virus in the world, reports Foer, have been traced directly to US factory farms. Due to factory farming another epidemic like the Spanish flu is waiting to happen.

Whilst slaughterhouses in the US are notionally inspected and controlled, Foer shows how little such controls mean. In the late 80s former inspector Temple Grandin witnessed “ ‘deliberate acts of cruelty occurring on a regular basis’ at 32 percent of the plants she surveyed during announced visits in the United States”. If this is observed during announced visits the mind-boggles to think what day to day practices are like. Drawing on Gail Eisnitz’s interviews with workers in her book Slaughterhouse, Foer argues it is impossible for people to remain human when working in a slaughterhouse.

The known horrors of intensive meat production ought to be enough to radically transform the practice of the factory farm. Instead there has been only a tinkering at the edges. As Foer summarises “the factory farm industry (in alliance with the pharmaceutical industry) currently has more power than public-health professionals”. Eating Animals give some insights into the political economy of the factory farm: how the mass producing monolith has almost eliminated the family farm, sometimes by outcompeting it, and sometimes by buying up and closing down the local hatcheries, slaughterhouses, grain-storage facilities and other services farmers require to survive outside the vertically integrated chains of the giant food corporations like Tyson, Smithfield, Monsanto and the handful of others that control the food industry in the States. Foer’s account would have been strengthened by giving these elements further attention.

Despite these omissions Eating Animals is an important and unique book but it has to be acknowledged that Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, is the more comprehensive. Pollan’s structure is simple: based on his own preparation of four meals that have their origins in radically different ways of raising food.

Pollan’s first section on the industrial food chain is hard to beat as he follows the triumphal march of government encouraged cheap corn (maize) from the field to the feedlot, to the mill and eventually to the supermarket – where more than a quarter of the forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket contain processed corn products. It’s fascinating stuff and the short account of cattle being fattened on the feedlots is not for the squeamish.

In looking at alternatives, Pollan’s analysis of what he calls ‘industrial organic’ is an eye-opener for anyone who is starry-eyed about pesticide free meat. Pollan critiques the use of the term organic when it is used to symbolise alternative in every sense – a diverse polyculture based on small-scale, local, non-exploitative social relations of production – as well as eschewing artificial fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides. A substantial section of the organic sector has been transformed into a capitalistically intensive, exploitative monoculture, often transporting its produce hundreds or even thousands of miles to its (super)markets. It is better (organic fertilisers, no pesticides), but it is very often not what you think it is.

Pollan then proceeds to look at the best of the alternatives he found, Polyface Farm, where Joel Salatin manages to produce a substantial output of chickens, turkeys and beef cattle on grass in “a food chain rooted in a perennial polyculture”. Grass is once again the basis of the farm (as it used to be before the age of the factory farm which incidentally barely existed anywhere before the Second World War). Animals are brought up out of doors and rotated on pastures, living a healthy and as “natural” a life as can be for any animal whose purpose in being raised is eventually to end up as food for others higher up the food chain. If there is animal food production which we can accept, it should look something like this.

Pollan’s writing is lucid, his storytelling rooted in a clear understanding of the economic underpinnings of the various choices farmers make, or are steered to make, in today’s agribusiness-dominated system. I found it is a more analytically coherent book than Foer’s fragmented and sometimes quirky form of presentation (though Pollan’s final odyssey, cooking a meal entirely of ingredients he had gathered or hunted for himself, including wild boar, has a quirkyness all of its own).

In many ways Foer and Pollan end in similar places. They both agree that the factory farm is the enemy. It simply has to be stopped. Support for any animal-centred farming philosophy is vastly preferable to the industrial factory where animals are treated as things (as are the people who have to work in these monstrous enterprises). But while Foer is now a committed vegetarian, Pollan is not. (Curiously, Foer never explicitly explores the vegetarian-vegan divide; but the logic of his argument would seem to place him firmly with the vegans.)

Foer goes where Pollan doesn’t really want to: asking why eat meat and what the real costs are to us, as human beings, of so doing. Of course Foer does express views – sentiments – but this is not, despite some reviewers’ criticisms, a ‘sentimental’ book. He provides plenty of countervailing arguments made by interviewees who are meat eaters and even the odd factory farmer. Pollan isn’t really troubled about eating meat in the abstract; Foer has become so. In a short, sharp snap at Pollan who claims that the moral clarity of the vegetarian depends on a denial of reality Foer asks simply which of them is denying the reality they both describe so graphically.

Pollan’s book made me very angry about the feedlot and the factory farm, but Foer’s sentiments got under my skin. I can no longer make sense of my own attitudes: an abhorrence of factory farming, a preference for organic meat which I eat occasionally, but a willingness, nonetheless, to eat factory-farmed produce, generally knowing-but-not-knowing that it is such – bacon and eggs, that stunning jerk chicken off a street stall at the Notting Hill carnival, food at friends where it wouldn’t occur to me to upset anyone by asking about the provenance of the fodder.

I was struck while reading Foer by the connexions to a book I’ve long admired: Stanley Cohen’s award-winning States of Denial (2002), a study about reactions to unwelcome knowledge, particularly the suffering that some people inflict on others – how people know but don’t know or at least don’t notice, process, digest, forget. Cohen was brought up in South Africa and lived for eighteen years in Israel so had plenty of primary material to underpin his enquiry. It ranges widely, but is focused on what people do to other people.

Foer (like Peter Singer, Tom Regan, J M Coetzee and many others) extends this enquiry to animals: “The secrecy that enabled factory farming is breaking down” he writes. “We can’t plead ignorance, only indifference. We have the burden and the opportunity of living in the moment when the critique of factory farming broke into the popular consciousness. We are the ones of whom it will be fairly asked, What did you do when you learned the truth about eating animals?”

Don’t feed the world? How food aid can do more harm than good

admin — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 12:56:37 +0000

Every year since the mid-1980s, when the late Mohammed Amin filmed the famine in Ethiopia, the UN and humanitarian aid agencies have announced a ‘historic disaster’ in some part of the world. In 2004, it was the Indian Ocean tsunami that wreaked havoc in parts of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand and India. In more recent years, it has been the conflict in Darfur in Sudan that displaced millions of people, the earthquake in Haiti, the floods in Pakistan – and now the famine in Somalia.
There is a familiar script that accompanies each of these humanitarian crises. Each disaster is described as ‘historic’. Fundraising appeals are supported by heart-wrenching images of displaced or starving women and children. The international community, led by the UN, descends on the disaster area, cameramen in tow, to witness the humanitarian catastrophe first-hand. This is often followed by fundraising concerts and live appearances by celebrities at camps for displaced people.
The problem is that the images and stories that we see or read in the international media are not as impartial as we would like to believe. More often than not, they are told by aid agency staff on the ground. Journalists rely almost exclusively on an aid agency version of the disaster. The narrative becomes both predictable and one-sided.
Dutch journalist Linda Polman believes that the ‘unhealthy’ relationship between journalists and aid agencies does not allow for independent, objective reporting and is often slanted in favour of the agency doing the ‘reporting’. Media-savvy aid workers fully exploit the eagerness with which journalists accept their version of a disaster or crisis. For their part, says Polman, journalists ‘accept uncritically the humanitarian agencies’ claims to neutrality, elevating the trustworthiness and expertise of aid workers above journalistic scepticism.’ There is almost no attempt on the part of news organisations to independently verify the facts and figures disseminated by aid agencies – which, as I discovered when I worked with a UN agency, are sometimes inflated or based on erroneous data.
Humanitarian crisis or fundraising opportunity?
Despite the usual acceptance of aid agencies’ figures, an increasing number of sceptics are beginning to wonder whether the famine declared in Somalia is as big as they would have us believe, or whether UN agencies and international humanitarian aid organisations have prioritised fundraising over accuracy.
The temptation to exaggerate the extent of a crisis in order to raise more funding is always present, says Ahmed Jama, a Somali agricultural economist based in Nairobi. Jama believes that some parts of Somalia that have been declared as suffering from famine, such as the fertile lower Shabelle region, may actually be food secure, and that the people suffering there may not be locals but those who migrated to the region from drought-prone parts of the country. He says that it is in the interest of UN and other aid agencies to show a worst-case scenario because this keeps the donor funds flowing.
The UN uses a scale developed by the Food and Agricultural Organisation-managed Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit to determine levels of food insecurity. This ranges from ‘generally food secure’ to ‘famine/humanitarian catastrophe’.
The unit’s estimates for the number of Somali people ‘in crisis’ in the period August–September 2011 indicate that less than half a million people – not the four million cited by the press – were experiencing famine. About 3.5 million people were experiencing some form of food insecurity but they were not dying of starvation as widely reported. And some of the food insecurity was related to inflation and rising food prices, not necessarily to drought.
Since 1995, the European Commission (EC) has been providing millions of euros for rural development and food security projects in Somalia. Yet every year Somalia continues to receive food aid.
In fact, food aid has become a permanent state of affairs in the country since the civil war in 1991. ‘Clearly there is a mismatch between the resources made available by the EC to UN agencies and the dismal picture emerging from what are generally considered the most agriculturally productive regions of Somalia,’ says Jama. ‘How is it possible that the EC investment in agriculture could not avert a famine in those regions?’
Does food aid help?
George-Marc André, the European Union representative to Somalia, cautiously admits that the EC is concerned that its efforts in Somalia are being hampered by UN agencies flooding the capital Mogadishu with food aid. In an environment where free food is readily available, he explains, farmers do not get value for their produce. Delivering food aid during the harvest season further distorts the food market. André says that UN agencies such as the World Food Programme could actually have ‘slowed down’ Somalia’s recovery by focusing exclusively on food aid, instead of supporting local farmers and markets.
Given that most of the food aid comes from the US and other countries outside Somalia, there is also concern that declarations of famine do more to help farmers elsewhere rather than supporting local producers. The food aid industry allows countries such as the US to offload food surpluses to poor countries. This distorts local markets and disrupts local food production. In other words, food aid destroys local economies, especially when it is provided over long periods of time, as in Somalia.
What is not mentioned in the appeals for funding is that a lot of the funds are used to pay off officials and militia to allow aid convoys to pass. In Somalia, the ‘entrance fee’ charged by warlords has in the past amounted to as much as 80 per cent of the value of the aid.
Also suppressed are reports about the regular diversion or theft of food aid, which is rampant in Somalia. In March 2010, for instance, the UN Monitoring Group on Somalia reported that as much as half of food aid was stolen or diverted by corrupt contractors, local businessmen, local NGOs and even by UN employees. That report led the US to withdraw funding from the World Food Programme, although it now says it is carefully monitoring food aid and that very little is being diverted. However, in August this year, the Associated Press reported that the sale of food aid in Mogadishu’s markets is still quite common and often occurs with the full knowledge of UN personnel on the ground.
Like Somalia, Haiti offers a perfect example of how aid can destroy a country. This island in the Caribbean has received so much foreign aid over the years that it has been described as ‘a poster child for the inadequacies of foreign aid’ because of its extremely poor development record and widespread poverty. Every few years, a new disaster strikes Haiti and the world rallies around through massive fundraising campaigns. But Haiti, like its distant cousin Somalia, continues to remain poor, under-developed and the site of much misery – ideal ingredients for yet another fundraising campaign.
Rasna Warah, a columnist with Kenya’s Daily Nation newspaper, is the author of the recently published book Red Soil and Roasted Maize: Selected essays and articles on contemporary Kenya

Food for thought: food sovereignty in Europe

admin — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 12:15:24 +0000

‘Food systems have been reduced to a model of industrialised agriculture controlled by a few transnational food corporations together with a small group of huge retailers. It is a model designed to generate profits, and therefore completely fails to meet its obligations. Instead of being dedicated to the production of food … it focuses increasingly on the production of raw materials such as agrofuels, animal feeds or commodity plantations. On the one hand, it has caused the enormous loss of agricultural holdings and the people who make their living from those holdings, while on the other hand it promotes a diet which is harmful to health and which contains insufficient fruit, vegetables and cereals.’
So states the final declaration of the Nyeleni Europe food sovereignty forum, which took place in August when 400 delegates from 34 countries met in the town of Krems in Austria. The forum was structured to break the delegations into interest-specific groups and then facilitate inclusive and participatory discussion so as to form the basis for a declaration that would provide direction for the European food sovereignty movement. However, as with most such forums, the most important element was the opportunity for producers, consumer organisations, workers, activists and campaigners to meet up, share their stories and plan the future.
In a direct challenge to the top-down ‘food security’ agenda, which accepts the corporate dominance in our food system that is part of the problem in the first place, the real struggle against global hunger is not taking place in parliaments, financial institutions or scientific laboratories. Instead, it is small-scale farmers and disempowered consumers who are coming together to build a better food system from the bottom up. In line with this approach, the forum included a day of protests at supermarkets around Krems and a market combining farmers’ stalls and political information aimed at the town’s inhabitants. This combination proved to be a powerful outreach tool.
Nyeleni Europe represents the community-supported agriculture collectives, organic farmer unions, local food cooperatives, seed swapping organisations, food activists, farmers’ markets and community gardens that form the front line against the corporate tide.

What’s in the name?
In Mali there is a powerful symbol that could serve as the symbol of food sovereignty. It’s a woman who left her mark in the history of Mali, as a woman and as a great farmer. When you mention her name everyone knows what this name represents. She is the mother who brings food, the mother who farms, who fought for her recognition as a woman in an environment which wasn’t favourable to her. This woman was called Nyéléni. If we use this symbol everyone in Mali will know that it’s a struggle for food, a struggle for food sovereignty.
Ibrahim

Greece
The situation in Greece is that over the past few decades farmers have been paid to stop cultivating – to take out old trees, old vines, etc . . . So now there is a lot of uncultivated arable land left unused and seemingly abandoned. With the economic crisis these farmers are getting less money and now everyone is afraid because we have all this land but no food is being grown.
In a search for a proactive alternative some families are going back to trying to directly support their local farmers. They are getting together to form consumer collectives to buy produce to try and usurp the middle-man. People are also trying to create alternative currencies to keep economies local.
Jenny Gkiougki works with the Greek indignados

Belgium
In Belgium there is a lack of cohesion among agricultural groups because of the language barrier and all the politics that go along with it. Consequently there is very little collaboration between the grass-roots movements on either side of the Flanders and Walloon areas of Belgium. However, some of the recent developments in food movements are similar in the northern and southern parts of the country.
There is a strong, growing local food network in the Walloon part, the GASAP (Groupe d’Achat Solidaire de l’Agriculture Paysanne) based in Brussels, and the Voedselteams in Flanders. The latter is the better established with a staff of five half-time employees, over 120 local groups and 80 farmers engaged in the project. All the groups have a similar approach as they focus on the proximity of the food producers to consumers. They have developed their own screening systems for farmers because of the failure of the main organic labels to count distance and scale of farming as criteria for labelling.
There is a very new phenomenon of ‘community supported agriculture’ farms appearing in Flanders that have a self-harvesting approach. There are about seven at the moment, operating close to cities such as Leuven, Gent and Antwerp. Farmers’ markets have also grown in recent years and been embraced by local authorities.
Last year, a group of six short food supply chain projects appealed to the Flemish government for a strategic action plan on short chain agriculture. This will involve a recognition of short supply chains as a new innovation that increases contact between food producers and consumers, enables producers to set their own prices for their products and produces food for local markets and communities.’
Wim Merckx, Belgian delegate from Flanders

Spain
As in all Europe, peasants and small farmers are disappearing in Spain. Statistics show that over the last 20 years three farms have closed every hour. There are lots of different problems caused by the abandonment of agricultural activity. Among them, due to our arid climate, are soil erosion and the threat of desertification. Social problems are even worse; depopulation of the rural environment causes a territorial imbalance and a deep disconnection between cities and villages.
However, there is a growing movement that offers solutions and practices alternatives to the dominant system. For more than ten years now, farmers, urban consumers, environmental activists and others have been working together for food sovereignty, resisting the current rules, bringing consumers and farmers closer together and developing new and innovative ways of fighting commercialisation, GM foods and so on. We want and we need peasants to produce local and healthy food that both respects the environment and keeps villages alive. It is great to share problems and experiences with people from all Europe and to see that there is a strong European movement fighting for food sovereignty.
Blanca G Ruibal, Friends of the Earth Spain

Bulgaria
In Bulgaria, as elsewhere, the problem is that there are a lot of powerful supermarkets that are not obliged to sell local products. The population is generally very poor, so people are forced to look for the cheapest goods, which are normally imported. This is killing Bulgarian producers.
Local groups have set up internet consumer schemes that organise together to create a virtual cooperative for food. This is done mainly through Google groups, with people ordering what they want on the web and then sending a collective order to the local farmers. This enables the farmers to know how much of particular products are needed and what to concentrate on. It also gives them considerably better financial security.
Bulgarian community food organiser

Italy
In Italy, the main problem now is that we are treating food as a commodity and the financialisation of agriculture is the major example of that. Land has been abandoned all over the country, not because it was impossible to farm but because the industrialised farming system thought the local market wasn’t important any more. This has led to a huge loss of biodiversity because we thought that vegetables need only be produced in just two or three regions in the south.
However, there are more examples of food sovereignty projects in Italy than ever. These include farmers’ markets giving producers direct contact with consumers – they are no longer simply consumers because they ask about production and become part of the process. In Italy we now have one million meals per day made with organic products, almost all Italian. This local money is generating a lot of local development for organic farmers.
Andrea Ferrante, chair of the Italian association for organic farming

The Nyeleni Europe website is being developed as a resource for the food sovereignty movement. The forum agreed on Europe-wide actions, including supermarket occupations, marches and other forms of direct action on the ‘International Day of Peasant Struggle’, 17 April 2012

Somalia: shocking images aren’t enough

emma — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 19:23:50 +0000

Since the media renewed their interest in the decades-old crisis in and around Somalia, we’ve seen a surge of advertisements from aid groups, featuring starving children with visible ribs and staring eyes. The subtext to these ads is simple if you don’t donate, you’re abandoning these children and they’ll die.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is one of the international aid agencies struggling to respond in Somalia and refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya. We’re also struggling to define responsible fundraising within a discourse that relies on guilt and superficial messages. Fundraising experts warn us that offering a more complex picture of the difficulties of delivering aid will lead to cynicism and donor fatigue: It’s shock value that works.

At the risk of losing some donations, MSF believes we must realistically represent what Somalis are facing, and our limits in assisting them. Simplifying the message may boost revenue, but if it comes at the expense of presenting a realistic picture, then the cost is too high.

Aid is difficult. Things go wrong all the time. In war zones particularly, non-governmental organizations continually fall short as we face massive challenges in accessing people who need us most. It’s never enough, even in the most straightforward emergencies. Of all the places I’ve seen, Somalia is among the most complex emergencies. The food security crisis is caused by a combination of conflict, displacement, bureaucratic obstacles to aid provision, misguided policies and drought. It is, in essence, a man-made disaster, aggravated by a natural phenomenon.

Working in Somalia requires an understanding of local political players, a capacity to constantly negotiate with warlords, and the drive to keep projects running despite security threats. Movement across front lines is almost impossible, preventing aid organizations from getting staff and supplies to those suffering the most. Somalis who can make the journey come to aid delivery points inside the country, or across the border in neighbouring countries. Those who can’t make it perish. Families are forced to leave loved ones behind when they lack the strength to go on.

The current crisis is the product of 20 years of war. Even before the recent drought, it was estimated there were only four doctors for every 100,000 people. Most health workers were based in cities. One in 10 women died in childbirth, and as many as 25 per cent of children under 5 never saw their fifth birthday. The average lifespan was 47 years. Drought, of course, has exacerbated the crisis: Harvests have failed, livestock have died. But this is on top of war, and some of the worst health indicators in the world, as well as high food prices and transportation costs.

Ads and headlines that label this crisis ‘Famine in the Horn of Africa’ or ‘East Africa Drought’ reduce people’s plight to the simple need for food and water. In reality Somali people have struggled to survive decades of the harshest circumstances on Earth, brought about by political chaos and military agendas.

Giving to save the life of a starving child in a photo won’t take Somalia very far. That’s not to say that donations are not important; rather, that there’s more to the story. Let’s be honest in admitting that humanitarian aid won’t solve Somalia’s problems, beyond keeping people alive for better times in the distant future. Aid is a temporary measure until more permanent solutions can address root causes, and the downward spiral can be reversed.

Donors can handle this complexity. Aid organizations, all of us, need to confront the story behind the tragic, if successful, fundraising images. Yes, we will lose some donors. But I’m convinced that most will continue to support aid, and will do so from a much stronger foundation, one that makes room for error. If aid organizations were bolder about the realism of our communications, we could foster groundbreaking levels of transparency and accountability.

Delivering aid in Somalia is difficult and dangerous, but not impossible. Provided it is executed in an impartial, neutral and preferably independent way, it will reach those in need, as MSF’s 12 major projects throughout Somalia – which are currently treating approximately 35,000 malnourished children – prove on a daily basis. But humanitarian assistance is only a rough remedy, deployed when politics and economic development have failed. It prevents a situation from deteriorating even further, but is emphatically apolitical and can therefore offer no resolution to the root causes of crises.

McHarg is a trained nurse with twenty years’ experience of humanitarian relief. She is currently executive director of MSF in Toronto. A version of this article first appeared in Canada’s Globe and Mail. Visit MSF to see the latest on their work in Somalia.

Steal this veg

admin — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 05:09:21 +0000

In April this year, Edible Public Space (EPS) gained formal access to a food growing project in a public space in Chapeltown, Leeds. EPS was born last September, when a group of people involved in environmental activism and agricultural projects around Leeds started to discuss how to establish a food project on public land that could radically challenge the way urban space is managed and designed.
Arguing that the institutional management of public space in the UK is currently repressive, EPS not only claims a right to the city as a right to shape and use public spaces in convivial ways (for community gathering without having to ask permission, for example) but also wants to bring back the culture and practice of food production to the core of urban life.
‘We are more and more forced into predesigned landscapes of consumption, into privatised, enclosed streets which plan and channel our emotions. We have lost the ability to imagine our city and to make it the place we want it to be,’ says Anzir, a group member particularly interested in organising engaging, playful activities for its gatherings. ‘With EPS we want to reverse this trend. We want back the right to play, and to eat and shape our public spaces.’
The local council’s declining budget is another part of the context. ‘It is ridiculous the amount of money spent annually by the council for mowing the grass. They could rather give the land to groups like us to be cultivated collectively and become a source of fresh food and an opportunity to learn how to grow food and feed ourselves,’ explains Pete, another group member.
In the interests of building a heterogeneous group, including families and people without a background in activism, EPS decided not to use tactics such as squatting or guerrilla gardening. Instead, networking with existing community groups and following council procedures has been their route to what they hope will be a long-term project. It has not been without its frustrations. Organising anything more than a family picnic needs advance permission, and fly-posting is not allowed. Instead Mary, aged 85 and active in a local tenants’ association, organised a team to distribute 2,000 flyers door to door and in all the shops and community display boards in the area.
EPS promotes collective growing based on the principle of non-ownership of produce, community-led project design and land management, mutual learning and re-skilling, non-consumption based on the right to gather in public space and the mix of playful activities with food growing. So when the Parks Department asked ‘But what if people start stealing the veg?’ EPS had to explain that it would consider that a success.
Changing public space
Mention urban agriculture and it is easy to summon up a picture of a back-garden hobby for the middle classes. Some of it is. But some of it is challenging the modern capitalist city, its modes of production and reproduction of social life, and raising issues of social and environmental justice.
Projects of this kind adopt three broad approaches, which are sometimes intertwined or overlapping: promoting alternative and convivial ways of using public space; sharing private resources for food production; and converting residential areas or spaces around housing estates and transport infrastructures for food production.
Urban wild food walks in public parks and urban green belts organised by groups such as Leeds Urban Harvest and Invisible Food in Brixton claim, more or less explicitly, the right to urban food and to places for foraging (see guerrilla guide, page 55). They promote a more spontaneous use of the city’s green spaces, and particularly of all those spaces that as ‘public land’ are collectively owned and are currently managed by local authorities. They reclaim the right to gather outdoors and to harvest the existing food, the right to a non-consumption based sociality, to escape the rules of the capitalist economy – to have free and non‑CCTV-tracked fun.
Darrin Nordahl, in his recent book Public Produce: the new urban agriculture, offers a good collection of visionary projects in US cities, which break the rules of ordinary space management, stressing a shift from ornamental to edible urban spaces in public policy.
Another form of urban agriculture getting a more mainstream hearing is land sharing. These projects do not directly challenge the capitalist city, but perhaps represent an embryonic reconstruction of the commons, a resurgence of collective use of land that is a firm and immediate answer – in the form of mutual aid – to the growing waiting list for allotments, concern for food quality, food miles and community building. Projects such as Abundance in Sheffield, Grow Your Neighbour’s Own in Brighton and Hove, and Transition Town land sharing groups promote the construction of networks of people willing to share their privately owned land with people without access to land, create publicly accessible fruit trees databases for collective harvesting and processing, and offer free opportunities for re-skilling.
Urban zoning
A third group of initiatives are challenging and reworking the consolidated land zoning and labour structure of the traditional capitalist city of the global North. In these projects suburban neighbourhoods, large industrial estates, neglected spaces or even interstices around transport infrastructures (for example, around railways in Tokyo and Vancouver) are transformed into food production units, and managed by informal grass-roots groups or co-operative agricultural enterprises.
Detroit, which has experienced one of the most drastic population declines and economic collapses of the post-Fordist era, with huge numbers of derelict buildings and 5,000 vacant acres of public land, is maybe the most emblematic case. Urban agriculture there is becoming one of the most efficient and viable ways for local communities to provide food and relieve poverty and ‘food deserts’ (the absence of fresh food in poor neighbourhoods). The great availability of urban vacant land and the growing popularity of food growing in this city suggest that it has the potential to become a training ground for radical alternatives to the post-industrial city, its land management, redevelopment trajectories and community empowerment.
A wide range of groups, communities, and organisations are now involved in urban agriculture in the city. Particularly interesting is the work of the Detroit Food Justice Task Force, and its Cook Eat Talk project, which is mapping ‘the unseen food justice skills, networks and relationships in Detroit’. Whether urban agriculture in Detroit will evolve from a solidaristic/subsistence tool to a main vehicle of a self-sufficient sustainable food system remains to be seen, but in the meantime its inspiration has spread around the northern hemisphere.
Housing estate food growing, mobile food farms on sites under development and rooftop agricultural projects are emerging in other large cities too. In Belgium, the Brussels-based Auto‑nomie project is combining a critique of the massive growth of car ownership and its environmental impacts with the provision of mobile kitchen gardens by transforming used cars into growing spaces. In Bristol, a food-growing project has been established by Eastside Roots inside the Stapleton Road train station.
In London, initiatives such as Growing Communities (Hackney) and Organic Lea (Lea Valley) have been leading the way for more than ten years in urban and periurban land reconversion, reskilling, and making local food available to city dwellers. Meanwhile Grow Heathrow in Sipson has grown out of the mobilisation of local people opposing the construction of the third runway, and the aftermath of the Heathrow climate camp in 2007. It is a growing project realised inside abandoned former market garden greenhouses, and was squatted a year ago, just before the government dropped the plans for the airport expansion. Grow Heathrow is now in its second growing season, and is a community garden embedded in local life.
The more we look closely at this wide range of agricultural projects, the more we begin to understand the complexity of the socio-environmental injustice issues they bring to the surface. From the rules you have to comply with in order to use publicly owned land to the extortionate price of land, particularly in urban and periurban areas; from the regulation of land zoning and allotment leasing, which prevents people from establishing agricultural projects beyond self-consumption; to discriminatory neighbourhood design which makes it common to have densely populated neighbourhoods without decent green space.
The emerging urban agriculture movement can not only tackle some of these issues, but begin to challenge the consumerist priorities of the modern city, creating a better way for us to live in the process.

Biotech bonanza

admin — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 14:07:56 +0000

Try looking objectively at biotech firm Monsanto, a company that only ever seems to receive a negative press, and see if you can find any redeeming features – any ray of light emanating from this seeming black hole of corporate misanthropy. You will struggle. Monsanto is the exemplar of all that is wrong with the world’s corporate-controlled food system.

Monsanto has a damning history. It worked on the atomic bomb in the 1940s and produced the chemical weapon Agent Orange during the Vietnam war. More recently its herbicides have been used to devastating effect against coca-producing peasant farmers in Colombia.

But nightmarish weapons have never been the company’s primary money-spinner. The big bucks come from industrialised agriculture. When it comes to food, never before has so much been controlled by so few – a situation that is worsening as genetically modified (GM) crops and patents are pushed further into agriculture.

The ETC action group on erosion, technology and concentration says that just ten companies now control more than two-thirds of global proprietary seed sales – compared with thousands of seed companies and public breeders three decades ago.

Monsanto is the biggest of the big, the world’s fifth largest agro-chemical company, and the largest seed company. In 2007 it held the patents for the seeds used on 90 per cent of the world’s total land area devoted to GM crops. It accumulated this monopoly by buying up existing seed companies, spending £6 billion on acquisitions during the 1990s.

Monsanto claims that there is a happy synergy between its need for profit and the world’s need to feed a growing population with crops resistant to changes in the climate. But according to Dominic Glover (Made by Monsanto: the corporate shaping of GM crops as a technology for the poor, Steps Centre, 2008), GM seeds merely offer the best means of preserving the commercial life of Monsanto’s most successful product: the pesticide Roundup.

Roundup, which is sold in more than 115 countries, was developed during the ‘green revolution’ of the 1960s, which was characterised by the promotion of oil-based fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides. Farmers working with soil depleted by intensive agriculture became dependent on the chemicals sold by companies such as Monsanto. This often drove rural communities into debt and poverty – and the chemicals harmed those exposed to them. Worldwide, chemical pesticides are still responsible for the poisoning of 25 million workers every year.

The leading GM firms developed out of the chemical industry. According to GM Watch, the leading GM corporations control nearly 75 per cent of the global pesticide market.

When the lucrative Roundup patent was set to expire in 2000, Monsanto was faced with potentially devastating commercial challenges. GM was its solution. Monsanto introduced glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, into plant genes, in order to create resistance.

Now farmers could spray Roundup without harming the crop, even during the growing season. The company preserved its market dominance by selling ‘Roundup Ready’ seeds alongside Roundup.

But surely technological innovation must be good news for farmers? No – not when the technology is this tightly controlled.

This year, 85 per cent of all corn planted in the US was GM. For soya the figure was 91 per cent. Such a huge volume of sales allows Monsanto to spend millions of dollars on a small army of investigators to pursue and prosecute farmers who breach the strict contracts that the corporation attaches to each and every seed sale.

These contracts forbid farmers from keeping any new seed produced by the crop for the following year, or even saving leftover seeds. If a crop containing a Monsanto patented trait is found on the land of a non-purchasing farmer (even if it was brought there by wind or insect pollination), the farmer is told they are liable for theft.

In 2007, the US not-for-profit watchdog the Public Patent Foundation noted that, in a rare victory for anti-GM groups, the US Patent Office had rejected four key Monsanto patents related to GM crops ‘because the agricultural giant is using them to harass, intimidate, sue – and in some cases literally bankrupt – American farmers’.

It’s not just US farmers who are suffering. Monsanto exploited last year’s global food crisis to increase its profits. As rice stocks hit their lowest levels in 30 years, the corporation announced plans to raise the price of the company’s staples.

GM maize varieties went up by 35 per cent and soybean seed by more than 50 per cent from 2006 to 2008. Retail prices for Roundup have more than doubled over the past two years. And so, as the world’s poorest people went hungry, Monsanto celebrated a 120 per cent rise in its profits.

Now Monsanto is a leading proponent of the ‘new green revolution’ – the ‘gene revolution’. It claims its new technologies can feed the world’s poor. But who would trust Monsanto to spearhead any sort of humanitarian endeavour?

Find out more at www.gmwatch.org

Hungry for change

admin — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 14:05:49 +0000

Just over a year ago, researchers presented the Cabinet Office with a thorough and far-reaching analysis that painted a sobering account of the state of our food system. It presented us with a clear challenge: can we make our food system sustainable in order to feed ourselves, long into the future, without wrecking the planet?

The analysis confirmed that about one fifth of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions are from food and farming. It also showed that 70,000 premature deaths could be prevented each year in the UK if people ate a better diet; and that many thousands more could enjoy healthier and more prosperous lives without the burden of diet-related conditions such as heart disease and many types of cancer. At the same time, a more ethical and sustainable food system could play a role in international development to improve the prospects for hundreds of millions of people, ensure better welfare for farm animals and help us adopt a far more responsible approach to issues such as world fish stocks and humanity’s profligate use of water.

Identifying and quantifying the problems ought to have been a promising start. Not since 2002 had such a far-reaching analysis been undertaken. Back then, the government took stock amidst the ashes of millions of farm animals slaughtered and burned due to foot and mouth disease. Its response was relatively encouraging – a sustainable food and farming policy and several initiatives to help improve the sustainability of food buying in, for example, schools and hospitals.

Farmers and food processors received support to get their products onto supermarket shelves – then considered the best place to invest their effort and trust. Regional government offices and development agencies were charged with implementing the policy. The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) commissioned a food industry sustainability strategy. An action plan was launched to support organic farming, which Defra then acknowledged as conferring considerable environmental benefits.

Yet since 2002, key government agencies have dismantled support for projects that address food poverty. Patchy efforts to improve food in public institutions remain ‘islands in a sea of mediocrity’, according to an apt summary by Professor Kevin Morgan of Cardiff University. £2.2 billion of public money is being spent each year on food that rarely meets health or environmental standards and largely fails to invest in reliable farm incomes or sustainable farming practices.

The organic action plan has been abandoned, and some civil servants at Defra now deny that they ever said organic farming conferred significant environmental benefits, preferring to denigrate organic as simply a ‘lifestyle choice’. Frequent calls on government to force supermarkets to treat their suppliers more fairly have met with silence, or vague encouragement for supermarket bosses to act more responsibly.

Call to action

All this is despite the call to action becoming ever stronger. Since 2002, the world has found out so much more about the inherent lack of resilience of our food system. Public awareness of food insecurity has never been higher, due not least to emerging understanding of peak oil and climate change. Our future ability to eat seems bound up with the turbulence of oil prices, global grain speculation, intensive animal farming practices that create pandemics, a reckless banking sector and the increasing problem of water shortages.

In the face of such enormous forces, it might be tempting to give in to a sense of powerlessness and loss of hope. Yet our task, if we choose to accept it, is to design a food system that is ethical, healthy and sustainable, which provides many more people with a decent living, builds communities and underpins stability between nations. It will also need to feed many more people – possibly as many as nine billion in just a few decades. Sustainable farming specialists tell us it can be done.

In summer 2008, the government responded to the Cabinet Office’s analysis with its Food Matters strategy, setting out commitments to start solving the problems. In August this year, it again sought to assure us that it is on the case, publishing Food Matters: one year on. It gave details of government actions over the past year and commitments for the years to come.

The publication had a strange effect. Journalists, analysts and campaigners struggled to find the story. They sifted through the report trying to get a handle on the substance, seeking to find any signs of large-scale and specific commitments to making the food system more ethical and less reliant on fossil fuels. They ploughed through lists of labelling and salt reduction initiatives, and general commitments to greater spending on international aid and rural development.

The report contained a number of initiatives to encourage businesses to do better things. Several newspapers re-hashed stories from the previous year’s round of Food Matters coverage, reminding us once more that householders (those naughty people) throw away one third of the food they buy, effectively wasting all of the energy, water and effort put in to make it in the first place. If only they would stop, and also learn to cook, it was implied, then things would generally be a lot better.

Public debate became polarised. On the one hand, there was a stress on the need at a local and individual level for more food labelling, composting schemes, education and allotments to ensure better informed consumers and fuller larders. At the other end of the scale, the focus was on the apparent imperative to accept and plant far more genetically modified (GM) grain in order to secure global food security and economic growth, and to ensure that more people can adopt diets that follow the western pattern – plenty of processed food and lots of meat and dairy products. To take issue with either would seem like churlishness on the one hand and Luddite veganism on the other, with a vague implication that to fail to accept the destruction of large areas of rainforest for grain production for animal feed is tantamount to wanting millions of people to starve.

Something was absent in the government’s announcement, and in the public debate that followed. It is an absence that is reflected in the government’s underlying philosophy concerning the role of the state and is very likely to predominate in any future Tory government’s whole approach. Governments of either persuasion are less and less willing to intervene, on all our behalves, on issues of common concern. They provide us with a description of the problem, but look to others to take the lead – usually businesses that, as we know only too well, have a lot of other priorities, not least returning profits to their shareholders. Such an approach by government has many implications for whether or not we can achieve the level and pace of change now needed.

In the Food Matters strategy, for the food policies focused at a local and individual level, much of the government’s approach can be characterised as ‘maintaining the freedom to choose’. As one example, for public sector caterers in hospitals and care homes, the government proposed a voluntary scheme (called the ‘healthier food mark’) to improve nutrition and the environmental performance of food bought with public money. Some £2.2 billion is spent every year on food in schools, hospitals, nursing homes, the army and prisons, and could routinely be invested in sustainable food and farming if mandatory standards were introduced and applied nationwide.

The M word

Instead, the government offered a voluntary grading scheme to praise caterers for choosing items such as sustainable fish, seasonal vegetables, fairly-traded drinks and lower-fat spreads. Effectively, it is saying that it is down to thousands of individual caterers around the country to make everyday choices about whether or not to curb climate change, global poverty and heart disease – but without the imperative, support, training or budgets to do so. There is no wider plan. Pressed to say whether the scheme would be made compulsory if it failed to result in change, government procurement officials said that ‘we don’t use the M word’ (‘mandatory’). We’ll all have to trust to luck.

Strangely, such a weak approach comes despite pressure even from the industry itself. Earlier this year, Compass Group – the biggest commercial caterer in the world – gave evidence to Hilary Benn’s new Food Policy Council that it would like to see mandatory standards for public sector catering (yes, they did use the M word) so that it can achieve the cost efficiencies to make healthy and sustainable food possible on a large scale.

At the other end of the debate, the government’s review of the state of food and farming, one year on from its initial Food Matters strategy, focused on global food production and international trade. Over the next year or so, the UK public can be expected once again to be consulted on the acceptability of GM crops. We didn’t give the ‘right answer’ last time, so (the government seems to be saying) on this occasion we jolly well should, this time with the argument that GM will prevent mass starvation.

The task of conducting a consultation is likely to be given to the Food Standards Agency, whose remit is to look at food safety. It is very unlikely, therefore, that issues of general concern about GM technology will be raised with the public. These include matters such as multinational corporate control of agriculture, over-dependence on monocultures and proprietary agricultural agro-chemicals, and the design of ‘terminator genes’ to prevent any prospect of seed-saving or adaptation of genetic stock to local circumstances. Meanwhile, investment in agricultural research and appropriate-scale technologies to help horticultural production and low-input farming, and to help design and implement practices that require less use of fossil fuels, is at a disturbingly low ebb.

No doubt the FSA will also ignore the madness of continuing to support the destruction of rainforest to grow grain – whether GM or not – to feed animals rather than people, which is hugely inefficient. According to UN figures, livestock production is responsible for 30 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, more than all the cars and trucks in the world, largely due to changes in land use and cutting down forests to clear space for industrial grain production.

Feeding nine billion

If we’re going to feed the nine billion people projected to be alive by 2050 ethically and sustainably, we all need to eat less meat and dairy produce (both major sources of greenhouse gas emissions and also unhealthy fat in western diets). And when we do eat it, it should have been raised to higher environmental and welfare standards. The change would be good for our waistlines too – these days there are more people in the world who are overweight than underweight, according to the World Health Organisation.

Macro-decisions about grain production are painted as ‘out there’ – the stuff of international negotiation and tough bargaining at tables full of suited businessmen and technocrats. No wonder people feel so powerless and frustrated. And no wonder individuals, farmers, shopkeepers and caterers cannot see or understand their roles in bringing about a better food and farming system, or feel empowered or incentivised to make the necessary changes.

In energy, major government investment is in ‘big kit’ – massive infrastructure such as an offshore National Grid and a new generation of nuclear power stations. The profits will return to big companies. So too in food and farming, where the approach is to invest in hi-tech biotechnology, with little said about the investment and local-scale farming technologies and practices needed to build resilient food, farming and trading systems that use inherently less fossil fuel.

We could be supporting an army of artisan food producers to take back control of the food system, use sustainable ingredients and open local shops and markets. How better to cut transport fuel than re-creating the ability for people to be able to buy their food a short walk away – and have pleasurable interactions with their community in the process?

The time has also come for more co-operative efforts to feed ourselves, with the values of a sustainable food and farming system built in from the start. Consumers do have power, but not just to choose between one product and another in the supermarket, which, all too often, presents a choice between one damaging product and another. Where consumers have most power, it is when they take control of food trading to create food co-operatives, box schemes and farmers’ markets –

re-forging the link between producers and citizens and using their power to support a better way of providing food. Consumer co-operatives, in particular, because they are run on a voluntary basis, can help ensure that food is affordable while remaining ethical by cutting out most of the costs of retail. Food campaigners are now championing city, town and community approaches to more resilient local food systems. More land and expertise needs to be made available for horticultural production, and more support is needed on the demand side from procurement, retailers and catering organisations to use ethical and sustainable food routinely to make the markets for this produce more secure. Farming needs to become an attractive industry for younger people to get involved.

Initiatives such as Growing Communities (see next page) are inspiring examples of communities rising to the challenge of food security. Such approaches could be scaled up and replicated, with investment from regional development agencies, while retaining local control, to help farmers and communities build good livelihoods. The government could be creating the right environment for change to happen. It remains to be seen whether or not it has the appetite to do so.

Kath Dalmeny is policy director for Sustain.
www.sustainweb.org

Food co-ops for the future

Consumer co-operatives are nothing new. As early as the 1850s there were 1,000-plus consumer co-operatives in Britain that were an integral part of the workers’ movement. They aimed to provide members with high-quality consumables they wouldn’t otherwise have been able to afford.

Today, the Co-operative supermarket behaves similarly to any other, albeit with a slightly more ethical purchasing policy. But more grass-roots food co-ops can also be found. They thrive in some US cities, for instance, with one of the biggest being the Park Slope Food Co-op in Brooklyn. Started in 1973, it now has 17,000 members, offers them 20-40 per cent off their weekly grocery bills and has an annual turnover of $32 million (£19 million).

In the UK, they also exist on a smaller scale, often operating one day a week out of a community centre. Sustain, the alliance for better food and farming (www.sustainweb.org) is among the organisations promoting them. To find your nearest, or get information on starting your own, check out www.foodcoops.org.

And since every food-based initiative needs a celebrity chef to promote it, enter Arthur Potts Dawson and his ‘People’s Supermarket’. This is essentially also a food co-op, which Dawson wants to be run by local people and sell good food that is cheap enough to compete with the likes of Tesco. Register your interest at www.peoplessupermarket.org and watch out for the inevitable Channel 4 series.

James O’Nions

Feeding the city

admin — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 14:02:41 +0000

Some 15 years ago, a small-scale box scheme started up in Hackney, feeding around 30 families. In 1997, that initiative started to develop into Growing Communities, an organisation that now feeds 1,000 people a week through its box scheme, hosts the only weekly organic farmers’ market in the UK, grows food on sites across Hackney and trains people in vital agricultural and food preparation skills.

Growing Communities is much more than the sum of those parts, however. Explicitly opposed to the current food production and distribution system, it sees itself as ‘growing the new society in the shell of the old’ and helping to model what a grass-roots, community-led, not-for-profit food production system might look like in the future. Through its 12-point ‘Manifesto for Feeding the City’ (see box, next page), the organisation lays out the principles that those involved believe are necessary for a fair and ecologically sound food system in the UK, and particularly for large urban areas such as London.

The organisation sources its food both through existing organic producers and through the development of its own patchwork of urban agriculture sites within the borough of Hackney. With around 25 producers hosting regular stalls at the farmers’ market, which has a customer base of an average 1,500 local residents each week, Growing Communities provides a much needed revenue stream for those small UK farms still competing with multinational supermarkets and agri-business. Meanwhile, its box scheme sources salad from Hackney-based ‘microsites’, as well as food from further afield. It generates nearly £10,000 from sales of Hackney-grown produce, from a total land area of only half an acre.

Constituted as a not-for-profit company, Growing Communities is run by a volunteer management committee elected from its membership. The membership is comprised of all subscribers to the box scheme, as well as those who donate to the organisation. In contrast to some other grass-roots food schemes across the country, it believes that members should have control of its operations through the management committee, as opposed to control by workers. As a result, while its structure is flatter than many commercial box schemes, it is not a workers’ cooperative but runs with a mainly traditional staff structure. It employs nearly 20 people, all of whom work on a part-time basis, as well as a number of volunteers.

Urban food strategy

Rather than simply attempt to grow as much food as locally as possible without analysis or strategy, Growing Communities has drawn on its years of experience in urban local food production to produce an achievable ideal of what food distribution might look like in the future. This ‘food zone strategy’ (see diagram, next page) informs the areas on which Growing Communities concentrates, and provides a way to measure the success of its efforts.

While the organisation currently enjoys success in sourcing food both from the urban and ‘rural hinterland’ zones, ‘peri-urban’ land remains a significant challenge. Despite the availability of urban fringe land within the M25, very little agricultural activity remains within this area of London. As a result, Growing Communities is currently looking into the possibility of kick-starting food production within the peri-urban belt, specifically for distribution within Hackney.

As well as expanding its own operations, Growing Communities is also looking into replication of the initiative across London. Having originally started as a small vegetable box scheme, the organisation is in a good position to advise other groups across the capital about the pitfalls and opportunities that await anyone attempting to repeat its success. Instead of leaving provision of local food to profit-orientated companies, Growing Communities hopes to catalyse more community-led, not-for-profit schemes in boroughs across the capital – having shown already that it can be done.

Part of the movement

Well aware of its wider connection to the environmental and social justice movements, Growing Communities attempts where possible to link its food production and distribution to a wider political agenda. Not only does its weekly box scheme newsletter often focus on critiques of the existing food system, but the organisation goes out of its way to make itself more accessible to lower-income residents of the borough. In June of this year, both the farmers’ market and the box scheme began accepting Healthy Start vouchers, the government scheme for low income families with young children.

In addition to this, the organisation seeks to create employment opportunities through its apprentice growers scheme, which teaches the skills necessary for urban agriculture and then allows hands-on experience on the Hackney based microsites. And the organisation is very activist-friendly – Climate Camp received a few boxes of Hackney-grown salad last year as a small token of Growing Communities’ awareness of its links to the wider movement.

Of course, there have been numerous challenges for Growing Communities, and many of these continue to exist. Any initiative that is seeking to challenge and subvert the power of institutions as large and as powerful as supermarkets will always encounter difficulties, particularly as it begins to grow large enough to make it onto their radar.

Even an organisation the size of Growing Communities, however, seems to have been largely overlooked by regional and national government, and has often been seen only as a concern of Hackney Council’s parks department, rather than as a wider exemplar of local economic health, environmental sustainability and social inclusion. Only many such organisations, networked and learning from each other, will be able to significantly challenge the status quo of food production in the UK.

As Kerry Rankine, who works at Growing Communities, says, ‘The most important lesson that the organisation can teach is that members of a community, working together, can achieve a real shift in people’s priorities and thinking. From a small start, the organisation now provides employment for scores of people, food for thousands, and hopefully inspiration for many more.’

Matt Sellwood is the Green Party candidate for Hackney North

Growing Communities’ 12-point manifesto

The food involved should:

Be farmed and produced ecologically

Be as local as practicable

Be seasonal

Be mainly plant-based

Be fresh or involve minimal processing

Be from small-scale operations

Support fair trade

Involve environmentally friendly and
low-carbon resource use

Promote knowledge

Foster community

Strive to be economically viable and independent

Be produced honestly, transparently and promote trust throughout the food chain

The great global land grab

admin — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 14:00:34 +0000

News of another big land deal between a rich nation and a poor developing country is becoming a common occurrence. In August a group of Saudi investors said that they would be investing $1 billion in land in Africa for rice cultivation. They are calling it their ’7x7x7 project’, since they are aiming to plant 700,000 hectares of land to produce seven million tonnes of rice in seven years. The land will be distributed over several countries: Mali, Senegal and maybe Sudan and Uganda.

A few weeks earlier South Korea acquired 700,000 hectares of land in Sudan, also for rice cultivation. India is funding a large group of private companies to buy 350,000 hectares in as-yet unspecified countries in Africa. A group of South African businessmen is negotiating an 8 million hectare deal in the Democratic Republic of Congo. And so it goes on. The United Nations believes that at least 30 million hectares (about 74 million acres, well over the size of the UK) were acquired by outside investors in the developing world during the first half of this year alone.

The land grab was indirectly spawned by the international financial crisis. It’s interesting to trace the investors’ train of thought because it says a lot about the kind of world we’re heading towards. Some two years ago many financial players – the investment houses that manage workers’ pensions, private equity funds, hedge funds, big grain traders and so on – saw that the sub-prime mortgage bubble was about to burst and moved money into the safer commodities market. Although there was no real shortage of food, food prices (especially of cereals, but also of dairy and meat) rose dramatically.

Countries dependent on food imports were badly hit, with a big increase in the domestic price of some food staples, particularly rice. People coped by changing their eating habits, in many cases cutting back on meals, but they also took to the streets to demand government action. By early 2008 riots had broken out in nearly 40 countries, instilling fear among the world’s political elite. Panic-stricken governments rushed to increase their food imports, leading several food-producing nations to restrict exports, fearful that they too could be hit by shortages.

The big winners from the crisis were not the farmers, as one might have expected. They enjoyed a big increase in the prices they were paid at the farm gate, but all their potential income gains were gobbled up by higher production costs. The people who made a real killing were the suppliers of agricultural inputs. With their quasi-monopoly control over seeds, pesticides, fertilisers and machinery, these giant companies made obscene profits out of the higher prices squeezed out of largely poor populations (see box).

Close on their heels in the ranking of the profiteers came the world’s largest grain traders. These companies played a role in artificially creating the food scare in the first place, so they made sure they were well placed to profit from it. Cargill, the world’s largest grain trader, reported an increase in profits in 2008 of nearly 70 per cent over 2007, a 157 per cent rise in profits since 2006. Profits for ADM, the world’s second largest grain trader, showed a lower rate of increase in 2008, partly because of its heavy investments in the sinking ethanol market, but the company’s profits were still more than 200 per cent higher than they were in 2006 (see tables, right).

Going abroad

The crisis eventually eased, at least temporarily, but by then its impact on rich, food-insecure nations had been profound. Take Saudi Arabia. Since the late 1970s the country had been seeking to become self-sufficient in some foods, particularly wheat. But just before the food crisis erupted, the government reluctantly decided that this strategy was doomed, largely because the country simply didn’t have enough water to irrigate crops.

In a radical change of tack, it decided that it would cover all of its grain consumption through imports by 2015. But this, of course, left the country completely reliant on the world market, just at a time that this market was showing itself to be alarmingly unreliable. Not surprisingly, a rather panic-stricken government sent out a directive to private businessmen instructing them to invest in agricultural production abroad. Adnan al-Naiem, secretary general of the Asharqia Chamber in the Eastern Province, put it succinctly in a briefing: ‘The objective is to achieve long-term food security for Saudi Arabia and to secure a continuous supply of food to the kingdom at low and fair prices.’

China is another example. While self-sufficient in food at the moment, it has a huge population, its agricultural lands have been disappearing to industrial development and its water supplies are under serious stress. With 40 per cent of the world’s farmers but only 9 per cent of the world’s farmland, it should surprise no one that food security is high on the Chinese government’s agenda. And with more than $1.8 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, China has deep pockets from which to invest in its own food security abroad.

As many farmers’ leaders and activists in south-east Asia know, Beijing has been gradually outsourcing part of its food production since well before the global food crisis broke in 2007. Through China’s new geopolitical diplomacy, and the government’s aggressive ‘Go Abroad’ outward investment strategy, some 30 agricultural cooperation deals have been sealed in recent years to give Chinese firms access to ‘friendly country’ farmland in exchange for Chinese technology, training and infrastructure development funds.

Other countries, such as South Korea, Egypt, Libya, Kuwait, India and Japan, have also decided for their own reasons that, faced with the prospect of a world shortage of food in the future, it makes sense to find reliable sources outside their own borders for at least part of their food supply. This is what is driving the current land grab, comparable in a way to the ‘scramble for Africa’ in the late 19th century. Huge areas of the world are being taken over by foreign powers, but they are no longer using military force – they are waving chequebooks, which in today’s world can be an even more powerful weapon.

Although land is being grabbed in many different parts of the world, Africa is under heavy assault. Many impoverished governments in sub-Saharan Africa are sorely tempted by the offer of money up-front, and the foreign investors know that if the deals go sour in the future the weak governments will find it hard to expel them. Not that the foreign investors are leaving much to chance. There have already been reports of some of the leased land being protected by private security firms.

There is much to worry us about the new carve-up. Some of the world’s poorest countries are letting go of land that they need to feed their own populations. The Sudanese government has sold a 99-year lease on 1.5 million hectares of prime farmland to the Gulf states, Egypt and South Korea. But Sudan is also the world’s largest recipient of foreign aid, with 5.6 million of its citizens dependent on food packages from abroad. All principles of basic justice tell us that Sudan should be using this land to feed its own people.

At the moment, the foreign investors speak of a win-win situation, in which both occupying and occupied countries benefit. Take the 7x7x7 Saudi project mentioned earlier. ‘West Africa has an annual deficit of about 2 million tonnes of rice,’ according to the Foras International Investment Company, one of the partners in the scheme. ‘Our project will confront the food shortage crisis, increase agricultural output and improve rice productivity.’ In other words, there will be enough rice to feed the local population and to send abroad. Yet the day may come when there isn’t enough rice for both Arabs and West Africans. It is hard to imagine that the investors will put the needs of impoverished African families before the needs of their own, much richer, more powerful people.

The day the food runs out

The day that the food starts to run out in the world may come far more quickly than most of us imagine. At present, there are more than a billion people going hungry even though there is no shortage of food. The very poor don’t eat enough because they don’t have enough money. The underlying problem is one of social inequality, of the highly skewed distribution of financial resources in the world.

Over the next century much worse food shortages may emerge. The climate crisis is already arriving far more quickly than scientists expected and proving far more dangerous. For a while, many scientists believed that the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be partly compensated for by an increase in plant growth, caused by the greater availability of CO2. But now it seems that carbon fertilisation, as it is called, will not happen or will happen far less reliably than was once imagined.

One of the most comprehensive models of the impact of climate change, carried out in 2007 by William R Cline, predicts that, without carbon fertilisation, crop productivity in the developing world is likely to decline drastically, by 21 per cent over the next 80 years. And these predictions may also be underestimates, as they haven’t taken into account all the so-called ‘positive feedbacks’ – the melting of the ice sheets in the Arctic and the Antarctic, the melting of the glaciers, the much greater frequency of forest fires, the growing water shortage and so on – which will make everything worse. Indeed, many of the nations that are scouring the world for arable land will have been warned by their own scientists that a world of dire shortages lies ahead.

Yet, in this dog-eat-dog world, the very actions that the rich countries are taking will increase the likelihood of a global food shortage. The land being grabbed by outside powers has its own precious ecosystems and much of it is used, at least for parts of the year, by local people. Even though governments say that they are only selling ‘empty’ or ‘marginal’ land, such a concept simply does not exist for many of the traditional peasant and indigenous communities in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

And the world destroys its biodiversity at its peril, for it is hugely important to have genetically varied populations and species-rich natural and agricultural ecosystems, particularly at times of environmental stress. Biodiversity plays a crucial role in supplying the raw materials and the genes that make possible the emergence of the new plant varieties on which we all depend. Such new varieties will be urgently required as the world heats up.

The outside investors, however, working with large private companies, are destroying existing ecosystems and creating huge areas of monoculture crops dependent on chemical fertilisers and pesticides. With the destruction of the ecosystems comes the dispersal of the peasantry and other traditional communities of farmers and herders, who have a profound knowledge of the local biodiversity. These communities could play a crucial role in combating climate change.

To give just a single example, with adequate financial support they could be linked together in a vast network of seed markets, stretching across the whole of the African continent, that would help plants to ‘migrate’ as climatic conditions change. They are perhaps mankind’s greatest hope of coping with the climatic cataclysms that lie ahead. Yet the current breakneck land grab is destroying the very basis of their livelihoods. And it is all of us, throughout the world, who will pay the price.