Reclaiming the food chain: global steps to living locally
October 30th, 2007As the concept of ‘food security’ gained prominence in the twentieth century, farmers, peasants and food producers across the world noticed a curious dynamic emerging. Despite being the ones whose labour was feeding the world, they were increasingly being cut out of the bargain. While food security may guarantee that there’s food on the table, it doesn’t guarantee that the food was traded on just and fair terms: that the farmer and her family got a reasonable price, that it was produced in a sustainable way, that it supports resilient local economies or even that it is culturally appropriate.
The concept of ‘food security’ has been increasingly appropriated by agribusiness and international financial institutions like the World Trade Organisation as a justification for the continued roll out of corporate economic globalisation. As Food First’s Peter Rossett explains, the US (or any other government) can argue “that importing cheap food from the US is a better way for poor countries to achieve food security than producing it themselves. But massive imports of cheap, subsidised food undercut local farmers driving them off the land. They swell the ranks of the hungry, and their food security is placed in the hands of the cash economy just as they migrate to urban slums where they cannot find living wage jobs. To achieve genuine food security, people in rural areas must have access to productive land and receive prices for their crops that allow them to make a decent living”.As Raj Patel highlights in Stuffed and Starved: markets, power and the hidden battle for the world food system, farmers and rural communities across the world are spiralling into disproportionate poverty. The profits from their labour are accumulating instead in the bank accounts of a handful of corporations that trade and retail their harvests around the planet . Despite more food being produced than ever before, and a frenzy of ‘free’ trade, paradoxically we now face a world where over 850 million people are chronically hungry. Furthermore, it is the traditional food producers, the farmers and peasants who are often going hungry.
In response to the appropriation of ‘food security’, in 1996, La Via Campesina coined the concept of ‘food sovereignty’. After a decade of discussions, in early 2007, La Via Campesina, Friends of the Earth International and number of other organisations held the first World Forum for Food Sovereignty in Mali, West Africa. On the dusty shores of Lake Sélingué, amid mud huts and mango trees, 600 peasants, family farmers, fisherfolk, nomads, pastoralists, rural workers and consumers from across the planet came together to articulate a vision that guarantees not just food on the table, but also seeks to return control of the food system to communities. At it’s most basic, food sovereignty is the right of communities to determine their own food and agriculture policy. While it embraces the local, it “does not negate trade, but rather, it promotes the formulation of trade policies and practices that serve the rights of people to safe, healthy and ecologically sustainable production”.
Food sovereignty recognises that food is the common ground for all peoples, and identifies it as a starting point and guiding theme for broader change. Food sovereignty suggests that it’s impossible to explore how food is produced, traded and consumed without questioning the whole fabric of global economics and society: from resource-intensive industrial production of crops and livestock, to technologies like GMOs and nanotechnology, to food aid, to the patenting of traditional knowledge and, through all of these aspects, the consolidation of corporate control of food production and trade.
Food sovereignty is intrinsically about connection to land and connection to place. It positions those from food producing traditions that have been maintained over time at the centre of its discussions and action. By acknowledging the wisdom of those who have been feeding their communities for centuries – peasants, indigenous peoples, fisherfolk and others – it recognises that those who maintain traditions of closeness and connection to the earth are best placed to make decisions and advise on how land should be used, how food can continue to be cultivated, traded and consumed in their communities and beyond. In this way, food sovereignty acknowledges that ‘sustainability’ is unique to the demands and capacities of a particular landscape.
Food sovereignty for Australia?
Led by what may be the largest civil society organisation on earth, La Via Campesina, the global movement for food sovereignty remains firmly driven by the farmers, families and activists from the majority world. For many of these advocates, from Africa, Latin America or Asia, their work towards food sovereignty is a campaign to protect and preserve food producing traditions and local economies from the disruptions and incursions of corporate globalisation.
In Australia, the landscape of (Indigenous) food traditions has already largely been overwritten by European agriculture, and in turn, that food system is increasingly consolidated into the hands of a few corporations. The top ten percent of Australian farms produce sixty percent of our food, and that share is growing . Food retailing is even more concentrated, with the two largest supermarket chains dominating almost eighty percent of food purchases . With so many of our crops grown for export, (think of the rice we send to Thailand, already one of the world’s biggest rice producers), Australia is already deep in the heart of the globalised trade system.
In the face of Australia’s globalised, industrialised food system, our challenge is to rebuild a kind of sovereignty for our food, nested within strong, ecologically conscious communities and resilient local economies. The surge of support for farmers’ markets over recent years is an inspiring step towards this, as is the growth of community gardens, and increasing interest in permaculture and the popularity of organics. With diet-related illnesses like diabetes, heart-disease and kidney failure rife in Indigenous communities , perhaps it’s also time to support greater food sovereignty based on traditional diets for Aboriginal communities. Faced with the same health issues, the Indigenous food sovereignty movement is already strong across North America.
Beyond our borders, Australia has already established free trade agreements with the United States, Thailand, Singapore and New Zealand, and is determined to develop further agreements with China, Japan, Korea and others. The impact of Australian exports onto local economies and communities often goes unreported, underscoring the urgency for us to build our understanding and work in solidarity with peasants and farmers throughout the region to defend their local economies, culture and environment.
Coming home to eat
In a society where the environments where we buy most of our food are meticulously calculated to influence our buying choices and tastes, and where agribusiness invests billions into attempting define and redefine what we should be eating, what’s nutritious, what’s ‘good’ for us, perhaps our first step is to reclaim sovereignty over our own food choices.
Underscored by the principles of food sovereignty, eating locally is a crucial first step in reclaiming the food chain. As Raj Patel describes, reclaiming our sovereignty over our tastes is intrinsically linked to local food, “changing our palates is a cultural invitation to the deeper and subtler pleasures of food that can’t be transported, can’t be processed, can only be eaten in a short season every year.”
Eating locally also has strong environmental benefits: a recent study into ‘food miles’ in Victoria found that the ‘average’ household food basket of groceries could have travelled up to 70,803 km (or almost twice around the circumference of the earth) including conservative estimates for some of the packaging. The food basket’s emissions from road transport alone were almost 17,000 km, with greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 4,247 cars driving for one year .
Fuelled by cheap oil, often more calories are consumed in the transport of food than the food itself contains: a British study cites the example of an iceberg lettuce flown from Los Angeles to the United Kingdom consuming 127 calories (in non-renewable oil) for every calorie contained in those leafy greens. The same report calculates that the transport alone from a “sample basket of imported organic produce could release as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as an average four-bedroom household does through cooking meals for eight months”.
By eating locally we can bypass the long, anonymous supply chain between a distant industrial farm and us. By building direct relationships with local farmers and growers we can easily find out exactly how our food is produced, and through our purchases directly support sustainable food production and the local economy. Indeed, as Slow Food states, we can become not ‘consumers’ but ‘co-producers’, “because by being informed about how our food is produced and actively supporting those who produce it, we become a part of and a partner in the production process” . Local food not only builds relationships in our local economies and communities, but also strengthens our relationship with the seasons and landscapes of our home bioregion.
In June 2007, Friends of the Earth Adelaide formed its new community food campaign ‘Reclaim the Food Chain’. Reclaim the Food Chain draws together community members who are passionate about the politics and pleasures of food, seeking to support just and sustainable food systems in South Australia and beyond both through cultivating community-based food production and distribution and through campaigning on the broader impacts of agriculture and trade policy.
In November, Friends of the Earth will be launching The Urban Orchard, in collaboration with the Goodwood Goodfood Organic Co-op. Inspired by a similar project at Melbourne’s CERES Community Environment Park, the Urban Orchard is a homegrown fruit, vegetable and skills exchange that will meet monthly to exchange surplus backyard produce and to share skills on suburban food cultivation, preparation and preservation. This festive season, Friends of the Earth welcomes everyone to participate in its bioregional festive food feast: a week-long challenge to eat only food produced in your bioregion, and to share the culinary wonders of our unique home environments with friends, family and broader community. After all, sustainability begins at home.
- Joel Catchlove, written for the Soil Association of SA journal ‘The Living Soil’, November 2007
For more information on Friends of the Earth Adelaide’s community food campaign ‘Reclaim the Food Chain, call us on 08 8227 1399, or email joel.catchlove[at]foe.org.au. Reprints of this article are welcome, please Friends of the Earth at the details above.
References
Rosset, P, 2003, ‘Food sovereignty: global rallying cry of farmer movements’, Food First Backgrounder, Volume 9, Number 4, p. 1
Patel, R, 2007, Stuffed and starved: markets, power and the hidden battle for the world food system, Black Inc., Melbourne
La Via Campesina, et al., no date, Statement on Peoples’ Food Sovereignty, http://www.nyeleni2007.org/spip.php?article147
Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, 2007, Future harvest: the way ahead for Australian agriculture and food, Commonwealth of Australia, p. 2
Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, 2007, Australian Food Statistics 2006, Commonwealth of Australia, p. 6
O’Dea K, 2005, ‘The price of ‘progress’: diabetes in Indigenous Australians’, Diabetes Voice, Volume 50, Issue 4, p. 28
Gaballa, S & Bee Abraham, A, 2007, Food Miles in Australia: a preliminary study in Melbourne, Victoria, CERES Community Environment Park, Melbourne, p. 23
Sustain/Elm Farm Research Centre, 2001, Eating Oil – food in a changing climate summary, Sustain/Elm Farm, p. 1, http://www.sustainweb.org/pdf/eatoil_sumary.pdf
Slow Food International, 2007, ‘Our philosophy’, Slow Food International, http://www.slowfood.com/about_us/eng/philosophy.lasso