Category Archives: Democratic food systems

advocate, Democratic food systems, Fair Food systems, Food policy, Food sovereignty, National Food Plan

Canadians endorse food sovereignty in public forums

A Food Plan for Industry, or a Plan for the People?

Nick Rose

This article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 17.9.11

Canada’s political parties, and its food movement, have in recent years thoroughly discussed food policy formation. As Australia grapples for the first time with the idea of a National Food Plan, it’s instructive to look at the Canadian experience.

First, the political parties. In Canada’s most recent Federal election, held on 2nd May this year, all the major parties – the Conservatives, the Liberals, the New Democrats (NDP), the Greens and Bloc Québécois – went to the electorate with a platform on food policy. The Conservatives, and to a lesser extent the Liberals, were clearly focused on export agriculture, and opening up new markets. Each of the other three parties, by contrast, spoke of the need to work towards food sovereignty, broadly conceived as the ‘right of peoples and sovereign states to democratically determine their own agricultural and food policies.’

What this translated to in practice in the Canadian context was a need to protect farm incomes, both by reviewing the impacts of trade agreements on Canadian farmers, and by building strong and diverse local food systems so that more value in the food dollar is returned directly to farmers. The NDP identified the need for specific measures to find pathways for new entrants into farming, while the Greens linked climate change and emissions reduction to agriculture.

Of all the parties, only the NDP had carried out an extensive public consultation process of 28 community forums over 18 months in all Canadian provinces. At every forum participants overwhelmingly expressed their agreement that food sovereignty, as summarised above, should form the basis on which the Canadian government approaches its international trade negotiations.

The NDP reported that Canadians wanted a ‘comprehensive food strategy’, with the core objectives of ensuring access to healthy food for all Canadians; helping Canadian farmers deliver such access; and building a sustainable agriculture for the future.

As a matter of interest, the NDP recorded a 13% swing in its favour, nearly trebled its number of seats in the Canadian parliament, and now sits as the official opposition to the Conservatives for the first time in its history.

Also in the lead up to the election, a grass-roots citizen initiative led by Food Secure Canada published its ‘Resetting the Table: A People’s Food Policy for Canada’ report. This was, as I mentioned last time, the outcome of very extensive public discussions over two years, including 350 kitchen-table talks in which 3,500 Canadians participated. The report was embraced by both the NDP and the Greens.

People's Food Policy Project: Resetting the Table
People’s Food Policy Project: Resetting the Table

The report pointed out its unique status as ‘the first-ever national food policy to be developed by the food movement itself – a diverse and dynamic network of organizations and individuals working to build a healthy, ecological and just food system for Canada.’ As the authors state, those involved in this movement ‘are taking actions daily that are transforming our food system from the ground up’, and the challenge is to ‘translate [these actions] into policy’.

The Policy itself draws on comprehensive recommendations and guidelines developed in ten detailed discussion papers generated by the engagement process with the public. The key recommendations are as follows:

  • ‘Ensure food is eaten as close as possible to where it is produced’ (e.g. mandatory local procurement policies for private and public organisations, and support for local food initiatives such as farmers markets)
  • Support producers in the transition to ecological production, including entry pathways for new farmers
  • ‘Enact a strong poverty elimination program with measurable targets and timelines’
  • ‘Create a nationally-funded Children and Food Strategy (e.g. school meals, school gardens, food literacy programs) to ensure that all children at all times have access to the food required for healthy lives’
  • ‘Ensure that the public, especially the most marginalised, are actively involved in decisions that affect the food system.’

You won’t find any of this in the Australian Government’s Issues Paper for a National Food Plan, which more closely resembles the food policy platform of the Canadian Conservative Party.

Collaborative cultures and networks, Corporate control of food, Democratic food systems, Fair Food systems, Food policy, Food sovereignty, Global hunger

Fair food from field to fork: food sovereignty

Reflections on the work of the People’s Food Plan process to date in Australia.

It’s a small beginning, there is a long way to go and the work seems daunting in its ambition and its urgency.

But we have to make a start.

Fair food from field to fork: food sovereignty.

advocate, Corporate control of food, Democratic food systems, Fair Food systems, Food sovereignty, Global hunger

Ending global hunger means ending the corporate control of food

Ending Global Hunger – is it possible?

Nick Rose

This article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on 25.6.11

On Monday 27th June, Uganda farmer and mother of 11, Polly Apio, will be speaking at the Bellingen Uniting Church, from 5.30 – 7.30 p.m.

She is in Australia on a speaking tour, organised by Action Aid, to raise awareness about the reality of hunger as it is experienced around the world, especially in Africa, and especially by women.

There is a common misconception that hunger in today’s world is the result of a lack of food. It seems logical enough, and our political leaders promote it widely.

For example, Trade Minister Craig Emerson travelled to Paris this week to attend the meeting of G20 Agriculture Ministers to discuss food price volatility, and come up with an action plan to address it. His message was that ‘the single most powerful means of dealing with the food security problem is through agricultural trade liberalisation’. In other words, other countries lower trade barriers to Australian products, creating incentives for our farmers and growers to increase production. We help feed the world, and we get new markets and earnings into the bargain. Simple.

The trouble is, this recipe – this ideology – has been promoted and tried for nearly three decades. It hasn’t worked, at least as regards the alleged objectives of combatting food insecurity and providing decent livelihoods for farmers. Since 1980, the numbers of malnourished people worldwide have more than doubled, food price volatility has become endemic as speculators have poured into commodity futures markets, and the terms of trade for most farmers worldwide – Australians included – have steadily worsened.

In any competitive system there are always winners and losers; only in this case, we have well over a billion losers, and a tiny handful of big winners. Among them is the leading grain processing and meat-packing corporation, Cargill. Cargill’s sales have more than doubled since 2000, while its profits have risen 500% to $US2.6 billion in 2010; and that figure is a hefty fall from the $US3.95 billion it earned in 2008, at the height of the last round of extreme food price volatility. So far this year its profits are up nearly 50% on the 2010 figure, once again taking advantage of the sharp rises in commodity prices.

I don’t know about you, but frankly I find something quite obscene in this coincidence between record agri-business profits and the proliferation of mass hunger, poverty and suffering. It says a lot about the naked and callous self-interest that passes for global culture at this point in history.

You won’t of course find this item on the agenda in the ministerial discussions in Paris. Instead, the communiqué calls for greater free trade, increased production, and the more efficient functioning of international commodities markets.

The alternative to this failed agenda for food security is to empower small farmers in the developing world to feed their communities and countries. This used to happen; before the era of trade liberalisation, most sub-Saharan African countries were actually net food exporters. Now they have to import as much as 50% of their food, which makes them highly vulnerable to price shocks.

Incidentally, Australians as a whole don’t eat enough fruit and veg, especially leafy greens, and we don’t produce enough either to meet the recommended daily intake. So before we start telling other countries how to organise their food systems, we should get our own house in order.

Which brings us back to Polly. Ironically, more than half of the malnourished persons in the world are small farmers; and in developing countries, most of the small farmers are women. Supporting them to raise their productive capacities – and to do so sustainably, without creating further dependencies on expensive seeds and chemical inputs – will make large inroads into global hunger.

This is called Food Sovereignty, and it means looking beyond our own self-interest, to stand in solidarity with inspiring leaders like Polly, and to do what we can to help them achieve their vision of dignity and self-determination for their communities. Come along and listen to what she has to say.

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

Environmental Sustainability and Social Justice Requires Democratic Food Systems

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

Hand plant

Some excerpts:

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

…

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

…

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

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

…

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

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

Political Reflection Vol 3 No 4