Talking About Food-- Nationally

Food Secure Canada is making it's bid to place a national food policy on the table as an issue in the nest federal election (expected this fall). According to a survey they've taken of their members, this is how the election issues shake out:

via Food Secure Canada

Their recent newsletter was pretty upfront about their push:

We are calling on politicians of all political parties to Step Up to the Plate!
We need a national food policy - a new vision for our food system that encompasses the goals of zero hunger, healthy and safe food, and a more sustainable food system.
We want the next Federal Government to be committed to our agenda. As New York Times columnist Mark Bittman so eloquently put it:

"You can’t address climate change without fixing agriculture, you can’t fix health without improving diet, you can’t improve diet without addressing income [...]. The production, marketing, and consumption of food is key to nearly everything."

The bottom line is that we need a national food policy that will eliminate hunger, ensure safe and healthy food for all, and set us in the direction of a more sustainable food system. Our ambitious vision is outlined in Resetting the Table: A People’s Food Policy for Canada.
In the past four years, we have witnessed increasing levels of food insecurity, an untreated epidemic of diet-related illnesses that costs billions, and an aging farming population that newcomers cannot afford to replace. The current government has not shown leadership on these issues. With a coordinated national campaign, we think the food movement can speak in a united voice. Strengthening our movement and building our membership goes hand in hand with advocacy.

FSC is a pretty good group. I recommend heading over to their website and signing up for their newsletter, or check them out on facebook. You can also tweet them  @FoodSecureCAN

Professor Elliot, Horsemeat, and the High Cost of Cheap

"Paardenrookvlees" by Takeaway - Own work.
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Well, after many delays, concerns, and political panic attacks, the Elliot report (pdf), (precisely, the Elliott Review into the Integrity and Assurance of Food Supply Networks) has finally been released in the UK. Professor Elliot, a food safety academic from Queen's University in Belfast, chaired the committee, and the final report bears his name. Like the IPCC climate report, the final version has been subject to intense political negotiation by the affected parties before the report's release, which makes, like the IPCC report, the observations and recommendations pretty amazing. Professor Elliot, in the opening paragraphs of the report says:

I published my interim report in December 2013 which set out what should be done to address weaknesses in the system.Stakeholders welcomed the interim report and the opportunity to provide further feedback before I published this final report.I have since completed a further round of meetings and evidence gathering. Stakeholders felt that the final report should provide additional background about the recommendations and their implementation. Feedback has further shaped my recommendations and this, my final report, sets out the issues and the best way to tackle them in more detail.

 Had Professor Elliot been able to be a bit more frank, the passage might read "My preliminary report freaked out the government and food industry so much that they threatened me, my crew, and my university until I was forced to use much less dangerous political language--particularly that I should make it clear that it wasn't business' fault." You know, just like the IPCC.
The most media-friendly takeaway from the report seems to be that organized crime has a pretty big share of the UK food supply, and that it doesn't play by the rules. Which, to be fair, is pretty interesting. But the report also makes the point that the only way organized crime got a foothold in the food system is through 1) the complexity of the food supply chain, and 2) the concentration on price as the only significant driver on the food supply.
The report points out the difficulty of knowing how bad food fraud and food crime are in the UK:

[M]ore information about the extent of food crime was sought. The review contacted food businesses through trade associations and also territorial police forces. [...] Whilst it may appear from this feedback that food crime is not widespread in the UK, it is more likely that this confirms that evidence of food crime is not currently sought at the required level or with the necessary expertise. [....]

A total of 18 police forces responded to the request for information, 12 of which recorded no such cases [of food crime]. Several police forces highlighted a problem with extracting data on cases involving food crime as there is not currently a Home Office Crime Code for food contamination meaning it is not possible to search crime recording systems for food fraud. Food fraud may be costing UK food businesses a substantial amount of money and risks causing significant reputational damage. Importantly, some of the examples uncovered pose food safety risks. However, due to factors such as a lack of intelligence-based detection, the scale of the problem remains unknown. [sections 1.16 and 1.17]

 Nobody wants to know how extensive food fraud/food crime is in the UK. Food inspections agencies have seen their budgets cut (as had the CFIA in Canada) to the point where they are really just barely functioning fronts that perform minimal actual work. Food inspections have been off-loaded onto the companies producing the food, which have incentives for not finding any problems with the products flowing through the factory. The idea that the food industry needs impartial non-corporate oversight seems to have fallen out of favour with everyone except the public.
But the report also points out that:

Consumers have been accustomed to variety and access at low cost, and at marginal profit to suppliers. These factors have increased opportunities for food crime. [section 1.9]

 How do corporations maximize profit when they have trained consumers to concentrate on price over everything else? This is the Walmart principle of putting pressure on suppliers to lower costs to, quite frankly, levels that are impossible for manufacturers to survive on. They, in turn put pressure on their suppliers and workers to lower costs, or offshore to lower cost regimes. This system is detailed at length Ellen Ruppel Shell's book  Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture.

In terms of the food system, this manifests in adulteration of ingredients

Slow Motion Famine Continues

Well, lead author Valerie Tarasuk Ph.D. (along with Andy Mitchell and Naomi Dachner), professor in the Department of Nutritional Sciences at U of Toronto has released the results of a new study (pdf) into food insecurity in Canada between 2008 (the year the bubble burst) and 2011. Little surprise, things are not looking good. Bigger surprise, just how awful things actually are.
Dr. Tarasuk sums up the state of food insecurity in Canada quite succinctly in a statement she made:

Almost 3.9 million Canadians experienced some level of food insecurity in 2011. This marks an increase of over 450,000 people since 2008. It includes 1.1 million children living in households that have worried about running out of food, made compromises in the quality of their diets, ate less than they felt they should, and possibly gone without eating, all because they did not have the money to buy more food. The seriousness of this situation, its impact on individuals, families, communities, on our health care system and economy over all, cannot be overstated.

In an interview with the Winnipeg Free Press, she points out that the only exception to this Canada-wide increase is in Newfoundland and Labrador--the only places where an aggressive anti-poverty program has been running during the same time period.
What's worse:

One of the most "disturbing" findings in the report, she said, is that almost one million households in 2011 were food insecure but relied financially on employment.
"That says something really bad about the things we are doing to support people in the labour force," Tarasuk said.

Bad Meat: Horsemeat and the Food System

via Wikipedia

On the BBC website today, it's being reported that Prince Charles has once again taken on the state of current food production practice:

Speaking in Germany, the Prince of Wales said the "aggressive search for cheaper food" should be replaced by more sustainable production worldwide.
He said farmers were being "driven into the ground" by low prices, which had led to some "worrying shortcuts".
He also warned low-quality food could lead to "unaffordable" future costs.
The prince said rising costs of dealing with type 2 diabetes and other obesity-related conditions, coupled with practices which damage the environment, meant cheap food production was "not cheap at all".
"The only reason it appears cheap in the shops is because the costs either fall somewhere else, or they are being stored up for the future," he said.
'Unrewarding profession' "The recent horsemeat scandals are surely just one example, revealing a disturbing situation where even the biggest retailers seem not to know where their supplies are coming from."
He said responsible farming methods are considered a "niche market", and questioned why the system rewards those whose methods have "dire and damaging effects" on the environment.
"That [cost] then has to be paid for over and over again elsewhere - chiefly, in all probability, by our unfortunate children and grandchildren, whose welfare I happen to care about," he said.
Speaking at a conference on regional food security at Langenburg Castle in the state of Baden-Wurttemberg, the prince also warned farming had become an "unrewarding profession" which young people did not want to enter.
He said: "In the UK, I have been warning of this for some time and recently set up apprenticeship schemes to try to alleviate the problem. But the fact remains that at the moment the average age of British farmers is 58 and rising."

Of course, the Prince is correct. I recently watched a BBC 3 programme called The Horsemeat Banquet,  an entertaining experiment in challenging people to walk the walk, rathter than just talk the talk about food. But the magic moment, the "money shot", came when they did a brief survey of street food / takeaway food. It is very much worth a watch--I've edited the clip down, but if you get the chance to see the whole programme, do. It's well worth it.


What this clip says to me is just how much of our food distribution system we have to take on faith, how much we have to blindly trust that our interests are being looked out for.
And, of course, our interests are not being looked out for. Capital is looking out for the interests of capital--that's the point behind capitalism. We like to think that by doing so, somehow societie's interests are best served, but that is clearly not the case. The case can be, and has been, made that the interests of capital are antithetical to the interests of society--and that is a very easy case to make when talking about the international food system.
Why buy local? Why the interest in the 100 Mile Diet and the locavore movement? Because we can no longer trust our food system. Period. Full stop. Cannot trust it. The only good thing is that we can do something about it--the food system is one place whered individuals can still make a difference.

The Horesemeat Scandal Opportunity

This Al Jazeera report on the horsemeat scandal takes a different tack, suggesting that class had something to do with the scandal--and that it may also provide an opportunity.



"The food industry across Europe displayed a contempt for consumers. Because the food that ended up containing horse meat was consumed primarily by the poor."
And that's kind of it in a nutshell, isn't it? Not just horse meat, but food deserts, food swamps, famine, food banks, all these are issues experienced by "poor people." Not "us". Not the mythical "middle class". We don't have this problem, they do. But food insecurity is a global issue, and it's getting to the point that in order for you and I to eat, someone else is going to have to starve. And it's getting closer and closer to the point where that's not going to be someone way over there, but someone here in Canada, here in the US or the EU. Because food security is an issue best treated with democracy--real democracy, not this faked up version we've got now. When people make their own decisions and can drive public policy to support those decisions, rather than having on policy be made for reasons often antithetical to our interests, or the greater interests of society, that's when things can change.
Because, when if comes to food security issues, "the poor" are really just those of us out at the leading edge of the wave. As the edge breaks, more and more of us are going to start crashing down, suddenly finding ourselves food-poor.

Building Food Security in BC

The British Columbia Food System Network has released a short report on the state of food security (pdf) in British Columbia which echoes Olivier de Shutter's report on Canada (pdf).
The BCFSN  is "comprised farmers, food activists, health promoters, Indigenous peoples, academics, municipal workers, educators, labour union members and others concerned about food security in B.C., with a shared a vision for a more equitable, accessible, viable, and sustainable food system" according to their report. I haven't looked at all the groups involved, but that looks like a pretty broad swath of people all concerned about the same topic.
The report (pdf) is pretty straightforward:

Given local and global trends, food insecurity will continue to adversely affect an
increasing number of British Columbians. Over the past decade, British Columbians have
been impacted by sharp increases and instability of food and energy prices combined
with already high housing costs and several decades of stagnant wage growth.
Increasingly, many are finding it difficult to access healthy and affordable food, with food
bank use becoming far more prevalent in recent years and growing public health concern
over the increasing prevalence of diabetes and obesity.
Meanwhile, many B.C. farms producing food for local consumption are struggling to stay
afloat in a volatile market due to unpredictable weather, price competition with other
jurisdictions, and relatively higher production and property costs. While a handful of
farms in B.C. are quite profitable, many are faced with tight margins and low incomes for
owners and workers alike. As a result, there is little incentive for young potential farmers
to succeed an ageing population of B.C. farmers.
These inter-related policy issues provide compelling reasons to elevate food policy on
B.C.'s political agenda.

While BC has the 4th highest gross provincial product, we have the greatest inequity and the worst poverty rate in Canada. The reason is quite simple; over a decade of a Liberal government pursuing a neo-liberal agenda. The depressing thing is  that even the NDP interregnum  failed to make any progress in adressing this issue. We're but month's away from another NDP government (so say all the polls, at least), but my hopes aren't very high for progress. I can only hope that they surprise me.

England Underwater

The Met Office map of UK rainfall
between 20 and 27 November Illustration: Met Office

The Guardian has an extended report on the plight of farmers in the UK. The American drought got a lot of press over the last year, but the situation in the UK is almost as dire--if rather wetter.
The UK was facing drought conditions across large a large swath of their farming country. Then last spring, the rains returned. And then they didn't stop.

Wakestock festival in July 2012.Image from The Week

 June saw multiple flood warnings, primarily across the south-eastern UK. July saw more floods, like the Wakestock Festival, above. By November it was south-western England and parts of Wales that were getting hammered. All in all, the UK is drowning.
And the effect on farms has been devastating. From The Guardian:

It is only now becoming apparent just how terrible sodden 2012 has been for farmers, particularly those in the north-west and south-west. Wheat yields were at their lowest level since the 1980s, the potato crop at its lowest since 1976. The oilseed rape harvest and barley yields also suffered. Livestock farmers suffered too. The wet weather conditions sent the price of animal feed soaring as farmers were forced to keep their animals indoors.
For some, the consequences threaten to be devastating. Recent figures from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs paint a bleak picture of a year many would prefer to forget. Dairy farmers saw their income plunge by 42%. Livestock and pig farmers have seen their incomes as much as halved. There were double-digit decreases for cereal and crop farmers, too.
Many have seen their profits completely wiped out. The only way they can survive is by borrowing from the banks. "We are seeing increased levels of indebtedness," said Charles Smith, chief executive of Farm Crisis Network. "For some it's becoming unsustainable."

 Climate change is an elephant in the room, when it comes to food security. We can't grow food in a world with 400ppm carbon in the atmosphere. The evidence is mounting that we can't do it at the current average of 395 (this past spring of 2012 saw the atmospheric concentrations pass 400 is some places for the first time in human history). We probably can't do it at anything over 360, at least not long term. Farming needs a generally stable climate to function, and once we get over that magic 350 mark, things start to spin off into more and more frequent extreme events. Places like Tewksbury in England have become pretty much un-insurable because of flooding.
We've had a climate buffer, as the oceans absorbed more CO2 for us, and this gave us a half-century or so to adapt our lives over to a lower carbon footprint, and to begin mitigation. Of course we didn't do anything like that at all. We ramped up industrial agriculture, we kept burning coal, and we opened up the Tar Sands in Alberta; all really, really stupid things to have done. Currently we're on track for sea level rise of 69 feet (21 metres)--that's going to make it a bit difficult to farm any of the world's deltas--like the one under Vancouver or the mouth of the Nile.

Food Security Failing in Britain

The World Health Organization uses this definition of food security:

The World Food Summit of 1996 defined food security as existing “when all people at all times have access to sufficient, safe, nutritious food to maintain a healthy and active life”. Commonly, the concept of food security is defined as including both physical and economic access to food that meets people's dietary needs as well as their food preferences.

Food security is built on three pillars:

• Food availability: sufficient quantities of food available on a consistent basis.
• Food access: having sufficient resources to obtain appropriate foods for a nutritious diet.
• Food use: appropriate use based on knowledge of basic nutrition and care, as well as adequate water and sanitation.

 Seems pretty simple, doesn't it? Access to a consistent supply of food that meets your nutritional needs and that you know how to use. The ruling classes long ago learned that if you expect a functioning society, your people need food, water, and shelter. So why is this so hard to accomplish?
In Canada, we have tens of thousands of citizens unable to access clean, safe water, never mind a secure source of food. And in Britain, the seventh-wealthiest country in the world, there are now 13 MILLION people now living below the poverty line and new food banks are opening every day.  And in the US about a third of the population qualifies for what used to be called "food stamps."
Suzanne Moore, writing in the Guardian, has called 2012 not the year of the Olympics, but the year of the food bank.

In fact, this has been the year of the soup kitchen. The switch from "soup kitchen", which smacks of Victorian desperation, to the more neutral "food bank" is a semantic coup d'état. An economic crisis initiated by the immorality of the banks ends up with nice "banks" that offer food for free.

I regularly volunteer at a soup kitchen, where we struggle to provide a balanced, home-style meal to those who need it five days a week. We are part of the Food Bank Canada network. A country so rich and with such a small population living so far above the global norm has 800 food banks and 3000 food programs. And no safe water for a significant part of its population.
Amartya Sen, the Nobel-winning, Bengali economist wrote a book called Poverty and Famines: an Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation in the early 80s, which looked at the food system and the way it delivers to the poorest--particularly under emergency conditions. Far too frequently in famines, there is food available, just not available to those in need. This was true during the Great Potato Famine in Ireland, and has been true since. Ethiopia during LiveAid was exporting food to Europe in the same way the Irish did a century and a half earlier.
The stories coming out of England in Suzanne Moore's essay sound so familiar:

a man who joined the army and found that while on basic training his wife and children, who had not yet been provided with accommodation, could not cope with increasing bills and his decreased income. His wife broke down at her children's nursery and was taken to a food bank. Is he a soldier or a shirker?

Wages too low to access food. Benefits packages too low to afford both housing and food. These are structural problems implicit in our food system. As Sen points out, it's too often about poverty, not famine. And poverty is something we can deal with, have dealt with. The 1970s saw the lowest rates of systemic poverty we've ever seen in the developed world--until it was decided that the poor have it too easy. That if being poor isn't so bad, workers won't fear it enough. That the whole "income redistribution for greater income equality" thing had gone too damned far, and that workers were just getting too damned uppity. 
And this isn't just me being some socialist mouthpiece. The historical record from the Mulroney/Thatcher/Reagan years bears this out. Greater income inequality, greater poverty and homelessness, and an inadequate and shredded safety net were choices, choices made by those with power to change the way the rest of us live. Greater globalization, the anti-union movement, greater inequality, these were decisions, choices.
And now, when, as Moore says "An economic crisis initiated by the immorality of the banks ends up with nice "banks" that offer food for free," we see people forced into desperation. Because famines rarely cause revolutions. And if you can keep poor people just on the edge of desperation, you can keep them too busy trying to survive to revolt.
But the problem is, the system isn't stable. It's predicated on having enough surplus food to make sure the developed world's poor can eat. But that may no longer be the case; the US drought of 2012 is continuing into the winter, with the Mississippi river at its lowest levels possibly ever (which is interfering with the ability to move barge traffic on the river). The World Food Price Index is expected to top out at 240 this spring--a level that, as NECSI points out, spreads enough hardship around that social instability results (as in the Arab Spring--revolutions at least partly caused by the price of bread).
Here in Canada,as the rest of the world, the global system is unstable. The bad news is that we have people in power who don't actually get this, and don't understand any of what needs to be done. Their prescription is simply for more of the same only cranked up to 11.
Food shortages and climbing prices. A bankrupt (morally, financially and theoretically) economic system held in place through political repression backed up by increasingly thuggish "police forces." A rapidly warming planet (really really rapidly warming). Collapsing ecosystems. A middle class in utter denial and desperate to maintain their privilege. A plutocracy willing to do anything to maintain theirs. This all makes it difficult to hold out any hope for te various systems we rely on.
The only thing that gives me flashes of hope is people. People engaging an issue, any issue, and struggling to reform a piece of the world. Like the anti-pipeline  crowd at the Dogwood Initiative; despite the fact that Canada is a hostage (Or, as Andrew Nikiforuk calls us, slaves) to the revenue from oil (the Feds rely on oil for about 25% of their budget, and that's set to rise to 33%), they are saying no to Enbridge and the Northern Gateway.
Te rise of the urban farming movement, to bring the food supply home, is encouraging. Cuba has shown us just how much can be done, and the Campasino a Campasino movement is spreading the word around the world.
All this is to the good, but until we're all engaging with the need for democracy and local decision making, until we're all forming linkages both within and between communities, hope is in short supply.

Water and Food

The Stockholm International Water Institute has released a paper titled Feeding a Thirsty World: Challenges and Opportunities for a Water and Food Secure Future.(.pdf) From the Note to the Reader:

Today, in 2012, nearly one billion people still suffer from hunger and mal- nourishment, in spite of the fact that food production has been steadily increasing on a per capita basis for decades. Producing food to feed eve- ryone well, including the 2 billion additional people expected to populate the planet by mid-century, will place greater pressure on available water and land resources.
This report provides input into the discussions at the 2012 World Water Week in Stockholm, which is held under the theme of Water and Food Security... It features brief overviews of new knowledge and approaches on emerging and persistent challenges to achieve water and food security in the 21st century. Each chapter focuses on critical issues that have received less attention in the literature to date, such as: food waste, land acquisitions, gender aspects of agriculture, and early warning systems for agricultural emergencies

Excitable Headlines

Food shortages could force world into vegetarianism, warn scientists

Yea, that's an actual headline from The Guardian.The opening para is not too much different:

Leading water scientists have issued one of the sternest warnings yet about global food supplies, saying that the world's population may have to switch almost completely to a vegetarian diet over the next 40 years to avoid catastrophic shortages.

Let's review, shall we? The US is experiencing a drought that affects more than half its farmland. Food prices are expected to rise 5%. Animal protein will probably become more expensive because we feed so many animals on corn. While higher prices for meat may well lead to open warfare in American cities, its doubtful that this will happen anywhere else. Food prices will rise because of a slow inflation from corn being used to make ethanol, but the primary reason is speculative money's effect. The Guardian also points out, in a separate article from that quoted above:

Biofuels – which last year swallowed almost 40% of the US maize harvest – have also been highlighted as part of the problem. In the US, pressure is growing to abandon targets for biofuels in car fuel. Livestock farmers are warning they won't be able to afford to feed their animals.
But missing from the lineup have been financial speculators, who have piled back into the market. Want to know what a brewing food crisis looks like to them? Last week, US hedge fund manager Peter Sorrentino commented: "It's like a big money tap has been turned on."
By June, markets in food derivatives were awash with $89bn in speculative cash. That figure is courtesy of Barclays, the UK's top food speculator, which this year highlighted speculation as a "key driver" of rising prices.

But the fear-mongering continues. You'd think the US right would be the least crazy--after all, the market is supposed to sort this sort of thing out with no problem. The market is the great equalizer, after all, shifting resources from one place to the other, almost magically bringing supply and demand into balance. Yet, here's a video from YouTube.



Craziness comes from people without enough information and a deep and unshakable conviction that they have no control over their lives. Or, as Obama has said; "[I]t’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Its hard to see Novella Carpenter panicking. She's already experimenting with dry-farmed tomatoes in Oakland.

Novella Carpenter, who runs Ghost Town Farm in urban Oakland

All it really takes to not panic is a couple of bucks in seeds and a little bit of dirt and space. Maybe a tech of thinking ahead, too. I noticed earlier today that local carrots are selling at the market for $2/5 lbs. At that price, I can buy several bags and get them in the freezer for the winter--thus providing myself with a sense of control over my own life and a measure of food security. You could do worse than to do the same....

James Hansen

...has been trying to get people to pay attention to the climate change crisis for quite a while now. He's been pretty gosh-darned prescient about it as well. Now, even moneynews.com is running a Thomson/Reuters article about the threat to global food security. And they're hitting the proper notes: big trouble is here. More people on the way. Distribution, not production, is a major problem.
There's even a mention of stockpiling more grain. Now, for 14,000 years, civilizations have known that keeping about five years supply on hand was about right. Famine would come--and it always came, although often for different reasons each time--and five years of grain was about right to cover shortage and ensure seed supplies. When civilizations could not or would not keep stores on hand, when they became reliant on imports to cover shortages, they failed. And usually very quickly. As usual, I point to Empires of Food as essential reading.
But notice, despite NECSI's work trying to bring attention to the role of speculative money in driving food bubbles and crisis, still almost no mention of it in the business press.

Cuba, Sí

It's amazing how good I feel today. Seriously. Because one of the big clouds has been lifted.

What happens if it all goes wrong? What if estimates of Middle East oil reserves turn out to have been fabricated out of whole cloth for the last thirty years? (A real possibility, much like the way the same Soviet ICBMs became more and more accurate with each budget appropriation cycle in the US during the late 70s and early 80s.) What happens if global climate change doesn't follow the nice timetable laid out by the IPCC, but instead beats us like Buddy Rich doing a solo? If food miles turns out to actually be a real problem? If industrial food collapses like a house of cards? What if the nightmare scenarios actually come to pass?

Well, after reading an article in The Journal of Peasant Studies, I feel a bit more relaxed when I think about the nightmare scenarios. Because Cuba has already been there, done that, and can see light on the other side.

Cuba, post-revolution, invested in extensive agrarian reform, but a combination of circumstances (the US blockade, and joining the international socialist division of labour for two), led Cuba to strengthen their sugar-producing sector; a sector that dominated 30% of the available farmland and generated 75% of export revenues by 1989. At the same time, Cuba was importing some 57% of its food.

Cuba embraced the Green Revolution wholeheartedly, with the most tractors per person and per unit of area, importing 48% of its fertilizers (which doesn't tell the whole story: of the fertilizer produced domestically, there was a 94% import coefficient), and importing 82% of its pesticides. Cuba was a poster child for Green revolution industrial agriculture. With the second-highest average grain yields of Latin America, Cuba achieved a high level of food security for its population. But what they discovered they did not have was food sovereignty. The 1980s brought increasing pest problems and the yields of some key crops began to decline due to soil degradation and pests (this is actually typical of Green Revolution lead areas around the world; long-term yield levelling or decline seem to be part of the model). 

Pushback 1

That's a lovely house, don't you think? And a nice yard in front of it.But Drummondville, Qe. (about 100 km NE of Montreal) doesn't seem to think so. After apparently getting a verbal approval from the town's Environmental Inspector, CBC reports that the couple who planted this lovely garden were served with a notice that they had to tear it out within 7 days or face fines of between $100 and $300 a day.
A follow-up report notes that the tear-out date has been extended to 01 September. It also notes that "Drummondville plans to make it illegal to grow vegetables on front lawns anywhere in the city." Apparently the city "held public consultations on the new rule and it said no one objected."
This is the beginning of push back; expect to see more and more of this. I expect it will be framed as a "property values" argument, and be claimed as being non-discriminatory because the new bylaws will affect everyone the same way (ask the residents of Africville how that worked out for them...).  Drummondville is saying that a 30% grass rule already exists--from the look of the above photo, sodding the paths would come close to taking care of that requirement).
In the US, things are the same. According to an article in Grist, push back is occuring there too:

[In] Tulsa [they] bulldozed the entire thing.
If you start looking for stories like these, you’ll turn them up in droves. In 2010, Clarkston, Ga., fined a gardener named Steve Miller for planting too many vegetables. In 2011, Oak Park, Mich., told Julie Bass she couldn’t grow any vegetables in her front yard because vegetables weren’t “suitable” yard plants. (“You can look all throughout the city and you’ll never find another vegetable garden that consumes the entire front yard,” a city official told the local TV station.) And in Chatham, N.J., Mike Bucuk, a young would-be organic farmer, had to fight with the entire town just to grow some vegetables his family’s property.

Gardens are productive. They serve a purpose, and part of that purpose leads to reduced sales for some businesses (fresh produce markets, or farmer's markets, often face stiff opposition from major supermarket players. Here in BC, Save-On Foods is supposed to be one of the big anti-farmer's-market forces). 
But home gardens breed neither fear nor consumption, the two major drivers of modern society. They encourage independence and self-reliance, neither of which sells industrial food. In fact, farmer's markets and home gardens produce exactly what the industrial food system cannot supply: good quality, good tasting produce.
And don't kid yourself. Industrial food will fight back against the home producers, the small and alternative producers. They have to--their business model is based on compliance, on being unable to see any alternatives. Local food has scared them (there are various talking heads that have produced "studies" showing that best-case New Zealand lamb has a smaller carbon footprint than worst-case local lamb, for instance). Industrial food already sends a private police force into the Canadian prairies to see what you're growing and if they can put a stop to it (check out the Percy Schmeiser story, as one example). Industrial food will continue to follow the Big Tobacco playbook to slow the challenge to its business. Like Big Tobacco, there are billions of dollars a year at stake as long as they can keep us solitary, afraid, and dependent. The solution is straightforward: be fearless (read Farm city : the education of an urban farmer by Novella Carpenter, or her blog). Form community. Grow, raise, or produce anything of your own. Its not your job to keep Industrial Agriculture on the top of the food chain. Its your job to do what's best for you, your family and community, and the planet.

National Food Plans

Australians have come to a bit of a disconnect with their government. The Australian government announced that they would pursue the development of a first-ever National Food Plan for the country, prior to the 2010 general election. The call was put out by (apparently now ex-) Woolworths chief Michael Luscombe, who is quoted as saying;

 "If you think about our food value chain, from the producers down, it is covered by multiple departments at federal and state level, and then there are many regulatory bodies.

"Because it's such a complex challenge for all of us, there's no one minister that has an over-arching approach at one point in time -- that has a view on how things are happening."

Australians took their own meaning from the call for submissions on the topic. Many of them were like Cathy Xiao Chen, who called for more urban food production and a strong organics recycling program. Or Carolyn Ballard, who wanted to see an integrated land/water/health program directed towards long-term sustainability.
The problem was, the Australian government really wasn't interested in hearing about these ideas. Michael Luscombe was calling for a free-trade-based, minimum-regulation regime focused on increased "food manufacturing." As The Australian reported: "The retailer had recommended a super-ministry, or "one minister with overall responsibility"." And that's what Australians got--a report focused on the dominant paradigm of a growth- and export-oriented model. Not much mention of a sustainable and secure food supply in-country.
Traditionally, and I'm talking here of "traditionally" stretching from Ur and the birth of agriculture until quite recently, the role of government was to manage a safe and secure food supply for their own people. After they had planned for famine, then they looked at taxing and controlling the flow of exported foodstuffs and the creation of empires. And every empire has learned, once you stop paying attention to the coming famine (and there's always a coming famine), once you allow your food system to become reliant on imports to keep the population fed, you were balancing a pyramid on its apex rather than its base. And that is an unsustainable model.

Monsanto--Taking The Shot

From Alternet:

A so-called “Monsanto rider,” quietly slipped into the multi-billion dollar FY 2013 Agricultural Appropriations bill, would require – not just allow, but require - the Secretary of Agriculture to grant a temporary permit for the planting or cultivation of a genetically engineered crop, even if a federal court has ordered the planting be halted until an Environmental Impact Statement is completed. All the farmer or the biotech producer has to do is ask, and the questionable crops could be released into the environment where they could potentially contaminate conventional or organic crops and, ultimately, the nation’s food supply.
Unless the Senate or a citizen’s army of farmers and consumers can stop them, the House of Representatives is likely to ram this dangerous rider through any day now.
In a statement issued last month, the Center For Food Safety had this to say about the biotech industry’s latest attempt to circumvent legal and regulatory safeguards:

Ceding broad and unprecedented powers to industry, the rider poses a direct threat to the authority of U.S. courts, jettisons the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) established oversight powers on key agriculture issues and puts the nation’s farmers and food supply at risk.

In other words, if this single line in the 90-page Agricultural Appropriations bill slips through, it’s Independence Day for the biotech industry.

Bragging Rights

Nothing serious. Just had our first vine ripened strawberries on June 1st and Paula just handed me three snap peas to eat. Which is early. And makes me very happy. And there's lots of blossoms on both the peas and strawbs, so there will be more summer goodness.
In addition, the pepper plants are doing well, the shallots are getting big, as are the Royal Burgundy bush beans (though no blossoms yet), and the carrots are all up. The tomatoes are struggling, but not dead yet. And the climbing beans are up and growing. So life is pretty good in the garden.

Link-straveganza!

Food Trucks

From The Toronto Standard. Credit: Jen Chan

Sometimes, there's a lot going on. And those days (like today), well, I can't posibly put an explanatory gloss on everything I see. Like food trucks. Not an entirely new phenomena, but suddenly they've taken off again in popularity.Now, I've had some terrific food truck food: at the St. Albert market we used to get pulled pork and bbq beans made with Cattleboyz BBQ sauce that was to die for. And green onion cakes were always a food you bought at a street vendor tent. I've even thought about opening one. But the current mania just seems an invitation to bad food driving out good (in the foodie version of Gresham's Law). Bronwyn Kienapple is asking a few of the same questions in the Toronto Standard.

Occupy The Farm

From Climate Connection.org

Trying to get a handle on what the Occupy movement means seems impossible--except to say that as a movement that seems dedicated to citizen involvement and democratic empowerment, I couldn't be more supportive. The Occupy the Farm group taking over UC Berkley lands and procceeding to plant food crops is an interesting idea. Jeff Conant explores it in more depth at Climate Connection.org.

Corporate Land Purchases

from the Grain website

Not just corporations, but nations (I'm looking at you, China), are busy buying up farmland--particularly in the developing workd--not to grow food to feed indigenous populations, but to support their own populations. This is a good idea from the corporate and national governments perspectives, but really is unsustainable. Carey L. Biron takes on the issue at Farm Land grab.org. Carey Gillam, at the same site, points out the ongoing influence of speculators in investment in agriculture. And at the Grain website, an article pursues the question of how these land grabs are affecting food security in Latin America.

Private Profit, Public Cost

is the issue around pig farms in a new report (pdf) from the WSPA (World Society for the Protection of Animals). Now, I have a few problems with PETA, but I have a lot more concerns around CAFOs. The Financial Post has a pretty neutral article discussing the points contained in the above report.

Food Security and Farms

Both Alternet and Rabble.ca  have articles on Why Big Food Must Go (alternet), and Why Hunger is a Farm Issue (rabble.ca). Both good, and both symptomatic of the discussion that is being heard more and more these days. As Michael Pollen says, the way we raise food is the issue that floats overtop all the other envirinmental issues we face.

The Madness of Smoked Pig Bellies

This recipe got passed around a while back.

Bacon Jam
Ingredients

    1 1/2 pounds sliced bacon, cut crosswise into 1-inch pieces
    2 medium yellow onions, diced small
    3 garlic cloves, smashed and peeled
    1/2 cup cider vinegar
    1/2 cup packed dark-brown sugar
    1/4 cup pure maple syrup
    3/4 cup brewed coffee

Directions

    In a large skillet, cook bacon over medium-high, stirring occasionally, until fat is rendered and bacon is lightly browned, about 20 minutes. With a slotted spoon, transfer bacon to paper towels to drain. Pour off all but 1 tablespoon fat from skillet (reserve for another use); add onions and garlic, and cook until onions are translucent, about 6 minutes. Add vinegar, brown sugar, maple syrup, and coffee and bring to a boil, stirring and scraping up browned bits from skillet with a wooden spoon, about 2 minutes. Add bacon and stir to combine.
    Transfer mixture to a 6-quart slow cooker and cook on high, uncovered, until liquid is syrupy, 3 1/2 to 4 hours. Transfer to a food processor; pulse until coarsely chopped. Let cool, then refrigerate in airtight containers, up to 4 weeks.

When did such a simple product like bacon become the object of such veneration and our latest food of mass destruction?

Urban Farmers

 A lovely project from Fire and Light Media Group: a series of short (and long) videos introducing you to urban farmers.




The trailer (above) is longer than many of the short films, but is a real delight; so many people passionate about growing food! The urban farming movement is really taking off--particularly with the experience of Cuba to draw on.

Photo from the City Farmer website

This is a shot of an urban farm in Havana--a farm a lot bigger than pretty much every urban farm in North America. But what has been done in Cuba can be translated into cities here in Canada. In Victoria we have a under-used program that puts growers together with people who would like to see their gardens be used. There are a number of community gardens--like the one up at the University of Victoria that Paula and I are involved with. There's also the Greater Victoria Compost Education Centre, a great resource for converting waste into soil. We had them come out to the Rainbow Kitchen (old site) and do a compost education day last fall. And Lifecycles, who worked on a fruit harvesting program (among so many other projects) last fall that filled a 20cf freezer with sliced, cored apples at the Rainbow Kitchen. Apples picked from the huge number of urban apple trees in this city.
We forget that urban farming can also grow livestock. And not just chickens, but rabbits (my aunt supplemented her income and the family's food  with a rabbit hutch on the family garden plot back in Manitoba decades ago), or pigeons (we forget that pigeons are edible, domesticated, and have been considered suitable for kings as well as commoners). There is a tremendous potential for integrating food production into our lives in the city. It is really a shame we don't do it more often.

The Battle Moves North

from Earth First News

From Locals Supporting Locals:

Monsanto coming to Richmond to try to overturn Council decision

This Tuesday Richmond Council voted unanimously at a general meeting, with the Mayor and all Councillors present, to pass a resolution to make Richmond the eighth GE free crop zone in B.C. The wording of the resolution is on the Richmond Council website, at http://www.richmond.ca/cityhall/council/agendas/gp/2012/052212_minutes.htm

Ten people spoke in favour of the resolution. This now has to go through the formal process of being passed at a Council meeting, which will happen on the 28th May at 7 p.m. at Richmond City Hall.

We've been informed that Crop Life, the Public Relations wing of Monsanto and other biotech companies, will be coming to the Council meeting on the 28th May. They have already begun their lobbying efforts to try and get Richmond Council to change its mind.

If you are in or near Richmond, please turn out for the meeting. Some Councillors may waver under corporate pressure, and a big turn out of the public will make all the difference and hold them firm to their decisions. Several Councillors spoke passionately about their concerns with genetic engineering, and a big public showing will give them more courage.

If Richmond becomes a GE zone this will have a really big impact on other parts of the Province. As a large municipality with about 200 farms and where GE corn is being grown, people will see that if this can be done in Richmond, it can be done anywhere in the Province. GE Free BC is already getting emails from other municipalities where environmental activists want to get a GE Free resolution passed. This is why Monsanto is sending in the PR guys.

At the same time, apparently the BC government is tryining to slide through an Ag Gag law.

Legislation being proposed by the BC's Liberal government will make it illegal and punishable for a person, including citizens or journalists, to disclose information relating to reportable animal disease in the Canadian province. Bill 37, The Animal Health Act, over-rides BC's Freedom of Information Act, making it unlawful for the public or the press to speak publicly about an agriculture-related disease outbreak or identify the location of an outbreak such as the deadly bird flu or a viral outbreak of IHNV at a salmon aquaculture feedlot.

Who would this affect? Anyone. My significant other, author Paula Johanson, recently wrote a book titled Fish: from catch to the table which addressed the safety of farmed fish--this law would have affected her work.

Fake Foods by Paula Johanson

Or the work she did in Fake Foods.Not because anything she said was wrong, but that she said anything at all.

Photo from Living Food FIlms website

 We've seen this sort of thing before, in the Howard Lyman case in Texas:

In April of 1996, Mr. Lyman (former cattle rancher and now President, Voice for a Viable Future)) was invited to appear on Oprah to discuss Mad Cow disease, food production, and the rendering process. He was part of a discussion of experts, including an expert from the beef industry, about food safety in the U.S. This included a discussion of potential health risks from e-colii and mad cow disease (which only weeks before was making headlines in Britain and throughout the world). When Mr. Lyman explained that cows are being fed to cows, Ms. Winfrey seemed to be repulsed by this thought, and exclaimed that it had just stopped her cold from eating another hamburger

Lyman was sued under an Ag Gag law, the Texas Food Disparagement Act, and it took four years and a heap of money to end the lawsuit brought by a Texas beef ranchers organization. Since then, there has been a pause, but these laws are back.

Peace. Bread. Land

The struggle for social justice is deeply tied to the struggle for land reform around the world.  At a conference in Islamabad Monday, participants echoed the rallying cry of the Bolshevik revolutionaries: Peace. Bread. Land.
The Express Tribune is reporting today that participants in a conference had "underlined the need for equal distribution of land rather than land reforms and ensuring food sovereignty, rather food security in the country.
They pointed out that due to corporatisasion of farming and giving land to foreigners, not only food security, but due food sovereignty is largely at the stake."
The call for countries to be food sovereign is pretty much worldwide, at this point. Participants in the Pakistan conference pointed to a " military-bureaucracy-feudal troika" standing in the way of land reform. According to the Express Times, "It was also highlighted that lands are given to generals, bureaucrats, cricketers and actors, but not to peasants, who are the real owners."
Increasingly, we are also seeing members of the national business press seeing problems with the continuing commodifying of everything threatening nation-states. The article closes with "Pakistan Business Review Chief Editor Dr Shahida Wazarat also advocated land reforms. “There will be adverse affects on food security if corporate farming continues in future,” she opined."