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). 

Hungry For Change

I have to say, I love this sort of thing--this is a student-produced, neighbourhood-generated video on a social issue (of course its food security--do I ever talk about anything else these days?)
Here, students look at the concept of a "food desert", a place where there are no grocery stores. All the while that they were interviewing people, I kept thinking "Hey! There's a vacant lot. Use that." Sure enough, they are also involved with an urban farm with a farmer's market component.
This is also a particularly American video. It takes place in an African-American neighbourhood, and there is a deep undercurrent of issues of race. But at the same time, the solutions are practical and applicable to pretty much any urban area.


Umoja Students from North Lawndale College Prep, Manley, and Ace Technical 
High Schools teamed with Free Spirit Media to discover the facts about the food 
desert in North Lawndale, Chicago.

In the end, you have to question how this situation could have become so dire. Food deserts? How the hell do you not feed people? Why should we have to educate people in what constitutes good food? And a big reason for many of the problems we face, I think, is because we are nations of immigrants that destroyed the indigenous cultures, leaving us with no food culture of our own (and not much other place particular culture either, but that's for a different venue). We don't recognize terrior, we have no real place-specific foods (no equivalent to Parmesan cheese which is made in Parma, from Parman cows, the whey of which is fed to hogs which then become prosciutto). We have no generational attachment to the land in North America, and while many immigrants had an attachment to owning land, a house in the suburbs has fulfilled that desire. There is no equivalent to, say, the attachment to land reform and land ownership you find among the peasants of  South America, or the Northern European peasants from whom I am descended. Land hunger has been diverted into house hunger.
But this video points out another truism; that, given tools, people are ready, willing, and able to make changes in their local environments that contribute to self-determination. In many ways, it boils down to an old punk slogan: DIY or Die. Because culture is made, not consumed.

Spring! (I hope I hope...)

Well, Saturday was a lovely day--meaning it wasn't raining, the sun was out occasionally, and there were no windstorms. I've been getting a bit twitchy watching first the snowdrops appear a month ago, then the crocuses a couple of weeks later, and now all the plum and cherry trees in blossom. The rest of Canada (well, maybe not the True North) have been regularly seeing temperatures ranging from the high single digits into double digits regularly, this being the Winter That Wasn't up here north of 49.
However, this fine example of the way global climate change is going to affect us over the next couple of decades aside, I've been wanting spring to be here already. I know I'm probably early (after all, it seems to be November here, even though it's March), but I'm really not used to planting times in a Mediterranean-like climate. And this year, we've got a garden.
I've written about it before, building the raised beds and setting up the poles that will carry the tunneling plastic. But I started some rosemary seeds six weeks back (like I said, I've been hurrying the season a bit), and some tomato seeds a couple of weeks ago. And rosemary seeds either have really have a crap germination rate, or I'm doing something really really wrong.
But looking at the fragile little sprouts in their peat pellets has been making me want to get my hands dirty. So yesterday, Paula and I went to the garden centre to buy more dirt.
Over the winter we've noticed that the rains have made the soil in the beds less fluffy--which was expected. So now we're topping off the topsoil/compost mix with more soil in order to fill the beds. To the tune of 4+ cubic feet per bed.
Unlike on the farm, we don't have a lot of room, so we're having to look at more intensive methods of growing vegetables this time around. I've always wanted to try forcing potatoes in a cylinder. I first heard about this a couple of decades back as a method for re-using car tires.

Intense (ive) Agriculture

Two innovative projects popped up on my radar (thanks, Jeff!) involving urban farming this week. One is a storefront farm in Hackney, London, called FARM:shop, and the other is Riverpark Farm in New York City.
Both are responses to the fallout from 2008 and the ongoing international economic crisis sparked by American corporate criminality. In Hackney, the number of disused storefronts has sparked a municipal initiative to fill them at least temporarily with art projects and the like. Something and Son took a look at the cubic footage they had available, and created a café/workspace/venue/ and an intensive food production space.

Honestly, Something and Son has the air of an art installation, talking about how their “displays” change with the seasons. They claim to be the world's first “urban farming hub” (whatever that is supposed to mean), but the ideas they've used involving food production are not all that innovative. FARM:shop's food production is directly descended from the work of the New Alchemy Institute (NAI), which, from 1971 through 1991 conducted a major research and education initiative on a farm in Massachusetts. They explored green-housing/aquaculture synergies, formulated the 90-day-compost plans used by most gardeners today, and rigorously documented their work. They even built one of their “Ark “ projects in Prince Edward Island, testing their theories in a less hospitable clime.
The New Alchemists weren't the first either, building on both academic and farm-based work that had gone before them. But, thankfully, they were a part of the 60s diaspora that documented their work,leaving behind not only a record of their work, but a group of people still pushing forward environmental design.

Community Garden

About six months back, Paula finally got a spot in the University of Victoria's Community Garden. By the end of August, they were ready to move the garden to its new location. And since then, gardeners have been busy preparing things for the next growing season.

  

The garden is located in what was nothing more than a grassy field for years. Pipes have been laid for water, and after the plots themselves were laid out, the sod was lifted in each of them. The best thing about the garden is the two metre high deer fence around it--there are a lot of deer on campus.

Paula and Ben, our son, originally laid out the beds in the new plot. Formal raised beds are new to me--on the farm, we used a rotary tiller to break up the earth and then used a hilling blade to hump it into a rounded long mound. As you can see, here we have a much more formal series of boxes--each lined on the bottom with landscape cloth to discourage anything from working its way up from underneath.
The boxes are spaced so that they are slightly further apart than my feet are long--enabling me to stand between the beds.Each had a layer of leaves laid in, and then covered with a mixture of compost and topsoil.The recent rains seem to have compressed the soil a bit.
The old strawberry garden was moved a week or so back, so Paula planted some of the extras in the one bed. This still needs to be mulched.

I salvaged what was left of a soaker hose that had been run over by a lawnmower (not by me!), and cut it into shorter pieces to fit in the beds. I found some L and T fittings at Rona and laid the hose out until I ran out. So far, this bed and the strawberries have hose in them, and the third bed and the empty space are still waiting. But I got a clockwork timer today (spring driven) that will enable us to turn the water on and leave.
The polytunnel hoops are 25mm electrical conduit held in the D holders for the next size up. The conduit came in three metre lengths--longer than I wanted-- but once I bent them into their holders, it didn't seem necessary to shorten them. Poly clearly still has to be installed....
The fourth space in the plot isn't being ignored; it is slated to have a cold frame built for it. Among other things, we're hoping this gives us a place to overwinter herbs.
Its strange to imagine overwintering anything. Out on the prairies, most everything is planted in May and out of the ground by mid-October at the latest. Here, things are different. Up the peninsula, someone is successfully growing citrus trees. Kiwi fruit are farmed nearby. Here at the bottom of Vancouver Island, the temperate rainforest is modified by a local micro-climate that gives us even milder weather. A lot of rain in the winter, sure, but seldom snow, and even less seldom, -20C. I've never gardened out here, so this year looks to be very experimental.

Quinoa and Food Faddism

Photo from Wikipedia

    Over at The Independent (22 March 2011) they're talking about "the "lost crop" of the Incas, a health-giving seed found in the Andes which is increasingly providing the garnish on fashionable Western dinner plates." The crop is quinoa, a high protein seed with a balance of amino acids long used by people needing a gluten-free grain alternative. It's not particularly "long-lost" either, being a staple of health food shops since at least the seventies.
      What has changed is the demand. The price of quinoa has trebled over the last couple of years, and the article in The Independent makes the unsupported claim that some of this price increase has trickled down to "agricultural workers" in the growing regions. While market prices may have risen over the last five years, it is doubtful that peasant farmers have seen all that much of an increase in their personal income as the majority of profit is always taken by the purchasing desk.

The Far North

     Of all the places in Canada, the North is the most food insecure. The North faces a number of factors that intensify problems north of sixty. The Yukon is at high risk for earthquakes (in 1964 a quake killed 134 people in Alaska), highways face more extreme conditions while dependance on trucked-in produce is high and energy prices are heading up, extreme weather conditions make flown-in produce both dear and uncertain, and local production is almost non-existent.
     The Yukon does not grow its own food. The Globe and Mail reports that the total population of food animals, for example, is about that of a large southern farm: 220 cattle, 160 hogs, 62 farmed elk, 130 goats and sheep, and 150 farmed bison. That is the population of farmed animals for the whole of the Territory. Production of grains and vegetables is similarly anaemic.
     It is true that conditions are not the best for southern-style agribusiness. After all, the number of frost-free days ranges from 93 down to 21. But that doesn't mean that local production can't exist; there was a government program back in 1988 that studied how to grow wheat, peas, and oilseed. And an Albertan couple have spent the last seven years overcoming the crap conditions and poor soils to grow oats, barley, carrots and potatoes. The couple, Steve and Bonnie Mackenzie-Grieve, have taken almost the whole food chain under their control, milling their own grain, and washing and bagging their own potatoes.
     But although there is a history of small-scale agriculture in the Yukon, there is currently significant resistance to agriculture in the North. Rick Tone, executive director of the Yukon Agricultural Association, is quoted in the G&M as saying "They [much of the northern population] see agriculture here as a blot on the environment." Fair enough, but what then of wild harvesting? Migratory populations have long served to keep the northern population fed (and housed, and clothed). Part of the problem is cramming too many people into an environment not equipped to handle them, but also by that population's reliance on a southern diet of chicken, pork, and beef. The Lapp of Finland have successfully ranched reindeer for generations; what is there to stop northerners from doing the same? This would mesh northern requirements with northern conditions. It doesn't meet the requirements for produce, but raising local food production from the current ~2 percent of needs, well, any increase would help.
     Ultimately, of course, maintenance of a northern population requires both local food production, southern supplement (particularly with the extreme conditions of the North), and a sustainable population size. There was a reason that the Inuit were never too populous--they lived in an environment that restricted population growth. Modern northern populations are dependant on fossil fuels; the houses are not built for the northern environment, but rather to be heated with imported fuel. Food is transported, the local population is abstracted from the environment, and if the oil stops, everything stops. Essentially, these are the problems we all face, just writ large. And the solutions are the same; solutions that are local, sustainable, and environmentally sensitive.

Feeding People Is Easy review

Recently finished reading Colin Tudge's book Feeding People is Easy, a book about food security that offers a couple of focused ideas for reforming the world food system.

Feeding People is Easy is a bit different than most of the food security library I'm reading my way through. First off, it doesn't spend all its time on discussing what's wrong with the current food system. And that's good, because Raj Patel, Eric Schlosser, and Michael Pollan have really covered that aspect, and covered it well. Colin Tudge takes the approach that:

The world's most powerful governments, industries,and their attendant experts and intellectuals have their minds set on quite different goals, and are pulling in quite different directions--to a large extent completely opposite to what is really required. To be sure, the title of this book [Feeding People is Easy] is a little hyperbolic: the human population will reach nine billion by 2050 and it won't exactly be easy to feed everybody to the highest standards. Yet it should be well within our grasp. Indeed this goal is so obviously achievable that it would surely be extraordinarily remiss not to give it a try. In this book I will explain how. But the harder task by far is to by-pass the powers-that-be. To do what needs doing we have to re-invent democracy, or rather to make it work almost for the first time in the history of civilization, for the chief rule of democracy--that we should be able to get rid of our "leaders" when they cease to function on our behalf--has gone missing. "They" do not know how to run the world, but they do know how to hang on to power. In the last chapter, I will be addressing this, too. Revolution is not required. Renaissance is what's needed--and that is very achievable.
(page 13)

Tudge argues that our current inability to feed the world (according to Raj Patel, "There are 75 million people more undernourished now than in 2008") has nothing to do with the inhospitality of the earth, or some basic flaw in humankind, but that it has "everything to do with policy." That we do not feed everyone is a matter of decisions we have made--maybe not individually, but certainly in our political centres. These decisions are things like deciding to treat food as a commodity, and driving people off the land in order to "modernize" agriculture. "Real agriculture," argues Tudge, involves having people on the land growing crops.

The cause of all our troubles has almost nothing to do with the difficulties that nature presents us with. The fault lies almost entirely with policy and strategy: ideas and courses of action dreamed up by human beings. If we, humanity, analyzed our own problems more astutely and from first principles, and if we did things differently, then even at this late hour we could create a world that was good for everyone, and for all our fellow creatures, forever. We should certainly be thinking of the next 10,000 years, or indeed of the next million. There is no good biological reason why our species should not last at least that long. That we should be seriously doubting our ability to make the world safe even for our grandchildren is ludicrous.
(page 18)