Here’s some food for thought:
These points urge us to think critically about our food system and reassess how “hunger” is created. Indeed, the environmental, social, and economic harm our current food system creates urges us to rethink food (see my previous post). We must rethink not only what we eat, but how larger systems in place also influence the prioritization, production, and transportation of certain kinds of food. The way this system influences food has major impacts on all facets of our lives. We must lay the groundwork for a food system that can continuously innovate, sustain the environment, and ensure access and equity across all communities, especially those historically left behind. We can do this by creating an institution (you might notice by now that institution-building is a strong part of my thinking) that can not only bring together multiple stakeholders that operate our food system but also plan and re-tool it to meet a triple-bottom line.
A network of national and regional food policy councils (FPC), as these institutions can be called, can reinvigorate systems—from its production, distribution, transportation, processing, sale, waste, and even education—coordinate government agencies that shape this food system (such as the transportation and planning departments), genuinely involve grassroots communities, shape and research new innovative policies and initiatives, and collect data that can continuously improve the system.
Toronto’s innovative Food Policy Council, established in 1991, is a good model. Its explicit mission is to establish “a food system that fosters equitable food access, nutrition, community development and environmental health.” The food policy council, formed out of citizen and scholar participation and activism, has catalyzed local and regional food policies, despite lacking formal authority to pass laws. The council has been influential in establishing zoning laws that helped preserve local farmland, “Buy Ontario” programs, such as an institutional purchasing program between local farmers and local hospitals, and a Toronto Food Charter, which championed citizen rights and municipal responsibilities to promote regional food security.
Both the national and regional scales are important. A national level FPC can coordinate policy across states and negotiate in global forums because of the way the food system operates in both an interstate and international manner. Regional FPCs can influence the way food operates across metropolitan areas, connecting the city, its suburbs, and its rural communities. As a local institution, Regional FPCs can facilitate food security by re-grounding food systems through local and regional relationships, such as supporting and connecting community- and regionally-based businesses, such as small and medium-sized restaurants, cooperatives, retailers, distributors, and farmers. This re-grounding not only reduces transportation costs across long distances, reducing CO2 emissions, but also utilizes local and regional “social networks to realize greater control and power over the flows of capital that play such an important role in shaping and producing American cities” (DeFilippis 2001). It is thus an empowering model to engage longstanding inequalities.
From this institutional base, two food policy themes highly important to metropolitan areas might be explored:
Organic agriculture.
- Even Monsanto’s CEO Robert Shapiro told a green business conference that contemporary industrial techniques “have not worked well to promote either self-sufficiency or food security in developing countries” (quoted in Vasilikiotis 2002). In light of the previous post’s critique of heavily industrialized and commodified agriculture, innovations in organic agricultural practices should be fostered through FPCs. Organic agriculture, according to the United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization (UN FAO) is the “holistic production management system which promotes and enhances agro-ecosystem health, including biodiversity, biological cycles, and soil biological activity.” Instead of relying on oil- and water-intensive industrial methods such as using genetically modified organisms and synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, organic farming practices use time-tested methods such as crop rotations, green manure, compost, biological pest control, and mechanical cultivation to maintain soil productivity and prevent pests. Importantly, organic agricultural isn’t about going back to pre-industrial farming methods and solutions and a fear of technology. If technological innovations can empower and educate farmers and communities, bolster continuous innovation and cooperation, and care for the earth, then we can also embrace technology.
- In contrast to subsidies for large corporate farms seen in the recent Farm Bill, the FPC can support policies that bolster organic farming methods for small and medium-sized farms and cooperatives. A major critique of organic food is that it is more expensive. However, we must realize institutions and policies influence the market in not-so-apparent ways and thus shape market prices. Subsidies to convention farming practices, for example, make the price of extremely energy intensive foods more abundant and artificially cheaper. The World Resources Institute demonstrated that with “traditional cost analysis methods, the average farm shows an $80/acre profit…[but] after accounting for all the external costs of soil loss, water contamination, and environmental degradation caused by farming practices, the average farm shows a $29/acre loss instead” (Vasilikiotis 2002).
- Another major concern is that organic agriculture cannot produce enough output to feed the world. We must remember that our current world food production already is more than enough to feed everyone on the planet, yet more than 1 billion people around the world suffer from hunger (think: the grape bonfires in The Grapes of Wrath). Hunger is not simply about the production of food. It’s much broader than that. It’s about how systems in place distribute that food, often inequitably, and how those systems impact our environments and communities. In contrast to claims often pushed by thinkers funded by the existing food industry (most notably, researchers in the Hudson Institute), small farms who employ organic agriculture often produce far more per acre than large farms, utilizing crop diversity, maximizing the use of land, and employing livestock that can also help with soil fertility (Perfecto 2007). The 1992 US Agricultural Census, for example, showed that even the smallest farms with less than 27 acres have more than 10 times the greater dollar output per acre than larger farms (US Agricultural Census 1992). It is not about who can feed the world. It is about how we can create systems and institutions that allow people to feed themselves sustainably and humanely for generations to come.
Urban Agriculture (UA)
- With rapid, global urbanization in which 70% of the population will live in cities by 2050 and by 2015, the need to import nearly 6000 tons of food per day for every city of 10 million, the current separation between the rural and the urban will be severely challenged by the increased need for food. Urban agriculture can bridge existing dichotomies between the rural and the urban often implicit in our discussions about food. As the name suggests, UA refers to food, and its integrated design systems, that sustainably reuse human and material resources produced in cities and grow organic food for communities in metropolitan areas. Because of the inherent space limitations in urban areas and its use by working class residents, UA cannot depend on industrial agricultural techniques that require large amounts of capital, economies of scale, energy and water. UA urges design and technique innovations in organic farming (for example, UA in Cairo involves the utilization of rooftop farms and in India the use of urban waste such as tires to build UA designs). The movement toward UA is ultimately not about replacing rural agriculture, but rather about forming regional complementarities that can bolster the livelihood of both urban and rural residents.
- The literature on the benefits of UA, often seen in innovative projects around the world, is immense, especially by bolstering the economic, social, and environmental security of urban communities. The economic base of cities, for example, will grow due to increased entrepreneurial opportunities that will allow denizens to play a role in sustaining the food system (for example, in production, processing, packaging, and marketing). The direct economic value of this food is tremendous. As mentioned, food costs are often regressive and pinch the pockets of the poor more so than wealthier residents (for example, low-income city dwellers around the world spending 40%-60% of their income on food). Community garden plots can not only save a family significant portion of their income on food costs, but, as seen in Waterloo, can also produce a market yield equivalent of up to $4 million annually, depending on the size of the plot. Socially, UA has been shown to bolster health and nutrition by increasing access to healthy, organic food, beautify community spaces, and increase interaction in otherwise isolated urban environments. Environmentally, UA reduces the high-energy costs of the current food system of which transportation plays a huge part (for example, 127 calories of energy are needed to transport 1 calorie of lettuce across the Atlantic and millions of tons of carbon emissions).
- FPC’s can bolster these local and regional efforts by supporting innovative community-based institutions. Community-based farming models can utilize undeveloped land that serves as physical space for local residents to cooperate, educate each other, and grow food. For example, the South Central Farm allotted plot spaces to community farmers who then cared for individual plots, often sharing community resources such as a tool shed or processing facilities that can allow food to be marketed or shared for local consumption. These farmers also came together to form farmers’ markets where farmers could reliably sell their products to consumers.
- UA isn’t just a pipe dream. Urban growers in India, for example, produced 5 kilograms of fruits and vegetables daily for 300 days year. In Cuba, having to deal with massive energy deficiencies after its diplomatic isolation, Havana produces 90% of its fresh produce in local urban farms and gardens.
Importantly, I must emphasize that these institutions are not silver bullets. The FPC requires a coalition of diversity of actors who can work toward the common good. The story of food goes beyond food itself. It goes to the livelihood, the dreams, and hunger of communities.
Diego taught me that.
Theurbanbriefcase's Blog 
Obviously, I agree with you on most everything. And while I think all the ideas are great, it will never happen unless people start talking about food. You ask people what the problems are the US is dealing with today, they’ll say terrorism, global warming, health care, who knows. Food is so far from the tip of Americans’ tongues that most of these ideas are pretty far from reality. It’s one thing for the government to create a FPC and follow a sort of “trust me” attitude toward food, it’s another have individuals realize the problems with their decisions and start a movement.
Great comment. I agree with you 100%. In a later post, I really want to address and think about how we can retool our political institutions to reinvigorate the citizen-activist and encourage more forms of direct and genuinely inclusive and participatory democracy. I think this is key to a movement, so much so that a movement is not simply a one-time thing. that rather our political society is continuous re-thinking and acting on institutions central to our everyday lives.
in either case, i wanted to flesh this out because I believe ideas are paired with action. With ideas we can start communicating in effective ways, for example co-opting the language of food “security” and tying this institution to the crisis of sustainability and energy. The interconnectedness of food is a major strength. It’s hard to start a movement without a sense of where you can go.
Nice post. I was especially interested in your comment that urban agriculture “cannot depend on industrial agricultural techniques that require large amounts of capital, economies of scale, energy and water,” all of which is likely to be scarcer in the coming years. The fact that urban agriculture can be practiced with minimal resources means that it is by far the most accessible food development plan out there for poor folks, and means that people can have some food security even if they have limited access to wage labor. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on urban land redistribution—the idea of using public land and even eminent domain to create public urban farms. Food security, after all, could certainly be considered as essential to the public good as, say, highway expansion.
You might also be interested in the case of Havana, Cuba. Pre-“special period”, Cuba had an industrial agriculture system much like our own. But after the Soviet Union fell, they could no longer afford the fertilizers and chemicals that it took to keep big monoculture crop fields going, or transportation to the cities. So they began a massive effort to redirect agricultural production to the cities, and especially to micro-producers—people producing mainly for themselves, and selling any small surplus that they grow. The result: well over 50% of the food consumed by the city of Havana is produced within the city, by mostly organic methods.